Red Power, white narrative: founding violence & the invalidation of Indigenous rights

ABSTRACT

The disavowal of ‘founding violence’ remains a core proposition of settler colonial theory. This paper expands our theoretical understanding of the concept to account for the strategic invocation of founding violence to legitimate settler colonial racial orders. Drawing from a sample of in-depth interviews (n = 27) with settlers who have historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) confrontational activism in the 1970s, I show how non-Indigenous territoriality is affirmed through the narrative displacement of founding violence onto Indigenous peoples. Across the U.S. state of South Dakota, where AIM’s ‘Red Power’ activism was most pronounced, interviewees routinely delegitimize movement grievances through historicized narratives of incessant inter-tribal conflict and Indigenous violence. Thus, in addition to justifying settler society’s bloody origins, the invocation of founding violence remains a powerful discursive mechanism for delegitimizing contemporary Indigenous rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonial theory
• founding violence
• American Indian Movement
• racial discourse
• Indigenous activism
• Red Power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Throughout the paper I utilize the terms ‘Indigenous’, ‘American Indian’, and ‘Native’ interchangeably to refer to the multitude of cultures monolithically racialized in the U.S settler context. Whenever possible I refer to specific cultural groups (e.g. Oglala Lakota).

2 On the relationship between violence and the U.S settler context, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); on settler ‘culturicide’ directed at the Oceti Sakowin see James V. Fenelon, Culturicide, Resistance, and Survival of the Lakota (‘Sioux Nation’) (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

3 For theoretical insights into the concept of ‘founding violence,’ see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 77–78, and Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal: The Settler Colonial Situation’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2008). For the empirical relationship between historiography and founding violence in Australia and Israel, see Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto Press, 2006), chapter 4.

4 See, for instance, Jean M. O’ Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

5 This definition is influenced by Veracini’s reflections on the concept, and transcends strictly settler colonial societies. As Veracini notes, however, the relationship of founding violence to settler colonial discourse is particularly fraught, reflecting a defensive mechanism to repress the collective trauma of Indigenous elimination and the corollary projection of a settler colonial polity as ‘both an ideal society and as truer and uncorrupted version of the original social body’ (Veracini, ‘Settler Collective, Founding Violence, and Disavowal’, 365; emphasis in original).

6 As is typical of the ‘frontier cultural complex’ that shapes settler historical consciousness, in Elizabeth Furniss, The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999), 16–22.

7 Joanne Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

8 Treaty rights comprised nearly half of the demands of the ‘20-Point Position Paper’ crafted by Native activists during the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties cross-country caravan. See Vine Deloria Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).

9 According to a 1973 Louis Harris survey, 93% of Americans were reported to be closely following AIM’s Wounded Knee Occupation, cited in Tim Baylor ‘Media Framing of Movement Protest: The Case of American Indian Protest’, The Social Science Journal 33, no. 3 (1996): 246.

10 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting; Rifkin, Settler Common Sense; Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1982); Karen Kosasa, ‘Sites of Erasure: The Representation of Settler Culture in Hawai’i’, in Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i, ed. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).

11 See note 3 on the theoretical and empirical work of Lorenzo Veracini.

12 Jeffrey Denis, Canada at a Crossroads: Boundaries, Bridges, and Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-Settler Relations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020); Nick Martino, ‘It Should be Equal Across the Board: How Treaty Opposition Among Hunters and Anglers Upholds Settler Colonialism in Canada’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 15 (2021); Shana Siegel, ‘What Disruption, Whose Status Quo? Non-Native Narratives of Victimization Surrounding a First Nations’ Land Reclamation’, Settler Colonial Studies 7, no. 3 (2017); Lawrence D. Bobo and Mia Tuan, Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

13 Ibid. For a theoretical overview and empirical application of ‘colorblind racism’ toward non-Indigenous racialized groups, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

14 Denis, Canada at a Crossroads, 129.

15 M.B. Fallin Hunzaker, ‘Making Sense of Misfortune: Cultural Schemas, Victim Redefinition, and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes’, Social Psychology Quarterly 77, no. 2. (2014).

16 Veracini, ‘Historylessness: Australia as a Settler Colonial Collective’, Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 3. (2007).

17 Martino, ‘It Should be Equal Across the Board’; Bobo and Tuan, Prejudice in Politics.

18 Jeff Corntassel and Richard C. Witmer, Forced Federalism: Contemporary Challenges to Indigenous Nationhood (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), chapter 2.

19 Denis, Canada at a Crossroads, 148.

20 Rifkin, Settler Common Sense.

21 Eva Mackey, Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2016).

22 Siegel, ‘What Disruption, Whose Status Quo?’

23 See note 3.

24 Veracini, ‘Historylessness’, 272.

25 Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land.

26 Elizabeth Furniss, ‘Challenging the Myth of Indigenous Peoples’ ‘Last Stand’ in Canada and Australia: Public Discourse and the Conditions of Silence’, in Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2006), 182.

27 Veracini, ‘Settler Collective, Founding Violence, and Disavowal’, 375 n 6.

28 See, for instance, Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley: University California Press, 1988); Andrea Lynn Smith, ‘Savagism, Silencing, and American Settlerism: Commemorating the Wyoming Battle of the American Revolutionary War’, Settler Colonial Studies 10, no. 3 (2020); Ried E. Mackay and Joe Feagin, ‘“Merciless Indian Savages”’: Deconstructing Anti-Indigenous Framing’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 8, no. 4 (2022).

