Becoming Indigenous: The Transnational Networks of the American Indian Movement, Irish Republicans, and Welsh Nationalists

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s American Indian Movement (AIM) activists visited Northern Ireland and Wales several times. AIM's visits were part of decades of communication, cooperation, and exchange with Irish Republicans and Welsh nationalists that formed the basis of an alternative politics of recognition, where these anticolonial activists sought and provided recognition of each other's struggles outside of the nation-state. While respecting the differences that were essential to the movements' assertions of distinct peoplehood, the activists involved recognized the commonality of their struggles and shared strategies to combat state violence to land and state denial of a self-determining future. Their alliances profoundly affected the activists involved by shaping understandings of settler colonialism and Indigeneity as they challenged race as a marker of colonization. Ultimately, the alternative politics of recognition challenged ideas of who "belongs" in Indigenous alliances and reveals a historical moment when activists interrogated the concept of Indigeneity and reevaluated what it meant to be colonized.