Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power

Abstract

The Ponca activist Clyde Warrior came to prominence during a time when a younger generation of American Indians was challenging the established tribal leadership with more radical notions of Indian rights. Warrior, according to his biographer Paul R. McKenzie-Jones, played a leading role in developing the ideology of red power and translating it into a movement, especially with his leadership of the influential National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). Through its focus on Warrior's life, work, and legacy, Clyde Warrior joins a body of literature that locates the origins of the American Indian civil rights movement in the grassroots organizing and political awakening of the 1960s. Warrior's activism was rooted in the belief that American Indians should be able to retain their tribal cultures and traditions while participating in modern American society. Born in 1939, Warrior was raised by his maternal grandparents within the Ponca community in Oklahoma and traveled the American Southwest on the Indian powwow circuit. In the early 1960s Warrior attended college and participated in a series of regional and national conferences and workshops to discuss American Indian issues. It was through these networks that Warrior emerged as a leader of a group of radical native youth who denounced with fiery rhetoric what they saw as weak tribal leadership too willing to accommodate the dominant society. Warrior channeled this energy into support for the NIYC while also joining direct action protests such as the 1964 Washington State fish-ins for treaty rights. By 1966, Warrior was using the term red power and articulating it as a focus on tribal self-determination, or the retention of tribal culture and identity while fostering the social and economic means for American Indian peoples to live as sovereign nations and self-sustaining communities. Warrior's work increasingly came to focus on education as a means of achieving these goals through federal Office of Economic Opportunity programs that promoted culturally relevant curriculums for American Indian students. Warrior died young, in 1968, but the concepts of red power that he developed had a direct influence on both the major shift in U.S. Indian policy initiated by the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations and the high-profile protests led by such groups as the American Indian Movement in the 1970s.