John was born in Omaha, Nebraska on  the day  after Vanentine's- February 15, 1946. He grew up in small towns near the Santee Sioux Reservation in northern Nebraska near the southeast corner of South Dakota.  His father was Santee Sioux and his mother was of MexicanIndian lineage. Hismotherpassedon when he was just 6 years old.

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John was best known as a frontline freedom-fighter attempting to preserve and defend Indigenous rights. In addition to being an  Indigenous rights activist, John was also renowned  as being a poet, musician, actor, prophet and spiritual motivator and counselor for Oklevueha Native American Church Kautantowit's Mecautea of the Pacific Northwest, and a frontline Hemp & Cannabis activist.

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In 1963 when John was 17 years old, he dropped out of high school and joined the US Navy. He served two tours during the early years of the Vietnam War and stayed in the Navy until 1967. In 1969 when Native American students and organizers occupied Alcatraz Island from November 20, 1969 to June 11, 1970 John was among them and hosted "Radio Free Alcatraz." That group became  known as “Indians of All Tribes,” and they issued the manifesto, We Hold the Rock, and eventually the book, Alcatraz is Not an Island. 

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John held the First Chair position as national chairman for AIM (the American Indian Movement from 1973 until 1979, and from then on maintained focus on emphasizing that all these political actions were not just moral, ethical issues but were legal issues, according to Native treaty rights and federal trust responsibilities.  The scattering of activists after the BIA take-over led to AIM actions at the Custer County Courthouse, followed by the 1973 Liberation/Occupation of Wounded Knee village by AIM and the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization.

 

He was also involved with the Seva Foundation and their great many Native American programs, and was the co-founder of Hempstead Project Heart with Willie Nelson, another elder member of ONAC Kautantowit's Mecautea. In 1990 John Trudell also took part in Tony Hymas's Oyaté project.

 

His second wife Tina Manning- Trudell's father was a member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe's Tribal Council who was working for treaty rights until the murder of  she, their 3 children, Ricarda Star, Sunshine Karma, and Eli Changing Sun, and Tina's mother Leah Hicks-Manning at the dishonorable hands of the federal government. Tina was pregnant at the time with their son Josiah Hawk. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Tina's mother Leah, was a coordinator for social services on the reservation, and Tina had been working actively in a local campaign to preserve the tribe's water rights at Wildhorse Resorvoir until her murder. The house fire that killed Trudell's family happened within 24 hours of him burning a US flag on the steps of the FBI building in Washington D.C. in protest of the government's treatment of Native Americans and the Sioux Nation.

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About six months after the deaths of his family, John Trudell started writing poetry. He described what would become his life's  work by saying: “They're called poems, but in reality they're lines given to me to hang on to.” Hundreds of poems John wrote, many of which went on to become songs  beginning in 1982 when he set them to traditional American "Indian" music . 

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In all, John wrote and published the following three books:

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• Living in Reality: Songs Called Poems, Society of the People Struggling to be Free, 1982, 

•  Stickman: Poems, Lyrics, Talks, 1999,

•  Lines From a Mined Mind: The Words of John Trudell, 2008.

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John Trudell performed and released on the following 18 albums:

• 1983 Tribal Voice

• 1986 aka grafitti Man (with Jesse Ed Davis)

• 1987 ...But This Isn't El Salvador (as Tribal Voice)

• 1987 Heart Jump Bouquet (with Jesse Ed Davis)

• 1991 Fables and Other Realities

• 1992 Child's Voice: Children of the Earth (vocals performed by Trudell's daughters)

• 1992 AKA Grafitti Man

• 1994 Johnny Damas & Me

• 1999 Blue Indians

• 2001 Descendant Now Ancestor (spoken word)

• 2001 Bone Days (produced by the actress Angelina Jolie)

• 2003 The Collection: 1985-1992 (anthology of first six albums)

• 2005 Live à Fip

• 2007 Madness & The Moremes (double album)

• 2010 Crazier Than Hell

• 2014 Through The Dust (with Kwest)

• 2015 Wazi's Dream (feat. Bad Dog: Quiltman, Mark Shark, Billy Watts, Ricky Eckstein)

• 2016 Like Broken Butterflies (with Kwest)

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His music draws from a blend of styles, including rock, blues and native beats, pop and political protest songs, and ultimately he won recognition at the NAMMY awards in 1999 for his album "Blue Indians."

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Trudell created a career as an actor, performing in roles in "Pow Wow Highway" (1989), Thunderheart (1992), On Deadly Ground (1995) and Smoke Signals (1998) (as the Radio speaker Randy Peone on K-REZ radio[21]). He was an adviser to the production of Incident at Oglala, directed by Michael Apted and produced by Robert Redford. A kind of companion piece to the fictional Thunderheart, the 1992 documentary explores facts related to the 1975 shooting of two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, for which Leonard Peltier was convicted in 1977. In Thunderheart, Trudell played a character who resembles Peltier.  John also was in  the  movie  "Dreamkeeper" in 2003, "The Legends of American Nations Come to Life" features several traditional native stories. Trudell played a character named coyote in a story about A Spider and Coyote.

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 Filmmaker Heather Rae spent more than a decade making a documentary about John's life titled "Trudell", which was released in 2005. Her intent was to demonstrate how his political and cultural activities were tied to contemporary history and inspired people.

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John has several children, as he has said, “spread around the country so they will always be safe.” His daughters Sage, Song and Star are featured in the 2005 documentary and his daughter Tara and her sisters were at Alcatraz. His youngest boy, Cetan, lives in San Francisco. He also was a proud grandfather as well.