On 27 February 1973, members and supporters of the American Indian Movement (AIM), mostly Lakota Sioux, occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota – the site of what is sometimes described as the last battle of the Indian wars, where in December 1890 the US 7th Cavalry, the regiment led by General Custer at the Little Big Horn, massacred some 350 Lakota, mostly women and children.
The 300 protesters were soon surrounded by some 800 federal marshals, FBI agents and national guardsmen in a siege that lasted 71 days and led to the deaths of two Native Americans, one a Cherokee, and left one agent paralysed.
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. 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. With long braids and a sculpted face, Means looked the part. Years later he would pursue an acting career, most notably as Chingachgook in Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992). 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.
He almost literally drifted into Native American activism. 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". During the second world war, his father, Hank, moved the family to San Francisco to work in shipyards. Russell faced discrimination growing up in Vallejo, and became a delinquent. 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.
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 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 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. The following year, he led the Trail of Broken Treaties occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, which ended, as the protest at Wounded Knee would, with promises of meetings with government officials.
After Wounded Knee, Means and Banks were charged with assault, conspiracy and larceny but were acquitted in 1974 due to the prosecution's misconduct and collusion with the FBI. Means ran for president of the Oglala but lost the election amid claims of voter fraud and intimidation against the incumbent, which led to riots outside a Sioux Falls courthouse. He was shot by an agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1975, and survived two assassination attempts within the next year. In 1976 he was acquitted of abetting murder in a bar-room brawl, but convicted of charges stemming from the Sioux Falls riot. He was sent to prison, where he was stabbed, but was released in time to join the celebration, at the Little Big Horn, Montana, of the 100th anniversary of Custer's last stand.
Means was often involved in political conflicts within AIM and was frequently accused of self-promotion, not least when he agreed to become the running mate of Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, in his attempt to become the Republican candidate in the 1984 US presidential election. Four years later he lost his bid to become the Libertarian party's presidential nomination to the future Republican senator and candidate Ron Paul.
He split AIM over his support for the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua, driven from their lands by the Sandinista government. Many AIM members refused to follow Means's support of the rightwing Contra movement, amid accusations of widespread fraud with monies given to the Contras to benefit the Miskito. In 1988 he resigned, for the sixth and final time, from AIM, which split officially five years later.
Means's acting career then blossomed. After The Last of the Mohicans, he appeared in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) and was the voice of Powhatan in Disney's Pocahontas and its sequel (1995, 1998). In more than 30 films and television movies he played such heroes as Jim Thorpe and Sitting Bull, as well as sending himself up in the TV comedy Duckman. Means published an autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread (1995), in which he defended the use of violent confrontation: "It told the world that John Wayne hadn't killed us all."
In 2007 Means was arrested in Denver for blocking the city's Columbus Day parade – which he accused of celebrating genocide – and, following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples the same year, he tried to unilaterally declare an independent Lakota nation.
Divorced four times, he is survived by his fifth wife, Pearl, and 10 children.