The long-intertwined communities of the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation and the bordering towns in Sheridan County, Nebraska, mark their histories in sensational incidents and quiet human connections, many recorded in detail here for the first time. After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the border towns' peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder's death at the hands of four white men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird and tells the story of Whiteclay, Nebraska, the controversial border hamlet that continues to sell millions of cans of beer per year to the "dry" reservation. Within this microcosm of cultural conflict, Magnuson explores the odds against community's power to transcend misunderstanding, alcoholism, prejudice, and violence.

"A nonfiction account of the Oglala of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and the white settler towns of Sheridan County, Nebraska. Explores the repercussions of Raymond Yellow Thunder's death at the hands of four white men in 1972 and the struggle of American Indian Movement Nebraska Coordinator Bob Yellow Bird Steele"--Provided by publisher.

Popular culture largely perceives the tragedy at Wounded Knee in 1890 as the end of Native American resistance in the West, and for many years historians viewed this event as the end of Indian history altogether. The Dawes Act of 1887 and the reservation system dramatically changed daily life and political dynamics, particularly for the Oglala Lakotas. As Akim D. Reinhardt demonstrates in this volume, however, the twentieth century continued to be politically dynamic. Even today, as life continues for the Oglalas on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, politics remain an integral component of the Lakota past and future. Reinhardt charts the political history of the Oglala Lakota people from the fifteenth century to the present with this edited collection of primary documents, a historical narrative, and a contemporary bibliographic essay. Throughout the twentieth century, residents on Pine Ridge and other reservations confronted, resisted, and adapted to the continuing effects of U.S. colonialism. During the modern reservation era, reservation councils, grassroots and national political movements, courtroom victories and losses, and cultural battles have shaped indigenous populations. Both a documentary reader and a Lakota history, Welcome to the Oglala Nation is an indispensable volume on Lakota politics.

The Native American activist recounts his struggle for Indian self-determination, his periods in prison, and his spiritual awakening.

On February 27, 1973, a group of roughly 300 armed Indigenous men, women, and children seized the tiny hamlet of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, at gunpoint, took hostages, barricaded themselves in the hilltop church, and raised an upside-down American flag. Taking place at the site of the infamous massacre in 1890, the highly symbolic confrontation spearheaded by the American Indian Movement (AIM) ultimately evolved into a prolonged, seventy-one-day armed standoff between law enforcement officers and modern-day Indigenous warriors. Among these warriors were Vietnam War veterans armed with Vietnam-era equipment and weaponry. By organizing in defense of the newly proclaimed Independent Oglala Nation, the AIM activists at Wounded Knee linked their nationalist quest for sovereignty and self-determination with a warrior masculinity they constructed from a mix of Indigenous cultures and contemporary cultural elements, including the Black civil rights movement, the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the antiwar movement. As Matthias André Voigt shows, the takeover of Wounded Knee was only one moment among many in the complex interplay between protest activism, gender, race, and identity within AIM. While AIM is widely recognized for its militancy and nationalism, Reinventing the Warrior is the first major study to examine the gendered transformation of Indigenous men within the Red Power movement and the United States more generally. AIM activists came to regard themselves, like their ancestors before them, as warriors fighting for their people, their lands, and their rights. They sought to remasculinize their Indigenous identity in order to confront hegemonic masculinities—and, by implication, colonialism itself. By becoming “more manly,” Indigenous men challenged the disempowering nature of white supremacy. Voigt traces the story of the reinvention of Indigenous warriorhood from 1968 to the takeover of Wounded Knee in 1973 and beyond. His trailblazing work explores why and how Indigenous men refashioned themselves as modern-day warriors in their anticolonial nation-building endeavor, thereby remaking both self and society.

Dennis Banks, an American Indian of the Ojibwa Tribe and a founder of the American Indian Movement, is one of the most influential Indian leaders of our time. In Ojibwa Warrior, written with acclaimed writer and photographer Richard Erdoes, Banks tells his own story for the first time and also traces the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The authors present an insider’s understanding of AIM protest events—the Trail of Broken Treaties march to Washington, D.C.; the resulting takeover of the BIA building; the riot at Custer, South Dakota; and the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee. Enhancing the narrative are dramatic photographs, most taken by Richard Erdoes, depicting key people and events.

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance. Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies