'Red' nations: Marxists and the Native American sovereignty movement of the late Cold War

Abstract

This article constructs a history of the mutual personal engagement of Native American sovereignty activists and Marxist entities in the 1970s and 1980s. Native American diplomacy attempted to reconfigure the geography of American Indian sovereignty into a fully independent Native America in alliance with revolutionary Marxism and its ‘red’ nations around the globe. Marxist-Native solidarity in Europe was enabled by older continental European fantasies about Indians, and sanctioned by some Eastern Bloc governments. Indian-Marxist alliances could not be sustained because of the difficulties of reconciling US patriotic anti-Communism, the Marxist revolutionary project, and the indigenous rights struggle.