Marxism did not make many inroads in Indian thought in North America – as opposed to its adoption by Indigenous thinkers elsewhere in the Americas – until the Second World War. Six decades before theories of settler colonialism were developed by Maxime Rodinson for Israel and, in their current academic configuration, by Patrick Wolfe for Anglo-settler states, Karl Kautsky refined the distinction between ‘work’ colonies, where Europeans settled and conducted extermination, and ‘exploitation’ colonies, where the aims were more purely extractive and relied on local labour. But the importance of radical politics for Native American thinkers wasn’t merely abstract. Lenin’s policies on safeguarding Indigenous cultures in the Soviet Union were looked on by many Native Americans as preferable to the forced assimilation initiatives of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. When Native nations petitioned to attend the Versailles Peace Conference, the Wilson administration dismissed them out of hand.
In 1932, the Marxist Nez Perce anthropologist Archie Phinney travelled from Idaho to the Soviet Union. He completed a doctorate at the Leningrad Academy of Science in which he favourably contrasted Soviet management of minority peoples with US federal Indian policy. As Benjamin Balthaser has noted, of particular interest to Phinney was the way that – in theory, if not in practice – the Indigenous peoples of Russia maintained dual identities as Soviet citizens and custodians of their cultures, which retained the right to outright self-determination. Phinney acknowledged the necessity of the developmentalism imposed by the US state but pointed out that it was hardly in Indian interests to become proletarians at the same level as the poorest people in the country. ‘The US government,’ he wrote, ‘feels compelled to rehabilitate [the Niimíipu] and bring them up “to the level equal to that of the average rural white family”. Yet that “average rural white family” is itself in need of a strong dose of “rehabilitation”.’ He argued instead for reforging traditions of common ownership on reservations into democratic co-operatives which would allow Indians to pursue – and exhibit to the rest of the country – alternative paths towards social transformation.
Native-Soviet mutual admiration reached its zenith in 1942, when Chief Fallen Tree of the Mohawk nation presented an Indian war bonnet to a representative of Stalin, whom the Indian Confederation of America voted ‘warrior of the year’. But the rest of the decade saw radicalism weaken dramatically. The interest in Marxism vanished with the Cold War consensus, as figures such as Luther Standing Bear – who starred as an Indian gardener in the Red Scare film Bolshevism on Trial – became a standard bearer for the ‘progressive’ Indian cultural movement of the 1940s and 1950s. More materially, 45,000 Indigenous soldiers had enlisted in the Second World War (the US military relied on code based on the Navajo language). But there were good reasons for Indigenous activists to think that the US state was starting to move in their favour. Roosevelt’s New Deal had included an ‘Indian New Deal’, in the form of the Indian Reorganisation Act, which counteracted some of the measures that had divided Indian lands. His administration closed down Indian boarding schools and other vehicles of violent assimilation, and also sought to re-sovereignise Native lands, including by means of legal jurisdiction. The Reorganisation Act went so far as to include provisions for the state to buy land and restore it to Indian reservations. As a further counter-thrust legal advocates for Natives such as Felix Cohen sought to bring the states back into submission by, for instance, suing them in federal court for withholding welfare payments to tribes. In the following decade, Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal was undermined by Western senators who sought to terminate the status – and take over the territorial holdings – of tribes by using the language of civil rights to insist on their members becoming fully integrated citizens of the nation.
One of Roosevelt’s more enduring reforms was the policy of hiring Native Americans to work at the Bureau for Indian Affairs. Many of the leading Indian activists of the postwar decades held jobs at the bureau, transforming it into a laboratory for reform. They conceived of their mission as preserving New Deal gains and their particular foe was the postwar drive for ‘termination’, by which politicians sought to cut off federal land grants to tribes deemed sufficiently assimilated. The 1956 Indian Relocation Act accelerated this process by moving Indians into cities en masse. The result was predictable: a new revolutionary movement of Native Americans who channelled their sense of dislocation into a new wave of activism known as Red Power.
Source: Thomas Meaney, “Red Power,” London Review of Books, 18 July 2024. My gratitude to Adam Tooze’s Chartbook for pointing me to this article, and to the supremely invaluable Sumanth Gopinath for sharing Sean Troschka’s cover of Hüsker Dü’s “Something I Learned Today.” Something I Learned Today will be an occasional series on this website, akin to El lector ruso and Sunday Reader. ||| The Russian Reader
