It is late February 1973, and the wind coming off the South Dakota prairie cuts straight through a coat.
The little village of Wounded Knee sits on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a handful of buildings along a dirt road: a church, a trading post, a few houses. The ground is frozen hard. The sky is wide and dark, and the nearest town of any size is miles away.
Into this quiet place, in the middle of the night, come cars full of men and women who have decided they will not leave.
Among them is a tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty-three, with long dark hair and a voice that carries. His name is Russell Means. Within days, the whole country will know his face. Within weeks, the whole world will know his name.
The standoff that follows will last seventy-one days. It will be the most famous protest in the history of the American Indian Movement. And Russell Means will be its most recognisable spokesman — the man who, for millions of television viewers, becomes the face of a people demanding to be heard.
He was born on this same reservation, in a place called Porcupine, on November 10, 1939. He would have turned eighty-seven on November 10, 2026. His life took him from the poverty of Pine Ridge to the streets of San Francisco, from the front lines of Wounded Knee to the sound stages of Hollywood — and this is the story of that life.
A Childhood Between Two Worlds
Russell Charles Means was born on November 10, 1939, in Porcupine, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. His mother, Theodora Louise Feather, was a Yankton Dakota from Greenwood, South Dakota. His father, Walter “Hank” Means, was an Oglala Lakota. Russell was the oldest of four sons — his brothers were Dace, and the twins William and Theodore.
His mother gave him the Lakota name Waŋblí Ohítika, which means “Brave Eagle.” It was a name he would carry, and live up to, for the rest of his life.
In 1942, when Russell was three years old, the Means family left the reservation and resettled in the San Francisco Bay Area, hoping to escape the poverty and hardship of Pine Ridge. His father found work at the shipyard in Vallejo, California. Russell grew up in the Bay Area, and in 1958 he graduated from San Leandro High School in San Leandro, California.
It was, by his own later account, a harsh childhood. He attended four different colleges but never graduated from any of them. In his 1995 autobiography, he wrote honestly about years of truancy, crime and drugs in his youth, and about a father who struggled with alcohol. His father died in 1967. In his twenties, Means drifted between several Indian reservations, looking for work. At the Rosebud Indian Reservation, he developed severe vertigo. Doctors at the reservation clinic at first believed he had been brought in drunk and refused to examine him for several days. Only later did a visiting specialist discover the real cause: a common ear infection that the reservation doctors had missed. The infection cost Means the hearing in one ear.
It was a small, bitter lesson in how the system treated Indian people. After recovering, Means worked for a year in the Office of Economic Opportunity, where he met legal activists working on behalf of the Lakota people. After a dispute with his supervisor, he left Rosebud for Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked with Native American community leaders against the backdrop of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Joining the American Indian Movement
In 1968, Russell Means joined the American Indian Movement — AIM. The organisation had been founded that same year in Minneapolis by a group of urban Indians, among them Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt and George Mitchell, to fight police brutality, poverty and discrimination against Native people in the cities. Means rose quickly. In 1970, he was appointed AIM’s first national director, and the movement entered a period of increasingly bold protests and direct action.
Means had already taken part in one occupation before he ever joined AIM. In March 1964, he had spent twenty-four hours occupying Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay alongside his father and a few other Lakota men. Five years later, in 1969, he returned to Alcatraz as part of the much larger occupation by Indians of All Tribes.
Then came a series of protests that made Means, and AIM, famous. On Thanksgiving Day 1970, Means and other AIM activists seized the Mayflower II, a replica of the ship that had carried the Pilgrims to America, to protest the mistreatment of Native Americans. In 1971, Means was one of the leaders of AIM’s takeover of Mount Rushmore, the federal monument carved into the Black Hills — land sacred to the Lakota.
In November 1972, he took part in AIM’s occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., an action known as the Trail of Broken Treaties. The occupiers held the building for a week to protest abuses by the bureau. Many records were taken or destroyed, and more than two million dollars’ worth of damage was done to the building.
Wounded Knee, 1973: Seventy-One Days
The village of Wounded Knee carried a heavy history. On December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers had killed hundreds of Lakota men, women and children there, in what is remembered as the Wounded Knee Massacre.
By early 1973, Pine Ridge itself was in crisis. Many Oglala residents accused the tribal chairman, Richard Wilson, of corruption and of ruling through intimidation, backed by a private militia. When efforts to remove Wilson through the tribal council failed, a group of Oglala traditionalists asked AIM for help. On the night of February 27, 1973, AIM activists and Oglala residents took over the village of Wounded Knee. Dennis Banks and Carter Camp led the occupation; Russell Means appeared as its spokesman and one of its most prominent leaders.
What followed was an armed standoff between more than three hundred Lakota and AIM activists and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state law enforcement. Federal agents surrounded the village with roadblocks, armoured vehicles and sharpshooters. Inside, the occupiers held the church and the trading post. Gunfire crackled across the prairie night after night.
