Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2007, pages 74-75

In Memoriam

WaBun-Inini (Vernon Bellecourt) (1931-2007)

By Matt Horton

WABUN-ININI, born Vernon F. Bellecourt, died Oct. 13 at the age of 75 of complications from pneumonia. He not only was an important leader in the American Indian community, but was a respected diplomat between that community and the Arab world.

A member of the Crane Clan of the Anishinabe Ojibway nation, WaBun-Inini—“Day Break Man” in Anishinabe—was born Oct. 17, 1931 to Charles Bellecourt Sr., a World War I veteran disabled by mustard gas, and Angeline Bellecourt, who raised 12 children on government benefits, and with no running water or electricity, on the Minnesota White Earth reservation. There he attended St. Benedict’s parochial school until the family moved to St. Paul.

At the age of 19, after a series of odd jobs, Bellecourt was convicted of robbing a bar and sentenced to St. Cloud prison, where he learned to be a barber. After he was released, he attended beauty school and became a hair stylist, soon opening two successful “Mr. Vernon” beauty salons. In the mid-1960s, he sold his business and moved to Denver, where he sold real estate.

At the time, Denver was emerging as a major “relocation center” for American Indian refugees fleeing reservations under physical and economic siege. U.S. Termination policy had revoked the reservations’ special status, cut off their funding and pressured the people to leave, providing one-way trips to urban centers for job-training.

In Minneapolis in July 1968, Bellecourt’s younger brother Clyde, along with Eddie Benton Banais, Dennis Banks and George Mitchell, founded what would be the first chapter of the American Indian Movement (AIM), to assist the displaced refugees with jobs, housing, and education—and to protect them from police brutality. AIM’s second chapter was organized in Cleveland.

Influenced by his brother, Vernon Bellecourt founded the third chapter in Denver. It focused on the spiritual and cultural education of urbanized American Indians, including a program for prisoners that received federal funding. As part of his own spiritual and cultural evolution, Bellecourt took the name WaBun-Inini, given him by an Ojibway medicine man.

By 1971 WaBun-Inini had emerged as a key spokesperson and negotiator. He served as an ambassador and fund-raiser during the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff and, as AIM national director, addressed the United Nations. He helped organize the first Treaty Conference in 1974, and until his death was a special representative of the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), an organization representing indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere to the United Nations.

Through the IITC, AIM developed close relationships with movements across the Americas. WaBun-Inini recently traveled to Venezuela to attend a conference of indigenous elected Latin American officials. Days before his death, he addressed a meeting between 30 American Indian nations and CITGO, the Venezuelan national petroleum company, that finalized a three-year deal for badly needed heating oil to be provided to American Indian reservations by a CITGO subsidiary.

AIM also developed relationships with Africa and the African Diaspora. In 1974, the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) introduced WaBun-Inini and the Treaty Council to the Libyan Embassy in Washington, DC, beginning a long relationship with Libya‘s Green Revolution and its leader, Col. Muammar Qaddafi. This relationship led to a meeting in the early 1980s, hosted by the Libyan government and organized by WaBun-Inini, of over 400 indigenous nations from the Americas. WaBun-Inini protested the Reagan administration’s 1986 bombing of Tripoli and the travel ban imposed on U.S. citizens by participating in a delegation to Libyathat year. On the one-year anniversary of the bombing, he helped organize a solidarity delegation of 200 Americans, including the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, to attend a rally at Colonel Qad­dafi’s home on the outskirts of Tripoli.

That same year, WaBun-Inini and Bob Brown of the AAPRP were summoned to testify in a precedent-setting wiretap case before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which was investigating the People’s Committee for Libyan Students. Refusing to testify, they were sentenced to 90 days in jail, where they embarked on a hunger strike that began in the Alexandria, VA Detention Center and continued after they were transferred to New York’s Metropolitan Correction Center.

Recipient of the 1991 Qaddafi Human Rights Prize on behalf of indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere, WaBun-Inimi at the time of his death was scheduled to travel to Tripoli with an American Indian delegation.

WaBun-Inini and AIM also developed close relations with Iraq’s Ba’ath Party—he visited Iraq as a delegate to its second International Conference on Human Rights—and with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), visiting PLO chairman Yasser Arafat in Lebanon and in Tunis on several occasions. Through its observer status at the U.N., the PLO mission  helped the Treaty Council gain international recognition, despite U.S. arguments that American Indian issues were an internal affair and therefore exempt from U.N. scrutiny.

During the Iranian hostage crisis, the Treaty Council, along with the United Methodist Church, helped deliver mail on three separate occasions from the American hostages to their families. When a U.S. judge overturned orders for the mass arrests and deportation of Iranian students in this country and they were released to a hostile mob on the streets of New York City, AIM and the AAPRP rescued the students, who had found temporary asylum in a church.

“WaBun-Inini and the Treaty Council were fortunate to find common issues of survival with the peoples of the Middle East,” said Treaty Council Board of Directors chair and Oglala Lakota Bill Means. “Through cultural exchange and conferences, we were able to establish a relationship based on our common histories of colonialism and our common experiences as indigenous peoples of the world.”

WaBun-Inini is perhaps best known in the U.S. for his work as president of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports & Media (NCRSM), which has led the fight against American Indian mascots and logos. NCRSM’s fight against negative stereotypes in the media was not limited to American Indians. On Columbus Day 2002, WaBun-Inini addressed negative post-9/11 portrayals by taking to task “comedians on late night shows telling jokes about Arabs and Muslims.” Speaking from his experience as an American Indian, he said, “You demean and trivialize a people—whoever it is at the time you portray as being your enemy. That justifies your greed for land and natural resources and makes them hated or expendable.”

WaBun-Inini was buried on what would have been his 76th birthday at the Snyder Lake Traditional Burial Site on the White Earth reservation.

Matt Horton is director of the AET Book Club.

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