"Rise up - make haste - our people need us!": pan-Indigenous activism in Canada and the United States, 1950 - 1975
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Date
2013-09-23
Authors
Duhamel, Karine R.
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Abstract
This dissertation examines the period of pan-Indigenous activism in Canada and in the United States between 1950 and 1975. The rights era in both countries presented important challenges for both legislators and for minority groups. In a post-war context increasingly concerned with equality and global justice, minority groups were uniquely positioned to exact from the government perhaps greater concessions than ever before. For Indigenous groups, however, the potential of this period delivered only in part due to initiatives like the Great Society and the Just Society which, while claiming to offer justice for Indigenous people, threatened them as perhaps never before, by homogenizing Indigenous people and their demands with those of other minority groups. As such, I argue that the broader political and social context of the rights era served to inform, but not to dictate, the shape and content of the Indigenous rights movement. The relationship of Indigenous activism to other forms of activism during the rights era was both complicated and contentious, with Indigenous activists conceiving of their struggle in markedly different terms than other marginalized groups. Within this context, I examine the formation of both mainstream and alternative organizations, as well as their responses to the challenges of radicalism, of youth culture and of gender. I argue that the failure of mainstream organizations to properly address the grassroots contributed to a crisis of legitimacy within an increasingly crowded organizational milieu. As both the documentary record and oral accounts demonstrate, what many have demarcated as a new period of “pan-Indian” unity, therefore, was also marked by important division and protest that has often been overlooked in laudatory accounts of the activism of the period. These internal critiques also serve to explain why the mid-1970s signaled an important change in organizational tactics in both countries, at least in the way they had been practiced previously. In addition, the proliferation of rights-seeking groups demonstrated an important echo pattern whereby both policy and protest was replicated and reinvented in a Canadian context slightly later than in an American one.
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History, Aboriginal