A lifetime of Protest
Vernon Bellecourt, calling for a "bloodbath before every Federal building in America" poured a jar of his own blood on an American flag, himself, and the doors of the Federal Building in downtown Minneapolis during a protest against U.S. military intervention in Panama in 1989.As a youngster, Vernon Bellecourt heard stories of how the people of his northern Minnesota White Earth reservation lost their land to unscrupulous whites at the turn of the 20th century and suffered profound poverty as a result. His life would be different, he decided.
And it was for a while. He opened a chain of successful hair salons in St. Paul, then moved to Denver to sell real estate. "I was going to become a millionaire," he told the Star Tribune in 1999.
But his younger brother, Clyde, who stayed in Minnesota and became an activist, changed that. "I'm trying to win back the land," Clyde told Vernon, "and you're selling it."
Vernon Bellecourt soon came home for good.
The self-proclaimed "freedom fighter" and longtime leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM) died Saturday at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis of complications from pneumonia, said Clyde Bellecourt. He was 75.
Vernon Bellecourt once said that the American Indian Movement, an often controversial group that led a series of high-profile, sometimes violent protests in the 1970s, was "respected by many, hated by some, but ... never ignored." The same might have been said for him. He spent most of his life protesting, often drawing criticism for the form it took, sometimes from within the Indian protest movement itself.
"He was very articulate in expressing the view that American Indians have not been adequately recognized and remembered in history, or adequately dealt with as political entities in these United States," said Laura Waterman Wittstock, who met Bellecourt in 1970 when she was a reporter with the American Indian Press Association and he was representing AIM.
Takes cause abroad
While Clyde focused on the home front, Vernon became a leader of AIM's work abroad, meeting with controversial leaders such as Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. As recently as four weeks ago, he was in Venezuela to talk with President Hugo Chavez about his program for providing heating assistance to American Indian tribes.
Most pressing in recent years was his fight against the use of Indian mascots and symbols for sports teams, such as the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians. He was arrested before Game 5 of the 1997 World Series for burning Cleveland's red-faced logo outside Jacobs Field, and he protested in Atlanta at Braves playoff games throughout the 1990s.
"Because of Vernon and other activists, fewer students in this country will have to tolerate this problem when they go to school," said Brenda Child, associate professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota.
"I don't think a lot of people in the Indian community thought there would be this kind of success in the mascot campaign," said Robert Warrior, author of "Like a Hurricane: American Indian Activism From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee" and an English professor at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.
While AIM succeeded in raising Americans' consciousness of Indian issues, it also participated in a number of events that featured violence and internal dissension.
"When you look at AIM actions ... mistakes were made and there are numerous criticisms [of their actions] and many of them are fair," Warrior said. "But what you see Vernon and the other AIM leaders doing was work that other native organizations were not doing. ... They were reaching out and trying to respond to the needs of people whose needs were not being met."
Bellecourt grew up on the White Earth reservation. "Although we all lived in poverty, we lived a better life than most people," he told the Star Tribune in 1999.
He was a disciplined student who learned his prayers from the Catholic nuns of St. Benedict's parochial school in White Earth. But the lessons in life he learned were not always pleasant.
"To this day, I can't stand the smell of Lifebuoy soap, because a racist teacher shoved a whole bar of it in my mouth," he recalled.
In Minneapolis, where the family moved when he was 16, Bellecourt quit school. After a series of odd jobs, he was convicted of robbing a bar in St. Paul and sentenced to St. Cloud prison when he was 19.
Opens beauty salon
There, he learned how to be a barber. When he was released, he went to beauty school to become a hairdresser. He opened Mr. Vernon beauty salons in Highland Park and on the East Side of St. Paul. Married and already the father of three children, he built a house in White Bear Lake. "I thought I had really made it."
In the mid-1960s, Vernon sold his salons and moved his family to Colorado, where he styled hair part time and skied on his days off. He moved to Denver to sell real estate before returning to Minneapolis.
Around that time, Clyde responded to Indian reports of police brutality by joining Dennis Banks, Harold Good Sky and George Mitchell to form AIM in a storefront office on E. Franklin Avenue.
Vernon's journey down "the Red Road" of Indian spiritual awareness led him to an array of causes and confrontations. In 1972, he was an AIM spokesman when 400 Indians occupied the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington. In 1973, as AIM's national director, he addressed the United Nations in New York, pleading for protection of Indian rights.
In January 1973, Bellecourt was one of several AIM members indicted after a riot at the courthouse in Custer, S.D. Charges were dropped.
Later that winter, AIM members occupied the historic hamlet of Wounded Knee, S.D., for 71 days. Bellecourt got the news of the occupation from a TV broadcast while visiting Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He continued his lecture tour, reasoning that he could serve the protest occupation better by drumming up support from off the reservation.
In the years that followed, AIM was plagued by disputes among leaders with ideological differences, including the Bellecourts, Russell Means and Dennis Banks. The disputes did not, however, dim Bellecourt's passion for activism on behalf of his people.
"When the American Indian Movement resurfaced in Minneapolis in 1968, a wildfire spread throughout other urban and reservation areas," he said in 1999. "It was a catalyst for people to understand that the roots of our tree of life had almost withered and died.
"Now, I'm very concerned about the cycles of alcohol and chemical dependency that, in many cases, we ourselves have perpetuated to our youth. What we pass on to the children will determine very critically to our future.
"We've got to stop killing ourselves, and we've got to speak out against others, those who take advantage of us."
Gerald Vizenor, who taught Native American Studies at the University of Minnesota in the late 1970s and early 1980s, said Bellecourt "worked very hard to become a knowledgeable and sensitive leader for native people." Vizenor, now professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, recalled Bellecourt's recent attempts to appreciate contemporary American Indian art, by attending openings and "trying to talk to artists about what they were thinking. I was quite moved by that."
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