Mark Parker, who has recently completed his MA at Cambridge, is one of three new CHASE/AHRC-funded PhD students involved in the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies. We asked Mark to tell us a little about the work he plans to be doing over the next few years. Here’s what he had to say:
Twenty-five years ago, the Red Power movement garnered little scholarly attention. Despite many recognising the movement’s importance, few works had paid attention to this era of Indigenous activism. This changed in 1996, with the publication of two major works: Smith and Warrior’s Like a Hurricane, and Troy Johnson’s The Occupation of Alcatraz Island.[1] These books were foundational to the field. As Smith and Warrior wrote, prior research had been unsatisfactory: often written by non-Natives, and typically seeking to ‘persuade readers that government policies were cruel and misguided.’ In turn, they argued, previous scholarship tended to favour a melancholic story of abuse over an account which recognised both the government’s exploitations and Native agency in challenging such cruelties.[2] Smith, Warrior, and Johnson introduced to the field an analysis of Native agency, particularly through an engagement with three key events: the Alcatraz occupation, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and the Wounded Knee occupation. Both works were incredibly successful in this respect.
Flag of the American Indian Movement (Tripodero, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
More recently, the field has taken great strides in analysing Red Power. Most notably, our understanding of the movement has broadened as scholars have attempted to situate Red Power within broader contexts of Native protest. Bradley Shreve’s Red Power Rising identified the roots of Red Power in the 1960s, illuminating the influence of the National Indian Youth Council and their Ponca leader Clyde Warrior.[3] Similarly, Daniel Cobb and Loretta Fowler’s edited volume, Beyond Red Power, sought to break the equation that Native activism equals Red Power, instead circumnavigating the movement to highlight the persistent presence of Indigenous activism throughout the twentieth century.[4] Other scholars, such as György Tóth and Kate Rennard, have sought to extend Red Power’s timeframe beyond the 1970s, and its scope across oceans.[5]
What is somewhat troubling, however, is that the ‘classic’ Red Power era (defined as 1969-1978) has remained relatively unexplored since the publication of Johnson’s and Smith and Warrior’s seminal works. The obvious outlier, of course, is Kent Blansett’s Journey to Freedom, which traced the life and activism of Richard Oakes, the young Mohawk who was instrumental in the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. Blansett’s investigation allowed for the drawing out of ideological shifts, most notably the rise of Intertribalism and Native Nationalism, which coupled to produce the ideological uniqueness of Red Power.[6] Nonetheless, the few works that have engaged with the movement during the classic era remain blinkered by an imagination of Red Power as characterised purely by direct-action activism. Resultingly, we still know little about Red Power beyond a few major protest events.
Last year, Sam Hitchmough stressed the need for studies of the classic era to move beyond analyses of just Red Power’s ‘monumental events’. If we wish to understand what it is we are talking about when we discuss Red Power, he argued, we must seek to recapture the ‘lost contours’ of the movement’s activism and ideologies by casting a wider and finer net over the period. Whilst Hitchmough saw potential in an analysis of ‘lesser-known events,’ I see a need also to look beyond physical protest itself.[7] My research looks to understand how art might be understood as a component of the Red Power movement. In doing so, I ask how art contributed to activism during protest events, as well as how art was a form of protest in and of itself.
In some instances, it seems evident that art and creative practices (broadly conceived) related closely to Red Power activism. Drumming, for instance, was a frequent feature at protest events, commonly written of in news reports. Graffitiing was also widespread. Most famously, as analysed by Dean Rader in Engaged Resistance, Alcatraz Island became a mosaic of slogans and signage; much of this remains on the island today. The American Indian Movement even had their own song. The list goes on, with similar such cases abundant in the pages of Akwesanse Notes, the Mohawk news outlet that has been widely dubbed the media counterpart to Red Power’s activism.
In other instances, art seems rather less related. In such cases, it remains a task to understand what constitutes Red Power art. Was Floyd Westerman’s folk music Red Power? The same could be asked of Buffy Sainte-Marie, one of many artists who contributed financially to the Alcatraz occupation. Could Fritz Scholder or T.C. Cannon’s paintings be considered Red Power? What about N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn? What Red Power art is and how it operates are the primary questions that underpin my research.
Nonetheless, the answers to these cannot be straightforwardly sought. As Lucie Kýrová and György Tóth recently noted, it remains unclear what Red Power itself is: ‘what exactly is Red Power? A slogan? An aspect of a movement or a movement within a movement? An era? An intellectual stance or mindset? All of the above?’[8] This problem is not easily resolved through an abstract reckoning with the term. Instead, our understanding of Red Power will derive from a deeper engagement with the movement’s character, including its strategies and ideologies. In this way, as I ask how art operated as a component of Red Power, I will also be contributing to a broader debate on Red Power’s character.
My PhD begins at an opportune time, for in recent years there has been a substantial improvement in the archival material scholars of the Red Power era are able to draw upon. For this, we have the American Indian Digital History Project to thank. Their efforts in digitising the vast archives of Native news outlets Akwesasne Notes and Indian Voice provides scholars with ready access to extensive Indigenous-edited media from the Red Power era and beyond. On the pages of these publications, one can find coverage of protests, advertisements for art shows, and vast swathes of amateur-authored poetry. In line with the aims of the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies, I hope that I can contribute to a shift towards a greater reliance on Indigenous sources, as well as collaborative engagements with Indigenous peoples. I expect my research to be driven by such sources, as well as interviews with Indigenous artists, activists, and communities who engaged with Red Power.
I want to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University of Kent, and my supervisor Professor David Stirrup for allowing me the opportunity to further scholarly understandings of the Red Power movement, as well as my own understanding of what it means to conduct research ethically.
[1] Troy R Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
[2] Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: The New Press, 1996), p. vii.
[3] Bradley G Shreve, Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).
[4] Daniel M Cobb and Loretta Fowler, Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900 (Santa Fe, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).
[5] György Ferenc Tóth, From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie: The Alliance for Sovereignty between American Indians and Central Europeans in the Late Cold War (New York: Suny Press, 2016); Kate Rennard, ‘“We’re Still Here”: Memory and Commemoration in the Alliances between the American Indian Movement and Welsh Nationalists’, Comparative American Studies An International Journal, 17.2 (2020), 167–82.
[6] Kent Blansett, A Journey to Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
[7] Sam Hitchmough, ‘Performative Protest and the Lost Contours of Red Power Activism’, Comparative American Studies An International Journal, 17.2 (2020), 224–37 (p. 224).
[8] Lucie Kýrová and György Ferenc Tóth, ‘Red Power at 50: Re-Evaluations and Memory Introduction’, Comparative American Studies An International Journal, 17.2 (2020), 107–16 (p. 108).