Red Power, white narrative: founding violence & the invalidation of Indigenous rights

Abstract

ABSTRACT The disavowal of ‘founding violence’ remains a core proposition of settler colonial theory. This paper expands our theoretical understanding of the concept to account for the strategic invocation of founding violence to legitimate settler colonial racial orders. Drawing from a sample of in-depth interviews (n = 27) with settlers who have historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) confrontational activism in the 1970s, I show how non-Indigenous territoriality is affirmed through the narrative displacement of founding violence onto Indigenous peoples. Across the U.S. state of South Dakota, where AIM’s ‘Red Power’ activism was most pronounced, interviewees routinely delegitimize movement grievances through historicized narratives of incessant inter-tribal conflict and Indigenous violence. Thus, in addition to justifying settler society’s bloody origins, the invocation of founding violence remains a powerful discursive mechanism for delegitimizing contemporary Indigenous rights.