Lakota leader Tom Poor Bear dies after battle with COVID-19
‘He never stopped fighting’
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Indianz.Com
The former vice president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and a longtime Native rights activist died Sunday from complications due to the coronavirus.
Tom Poor Bear, 66, died at the North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley, Colorado.
“I still can’t believe Tom has left us,” said Bryan Brewer, who served as president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe with Poor Bear as his vice president. “It’s a bad day for the tribe and his family.”
Poor Bear joined the American Indian Movement not long after they came to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1972. He ran away from boarding school to jump in a car and ride to Washington, D.C., where AIM took over a Bureau of Indian Affairs building to protest the federal agency’s failure to fulfill its trust responsibilities to Native people.
Poor Bear continued to seek justice for Native people, and in 1999 he began fighting beer sales in Whiteclay, Nebraska, an unincorporated village on the reservation’s southern border that once sold as much as 4 million cans of beer a year mostly to residents of the dry Pine Ridge Reservation.
His fight against Whiteclay beer sales was a deeply personal one, driven by the murder of his brother, Wilson Black Elk Jr., and cousin, Ron Hard Heart, whose bodies were found in a field between Whiteclay and Pine Ridge on June 8, 1999.
Along with other activists such as the late Russell Means and the late Frank LaMere, Poor Bear fought to close the beer stores and to seek justice for his brother and cousin, hosting annual marches to Whiteclay for many years.
“I made a commitment I wouldn’t walk away from their spirits,” he told a reporter for the Rapid City Journal in 2009. “We’re going to keep marching until justice is found.”

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