With the Vietnam War still raging and the reelection of Richard Nixon in November 1972 imminent, a coalition of eight Indigenous organizations—AIM, the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada (later renamed Assembly of First Nations), the Native American Rights Fund, the National Indian Youth Council, the National American Indian Council, the National Council on Indian Work, National Indian Leadership Training, and the American Indian Committee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse—organized “The Trail of Broken Treaties.” Armed with a “20-Point Position Paper” that focused on the federal government’s responsibility to implement Indigenous treaties and sovereignty, caravans set out in the fall of 1972. The vehicles and numbers of participants multiplied at each stop, converging in Washington, DC, one week before the presidential election. Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the “Native American Embassy,” hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the “20-Point Position Paper,”14 the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' Hist…, loc. 408922