From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie

György Ferenc Tóth

Description

From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie examines the history of the transatlantic alliance between American Indian sovereignty activists and Central European solidarity groups, and their entry into the United Nations in the 1970s and 1980s. In the late Cold War, Native American activists engaged in transnational diplomacy for nation building by putting outside pressure on the US government for a more progressive Indian policy that reached for the full decolonization of Native American communities into independence. By using extensive multinational archival research complemented by interviews, György Ferenc Tóth investigates how older transatlantic images of American Indians influenced the alliance between Native activists and Central European groups, how this coalition developed and functioned, and how the US government and the regimes of the Eastern Bloc responded to this transatlantic alliance. This book not only places the American Indian radical sovereignty movement in an international context, but also recasts it as a transnational struggle, thus connecting domestic US social and political history to the history of Cold War transatlantic relations and global movements.
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Indians at Checkpoint Charlie

1. “Playing Indian” Revisited: American Indians in the Transatlantic Cultural Landscape

2. There Ain’t No Red in the American Flag: The Indian Sovereignty Movement as a Transnational Challenge to the U.S. Nation State

3. The Rise of the Transatlantic Sovereignty Alliance

4. The Politics of Solidarity in the Transatlantic Sovereignty Alliance

5. “Red” Nations: Marxist Solidarity and the Radical Indian Sovereignty Movement

6. A Trail of New Treaties: Performing American Indian Rights at the United Nations
Photo gallery follows page 168

7. States of Control: U.S. Government Responses to the Transnational Sovereignty Movement

Conclusion: The Transatlantic Sovereignty Alliance and Its Legacy

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Indigenous peoples
• Eastern Europe
• History of the Americas
• History of Europe

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438461236
• Langue: English

Extrait

From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie
SUNY series, Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building

Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper, editors
From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie
The Alliance for Sovereignty between American Indians and Central Europeans in the Late Cold War
György Ferenc Tóth
Cover photo courtesy of Dick Bancroft and Claus Biegert; photo archive of the Gesellschaft fur Bedrohte Volker, Gottingen, Germany.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tóth, György Ferenc, 1976–
Title: From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie : the alliance for sovereignty between American Indians and Central Europeans in the late Cold War / György Ferenc Tóth.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Series: SUNY series, Tribal worlds : critical studies in American Indian nation building | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015027729 | ISBN 9781438461212 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781438461236 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America—Politics and government—20 th century. | Indians of North America—Government relations—History—20 th century. | Indians of North America—Civil rights—History—20th century. | Sovereignty—History—20th century. | Anti-imperialist movements—History—20th century. | United States—Relations—Europe, Central. | Europe, Central—Relations—United States. | United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. | Europe, Central—Politics and government—20th century.
Classification: LCC E98.T77 T68 2016 | DDC 323.1197—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015027729
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In honor of the transatlantic activists for American Indian sovereignty.
Dedicated to my mentors, parents, and grandmother.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments Introduction: Indians at Checkpoint Charlie Chapter 1 “Playing Indian” Revisited: American Indians in the Transatlantic Cultural Landscape Chapter 2 There Ain’t No Red in the American Flag: The Indian Sovereignty Movement as a Transnational Challenge to the U.S. Nation State Chapter 3 The Rise of the Transatlantic Sovereignty Alliance Chapter 4 The Politics of Solidarity in the Transatlantic Sovereignty Alliance Chapter 5 “Red” Nations: Marxist Solidarity and the Radical Indian Sovereignty Movement Chapter 6 A Trail of New Treaties: Performing American Indian Rights at the United Nations
Photo gallery Chapter 7 States of Control: U.S. Government Responses to the Transnational Sovereignty Movement Conclusion: The Transatlantic Sovereignty Alliance and Its Legacy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
I was born in 1976—in the year of the U.S. Bicentennial. My parents did not get to attend the anniversary’s festivities because we lived on the other side of the iron curtain—in Communist Hungary. We were far away from the official celebrations sponsored by the U.S. government, and from the counter-commemorations and alternative ceremonies staged by dissenting groups and movements, who reflected, reenacted, and challenged the meaning of U.S. national history and identity.
Yet, in spite of Hungary’s official anti-U.S. propaganda, we did engage with “American” culture. My grandmother, a Baptist faithful even under the toughest dictatorship, was elated when she heard that Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist, was elected president of the United States. As for me, some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me at bedtime some of Karl May’s novels, in which a young German protagonist goes to the Wild West, strikes up a friendship with an Apache warrior, and together they fight against the “evil” Kiowa Indians and white bandits. When I was a little older, I acted out some of these stories with a friend of mine. Around this time and later, I would go with my parents to the cinema to watch Westerns made in the Eastern Bloc about the nineteenth-century resistance by American Indians to the U.S. Army and land grabs by white capitalists. Their star, Gojko Mitic, was from Yugoslavia, but for us he was an American Indian. Later still, in the early 1990s, I met a Hungarian hobbyist who told me about the people who had been reenacting American Indian cultures in their summer camps in the hills.
However, no one told me about the American Indian Movement’s struggles when I was growing up. It was only much later, after long years of learning English at school and at home on TV, after the transition of my country to democracy and capitalism, and once I was majoring in American Studies at university, that I learned about the American Indian radical sovereignty movement. At first I did not make any connections between the Indian fantasies of my childhood and the Native activism on the other side of the Atlantic. As I increasingly used my academic training about the United States to critically examine my own society, I became interested in just what I and millions of other Hungarians (and indeed, Central Europeans) were doing with those fantasies. From recent scholarship I learned to recognize and appreciate the multiplicity of motivations and functions of this “Indian play” among Europeans. However, what kept intriguing me was the possibility that some of the people who engaged in “playing Indian” could also perhaps fight for Indian rights. As I became a Hungarian scholar of the politics of U.S. culture in Cold War Central Europe, I embarked on a project to show that cultural consumption and creative engagement with “America” can lead to not only intercultural encounters, but also to political activism and alliances for social justice across geographical, ideological, and racial divides. Set in the period of my childhood, this is the history of the transatlantic coalition for American Indian sovereignty.
Acknowledgments
This book was written about a select group of people who worked hard for their ideals. As such, the project benefited from the contributions of a select group of people—friends, colleagues, and professionals.
During my research trips I received in-kind logistical assistance from Su Zhang, Carlton Rounds and Michael “Cabbie” Caban, Leslie Holland and Jack Lamb, Carmen Samora, Betsy Loyd and Kol Harvey, Colleen Kelley, Abby Kaiser, and Danielle Dahl.
My research benefited greatly from the assistance of Anna Bánhegyi, Colleen Kelley, Vera Grabitzky, Adrienn Kácsor, Zsuzsanna Horváth, Claus Biegert, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, H. Glenn Penny, Martin Klimke, Trudy Peterson, and anonymous Hungarian hobbyists of American Indian cultures.
During my research trips I relied on the professional services of the staff of the Minnesota Historical Society; Leah Jehan and the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University; the staff of the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland; the staff of the United Nations Archives in New York City; Donald Burge and the staff of the Center for Southwest Research of the University of New Mexico; the staff of the Library and the Archives Registry Sub-Unit at the United Nations Palace of the Nations in Geneva, Switzerland; the staff of the Federal Archive, Reich and GDR Department, Archive of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR; and the staff of the Federal Commissioner for the files of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic, Berlin, Germany.
My research of the organizational records of the transatlantic sovereignty alliance would not have been possible without the kind help of Alberto Saldamando and the staff of the International Indian Treaty Council, San Francisco; Pirrette Birraux and the staff of the Indigenous People’s Documentation Center in Geneva, Switzerland; Helena Nyberg and the staff of INCOMINDIOS in Zürich, Switzerland; and Yvonne Bangert, Tilman Zülch, and the staff at the Gesselschaft für Bedrohte Völker in Göttingen, Germany.
Crucial funding for my research was provided by various offices and departments at the University of Iowa. Finally, my book benefited from the scholarly feedback of Jane Desmond, Virginia Dominguez, Kim Marra, H. Glenn Penny, Joni Kinsey, and Chris Merrill, and from the generous editorial expertise of Bill Lively, and Diane Ganeles and her colleagues at SUNY Press.
Introduction

Indians at Checkpoint Charlie
вы выезжаете из американского сектора.
Vous sortez du secteur Américain.
Sie Verlassen den Amerikanischen Sektor.
You are leaving the American Sector.
“You are leaving the American Sector.” As the Cold War wa