‘History…Hijacked by a Band of Revisionists’:
Place as Rhetoric in American Indian Activism.1
1
‘PROTEST: Raid at Wounded Knee’, Time (New York City: Chicago), 12 March 1973, 21.
, Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Washington D.C.…………….………………………………………………….....7
Chapter 2: Mount Rushmore…………………………………………………………………11
Chapter 3: Wounded Knee…………………………………………………………………...17
Chapter 4: Plymouth……......………..………………………………………………….........21
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………24
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….25
, The thing that sticks most in my head is a prophecy that she [Minneperl]
repeated to me, made by Crazy Horse or Black Elk, I think: that the Indians
will stay defeated for four generations, but that the fifth will rise again. And
this she pointed out, is the fifth generation.2
Sitting ‘close to the flickering fire’ ‘late into the night’, Minneperl (a young American Indian
woman) might well have felt that the prophecy was already coming true, as she repeated it to
a reporter in 1970 on top of Mount Rushmore.3 This was just one of several occupations that
constituted a visible wave of widely-supported and non-violent American Indian activism,
known collectively as the ‘Red Power Movement’. Put simply, ‘Red Power means we want
power over our own lives’ and this was to be achieved through the Movement’s principal
objectives of improved living conditions, self-determination, and tribal sovereignty.4 Emerging
in a social, cultural, and political moment of profound externalisation, it was a time of
demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the invasion of Cambodia, the civil rights
movement, Cold War tensions and decolonisation movements. Wider explicit questioning of
domination inside and beyond American boundaries, familiar to American Indians since the
arrival of Columbus, provided them with an opportunity to (re)articulate their demands in more
challenging and insistent, temporarily (re)constructive, ways. Special revered or nationally-
‘hallowed’ sites, such as Mount Rushmore, had long been fundamental elements in nation-
building and sustaining worldview in American self-understanding.5 Now, the historical
narratives anchored by this ‘national geography’ that had enshrined the idealised values of
American civil religion, being ‘personal liberty, political democracy, world peace, and cultural
tolerance’, were ripe for revision by American Indian activists.6 This relationship between
place as rhetoric and the Red Power Movement has yet to be explored in any breadth or depth.
This dissertation seeks to recover the role of nationally-‘hallowed’ places of memory in
American Indian activism in order to shed light on the functionality of this performative space.
It will argue that the very place in which American Indian activism occurred was a rhetorical
performance that was part of the message of the Movement and literally enacted red power.
2
‘Slow Time on Rushmore’, San Francisco Good Times, vol.3, 42, 23 October 1970, 7.
3
‘Slow Time’, San Francisco Good Times, 6.
4
Vine Deloria Jr (speaking at the National Congress of American Indians annual conference in 1967)., quoted in
Kevin Bruyneel. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 152.
5
David Chidester., and Edward T. Linenthal. American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995), 313.
6
David Storey. Territory: The Claiming of Space (Harlow, England: New York: Prentice Hall, 2001), 76; Peter
Gardella. American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
2014), 6.
1
, Writing at the close of the twentieth-century, authors such as Paul Smith and Robert Warrior,
Troy Johnson, Joane Nagel and Duane Champagne, wrote of Red Power as a period in time,
recognising the convergence of contextual factors as sparking the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz
Island.7 Their suggestion that Red Power only began when it came to the attention of the
American public in 1969 and ended in 1973 with the occupation of Wounded Knee is
problematic on a series of levels. It is not only unduly American Indian Movement-centric,
flattening and over-defining a complex time, it consequently undermined the significance to
pan-Indianism of the 1961 Chicago conference.8 It confused the waning white media interest
after 1973 with the end of Red Power; periodisation is conveniently suggestive of a resolution
of American Indian disputes when in actuality the conflict increasingly moved into the judicial
system. However, the validity of this suggested endpoint of Red Power was superficially
bolstered by resonating with the widespread public understanding that Wounded Knee 83 years
previously had marked the end of American Indian life, founded upon the acclaimed book Bury
My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.9
Brown pioneered a history of American expansionism from the critical perspective of its
ramifications for American Indians, an outwardly notable turn away from the previous
triumphalist narratives advancing Manifest Destiny, such as those by historian Francis
Parkman and novelist James Fennimore Cooper.10 Almost overnight, Wounded Knee assumed
significance beyond the sheer number of American Indian lives lost there in 1890 during the
massacre by the U.S. Army. It became a ‘touchstone of Indian suffering, a benchmark of
American brutality, and a symbol of the end of American Indian life, the end of a frontier, and
the beginning of modern America.’11 However, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was
fundamentally not dissimilar to the aforementioned works in its denial of American Indian
agency and, by so doing, it was yet another ‘victimist history.’12 This dissertation reassesses
7
Paul Smith., and Robert Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New
York: New Press, 1997); Troy R. Johnson., and Joane Nagel., and Duane Champagne. American Indian Activism:
Alcatraz to the Longest Walk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Troy R. Johnson. The Occupation of
Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1996).
8
See, amongst other works, Joan Ablon. ‘The American Indian Chicago Conference’, Journal of American Indian
Education, vol.1, 2(January 1962), 17-23.
9
Dee Brown. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (London: Barrie &
Jenkins, 1970).
10
Francis Parkman. The Californian and Oregon Trail (1849); James Fennimore Cooper. The Pioneers (1823).
11
David Treuer. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (London: Corsair,
2019), 1.
12
Gerald Vizenor., quoted in Clara Sue Kidwell., and Alan Velie. Native American Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2005), 12.
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