29 Smith, ‘Savagism, Silencing, and American Settlerism’.

30 Though often conflated as a result of AIM’s effectiveness at securing media coverage, the organization represented one facet of the multi-dimensional Red Power activism in post-WWII U.S. society. Indigenous collective action during the era included grassroots social movements (e.g, Indians of All Tribes, United Native Americans), national-level organizations (e.g. National Congress of American Indians, National Indian Youth Council), and emboldened tribal leadership and political activism. On the multitude of manifestations of Indigenous activism in the twentieth century, see Daniel M. Cobb and Loretta Fowler, eds., Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism Since 1900 (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007).

31 Kent Blansett, A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 8–9.

32 In addition to shifting US federal policy towards tribal self-determination, the accomplishments of AIM and the broader Red Power movement are lengthy and warrant their own detailed study. Any inventory would necessarily include: Indigenous cultural regeneration (Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal), Indigenous educational institutions, including ‘survival schools’ in Minneapolis/St. Paul (Julie L. Davis, Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Native Studies programs in higher education (Blansett, A Journey to Freedom, 96–113), and global pan-Indigenous activism, catalyzed by AIM’s organizing of the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) on the Standing Rock Reservation in 1974.

33 As shown in Figure 1, the Great Sioux Reservation also encompassed a small section of land in northern Nebraska, adjacent to and west of the Missouri River.

34 The Oceti Sakowin land base was further eroded by the 1887 Dawes Act and its legislative progeny (e.g. 1906 Burke Act), which fractured tribal territories into individually-owned allotments.

35 For an historical overview of the settler state’s dispossession of the Black Hills and the as yet unsettled Sioux legal claim, see Edward Lazarus, Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

36 On the cultural and political divisions between Dick Wilson and traditionalist Oglala tribal members, see Jeffrey Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 171, and Pekka Hamalainen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 386. For a case study of the widespread political, economic, and social impacts of the assimilative Indian Reorganization Act on the Lakota, see Thomas Biolsi, Organizing the Lakota: The Political Economy of the New Deal on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).

37 Baylor, ‘Media Framing of Movement Protest’.

38 The historical documents used to recruit the sample were retrieved from the Gale Family Library (Minnesota Historical Society) and the I.D. Weeks Library (University of South Dakota).

39 It should be noted that the recruitment of participants, and the content of the resultant interview data, was surely influenced by the author’s stated background as a settler-descendant with multi-generational ancestral ties to South Dakota. I have no doubt that this positionality contributed to the author’s access to both interviewees and their in-depth narratives of settler-Indigenous relations.

40 Veracini, ‘Indigenes and Settlers (Fourth World)’, in A Companion to Global Historical Thought (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 451. Veracini adapts the concept of a ‘great settler silence’ from Stanner’s discussion of the ‘Great Australian Silence’ in W.E.H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians, an Anthropologist’s View (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969).

41 Though instances of collective settler violence, and even massacres, continued. See Blackhawk’s discussion of the 1911 Shoshone Mike Massacre in Violence Over the Land, 284–87.

42 Spurred by tribal activism, federal legislation to rescind Medals of Honor granted to 20 7th Cavalry soldiers for their conduct at Wounded Knee has been introduced in the U.S. Congress as the ‘Remove the Stain Act.’ As of this writing, the legislation remains mired in the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. For historical context on the political contestation surrounding the Wounded Knee Massacre, including the awarding of the medals, see David W. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

43 All of the interviewee names within the text have been anonymized to protect individual project participants. Narrative data throughout the text is derived from the author’s original interviews with participants in 2014–2015.

44 For further examples of ‘tribal warfare’ settler discourse, see David W. Everson, ‘Narrating the Territorial Foundations of Privilege: Racial Discourse and Indigenous Peoples’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 8, no. 1. (2022): 222–24. As Cook-Lynn documents, a focus on historical Lakota aggression against other Indigenous tribes has served a central discursive role in resisting Sioux claims to the Black Hills. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 61. The prominence of the Indigenous tribal warfare narrative in U.S. settler culture was recently illustrated by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s questioning of the Indian Child Welfare Act’s policy of giving Indian child adoption preference to other tribes, rather than non-tribal families: ‘Why is it rational? Before the arrival of Europeans, the tribes were at war with each other often … ’. Supreme Court of the United States, ‘Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, et al. v. Chad Everett Brackeen, et al.,’ No. 21-376, Cherokee Nation, et al. v. Chad Everett Brackeen, et al., No. 21-377, Texas v. Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, et al., No. 21-378, Chad Everett Brackeen, et al. v. Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, et al., No. 21-380 (Washington, D.C.: November 9, 2022), 172.

45 South Dakota Department of Tourism, The Economic Impact of Tourism in South Dakota: County Analysis, Calendar Year 2021, https://sdvisit.com/sites/default/files/2022-04/21EcoImp_Tourism_Economics_Counties_rev.pdf.

46 With its focus on settler-Lakota conflict in what is now present-day South Dakota, Dances with Wolves retains distinctive cultural resonance for residents of the state.

47 Everson, ‘Narrating the Territorial Foundations of Privilege’, 224–25.

48 Smith, ‘Savagism, Silencing, and American Settlerism’.