American Rights Movement Research Articles

Assessing the sociology of sport: On social consciousness and social movements

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a foundational scholar in the formation and development of sociology of sport, George Sage, reflects on how the discipline has evolved and continues to be anchored in social consciousness and social movements. Sage traces the development of the field to the formation of the International Committee for the Sociology of Sport (which became the ISSA) and the first publication of the IRSS in the 1960s and notes how that era played a role in seating the sociology of sport in social movements and advancing change. Sage focuses on three social movement pathways that have shaped the discipline: (1) the movement challenging dominant social theories, (2) the feminist (women’s) movement, and (3) the African American rights movement. The focus on social movements has continued to influence the character of the sociology of sport as it has evolved into an identifiable field of study.

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel (review)

Reviewed by: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel Edwin Whitewolf The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. By Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 416 pages, $28.00. Within the introduction to The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Glenn Frankel explains that what he finds most striking about the film is John Ford’s “ability to weave myth and truth into a seamless fabric” (8). This book is Frankel’s attempt at deconstructing the myths behind the film: the kidnapping of a white settler girl named Cynthia Ann Parker, her assimilation into Comanche society, and her “rescue” decades later by the Texas Rangers. Frankel elucidates how this history has been written, rewritten, and reinterpreted by a number of people and groups, including Ford in his 1956 film The Searchers. The first two sections of the book compose the most compelling half of the narrative when Frankel deals specifically with the mythology of how Parker’s story has been passed down and translated throughout the years by her white and Comanche descendants, as well as by US western writer Alan LeMay and filmmaker John Ford. Frankel deftly deconstructs a number of interwoven mythologies involving white settlers, Comanches, Texas Rangers, western fiction writers, directors, producers, Navajo actors, movie stars, and he convincingly illustrates how the story of one woman became a part of the mainstream US consciousness. Also admirable is how Frankel privileges histories written by women, representing much of the mythology surrounding Parker as the product of male creation: “Each of these male authors created and buffed the macho frontier legend using whatever facts fit their vision and discarding those that were less convenient. But occasionally, someone came along who gathered a more modest, fact-based account” (151). Thus, he privileges the voices of Rachel Plummer, Marion Ross, Susan Parker St. John, and Araminta Taulman in telling this history. It is disappointing, however, that Frankel settles upon a particular representation of the Comanches. He elides the history and cycles of violence that had shaped Comanche/Euroamerican relations for hundreds of years previous to the kidnapping of Parker and portrays the Comanche people largely as marauding, baby-killing rapists bent on the destruction of white bodies. While he comments about the regrettable way US citizens and the US government treated Native Americans in general, he claims, “The modern image of Indians—nurtured by the Native American rights movement, revisionist historians, and the film Dances with Wolves—has been one of profoundly spiritual and environmentally friendly genocide victims seeking harmony with the land and humankind. But the Comanches were nobody’s victims and no one’s friends. They were magnificent, brutal, and relentless” (32). While only a revisionist historian could portray the Comanches as a peaceable or docile people, Frankel portrays them using the language one [End Page 490] would use in describing the great white shark in Jaws (1975). He largely ignores that the Comanches fought back against the Euroamerican encroachment that had dispossessed them from their land and spread disease and famine among them for generations. Additionally, many Native American studies scholars and many people within the Native American rights movement, or even those familiar with it, would take issue with Frankel’s suggestion that they have nurtured an image of Native Americans as anything other than human beings who are not simply figures of a brutal or a romanticized past. Finally, is Frankel proposing that Native Americans were not victims of genocide? Is genocide a word that can only be applied to those victims that can be deemed friendly or incapable of resisting? In the introduction, Frankel explains what he found most fascinating about The Searchers when he watched it in his youth: “What entranced me most were the Comanches. … Ford’s portrait of them is mostly one-dimensional: Indians in The Searchers are for the most part murderers and rapists” (7). It is, therefore, ironic that Frankel largely portrays the Comanches in the same fashion. This lack of historical contextualization is especially frustrating because, otherwise, the book is truly captivating. Frankel’s illustration of how a specific history gave birth to a number of mythologies and how those mythologies in turn...

Out of the Woods: The Making of the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act

“Maine appears out of the woods,” the editor of the Lewiston Evening Journal opined, after President Jimmy Carter signed the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act in 1980.1 That sigh of relief was heartfelt. During the 1970s, two Native American tribes, the Passamaquoddies and Penobscots, had sparked a long, statewide nightmare when they asserted claim to more than twelve million acres of land in the Pine Tree State. To the Indians, their claim and the ensuing settlement represented long-delayed justice. For privateproperty owners, however, the controversy unleashed great anxiety about the future of Maine’s economy. To leaders in the Maine statehouse, Congress, and the White House, the matter was a conundrum pitting the demands of an aggrieved racial minority against the ire of an aroused white majority. When Congress, in 1980, granted the Passamaquoddies and Penobscots federal recognition and $81.5 million in cash, from which they could purchase up to three hundred thousand acres of land, all sides breathed easier. The land claims of these tribes form a compelling, albeit overlooked (by historians), story that illustrates three larger themes.2 The first involves the Native American rights movement, whose leadership and tactics proved quite diverse. Along with elected leaders located on federal reservations and urban-based “Red Power” radicals—the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM)—it included a new generation of university-educated activists who worked with tribal officials to reclaim Indian land, fishing, and water rights through lawsuits.3 One columnist noted that “the trend among most of the Western tribes seems to be toward organizing for court action and away from violent protest.”4 It was a similar story in the East, where Indians, lacking both federal recognition and extensive reservations, had little to lose by suing in court.5

The Native American rights movement in the United States: an interactive encyclopedia

The Native American rights movement in the United States: an interactive encyclopedia

The ABC-CLIO companion to the Native American Rights movement

This comprehensive reference source follows the history of efforts to preserve and recover the civil rights of American Indians in the United States. The ABC-CLIO Companion to the Native American Rights Movement examines such matters as the political struggle over treaty obligations, religious freedom, and the political sovereignty of reservations. The A-Z entries cover key persons, legislation, organizations, and events. Topics discussed include the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Wounded Knee occupation, the occupation of Alcatraz, the Native American Church, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Black and white illustrations enhance the easy to read text. * A-Z entries cover key persons, legislation, organizations, and events * Includes black and white illustrations