This paper examines three interconnected dimensions of Native American history and policy in the United States. It traces the political and military conditions at Pine Ridge Reservation that led to the 1973 occupation known as Wounded Knee II and the subsequent trial and imprisonment of AIM activist Leonard Peltier. It then surveys the legislative and judicial history affecting Native American religious expression, from the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 through the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Finally, it analyzes both the immediate and enduring consequences of the Dawes Act on indigenous land ownership, cultural survival, and economic welfare.
The paper uses contextualization as its primary analytical tool. Rather than treating each question in isolation, the author consistently frames legal and political events within the larger history of U.S. federal policy toward Native Americans. This allows even narrowly focused legal arguments — such as the limits of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act — to carry historical weight and moral gravity.
The paper is organized as a three-part response to discrete prompts, each functioning as a self-contained analytical section. The first section covers historical and political context for Wounded Knee II and Peltier's conviction. The second surveys religious freedom legislation and relevant Supreme Court rulings. The third and fourth sections (treated here as separate H2s) together address the short- and long-term consequences of the Dawes Severalty Act, including land loss, cultural suppression, and BIA mismanagement.
Leonard Peltier has been in prison since 1979, after being convicted of the murder of two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation four years earlier. He was an activist with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and has been regarded, at least on the left, as a political prisoner — convicted for a crime he probably did not commit and for which two of his other alleged accomplices were acquitted at a federal trial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This acquittal occurred before his own conviction, but because Peltier was not extradited from Canada in time for that trial, the federal government tried him separately and obtained a sentence of life imprisonment. His next parole hearing will not be for thirteen years, and despite many years of protests and petitions on his behalf, no U.S. president has shown meaningful interest in granting him a pardon or clemency. Peltier has always maintained that he did not shoot the FBI agents, although he admitted firing at them in self-defense.
When Peltier arrived at the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975, it had been under a semi-military occupation for two years, and AIM members were being targeted by what appeared to be an assassination program or a counterinsurgency campaign. During the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI was actively attempting to suppress AIM and similar militant minority groups such as the Black Panthers. Until 1971, this effort fell under the auspices of the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Under Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO essentially carried out a covert war against the New Left and countercultural organizations.
In 1972, Richard Wilson became head of the reservation and aligned himself with the FBI and various white investors and corporations that were exploiting reservation resources. His vigilante organization, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), killed dozens of AIM members over the years. AIM had originally come to Pine Ridge in 1972 to protect traditionalist Indians against Wilson and the GOONs, as well as the police and FBI agents allied with them. In February 1973, AIM occupied Wounded Knee for 71 days to protest Wilson's leadership and draw international attention to indigenous rights. Several AIM members were killed in shootouts with the GOONs and U.S. government forces during that occupation. In U.S. history, Wounded Knee is infamous as the site of an 1890 massacre in which 300 Sioux who had fled the Pine Ridge Reservation and attempted to reach Canada were hunted down and killed by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. Their mass grave lies near where the 1973 siege occurred — which soon became known as Wounded Knee II.
Peltier was indeed part of the guerrilla warfare being waged against the GOONs and the FBI at this time, but given that the situation amounted to near-warfare, his actions must be understood in that general context. Neither he nor his AIM associates would have regarded the FBI as a neutral investigative agency; rather, they saw it as an organization that was trying to destroy AIM and was complicit in the killing of their supporters, such as Anna Mae Aquash, a teacher and AIM activist at Pine Ridge. FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler claimed to be pursuing an AIM member wanted on petty theft charges when they encountered Peltier and his associates. Both agents were wounded and then shot execution-style at close range, but Peltier denied firing these fatal shots. He fled to Canada and was extradited in 1976. Had he stood trial alongside the two AIM members who were acquitted, he very likely would never have gone to prison.
Native American religious expression was effectively made illegal following the passage of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, and this did not change until 1934, when John Collier became head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For many years, official U.S. policy held that Indian culture, language, religion, and tribal governments were to be abolished and Native peoples fully assimilated. Collier reversed this policy in the 1930s, but even in the 1940s and 1950s the federal government attempted to "terminate" Indian tribes and relocate their members to urban areas, once again pursuing assimilation — this time as industrial workers in major cities. From the nineteenth century to the present, there has always been Native American resistance to such policies, whether overt or covert. In the civil rights era of the 1960s and early 1970s, AIM and other indigenous rights organizations engaged in a series of confrontations with state and federal governments, as well as with assimilated Indian allies of those governments.
In the wake of these protests and confrontations, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) of 1978, which applied to all Native peoples, including those in Alaska and Hawaii. Even so, the conservative Supreme Courts of the 1980s and 1990s significantly limited the law's application. In Bowen v. Roy (1986), the Court ruled that an Indian father who opposed his daughter being assigned a Social Security number was not protected by AIRFA because the federal government had no obligation to alter its administrative practices to accommodate indigenous religious beliefs. A similar ruling came in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988), in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the U.S. Forest Service had the right to build a road through an Indian cemetery because the land belonged to the federal government and the government was not required to modify its standard practices to satisfy Native religious needs.
In the 1990 case Employment Division, Department of Human Resources v. Smith, the Supreme Court applied the same principle to state laws and reversed earlier decisions that had recognized the use of peyote as a legitimate part of Native American religious ceremonies. The Court held that when indigenous practices conflicted with state laws and regulations, state requirements would be considered superior. Congress responded by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which guaranteed free religious expression to Native Americans unless the government could demonstrate a compelling interest against it.
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