RED POWER, WHITE DISCOURSE: PRIVILEGE NARRATIVES AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT, 1973-2015 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by David W. Everson ------------------------------------ Rory McVeigh, Director Graduate Program in Sociology Notre Dame, Indiana July 2017 © Copyright 2017 David W. Everson RED POWER, WHITE DISCOURSE: PRIVILEGE NARRATIVES AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT, 1973-2015 Abstract by David W. Everson This dissertation investigates the evolution of the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) discursive field from 1973 to 2015 in order to unveil how dominant cultural narratives toward the movement, and American Indians more broadly, have served as an impediment to the alteration of the unequal white-Native racial order. Theoretically, I outline a model of “discursive field shift” to aid in the understanding of how dominant group bystanders discursively reconstruct social movements over time. I lend empirical support to the theoretical model by drawing on an innovative longitudinal research design that matches bystander AIM narratives from the 1970s to 2014/2015. By comparing discourse toward the movement from the same individuals over an approximately forty- year period, I provide evidence of a discursive field shift in the contexts of AIM’s most pronounced activism. In such contexts, AIM’s threat to the “privilege narratives,” or the stories that legitimate extant social inequalities, led to the temporal modification of the movement’s discursive field. This discursive field shift is argued to be an outcome of a sociocultural process whereby disrupted narratives of privilege encouraged the dominant culture’s privileging of narrative in order to more effectively delegitimize AIM grievances. TABLE OF CONTENTS Figures………………………………………………………………………....................iii Tables………………………………………………………………………….................iv Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………...................v Chapter 1: Introduction………………………………………………………...................1 Chapter 2: A Theory of Discursive Field Shift……………………………….................24 Chapter 3: Bystander Reaction to AIM in the 1970s………………………....................44 Chapter 4: AIM’s Discursive Field in 2014/2015…………………………….................91 Chapter 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………….................119 Bibliography………………………………………………………………....................129 ii FIGURES Figure 1: Custer County (SD) Perceptions of Indian Poverty (1975)…………................59 Figure 2: American Indian Movement Pamphlet Calling for Tourism Boycott of South Dakota……………………………………………………….................65 Figure 3: Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Battle or Massacre?.........................................93 Figure 4: Bystander Attitudinal Change Toward AIM 1973-2015…………….............103 Figure 5: Bystander Narrative Change Toward AIM 1973-2015……………...............106 Figure 6: Discursive Bridging of AIM and the Civil Rights Movement……................114 Figure 7: On the Interior Walls of an Irish Pub. South Bend, IN……………...............127 iii TABLES Table 1: 1973 Harris Survey on Attitudes toward AIM and Indians...………………......55 Table 2: South Dakota Bystander Sympathy at Wounded Knee………………………...57 Table 3: Antagonistic AIM Narratives in South Dakota…………………………….......62 Table 4: Attitudes toward AIM and American Indians in South Dakota and Minnesota (1973)…………………………………………………………….......70 Table 5: Antagonistic AIM Narratives in Minnesota………………………………........73 Table 6: Sympathetic AIM Narratives in Minnesota……………………………….........73 Table 7: Minnesota AIM Narratives 1973-2015………………………………..............107 Table 8: South Dakota AIM Narratives 1973-2015………………………………….....109 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project was partially made possible through the generous funding of various entities at the University of Notre Dame: the Graduate School, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the Center for the Study of Social Movements. I am beyond grateful for their financial assistance during a lengthy and intensive data collection and analysis process. This latter process turned out to be a relatively smooth one thanks to the helpful staff at the Minnesota Historical Society, Richardson Archives (USD), and the Mudd Manuscript Library (Princeton). Thanks also to the many “bystanders” throughout Minnesota and my beloved home state of South Dakota who so generously invited me into their homes to offer their memories and retrospective evaluations of the American Indian Movement. For academic guidance I thank my committee members for their unyielding time and support: Rory McVeigh, Robert Fishman, Lyn Spillman, and Kraig Beyerlein. Thanks also to Christian Davenport, David Cunningham, Jennifer Jones, and Joane Nagel for providing feedback at various stages of the project. Immense gratitude is owed to Rebecca Overmyer and Tracy Wickham at Notre Dame for their tireless efforts keeping the sociology department, including myself, afloat. For personal support throughout this long graduate school adventure I thank Mom, Dad, Laura, Amber Tierney, Justin Farrell, Justin Van Ness, Peter Barwis, Craig Johnson, Matt Chandler, Matt Rafalow, Paul Hernandez, the UNL “Royal We,” and many, many others. “Off on the other ocean now. All is behind you; all is sea.”—Robin Pecknold v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.—December 20, 1890 The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.—January 3, 1891 L. Frank Baum, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer There is a scene in the Wizard of Oz where Glinda, the “Good Witch of the South,” informs Dorothy that parting with her new ruby slippers will make her vulnerable to the “Wicked Witch of the West,” alleged to be even more dangerous than her Eastern counterpart. Though the slippers were silver in L. Frank Baum’s (1900) original novel, likely reflecting the author’s populist support for the Free Silver Movement of the end of the 19th century, they can also serve as a broader metaphor for the cataclysmic changes occurring on the American frontier. As editor and publisher of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer in South Dakota at the time of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, Baum had a front-row seat for the violent triumph of American settler colonialism on the Western prairie. His editorials on the subject, two of which are recounted above, glare in their unabashed support for a genocidal approach to resolving the “Indian problem.” This 1 problem, of course, resided in the fact that “untamable” Indians continued to present an obstacle to the Euro-American conception of Oz: a culturally-monolithic space of individuals chosen by God to spread the seeds of capitalism over an endless expanse of terra nullius. Thus in addition to its populist themes, Baum’s film perhaps symbolically represents a broader clash between “savagery” and “civilization.” For it was indeed in pursuit of the latter that the 7th Calvary systematically murdered hundreds of unarmed Miniconjou Lakota at Wounded Knee, just one of many genocidal episodes enabling the paving of America’s yellow-brick road. In editorializing for the ethnic cleansing of Indians, by no means an idiosyncratic view at the time, Baum discursively encapsulated civilization’s bloody taming of the Wicked Witch of the West. Though certainly brutal in method, a defining feature of American settler colonialism continues to be its incompleteness. Effective in neutralizing the central threats to American state-building, it could never quite achieve Baum’s call for the complete eradication of Native peoples. Through centuries of collective resistance in the form of social movements, tribal organizations, and pan-Indigenous coordination, American Indians have persevered as autonomous nations with sovereign governments and counter-hegemonic cultural traditions. Yet it this very act of collective persevering outside the dominant settler colonial culture that has often led to clashes between Natives and whites. Attentive visitors to the Custer County Courthouse Museum in western South Dakota are reminded of one particularly momentous period of contemporary Native-white conflict. A peculiar artifact hangs on the interior wall above the guestbook providing an “honor roll” of the county’s 2 military veterans. An unsurprising tribute, indeed, particularly considering its presence in a town whose namesake, George Armstrong Custer, is alleged to have discovered gold in the region during the 7th Calvary’s Black Hills Expedition of 1874. But what is notable about the memorial is that it appears to have seen battle itself: smoke and fire