An Alternative to Red Power: Political Alliance as Tribal Activism in Virginia

Abstract

The Red Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s was not universally endorsed and accepted by all Native communities, particularly in areas where other forms of indigenous accommodation and resistance to settler colonialism had already developed long-term strategies. The situation in the U.S. South was complicated by issues of race, and must be understood in the historical context of, first, slavery, and subsequently, Jim Crow. In these systems, activism by non-White populations carried different meanings within the wider political economy of the region. Understanding the push and pull factors of a desegregating South is required to explain Virginia’s mid-century indigenous political landscape. Attention should be given to the various and multiple reasons for Native community action in each specific context, especially to race-based civil rights activism within a state where the Eugenics Movement, Racial Integrity, and the ‘one drop rule’ had historically loomed large. Like other states across the South, the Commonwealth of Virginia officially recognised eleven tribes of ‘Virginia Indians’ between 1983 and 2010, an outcome of post-Red Power indigenous political activism. Virginia tribes’ political positioning during the civil rights era requires an analysis that historically situates their long-term alliance building and strategic essentialism as alternative approaches to those that were promoted by Red Power.