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RED POWER AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT: DIFFERENT TIMES, DIFFERENT PLACES Troy R. Johnson Daniel M. Cobb. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xi + 306 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95.
The thesis of this book is simply stated but extremely complex. Daniel Cobb states that the book is "the culmination of a ten-year effort to shift 'everything that happened in the Seventies' back to where it belongs" (p. 1). That is to say that the author feels that defining American Indian activism as a period between 1969 and the late 1970s is myopic, frustrating, and results in a "widespread misconception that equates Red Power with the American Indian Movement (AIM)" (p. 1). Such a conception, Cobb argues, fails to take into consideration the history of previous American Indian political activism, the importance of the War on Poverty, and the U.S. political and social movements beginning as early as 1945 and culminating in the 1960s.
Cobb's frustration, and ultimately his motivation for writing Native Activism in Cold War America, grew out of an October 2001 meeting with the late Dr. Vine Deloria Jr., Standing Rock Sioux scholar, political activist, and former director of the National Congress of American Indians. At this meeting Cobb spoke with Deloria about the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of 1960s Indian activism. Reflecting on the oft-made connection between AIM and the Red Power movement, Deloria responded by speaking of the irony that AIM, founded in 1968, could be considered emblematic of 1960s activism and emphasized that even the most successful of the American Indian occupations-the nineteen-month-long occupation of Alcatraz Island-began in November 1969 and barely fell within the '60s. Deloria pointed out as well that the seventy-two hour occupation of the Washington D.C. Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in 1972 fell well outside of the parameters of a '60s Red Power event, as did the seventy-one-day-long AIM occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.
To understand the concern expressed by Cobb and Deloria one must put aside the often accepted definition of activism that posits that activism must include transformative goals that can be achieved only through militant direct action. In Native American Activism, Daniel Cobb provides the reader with...