November 2 to 8
The Trail of Broken Treaties protesters
occupy the Bureau of Indian Affairs
headquarters.
Starting from the Rosebud Reservation in South
Dakota, a contingent of nearly 1,000 Indian
activists, including many American Indian Move-
ment members, travel to Washington, D.C., in a
caravan they dub the Trail of Broken Treaties. The
activists bring a 20-point platform on Indian rights,
which they intend to present to President Richard
M. Nixon during a massive demonstration. The
majority of the platform deals with treaty rights,
including a demand that the U.S. government re-
institute the treaty-making process (see entry for
MARCH 3, 1871). Other portions of the document
call for the dissolution of the Bureau of Indian Af-
fairs (BIA), the end of state interference in civil
and legal matters on Indian territory, and a formal
repeal of the Termination policy (see entry for AU-
GUST 1, 1953).
When the caravan reaches Washington, about
400 activists enter the government building that
houses the BIA, while representatives of the group
meet with bureau officials to discuss the demon-
stration. When guards try to expel the activists,
they fight back and take over the building. No one
is hurt during their six-day standoff with police,
which ends peacefully when the Nixon adminis-
tration agrees not to prosecute the activists and
promises to give a written response to each point in
their platform.
November 25
The American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame
admits its first inductees.
Located at the Haskell Indian Nations University
in Lawrence, Kansas, the American Indian Athletic
Hall of Fame is established to celebrate the achieve-
ments of Indians in football, baseball, basketball,
and track. At its first induction ceremony, 14 ath-
letes—including Charles “Chief ” Bender (see entry
for 1953), Joseph Guyon, and Allie P. Reynolds (see
entry for SUMMER 1942)—are admitted into the
hall of fame.1973The Tlingit are compensated for the
bombing of Angoon.
The Tlingit of southeastern Alaska accept a
settlement of $90,000 from the Indian Claims
Commission (see entry for AUGUST 12, 1946) in
compensation for the destruction of Angoon. With
little provocation, the U.S. Navy shelled and set fire
to the Tlingit village nearly 100 years earlier (see
entry for OCTOBER 24 TO 26, 1882).The American Indian National Bank is
founded.
With Crow educator and Bureau of Indian Af-
fairs administrator Barney Old Coyote as its first
president, the American Indian Nation Bank is
established to help provide Indian businesspeople
and tribes with needed capital. The bank issues
one hundred thousand shares of stock, all of which
are Indian owned. Old Coyote announces that the
institution represents “the first real opportunity
for Indians to put their money to work for them-
selves and for others in the Indian community.”
Over time, the American Indian National Bank will
founder financially, eventually closing its doors in
the 1980s.The Dann family of the Western Shoshone is
accused of trespassing on federal lands.
The Bureau of Land Management orders the Danns,
a ranching family on the Western Shoshone Reser-
vation, to remove their cattle from a grazing area in
Nevada that the bureau regards as federally owned
rangeland. The Danns refuse to round up their
herds or to purchase grazing permits. They main-
tain that they never agreed to a Court of Claims
settlement cited by the BLM (see entry for 1962),
in which one band of the Western Shoshone took
monetary compensation in exchange for some 24
million acres of land, including the Danns’s graz-