AIM Song

Edward Benton-Banai, from the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Ojibwe Indians, co-founded the movement in 1972, and is rumoured as the songwriter.

[citation needed] Severt Young Bear, an Oglala Lakota from Porcupine, South Dakota, was also involved in AIM.

It may have been written as a victory song after the AIM protest in Gordon, Nebraska regarding the murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder resulted in criminal charges and the dismissal of the Chief of Police[1] Several Ktunaxa Elders (Marianne Michel, Leo Williams, Wilfred Jacobs, and Joe Skookum) were tape recorded at a powwow in 1981 at the Lower Kootenay Band at Creston British Columbia and stated that the song people are using in association with AIM and the Constitutional Express Constitution Express in 1980 which went from Vancouver to Ottawa is a Ktunaxa warrior song.

The female vocal line becomes particularly prominent in this repeated motif: The song is usually accompanied with a steady beat on a traditional man’s drum.

This song was sung by Omaha leader Nathan Phillips at an Indigenous People's March in Washington DC in a viral video incident to defuse a tense situation between a group of 200 Catholic high school boys and a group of four Black Israelites on January 18, 2019.