2015 Session 4: Indigenous Resistance

Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program
2015 Session 4: Indigenous Resistance and
the Colonization of North America

Required Readings and Video

  1. Corrina Gould, “Protecting and Preserving Sacred Sites,” 15 minute video of a talk presented at Moana Nui II, Berkeley CA, June 1, 2013 (review from the orientation session). On Youtube.com/watch?v=jrrzx4UrBus. Transcript: 6 page PDF: Gould Sacred_Sites_Transcription. (bio).
  2. Elizabeth Castle, “‘The Original Gangster’: The Life and Times of Red Power Activist Madonna Thunder Hawk” in Dan Berger, ed., The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism. (9 page PDF: Castle Madonna_Thunderhawk). (bio)
  3. Andrea Smith, “U. S. Empire and the War Against Native Sovereignty” from Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. (11 page PDF: Smith US_Empire_and_War_Against_Native_Sovereignty). (bio)
  4. Andrea Smith, “Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide,” lecture at the CMC Media and Democracy Lectures, Wealthy Theatre, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2011. (video; lecture starts at 9:25 on Youtube.com/watch?v=Neg-Rlbi764.; also transcription, 22 page PDF: Smith Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide lecture).
  5. Morning Star Gali, “Protecting Sacred Sites,” Snag Magazine no. 8, on Issuu.com. (2 page PDF: Protecting_Sacred_Sites Morning_Star_Gali). (bio).
  6. Weather Underground Organization, Map from Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism: Political Statement of the Weather Underground. (1 page PDF*: Map of the Peoples and Nations of North America). (bio).
  7. Harsha Walia, 11 minute video interview recorded at PowerShift Canada, October 28, 2012 in Ottawa on unceded Algonquin territory, “On Anti-Oppression, Decolonization, and Responsible Allyship.” On Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=IGqhgRr66ng. Transcript: 4 page PDF: Walia Anti-Oppression_Decolonization_Allyship. (bio).
  8. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, blurb from Beacon Press on her An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

Recommended Reading

  1. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “The Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians” (9 page PDF*: Dunbar-Ortiz Grid_of_History_MR; also at Monthly Review). (bio).
  2. Winona LaDuke, “The Militarization of Indian Country”, interview on Democracy Now!: democracynow.org/2011/5/6/native_american_activist_author_winona_laduke! (38 minute video). (Transcript – 6 page PDF: LaDuke Militarization of Indian Country). (bio)
  3. Lee Maracle, “Blind Justice,” www.ContextwithLorna.com, Apr 11, 2014 (poem). (5 minute video). YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=tv3HVOSr90c. (bio).

Further Resources

  1. Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. (The New Press, 1997).

Readings are provided free for use by participants studying in the Anne Braden Training Program for Anti-Racist Organizers, a noncommercial, nonprofit educational program. We encourage everyone to buy the works from which excerpts have been taken – please support these authors and publishers.

Author Biographies

Elizabeth Castle publicity photo from NativeTelecom.org

Elizabeth Castle

Elizabeth (Beth) Castle is Co-Director and Producer at Warrior Women in Sioux Falls SD. Previously she served as Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota. Leaving her cushy job as an academic UC Berkeley, at the encouragement and insistence of Madonna Thunder Hawk, she has joined the front lines of Indian academia and activism. Her book Women Were the Backbone, Men Were the Jawbone: American Indian Women’s Activism in the Red Power Movement was published by Oxford University Press. In 2001 she served as delegate for the Indigenous World Association at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Described as the “indigenous hillbilly” she takes pride in being a descendent of accused traitors and resistors to colonization from a mixed family of Shawnee women and European immigrant men. Not wishing to be a part of the practice of trading on Native heritage to obtain academic positions, she is content to fight the good fight as a comrade, ally, or secret weapon.  The heart of her work concerns communicating the priorities of indigenous communities to public institutions and creating transformative social change in response to colonization.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz publicity photo from Beacon Press

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor, and writer. Her most recent book (2014) is An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles she has published a trilogy of historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975, and Blood on the Border: a Memoir of the Contra War. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless farmer and half-Indian mother. Her paternal grandfather, a white settler, farmer, and veterinarian, had been a labor activist and Socialist in Oklahoma with the Industrial Workers of the World in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism.  She was a leading member of the Women’s Liberation and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  She worked with the American Indian Movement and continues to struggle for indigenous self-determination and land. More on her own website, www.reddirtsite.com.

