Liberation Day 2017 Remembering Wounded Knee 1890 and 1973. Looking Back at the 25th anniversary of when Lakota Student Alliance helped create the annual event as a tribal holiday "I never thought in my lifetime that I'd see a tribal government respectfully honor something that AIM did," says Clyde Bellecourt, Co-Founder of the American Indian Movement. Photo courtesy Dan Sky, High Times. 1998. On February 27th, 1973, an independent nation was declared in the tiny village of Wounded Knee on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. For 71 days, a group of American Indian Movement (AIM) members and traditional Oglala Lakota people held ground in a shooting war against the largest internal deployment of federal forces since the Civil War. The Indians had one demand: the return of the Great Sioux Nation, a sovereign land base (consisting of the entire western half of South Dakota) that was recognized by the United Sates in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868