American Indian Movement

While it is not yet clear whether there will be such an organized expression of protest in 2025, one can only assume that some films will play to audiences much differently than if the election had had a different outcome, such as Jesse Short Bull and David France’s documentary “Free Leonard Peltier,” on the imprisoned leader of the American Indian Movement, Kim A. Snyder’s doc “The Librarians,” about the role of librarians amid a wave of state book bans, or Andrew Ahn’s remake of the LGBTQ+-themed “The Wedding Banquet.”

The ’60s and ’70s looked, on balance, like an era of progress to many on the left, but the women’s rights movement, the post-Stonewall gay rights movement, Black Power, the Chicano movement, and the American Indian Movement looked very different to those on the far right, and they became nightmare fuel for a very different horror show.

In the 1970s, the FBI infiltrated the highest levels of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

The action is bookended by two deadly standoffs: the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where U.S. soldiers killed as many as 300 members of the Lakota Sioux tribe, and the occupation of that site in 1973 by the American Indian Movement and its supporters, who were protesting government injustice.

His family operated a trading post and museum there until 1973, when American Indian Movement protesters occupied the site, destroying both the post and Czywczynski’s home.