The siege lasted seventy-one days. It became the best-known action in the history of the American Indian Movement, and one of the most watched protests in American history. Television crews camped outside the roadblocks. For millions of Americans, Russell Means — tall, long-haired, unflinching in front of the cameras — became the face of the protest.
The cost was real. In April, two men were killed in the exchange of fire: Frank Clearwater, a visiting Cherokee activist from North Carolina, and Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont, an Oglala Lakota activist from Pine Ridge. An African-American activist, Ray Robinson, disappeared during the occupation and is believed to have been buried in the hills.
The occupation ended on May 8, 1973, after negotiations. The occupiers laid down their arms. But nothing was the same afterwards. Wounded Knee had forced the United States to look, for seventy-one days, at the living conditions on Pine Ridge and at the broken promises of more than a century of treaties. Russell Means had become, in the words of one later account, one of the best-known Native Americans in the country since the Lakota war leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Politics on the Reservation — and Beyond
In 1974, Means resigned from AIM to run for president of his native Oglala Sioux Tribe against the incumbent, Richard Wilson. The official vote count showed Wilson winning by more than two hundred votes. Residents complained of intimidation by Wilson’s private militia, and a government investigation confirmed problems in the election — but a federal court upheld the result.
Means did not walk away from politics. In the late 1970s, he turned to the international stage, working on the rights of indigenous peoples around the world. He worked with the artist and activist Jimmie Durham, who established the offices of the International Indian Treaty Council to work with the United Nations in 1977. Back on Pine Ridge, Means helped organise community institutions, including the KILI radio station and the Porcupine Health Clinic in his home town. He travelled to Germany, behind the Iron Curtain to meet East German AIM supporters, and to Switzerland for a human rights conference in Geneva.
In the 1980s, AIM split into competing factions, in part over support for the indigenous peoples of Nicaragua. Means supported the Miskito people and their organisation MISURASATA — later known as YATAMA — which was allied with the Contras against the Sandinista government. He travelled to Nicaragua on fact-finding tours in 1985 and 1986 and came to believe that the Miskito as a people were being targeted for elimination. Other AIM members supported the Sandinistas, and the disagreement ran deep.
On January 8, 1988, Means held a press conference to announce his retirement from AIM, saying it had achieved its goals. The AIM Grand Governing Council, headed by the Bellecourt brothers, responded with a press release noting that this was the sixth time Means had resigned since 1974, and asking the press never again to report that he was a founder or a leader of AIM. The movement would formally divide in 1993 into two main factions: the AIM Grand Governing Council, based in Minnesota, and the American Indian Movement Confederation of Autonomous Chapters, based in Colorado and allied with Means.
Means’s politics did not fit neatly into any party. Since the late 1970s, he often supported libertarian causes, in contrast with several other AIM leaders. In 1983, he agreed to become the running mate of publisher Larry Flynt in Flynt’s unsuccessful run for U.S. president. In 1987, Means ran for the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party, finishing second, with 31.4 percent of the vote, at the 1987 Libertarian National Convention. He lost the nomination to Congressman Ron Paul.
He kept running for office, and kept losing, and kept coming back. In 2001, an independent candidacy for Governor of New Mexico failed to meet the procedural requirements and he was not placed on the ballot. In 2004, he ran again for president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, losing to Cecilia Fire Thunder, the first woman elected to the post. In the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, he supported the independent candidate Ralph Nader.
In 2007, Means and eighty other protesters were arrested in Denver during a parade for Columbus Day, which they described as a celebration of genocide. That December, following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a group of activists presented a letter to the U.S. State Department saying they were withdrawing from all treaties with the U.S. government. Means announced the withdrawal on behalf of a small group of Lakota people, and the group declared the Republic of Lakotah a sovereign nation, claiming territory across South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana. Tribal leaders in the northern Great Plains said Means and his group did not speak for their members or for any elected Lakota tribal government. While acknowledging that Means had accurately described the federal government’s broken promises and treaties, they said the issue was to enforce the existing treaties, not renounce them.
From the Barricades to the Big Screen
In 1992, at the age of fifty-two, Russell Means began a second career — as an actor. His first role was the one that made him famous to a whole new audience: Chingachgook, the Mohican chief, in Michael Mann’s film The Last of the Mohicans.
He appeared in numerous films and television productions over the next dozen years. He played an old Indian in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), and Jim Thorpe in Windrunner (1994). He played Sitting Bull in the television miniseries Buffalo Girls (1995), and Arrowhead in the made-for-TV movie The Pathfinder (1996). He appeared in three episodes of the miniseries Into the West (2005) as the older Running Fox, and made a guest appearance on the comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm.
For millions of children, though, his most familiar role was one they never saw him play. In 1995, Means provided the voice of Chief Powhatan, the father of the title character, in Disney’s animated film Pocahontas — one of the studio’s biggest hits of the decade. He returned to the role for the sequel, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, in 1998.
It was a striking turn for a man who had spent his life fighting Hollywood’s portrayal of Indian people. Means had long criticised the film industry for casting non-Native actors as Indians and for reducing Native characters to stereotypes. Now he was inside the biggest animation studio in the world, giving voice to a Native chief.
