Russell Means

No act of protest was too bold for American Indian activist Russell Means–not even urinating on George Washington’s head at Mount Rushmore. An Oglala Sioux who died at 72 on Oct. 22, Means became famous in 1973 when he helped lead the American Indian Movement’s 71-day armed occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D.–site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children–to protest broken treaties and corrupt tribal governments. To combat stereotypes of Indians in movies, he later acted in them, notably as Chingachgook in the 1992 film Last of the Mohicans. As for his act on Mount Rushmore, he said he did it to symbolize “how most Indians feel about the faces chiseled out of our holy land.”