His protests won government concessions and created national attention and sympathy for the oppression and endemic social and economic conditions for Native Americans.

[2] Born on Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota in 1937, Dennis Banks was also known as Nowa Cumig (Naawakamig in the Ojibwe Double Vowel System).

At the age of 5, Banks was taken from his reservation and family to be forcibly moved to a federal Indian boarding school, David Mueller (Director) (2010).

Its goals were to "civilize" and educate Native American children in English and mainstream culture, in effect, to assimilate them.

[9] Banks participated in the 1969–1971 Occupation of Alcatraz, initiated by Indian students from San Francisco of the Red Power movement.

[10] In 1972, he assisted in the organization of AIM's "Trail of Broken Treaties", a caravan of numerous activist groups across the United States to Washington, D.C., to call attention to the plight of Native Americans.

[citation needed] Over 9000 tons of documents were removed by AIM members and hidden by the Hatteras Tuscarora and Lumbee in Robeson County, N.C.

[citation needed] Wounded Knee was the scene of the last major conflict of the so-called American Indian Wars, in which 350 Lakota men, women, and children were massacred by United States Army in 1890.

[2] In 1973, Banks returned to Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, when the local Lakota civil rights organization asked for help in dealing with law enforcement authorities in nearby border towns.

Under Banks' leadership, AIM led a protest in Custer, South Dakota in 1973 against judicial proceedings that had resulted in the reduction of charges of a white man to a second degree offense for murdering a Native American.

[citation needed] AIM became involved in the political faction wanting to oust Richard Wilson, the elected chairman of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

[1] Thirty resident families returned to the village to find that their homes and businesses had been destroyed by the federal agents.

He was acquitted of the Wounded Knee charges, but was convicted of incitement to riot and assault stemming from the earlier confrontation at Custer.

[citation needed] Refusing the prison term, Banks jumped bail and worked with Anna Mae Pictou Aquash in the American Indian Movement.

After the Wounded Knee Occupation—where COINTELPRO FBI agents sieged the occupation, cut off electricity, water and food supplies to Wounded Knee, when it was still winter in South Dakota, and prohibited the entry of the media; and the US government tried starving out the occupants, AIM activists smuggled food and medical supplies in past roadblocks "set up by Dick Wilson and tacitly supported by the US government"— there were many suspicious events surrounding murders of AIM activists and their subsequent investigations or lack thereof.

Deaths of AIM activists went uninvestigated, even though there was an abundance of FBI agents on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at the time.

For instance, Annie Mae Aquash was an activist who had been present at Wounded Knee and was framed by the FBI as a spy for the government.

Dissatisfied with this finding, an exhumation was requested by OSCRO, which found that Aquash had been shot in the back of her head at close range, after being beaten severely in the face with many of her teeth missing from the beating.

[14] Banks was given amnesty in California by then-Governor Jerry Brown, who refused to extradite him to South Dakota to face the charges related to activities in the 1973 Custer protests.

[15] In January 2003, a federal grand jury indicted Arlo Looking Cloud and John Graham in the murder of Aquash.

In 2008, Vine Richard "Dick" Marshall was indicted by a federal grand jury for aiding and abetting the murder of Aquash; he was alleged to have provided John Graham with a gun.

[citation needed] After Governor Brown left office, in 1984 Banks received sanctuary from the Onondaga Nation in upstate New York.

[citation needed] In 1985, Banks left Onondaga to surrender to federal law enforcement officials in South Dakota.

Major events were held in Albuquerque, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Mississippi, a civil rights site; Knoxville, and Washington, D.C.[citation needed] Since "The Longest Walk" in 1978, Sacred Runs have developed as an international movement.

[5] Mr. Banks was in a committed relationship with Lumbee Attorney and Native Rights Activist, JoJo Brooks Shifflett in the later years of his life and at the time of his death.

The project contains a message of international peace, intertwined with stories and life lessons from Banks, and featuring the music of Kitaro.