American Indian Political Action V::

From Direct to Legal Action

As the 1970s pushed on, the Red Power movement became increasingly characterised by non-confrontational behaviour. An example of this is the 'Longest Walk' - a five-month protest march that took place in 1978. The objectives of the Walk was to symbolise the forced removals of Indians from their traditional homelands, to draw attention to problems and concerns in Indian Country and to push, again, treaty rights. The Walk was conceived as a peaceful and spiritual event. It included tribal elders and spiritual leaders among its participants and ended without violence.

Though AIM has remained a force in Indian activism to the present day, it has been noted by many that the Movement has become much better organised and non-violent.

Another feature of Indian activism in the mid- to late 1970s has been the repression of many Red Power leaders and organisations by federal and state law enforcement agencies. The most prominent example of this is perhaps the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier after Wounded Knee II - an imprisonment made on the basis of questionable evidence. Federal agencies joined together in a campaign of surveillance, organisational infiltration and indictment directed at Indian activists and organisations, especially AIM. Those readers familiar with the civil rights movement will remember those tactics of repression employed against the Black Panther Party by the FBI. By the mid-1970s, the FBI were released from fighting against black militancy and were free to attack red militancy.

A third feature of late 1970s Indian pan-Indian activism has been its increasingly internationalised character. By 1975, AIM had begun to widen its focus from the national to the international arena. It focussed on Indian treaty rights but contextualised these more within the broader and universal indigenous or aboriginal rights movement. In 1974, an offshoot of AIM emerged: the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) which still remains active in the international indigenous rights movement. IITC hasn't lost sight of Indian treaty rights, however. In 1998, it spent time on most of the Sioux reservations gathering testimony on the status of the Sioux land claim for the Black Hills and other traditional lands that have been occupying local Sioux activists for the entire duration of this century.

The movement into the international arena marked a shift within Indian political activism from direct, often violent action to indirect, legal action. Even tribal political activists such as those engaged in land rights claims have brought their cases to the international arena. A group of Lakota Sioux activists I was researching in 1998 - Black Hills land claim campaigners - make annual trips to the United Nations to participate in the worldwide indigenous rights movement that convenes there.

This brings me to my final point: pan-Indian activist organisations and movements have been rapidly increasing as the century has progressed. But it is important to remember that at a grassroots level - in those small reservation communities largely unknown to the rest of the world - the bulk of political activism has been taking place on a daily basis throughout the twentieth and current century. The concerns may be reservation based and particular to a region - for instance, localised land claims, fishing rights, sovereignty issues, actions against poverty or substance abuse, campaigns against dams or roads or water pollution - but cumulatively such local actions have national effects.