Farewell to Custer

Over the past two years, Chippewa Dennis Banks has emerged as an angry and outspoken leader of the militant American Indian Movement. With his hair in braids, he has preached a return to traditional Indian ways, including the ancient religions and methods of education. He wants Indian tribes to abandon their white-imposed system of elections and revert to a selection of chiefs by a kind of consensus of medicine men and district leaders.

Last week, however, Dennis Banks' confrontation with the American system was scheduled to take place in a court in Custer, S. Dak. He was to appear for sentencing on his conviction of rioting and assault in connection with the burning of the Custer courthouse in 1973. Maximum sentence: 15 years' imprisonment. But Banks did not show up. He told friends he feared for his life if he was ever sentenced to prison. Then he vanished into the underground.

Banks' disappearance did nothing to cool matters at the nearby Oglala Sioux's Pine Ridge Reservation. There the AIM members and sympathizers, many of them fullblood Indians, want to depose Tribal President Richard Wilson and his mostly mixed-blood followers. At week's end many AIM members were gathering at Pine Ridge to participate in a traditional Sioux sun dance, an occasion that held the danger of further violence. In any event, it is clear that the problem of Indian protest is still far from solved.

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