Pan-Indianism

Racism and Response

Historically, White racism has excluded Americans of color, including Indigenous Peoples, from full participation in the U.S. economy, polity, and society. Although the legal framework supporting this centuries-old system has largely been dismantled, racial prejudices and ideologies still undergird and rationalize widespread racial discrimination. American Indians' response to such societal racism has been doubly challenged—not only by Indians' physical isolation on rural reservations but also by U.S. policies that, over time, have resulted in virtually the removal and erasure of indigenous people from the U.S. imagination.

During the early centuries of European colonization, Native Americans had their lands taken from them, [Page 1023]sometimes by chicanery and sometimes by force. Subsequently, most Native Americans were not incorporated into the dominant culture but instead were driven westward, beyond the boundaries of White interest, and eventually were restricted to segregated enclaves known as “Indian reservations.” Moreover, a great many Native Americans died, directly or indirectly, as a result of government actions and policies that many scholars have described as genocidal. Furthermore, the process by which people in the United States are categorized according to race has not allowed for an accurate count of Native Americans; according to Jack Forbes, thousands of Indians have been “lost” within other ethnic communities because of their misdesignation as Black, White, Latino, or some other race that excludes Indian in the definition or possible ethnic classification of the group.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, American Indian activism increased to an all-time high, especially between 1965 and 1980. Federal government policies during the 1940s and 1950s had led to the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Indians from rural reservations to urban areas, where they later organized important acts of resistance such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco from November 1969 to 1971; the occupation and takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building in Washington, D.C., in 1972; and the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

The American Indian Movement (AIM), in particular, was highly successful in restoring public attention to the plight of Indians living on reservations and in urban areas with little economic, educational, or social support for the many disenfranchised individuals and communities. Moreover, AIM sought to reassert specific aspects of Indian identity that were common to most tribes. The occupation of Alcatraz Island and the protest activism that spread across the country in its wake stirred more than Indian ethnic pride. The multithread, urban membership of many Red Power organizations, including AIM, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), and Indians of All Tribes, and the Indian nationalist agenda of the movement, which emphasized the rights of all tribes and all Indians, combined to legitimize and empower supratribal Indianness as an identity, a source of pride, and a basis for activism.

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