Clyde attended a Roman Catholic mission college run by Benedictine nuns on the reservation till he was a youngster. The household then moved to Minneapolis, the place he struggled academically, dropped out of highschool, did not discover a job and was jailed for burglaries and robberies.
In jail, he met Mr. Banks and Eddie Benton-Banai, who was working a cultural program for different Native American inmates. After they had been launched, in mid-1968, they based the American Indian Motion with George Mitchell, Charles Deegan and others to assist city Indians take care of discrimination, unemployment, poverty and inadequate housing. Mr. Bellecourt’s older brother Vernon was additionally energetic within the motion.
Mr. Bellecourt, who later labored for a utility firm, was chosen because the motion’s first chairman and helped launch the so-called Path of Damaged Treaties, a protracted march from the West Coast to Washington, in 1972.
Along with his spouse, whose Japanese American father was interred throughout World Warfare II, Mr. Bellecourt is survived by 4 kids, Susan, Tonya, Little Crow and Little Wolf; and quite a few grandchildren.
He pleaded responsible following his arrest in 1985 in a drug possession case. He later mentioned that the arrest and the 2 years he spent in jail helped him break his dependancy.
In 2016 he revealed an autobiography, “Thunder Earlier than the Storm,” written with the journalist Jon Lurie, In it, he wrote that earlier than he might assist heal others as a frontrunner of A.I.M. within the late Sixties, he needed to make peace along with his creator and heal himself in a prayerful sweat lodge ceremony, which in the end reworked the motion’s agenda from violent confrontation to constructive engagement.
“I understood that the one manner we had been going to reach the Motion was to put therapeutic and spirituality on the middle of every thing we did,” Mr. Bellecourt wrote. “The spirits within the ceremony advised us that we had been to proceed on our journey, that we needed to deliver again the spirit of the Indian folks.”
