„Lead, follow, or get out of the way!“ Militant Women and their Radical Traditions of Thought in the Red Power Movement, USA 1960–1980

Abstract

Female participation in the Red Power movement, the Indigenous resistance in the USA, has long been ignored in research. At best, the women of Red Power emerged on the non-violent periphery of the militant movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper sheds light on the hitherto suppressed radical and militant activities of female Red Power activists by analysing analogue and borndigital sources using the analytical categories of race, gender and class. This shows that the activists explicitly included women’s concerns in the Red Power discourse, such as the fight against sterilisation forced by the US government, which particularly affected them as members of the poorest minority in the country and as Women of Colour. Furthermore, this essay, which contributes to the history of resistance movements, relates their political struggle in the Indigenous collective to their  individual engagement with Western US feminist movements in the period.