Orwellian Language and the Politics of Tribal Termination (1953-1960)

From 1953 to 1960, the federal government terminated sovereign recognition for 109 American Indian nations. Termination was a haphazard policy of assimilation that had disastrous consequences for Indian land and culture. Nonetheless, termination cloaked latent motivations for Indian land within individual rights rhetoric that was at odds with Indian sovereignty. Termination highlights the rhetorical features of social control under capitalism portrayed in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which opposing principles are fused and inverted. This essay critiques termination’s Orwellian language to show how ideographs of social liberation are refashioned by the state to subvert Indian sovereignty and popular dissent

Urban Indians and the Occupation of Alcatraz Island

It was 1951 when my wife Bobbie and I moved to San Francisco with three hundred dollars in savings and all of our possessions in three suitcases. We rented a tiny apartment and set up housekeeping on the forty-eight dollars per week that I earned after taxes. I endured the mindless racism of being called “chief” and “blanket-assed Indian” on the job, but a year later, at the age of twenty-one, I had passed the state test to become a licensed termite inspector. A decade later, I was vice president and general manager of a major East Bay termite exterminating firm. Those early years in the Bay Area were a period of financial struggle and hard work, but I was on my way to becoming financially successful. In fact, by the late 1960s, I owned my own business, the First American Termite Company; employed fifteen people; lived in a comfortable, suburban house with Bobbie and our three children; and even drove a Cadillac. Nothing would have been easier than assimilating into middle-class America. Not only was assimilation tempting, but it was encouraged in a society that preferred its Indians to be caricatures. There was no easy path “back to the blanket,” as it was termed, but, for my young family, there was reason—and need—to explore my heritage, and theirs. We took trips to the reservation at Red Lake or to Bobbie’s family home on the reservation in Nevada, but these trips were touring excursions among relics of something that was no longer a real and daily part of our lives. Perhaps we would have lost even that much of our past had the times not brought it back to us

Détournement, Decolonization, and the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971)

On November 20, 1969, eighty-nine American Indians calling themselves the “Indians of All Tribes” (IOAT) invaded Alcatraz Island. The group’s founding proclamation was addressed to “the Great White Father and All His People,” and declared “We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery” (2). Tongue-in-cheek, the IOAT offered to purchase Alcatraz Island for “twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red clothe.” In this essay, I illustrate how the IOAT engaged in a rhetoric of détournement, or a subversive misappropriation of dominant discourse that disassembles and imitates texts until they clearly display their oppressive qualities. I argue that the Proclamation established a textual framework that calls for a skeptical and irreverent reading of dominant discourse. I conclude that strategic détournements suture dominant discourses to the moniker of colonialism and invite sympathetic audiences to engage in decolonization