The Red Power Movement and Environment

Against the Environmental Destruction of Settler Colonialism

Abstract

　This study examines the relationship between the indigenous peoples and environment as it was identified within the Red Power movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Here, the discourse of the Fish War (in the 1960s and the 1970s), the Alcatraz Occupation (1969-1971), and the Women of All Red Nations (1974-1979) are examined. Mainstream environmental and counterculture movements posited that environmental destruction was the result of capitalism and resource development, especially following the Second World War, and they created an image of the Ecological Indian that inherited the primitive myth perspective in the form of a counter-concept. However, within the Red Power movement, environmental destruction that occurred on reservations, including infringement of fishing, devastation of lifelines, the plundering of land, poverty, mining of natural resources, and the Westernization of food, all of which had been responsible for destroying the relationships between the indigenous peoples and their environment and was positioned in the context of settler colonialism. The Red Power movement went beyond the narrowly defined alternatives that were envisioned by the Ecological Indian image, actively promoting tribal autonomy over the land, resources on reservations, and the claim for the right to tribal self- determination over building relationships with and caring for their environment, which the settler-colonial indigenous policy had demolished over the previous five centuries. 　Historian Roxanne Dunbar Otis notes that the actions that lead to the cultural and physical exclusion of indigenous peoples in the United States should be understood to be environmental factors that resulted from the deliberate refusal on the part of settlers to allow indigenous people’s access to their lands and resources. When indigenous peoples were separated from their land and resources, the communities and societies formed by the chain of responsibility of caring for their lands were severely damaged. In other words, settler colonialism entails the act of destroying the environment of indigenous peoples that has persisted over the centuries, and beyond that, various environmental problems faced by indigenous peoples have been identified. This study finds that the Red Power movement exhibited activism aimed at decolonizing the arguments for addressing the environmental problems that indigenous peoples faced and regaining tribal sovereignty over the system of the responsibility of caring for the environment.