Socialist Worker: Interview with Robert Robideau

National

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Socialist Worker publishes a 2006 interview with the late Robert Robideau, an American Indian Movement activist who died on February 16. He was acquitted of the murders of two FBI agents, the same crime for which Leonard Peltier was convicted.

"Could you tell us what were the issues and conditions that gave rise to the American Indian Movement?

AIM was born at a time when there was great civil unrest in the United States. The antiwar movement against Vietnam and the Black civil rights movements was the spark that ignited hundreds of thousands of people of all colors to rise up and voice their grievances--against the unjust war in Asia, and racism and prejudice against Black people.

Issues with treaty rights had begun anew with the fishing struggles in the Northwest, and reclamation of Indian lands was in full swing after the Native takeover of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in 1969. This electrifying moment in time and history inspired a small group of urban tribal members to form the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis, to fight racism and police abuse against urban Indians.

The First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the relocation and termination of some tribes brought thousands of tribal Indian people into the large cities of North America. Indian people didn't find the better life that had been painted for them. They discovered racism, prejudice and abuses that were no different then what they had experienced most of their life from whites who surrounded their reservations.

Those who became members of the American Indian Movement formed roving patrols to record the police abuses that went on in their communities. They alerted the media with the hope of generating community support. They began to rally, and hold workshops and teach-ins in an effort to create community consciousness against the abuses and the general attitude of racism.

They were looking for a better life in which to raise families--and were willing to fight to have it."

Get the Story:
The FBI war on Indian radicals (Socialist Worker 7/28)