After years of political organizing, the Native Alliance for Red Power disbanded.
By the mid-1970s, the Red Power movement across Turtle Island (North America) was beginning to slow down. But the new generation of Indigenous activists wasn’t giving up. As Stó꞉lō writer Lee Maracle wrote in her memoir, Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel, the energy of the movement was moving on to new ideas and projects, including a newly formed group called the Native Study Group:
The Native Study Group was born on the heels of the implosion of the Red Power Movement […] we studied Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and other writers, not from the slavish perspective of a great many leftists of the time, but critically.
In the Vancouver-based Native Study Group, Indigenous activists gathered to read new texts which analyzed why capitalism and colonialism are harmful. They applied these ideas to their own experiences and developed new, powerful ways of looking at the world as a result. These new interests were one of the ways that Red Power changed through the 1970s.
The Red Power Movement casts a long shadow that is still visible today. One example is The Red Nation, an Indigenous organization “dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism.”
All of North America, the Western Hemisphere, and the Pacific is Indigenous land. Our rights do not begin or end at imposed imperial borders we did not create nor give our consent to.
Image source: Michigan State University Library