As an opening salvo to this blog, I intend to share some of my recent research on the state of African Americans and Native Americans in 21st century America. I have just begun to research this issue and am planning to attempt academic publication, but I also feel the need to share my findings with normal, everyday people on the off chance that it might inspire others to take even a small beneficial action. Hence, my plan is to incorporate ideas for action and potential solutions into future posts and I hope to inspire others to consider entering the conversation, suggesting solutions, and perhaps acting on them. One of the elements lacking in contemporary American society is action. We all like to talk a good game...but how often does that translate to tangible positive action with workable solutions? Not often enough.
This first entry introduces the Black Power Movement, the Black Panther Party, and the
American Indian Movement from the perspective of the women who were involved in these movements. If you learn something new, I encourage you to investigate the history of these groups, learn more, and share that knowledge with others.
(A small list of suggested reading can be found at the end of this post.) One of the sad results of my current research is the realization that too many people don't know about these groups - not as they really are. Rather, we are fed lies, such as "Members of the Black Panther Party were terrorists." I heard this - or something to this effect - recently on Fox News. Couldn't be farther from the truth. But too often, the truth is lost among fallacies and detrimental, fear-based rhetoric. Trust no one - least of all television and cable news channels. Don't even trust what I'm writing...always investigate and research for yourself.
Here we go - I hope you enjoy, learn something new, and please feel free to respond with your own ideas, comments, and knowledge! And thank you for visiting!
- Amanda
A View From Inside
Typically, when the Black Power Movement (BPM) and the American Indian Movement (AIM) are the subject of discourse, one reads about men, the male perspective, the male opinion. However, the women in these movements were powerful, opinionated, and strong. Consequently, their voices contribute acute observations from inside that allows for a broader perspective when considering the movements’ long-term ramifications. Mary Crow Dog, author of Lakota Woman and former AIM member, cites an “old Cheyenne saying: ‘A nation is not dead until the hearts of its women are on the ground.’”[i] Indeed, women are the heart of these two movements because they are the oppressed within an oppressed group. To be American Indian or African American and female in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to be in the ultimate position of struggle. To survive this position, or even thrive, succeed and inspire others, these women possessed strong hearts, great dignity, and wise words. According to Black Panther member Connie Matthews in a speech delivered at a Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in October 1969, “We have to understand that the struggle at this moment is a world struggle [. . .] the oppressed versus the oppressor.”[ii] These words find an echo in Huey Newton’s writings, Malcolm X’s speeches, and Amiri Baraka’s rhetoric. Lorelei DeCora Means writes about the secondary nature of womanhood to the main struggle in “Women of All Red Nations” in 1974: “Native women took on both traditional and activist roles: some cooked, some took care of children, and others marched, petitioned, occupied, and fought alongside their brothers to force the U.S. government to acknowledge its treaty obligations […] to open a new era of tribal self-determination and native rights.”[iii] Because of this gender equality of labor and purpose within AIM and the BPM, one could argue that women had just as much, if not more, at stake in this battle. Means continues,
We are American Indian women, in that order. We are oppressed, first and foremost, as American Indians, as peoples colonized by the United States of America, not as women. [. . .] Decolonization is the agenda, the whole agenda, and until it is accomplished it is the only agenda that counts for American Indians.[iv]
More than anyone else, women had the most to gain and to lose in this national and global struggle for economic, political, and cultural parity. Means’s words make a clear distinction between her fight and the larger women’s liberation movement. Unlike participants in the second wave feminist movement in the dominant American culture, Indian and black women’s homes, economic and political futures, and families were at stake.
In Joan Bird’s case, she joined the New York Black Panthers in 1968 after receiving a nursing degree and wanting more. She writes, “I needed and wanted to be fully aware of myself, the changing world, my people’s true identity and their roles in society and the need for us to unite if we are ever going to achieve any sort of power.”[v] The desire to learn about herself, the black community, and to assist in the fight for power drove Bird to embrace the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program and become an active volunteer. Likewise, Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther Party member, epitomizes the resolve and passion required by women of color to thrive under multiple layers of oppression. In her letter from the New York Women’s House of Detention, Shakur writes,
We know that we are a colony, living under community imperialism. The U.S. that we see is not one of freedom, beauty, and wisdom, but of fear, terror, and hate. This is a nation of your laws, run by your police, and based on protecting your economic strength. The poor are politically, economically, and legally non-existent.[vi]
This colonization, imperialism, and division Shakur refers to finds echoes in Lorelei Means’s and Mary Crow Dog’s words, and can doubly apply to the underlying themes of the American Indian Movement.
Far from the grit of New York, on the other side of the country at the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota in 1971, Mary Crow Dog first encountered AIM at a powwow after the Sun Dance. She writes in retrospect, “I recognize now that movements get used up and the leaders get burned out quickly,” but at that time, as a “wild rebellious teenager,” Crow Dog was enthralled with the visual and verbal messages of AIM’s leaders.[vii] She recalls one Chippewa man who “spoke about genocide and sovereignty, about tribal leaders selling out and kissing ass—white man’s ass. […] He had himself wrapped up in an upside-down American flag, telling us that every star in this flag represented a state stolen from Indians.”[viii] One young man told Crow Dog, “‘We are AIM…American Indian Movement. We’re going to change things’.”[ix] Change was heralded by the vibrations of these puzzle pieces moving into place, with women staunchly supporting the fight for jobs, better health care, and decent housing for their families and communities. Crow Dog also acknowledges AIM’s explicit connection to the Black Power Movement: “We took some of our rhetoric from the blacks, who had started their movements before we did. Like them we were minorities, poor and discriminated against, but there were differences.”[x] Some of these differences are revealed when comparing the two groups’ written platforms. Despite some programmatic variations in themes, goals and actions, many aspects of the Black Power Movement and AIM were frighteningly similar, such as the effect each movement had on their own communities and the dominant white society. Crow Dog writes succinctly: “Some people loved AIM, some hated it, but nobody ignored it.”[xi] Indeed, the same can be said about the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party. Ultimately, without the support of each community’s women, these movements likely would not have lasted as long as they did or had the resulting impact on the shifting American landscape.
[ii] Black Panthers Speak, p. 154
[iii] Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Joane Nagel, & Troy Johnson eds. Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom, University of Nebraska Press, 2nd edition 1999, p. 51
[v] Black Panthers Speak, p. 160
[vi] Black Panthers Speak, p. 162
[vii] Lakota Woman, p. 74
Suggested Reading:
Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Joane Nagel, & Troy Johnson eds. Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for
Freedom, University of Nebraska Press, 2nd edition 1999.
Baraka, Amiri. “Tokenism.” LeRoi Jones, HOME social essays. New York: William Morrow, 1966.
Crow Dog, Mary. Lakota Woman. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
Foner, Philip ed. The Black Panthers Speak. Orig. New York: HarperCollins,1970. Cambridge, MA: Da
Capo Press 2nd ed, 2002
(More suggestions will be made with each post)
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