I traveled a long road in completing this book and accumulated many debts along the way. A Lester J. Cappon Fellowship in Documentary Editing in the summer of 2009 afforded an opportunity to draft the proposal and identify documents in the rich collections of Chicago’s Newberry Library. Presentations at Helsinki University’s Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference in North American Studies, Stockholm University, and Dartmouth College in 2010 provided settings for me to work through my initial thoughts on the topic. An invitation to contribute a chapter to the edited volume Native Diasporas pushed me to clarify my thinking in regard to the assertion of a global indigenous identity in the context of Native activism before and after the Cold War.1 For these opportunities, I thank Allan Winkler, Markku Henriksson, Clara Sue Kidwell, Bo Persson, Gunlög Fur, Ben Madley, Colin Calloway, Gregory Smithers, and Brooke Newman. The History Department at Miami University and the Department of American Studies and Center for Global Initiatives at the University of North Carolina generously supported my international travels.
In my first year at the University of North Carolina, I developed an upper-division, research-intensive course on Native politics and activism since 1887 inspired by and founded on the material I had identified for this volume. Students selected primary documents and spent the better part of the semester transcribing and conducting the research necessary to contextualize them. I believe there is no better way for teachers to encourage student engagement than to involve them directly in what we are most passionate about—to invite them to be co-creators of new knowledge. That’s exactly what my students have become each time I’ve taught the course. They have challenged me to think about Native activism in a different light, and their unique interests caused me to pursue themes and avenues of investigation that I would not have otherwise. So, to the approximately seventy-five scholars who have gone “Beyond Red Power” with me since 2010, I say thank you for being outstanding students and teachers. A special note of gratitude is due to Ariana Chavis for graciously allowing me to use her original work, Recognition, Part 1, as the cover art.
I was also fortunate in being able to call upon colleagues for assistance in tracking down documents I had encountered in reading their brilliant work. My gratitude goes to John Troutman, Christian McMillen, Tisa Wenger, Katherine M. B. Osburn, Keith Richotte, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Jean Dennison, and Jacqueline Solis in this regard (even though some of the documents didn’t make it into the volume). Thanks, too, to Cindy Kelly, president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Barbara Leigh Smith of Evergreen State College, Chickasaw legal scholar Alex Pearl, and Diné poet, musician, and activist Lyla June Johnston for granting permission to include excerpts from the Russell Jim interview, Osage constitution case study, “3/256,” and “Call Me Human,” respectively. Dave Posthumus provided invaluable service by transcribing and translating the Lakota language used by Armando Iron Elk and Faith Spotted Eagle in chapter 5. I thank Bill Wingell and Jason Kaplan, too, for allowing me to include their photographs of the Alcatraz occupation and Yakama elder Russell Jim. Maureen Booth, Jennifer Klang, Shyamalika Ghoshal, and George Franchois of the U.S. Department of the Interior Library delivered critical assistance at a rather late hour, as well.
In researching and writing about the 1960s, my life has been made much richer by virtue of getting to know many of the people who made that history. More meaningful still have been the ongoing relationships, some of which are now more than a decade old. I am particularly thankful for Jeri (Cross) Redcorn’s and Sandra (Johnson) Osawa’s willingness to let me include the words they wrote as college students attending the Workshop on American Indian Affairs. Angela Russell graciously permitted me to include her reflections on participating in the Selma-to-Montgomery March originally published in Americans before Columbus. Della Warrior has always been generous, sharing her life experiences and personal papers with me. In addition to leading to the inclusion of Clyde Warrior’s words in this volume, my relationship with her set the next destination of my intellectual journey, a biography of her late husband.
Mark Simpson-Vos, editorial director of the University of North Carolina Press, has been a stalwart supporter of this project from its inception all the way through to its completion. I am so very thankful for his patient encouragement and keen insights over the years. The readers of this volume’s prospectus and earlier iterations provided critical feedback and were instrumental in streamlining its organization, sharpening its focus, and correcting at least one bad date. Any errors that remain are my responsibility alone.
And last, I would like to close with the words of Ponca activist Clyde Warrior. “The foundation of any individual . . . is his family,” he wrote in 1965. “In today’s society when the ‘chips are down’ and an individual needs help . . . he can only turn to his family. . . . This is a painful lesson everyone learns as they grow older.”2 The five years it took to write Say We Are Nations taught me the truth of this insight. I thank my wife, N. Nicole Cobb, and my daughters, Anna and Molly, for once again understanding the demands of my solitary craft. As they have always done, my parents read and offered critical feedback on every word of every page. And my dad, a skilled anthropologist whose interest in Native America inspired my own, is the “someone” referred to in the introduction who read all of these documents aloud the second time so I could check the transcriptions for accuracy.