Morning Star Gali  (member of the Ajumawi band of the Pit River Tribe in Northeastern California).  Born at the AIM for Freedom Survival School, she was immersed into the Bay Area Indian Community and spent her childhood years attending Hintil Kuu Ca, which originated as the cultural school during the Indians of All Tribe’s takeover of Alcatraz.  She worked for a number of Bay Area Indigenous organizations over the past 10 + years and has been an active community organizer volunteering in the efforts to protect sacred places such as the the Medicine Lake Highlands.  For two years she served as Board Chairperson for the Intertribal Friendship House and currently serves as Vice-Chairperson for Pit River Health Services, Inc.
She works as the Assistant Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and Cultural Information Officer for the Pit River Tribe. For the past 3 years she worked as the Community Outreach Liaison for the International Indian Treaty Council, working for the Sovereignty and Self Determination of Indigenous Peoples and the recognition and protection of Indigenous Rights, Treaties, Traditional Cultures and Sacred Lands. She is a rotating host on KPFA 94.1’s Bay Native Circle. She is the proud mother of 3 children.”

Corrina Gould speaking at the Anne Braden Program 2013.

Corrina Gould

Corrina Gould is a Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone woman, born and raised in Oakland, CA. She is co-organizer of Indian People Organizing for Change (IPOC). Her current focus includes creating an Ohlone land trust within the urban setting of her ancestral territory in the Bay Area. She also works full time at the American Indian Child Resource Center, where she assists in directing an after school program that provides services for Native students in Oakland. Gould also sits on the California Indigenous Environmental Association Board and the Board of Directors for the Oakland Street Academy Foundation.

Winona LaDuke publicity photo

Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke  (Anishinaabe) is an author, orator and activist. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities with advanced degrees in rural economic development, LaDuke has devoted her life to protecting the lands and life ways of Native communities. LaDuke is founder and Co-Director of Honor the Earth, where she works nationally and internationally on issues of climate change, renewable energy, sustainable development, food systems and environmental justice. In her own community in northern Minnesota, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project … and a leader on the issues of culturally-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy and food systems. In this work, LaDuke also works to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering. LaDuke served as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections.

Lee Maracle publicity photo

Lee Maracle

Lee Maracle, of the “Sto: Lo nation, grandmother of seven, mother of four, was born in North Vancouver, B. C. and now resides in Ontario. Her works include the novels Ravensong, Bobbi Lee, Sundogs, Daughters are Forever, and Will’s Garden; the short story collection, Sojourner’s Truth; the poetry collection, Bent Box; and non-fiction work I Am Woman. She is co-editor of My Home as I Remember and Telling It: Women and Language across Cultures; editor of a number of poetry works and Gatherings journals; and has published in dozens of anthologies in Canada and America. Ms. Maracle is a both an award winning author and teacher. She is currently Aboriginal Writer-in-Residence for First Nations House.” – Diaspora Dialogues

Andrea Smith publicity photo

Andrea Smith

Andrea Smith “is an American academic, feminist, and activist against violence. Smith’s work focuses on issues of violence against women of color and their communities, specifically Native American women. A co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the Boarding School Healing Project, and the Chicago chapter of Women of All Red Nations, Smith has based her activism and her scholarship on the lives of women of color and long claimed to be Cherokee. Formerly an assistant professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at University of California, Riverside.” –Wikipedia

Harsha Walia publicity photo

Harsha Walia

Harsha Walia “is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. She has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements for over a decade. She is formally trained in law, works with women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013, 2014). Her rabble column ‘Exception to the Rule’ is about challenging norms, carving space and centring the dispossessed. You can find her at twitter.com/HarshaWalia.” –rabble.ca

* Note: number of pages refers to pages within the PDF file to provide a sense of the download size, not the number of pages of readings included. Links to external web sites open in a new page.

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