Richard Two Elk's Oral Histories of the American Indian Movement (AIM)

On June 7, 2007, Richard Two Elk interviewed the retired FBI official Joe Trimbach on his radio show, Generations: Native American Radio [See left side at Two Elk's site], about the FBI agent's just-released history of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

Mr. Trimbach's book is titled American Indian Mafia, and it can be downloaded as an e-book for only five dollars. You can listen to Mr. Two Elk's interview of Joe Trimbach here.

Mr. Two Elk also interviewed the residents of Wounded Knee and let them tell what happened to their town when armed AIM radicals invaded their community in February 1973.

You can listen here to what the people of Wounded Knee told Mr. Two Elk about how the American Indian Movement (AIM) terrorized and robbed the people, ruined their homes, churches, trading post, and museum. It sounds like the kind of thing that happened a long time ago, not in the 20th century.

Mr. Two Elk wrote the foreward to American Indian Mafia and has spent his life interviewing Indian people and chronicling their history.

I wrote about the ruin of Wounded Knee here, but this is a first-hand oral-history by people who actually lived through this terrorist attack and the 71 day occupation by AIM gunmen. They all tell very sad, scary stories.

One mother told how terrified she was when she had to hike out of the town in the middle of a February night carrying her three-year-old because she didn't have any food to feed her daughter.

This lady told how her family's pictures, treasured collections, and historical heirlooms were all stolen even though they were hidden in the attic.

One lady said, "Nobody cared that somebody lived here, they just made themselves at home."

Many people's homes were burned to the ground.

How could we have been so blind that we couldn't see that our own people were held hostage by terrorists right in America?

Why didn't the news media tell us the truth about what was really happening?

I guess the media and politicians felt guilty about the historical treatment of Indians and so were fooled by the AIM propaganda. Also, I think that the victims may have been afraid to speak out for fear of retaliation. I think that this fear of speaking out is changing because of Mr. Two Elk's interviews.

In my opinion, Mr. Two Elk's history of AIM is a lot more
believable than the historical fabrications penned by the white radical Ward Churchill.

Hat tip to my friend Mr. Martin.