This lecture will provide a history of Red Power radicalization and Indigenous-Marxist cross-fertilization. It examines the political work undertaken by a small but dedicated cadre of Native organizers going by the name Native Alliance for Red Power (or NARP) in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), from 1967 to the 1975. It argues that their political organizing and theory-building borrowed substantively and productively from a Third World-adapted Marxism which provided an appealing international language of political contestation that they not only inherited but sought to radically transform through a critical engagement with their own cultural traditions and land-based struggles. Not unlike many radicalized communities of color during this period, NARP molded and adapted the insights they gleaned from Third World Marxism abroad – with a focus on Maoism in particular – into their own internationalist critiques of racial capitalism, patriarchy, and internal colonialism at home. A focus will be placed on NARP’s application of a Red Power- Maoist critique of the political economy of extraction spanning from Palestine and the Middle East to Canada via the Oil Crisis of 1973.

Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s CB Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory, published in English or French, in 2014/2015, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book in 2016. He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program