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SPEAKER 1: White Earth band member Clyde Bellecourt has spent decades fighting for the rights of Indian people. He's marched in rallies and protests across the country, including one at a Vikings football game last fall. Native drummers joined others to oppose the continued use of the Washington Football team's name and mascot. Bellecourt says Indian people face a different treatment.

CLYDE BELLECOURT: We're the only people in America that they still make fun of. They would never do that to black people. Little Black Sambo is gone and Frito Bandito is gone.

SPEAKER 1: Clyde Bellecourt is 79 this month and still active in educating people about American Indian history and culture. Dan Olson has a new episode of Minnesota Sounds and Voices.

DAN OLSON: The staff at St. Benedict's Mission School on the White Earth Reservation had their own way of punishing 10-year-old Clyde Bellecourt for his chronic truancy.

CLYDE BELLECOURT: In my case, they turned my hands over and they split every single one of my knuckles open with the side of a ruler. That's why I ran away.

DAN OLSON: Bellecourt was born and raised on White Earth. He enjoyed fishing, harvesting wild rice, and collecting berries, much more than attending class. A Becker County judge decided when Bellecourt was 11 that he was incorrigible and sent him to Red Wing, the corrections facility for young men. Later, addiction and crime would put Bellecourt deeper into the corrections system. During one stint, he was put in solitary confinement in Stillwater State Prison.

CLYDE BELLECOURT: Felt I was never going to walk the streets again.

DAN OLSON: It was the early 1960s. Bellecourt remembers it all. A concrete cell, no light, no mattress.

CLYDE BELLECOURT: I was having dreams about being electrocuted and being-- had my head cut off and being hung. And one day I heard a man whistling, you are my sunshine.

DAN OLSON: Bellecourt recalls thinking what kind of person would be whistling you are my sunshine in solitary confinement? It was Edward Benton-Banai, an Ojibwe spiritual leader. And after his release, Banai urged Bellecourt to turn his life around.

CLYDE BELLECOURT: And Eddie Benton-Banai came and visited me, along with James Donahue, a white caseworker, and convinced me that I should be part of their efforts to change the conditions.

DAN OLSON: Those conditions, alcohol, poverty, unemployment, and crime created a revolving prison door for Native Americans. Once out of prison, Bellecourt, along with others, founded the American Indian Movement in 1968 in Minneapolis. They wanted to end the revolving prison door and teach young people their native heritage.

SPEAKER 2: Several groups of American Indians have banded together to march on the nation's Capitol for a redress of some long-standing grievances. ABC's Bill Matney reports.

WILLIAM MATNEY: They came to the Capitol as a trail of broken treaties caravan, they said, to reclaim their lands and their rivers and most of all, their dignity.

DAN OLSON: AIM's tactics included public protest. Bellecourt and others got nationwide coverage in 1972 for their occupation of Interior Department offices in Washington, DC. In 1974, Bellecourt spoke to reporters as Native Americans were the first indigenous people to present their message to the World Council of Churches.

SPEAKER 3: We numbered as our three worst enemies, the Christian church, the offices of education, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And for the past six years, we have lodged an attack against these three institutions.

DAN OLSON: AIM's members created survival schools to teach culture. They started jobs programs, a women's shelter, and a legal rights service. At 79, Bellecourt is unrelenting in his campaign to tell others about the genocide of Native people, broken treaties, natural resource predation, and other injustices.

CLYDE BELLECOURT: The white man will never publish that stuff. They don't want their children to know what they did to Indian people and the tremendous debt that they owe to Indian people. So that's a hidden part of history.

SPEAKER 1: That's Clyde Bellecourt. Bellecourt lives in Minneapolis. He's a founder of the American Indian Movement. Dan Olson is our Minnesota Sounds and Voices reporter.