Book Description

A vivid description of the people, events, and issues that forever changed the lives of Native Americans during the 1960s and 1970s—such as the occupation of Alcatraz, fishing-rights conflicts, and individuals such as Clyde Warrior. Rising out of more than a century of poverty and pervasive repression, stoked by the example of the movement against the Vietnam War and the upheaval among black and Chicano civil-rights activists, the American Indian Movement shifted the debate over "the Indian problem" to a new level. Many Native peoples also took a stand for fishing rights, land rights, and formed resistance to coal and uranium mining on tribal land. This work tells the story of that movement, and provides the first encyclopedic treatment of this subject. Providing a vital documentation of a controversial and often surprising period in American Indian history, Bruce E. Johansen, an accomplished scholar and authority on Native American history, provides more than descriptions of historic events and careful analysis; he also frames what occurred in the American Indian Movement personally and anecdotally, drawing from individual stories to illustrate larger trends—and to ensure that the material is appealing to high school students, university-level readers, and general readers alike.