
Ojibwa warrior
by Dennis Banks, Erdoes, Richard
Publisher's description: Dennis Banks, an American Indian of the Ojibwa Tribe, is probably the most influential Indian leader of our time. In Ojibwa Warrior, written with acclaimed writer and photographer Richard Erdoes, Banks tells his own story for the very first time and reveals an inside look at the birth of the American Indian Movement. Born in 1937 and raised by his grandparents on the Leach Lake reservation in Minnesota, Dennis Banks grew up learning traditional Ojibwa lifeways. As a young child he was torn from his home and forced to attend a government boarding school designed to assimilate Indian children into white culture. After years of being "white man-ized" in these repressive schools, Banks enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, shipping out to Japan when he was only seventeen years old. After returning to the states, Banks lived in poverty in the Indian slums of Minnesota until he was arrested for stealing groceries to feed his growing family. Although his white accomplice was freed on probation, Banks was sent to prison. There he became determined to educate himself. Hearing about the African American struggle for civil rights, he recognized that American Indians must ta
For young readers
Book data: Open Library