Music, Books, and a Voice That Would Not Quit
Means was also a musician. In 1993, he recorded a CD entitled Electric Warrior with Sound of America Records. Its songs included “Une Gente Indio,” “Hey You, Hey Indian,” “Wounded Knee Set Us Free” and “Indian Cars Go Far” — protest songs carrying the same message he had delivered in speeches for twenty-five years. A second album, The Radical, followed. In 2013, a year after his death, he was recognised by the Native American Music Awards with a Hall of Fame award.
In 1995, the same year Pocahontas reached cinemas, Means published his autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, written with Marvin J. Wolf. The book told his life story without softening it: the poverty of his childhood, the years of trouble in California, the ear infection that cost him his hearing, the protests, the trials, the splits inside AIM, and the acting career that had begun so late.
He never stopped speaking out. In November 2001, days after the September 11 attacks, he spoke at an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C., against the war on terror. In January 2012, he announced his endorsement of Republican Ron Paul in his bid for president — the same man who had beaten him for the Libertarian nomination a quarter of a century earlier.
Final Years
In August 2011, Means was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. His doctors told him the condition was inoperable. He told the Associated Press that he was rejecting mainstream medical treatment in favour of traditional and alternative remedies. In late September, he reported that through tomotherapy — a form of targeted radiation — the tumour had diminished greatly, and in December of that year he said he had beaten cancer.
His health, however, continued to decline. He died on October 22, 2012, aged seventy-two, less than a month before his seventy-third birthday. He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the Black Hills — the sacred land he had fought for all his life.
He left behind his wife, Pearl Means, whom he had married in 1999, and ten children, including his son Tatanka Means, who followed his father into acting.
Russell Means: The Man Behind the Headlines
To understand Russell Means, you have to understand where he came from — and how far he travelled to become the man the world knew.
Born on Pine Ridge
Russell Charles Means was born on November 10, 1939, in Porcupine, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the oldest of four sons of Walter “Hank” Means and Theodora Louise Feather. His mother, a Yankton Dakota, gave him the Lakota name Waŋblí Ohítika — “Brave Eagle.”
When he was three, the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where his father worked in the Vallejo shipyard. Russell grew up in California, graduated from San Leandro High School in 1958, and attended four colleges without graduating from any of them. By his own account, he spent years in truancy, crime and drugs before finding a purpose in the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis.
The contrast between those two worlds — the reservation he was born on and the city he grew up in — shaped everything that followed. He knew what it was to be poor on Pine Ridge and what it was to be an Indian in a big American city, and that was what made him such a powerful spokesman.
The Activist
Means joined the American Indian Movement in 1968 and was appointed its first national director in 1970. Over the next five years he helped organise the protests described above — Alcatraz, the Mayflower II, Mount Rushmore, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Wounded Knee — and by the mid-1970s he and Dennis Banks were, by one account, the best-known Native Americans since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. In 1976, he was acquitted in a jury trial in Rapid City, South Dakota, of abetting a murder in a barroom brawl.
The movement he helped lead eventually split, and Means split with it. He retired from AIM in 1988, allied himself with the Confederation of Autonomous Chapters, and spent his later years working on international indigenous rights, community institutions on Pine Ridge, and a series of long-shot political campaigns. He never won an election. He never stopped running.
The Actor
Beginning an acting career in 1992, at an age when most actors are winding down, Means appeared in films and television for more than a decade. His roles — Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans, Sitting Bull in Buffalo Girls, Jim Thorpe in Windrunner, Chief Powhatan in Pocahontas — were, almost without exception, Native leaders and elders. Hollywood had spent a century casting Indians as villains and sidekicks; Means played them as men of dignity and weight.
The Writer and the Musician
Means published his autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, in 1995, written with Marvin J. Wolf, and recorded the album Electric Warrior in 1993, followed by a second album, The Radical. Both the book and the music carried the same message as his speeches: that the American Indian people had survived centuries of broken promises, and that survival itself was a form of victory.
Why He Still Matters
Russell Means was a complicated figure, and he knew it. He was admired and criticised in equal measure, inside the Native community as well as outside it. His fellow AIM leaders quarrelled with him. Tribal leaders rejected his declaration of the Republic of Lakotah. His politics wandered from the left to the libertarian right and back again. In the bitter aftermath of the murder of the activist Annie Mae Aquash, he publicly accused senior AIM leader Vernon Bellecourt of having ordered her killing — a charge Bellecourt denied.
None of that erases what he did. Before Wounded Knee, most Americans had never thought seriously about the living conditions on Pine Ridge, or about the treaties the United States had signed and broken. After Wounded Knee, they could not avoid thinking about them. Means put those questions on the national agenda, and kept them there for forty years — through protests, through politics, through films and books and songs.
He was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1939, and he died on it in 2012. In between, he carried the name his mother gave him — Brave Eagle — across the whole of America and around the world. On November 10, 2026, he would have been eighty-seven. The causes he fought for are still unfinished, but his voice, in the films and the songs and the books he left behind, is still there to be heard.
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