Spring 2025
Introduction:
As the Red Power movement emerged in the 1950s–60s, it engaged with a diverse array of social movements. Indigenous activists built alliances while pushing back against racist stereotypes. From civil rights to environmentalism, Red Power’s relationship with non-Indigenous movements remains complex, with its legacies still unfolding today.
The complicated relationship between Red Power and the hippie counterculture:
Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, a counter-cultural movement of young people known as the hippies grew in popularity. Responding to the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement of the long 1960s and the burgeoning feminist and environmentalist movements, the hippies, largely white young people involved in the counterculture, quickly took on an interest in Indigenous culture, traditions, and social movements. Hippies and the “new left” movement took interest in Indigenous social movements in ways that led to a proliferation of racist ideas about Native people as somehow “precapitalist” or inherently spiritual (Smith 20). However this increased interest also led to genuine non-Indigenous allyship and newfound non-Indigenous understanding of indigenous activism (Smith 22). Some Native activists and organizers, for their part, also sought out allyship and political partnership with outside social movements and counter-cultural movements of this era.
Separation, integration, and the Civil Rights Movement:
As the Black Civil Rights Movement took shape in the 1950s and 60s, Native activists and organizations took a variety of stances on how to respond, including debates about how their movements could synergize or conflict with the civil rights movement. For instance, Indigenous activist Tillie Walker made the case to Indigenous leaders and activists to join Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Pushing back against racist attitudes, Walker argued that “Indian people are poor and the poor know no color” (Cobb 147). On the other hand, other Indigenous activists asserted important differences in goals and pushed back against a wholesale combination of Indigenous movements with other civil rights movements like the black civil rights movement and the black power movement. Other activists involved with the poor people’s campaign articulated how the needs of Indigenous people differed from the needs and goals of the black civil rights movement. The committee of 100 argues particularly that “we make it unequivocally and crystal clear that Indian people have the right to separate and equal communities within the American system—our own communities, that are institutionally and politically separate, socially equal and secure within the American system” (Cobb 150). Native activists walked complicated lines and often encountered disagreement between wings of the Red Power movement over how to respond to the changing landscape of civil rights and citizenship within the settler colonial state.
Contemporary Allies:
In the 21st century, Indigenous-led movements against projects like the Dakota Access and Line 3 pipelines have brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, producing both solidarity and tension. These collaborations highlight the fraught role of non-Indigenous participants. The zine Everyone Calls Themselves an Ally Until It’s Time to Do Ally Shit by Ancestral Pride critiques common assumptions non-Indigenous activists bring into these spaces and offers concrete steps for effective support. Suggestions include providing infrastructure like safe-houses, confronting racism and tokenism among allies, and using white privilege within the legal system to protect Indigenous organizers from state repression (Xhopakelxhit 8-11).
Conclusion:
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Indigenous activists have organized to defend sovereignty and self-determination, while non-Indigenous movements for civil rights, environmentalism, and social justice have advanced parallel struggles. These movements have at times collaborated and at others diverged. Indigenous organizers have often challenged reductive or racist assumptions brought by allies and emphasized key differences in goals. Still, meaningful coalitions have emerged—built on mutual respect—that advance both Indigenous and non-Indigenous struggles for justice, sovereignty, and liberation.
Works Cited:
Cobb, Daniel M., ed. “‘A Sickness Which Has Grown to Epidemic Proportions’ (1968): Committee of 100.” In Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887, 149–52. University of North Carolina Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469624815_cobb.39.
Cobb, Daniel M., ed. “‘I Want to Talk to You a Little Bit about Racism’ (1968): Tillie Walker.” In Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887, 146–48. University of North Carolina Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469624815_cobb.38.
Xhopakelxhit. Everyone Calls Themselves an Ally Until It Is Time to Do Some Real Ally Shit. Portland, OR: Microcosm Publishing, 2015.
Smith, Sherry L. (Sherry Lynn). Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
