In the 1960s and 70s, Red Power intellectuals and activists engaged in a remarkably ambitious wholesale rewriting of American Indian history. New works of popular and academic history challenged standard narratives of U.S. territorial expansion, with particular emphasis paid to major events of the nineteenth century ‘Indian Wars’, such as Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This presentation seeks to understand Red Power Historiography as more than just retrospective revision and, instead, as a distinct mode of contemporaneous political critique. Particular attention is paid to the way that Red Power Historiography helped to reframe popular interpretations of Cold War conflict, especially, the spectre of the guerilla, the partisan, and the revolutionary insurgent. Work from this period serves as a model then for how we might bind disparate struggles together, across great time and space.

Robert Nichols is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work in social and political theory has been published in several books and journal articles, including Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Duke, 2020); The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor, ed. and trans., (Minnesota, 2021); and The World of Freedom: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology (Stanford, 2014).

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.