In 1971, at the Mount Rushmore national memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota, he urinated on the giant visage of George Washington, and filed a $9m defamation suit against the Cleveland Indians baseball team and their mascot, Chief Wahoo. He became AIM's national director and organised the boarding of a replica of the Mayflower during Thanksgiving Day celebrations at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, in 1970. In Cleveland, Ohio, he met Dennis Banks, co-founder of AIM, which he joined in time to take part in the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay. He tried college four times, but moved across the west back to reservations, finally finding work first with the Rosebud Sioux tribal council, then with the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. Russell faced discrimination growing up in Vallejo, and became a delinquent. During the second world war, his father, Hank, moved the family to San Francisco to work in shipyards.
Born Russell Charles Means into the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge reservation, South Dakota, his Oglala name was Oyate Wacinyapin, "works for the people". He almost literally drifted into Native American activism. But Means had always been a keen actor in the sort of political theatre which was a prominent, if only occasionally successful, part of 1960s protest.
Years later he would pursue an acting career, most notably as Chingachgook in Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992). With long braids and a sculpted face, Means looked the part.
Viewed as the most notorious Indian since Sitting Bull, he assumed a position of de facto leadership that often put him at odds with his fellow activists, as well as with the authorities. As the spokesman for AIM brought to Washington to negotiate, Russell Means, who has died aged 72 after suffering from throat cancer, became the leading face of Native Americans.
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