In the fall of 1972 AIM helped organize the Trail of Broken Treaties, a cross-country caravan that brought hundreds of Native people to Washington the week of the presidential election carrying the Twenty Points, a program for restoring treaty-making and Indigenous sovereignty. When promised housing and meetings collapsed, the caravan occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters on November 2, 1972, holding the building for six days and leaving with thousands of pages of files documenting federal mismanagement.
The government's response set the pattern for what followed: rather than negotiate over the Twenty Points, federal agencies opened intelligence files on the caravan's leadership, and AIM was formally classified as an extremist organization — the prelude to the saturation policing and prosecutions of the Wounded Knee years.