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 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 Indige- nous 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.
“In this masterful analysis of the American Indian Movement, Matthias Voigt explains the sui generis warrior tradition embedded in Indigenous men. This Native patriotism manifested in the civil rights era with AIM warriors of this modern masculinity willing to fight and die for Native sovereignty.”—Donald L. Fixico (Muscogee, Seminole, Shawnee, and Sac and Fox), author of The American Indian Mind in a Linear World
“An archivally driven and theoretically sophisticated analysis of Indigenous masculinity during the height of the Red Power Movement has long evaded this period—until now. Matthias André Voigt has written one of the best books on the Indigenous freedom struggle and its connection to gender, self-determination, and nationalism. A well-researched, conceptually sound book, you will no doubt want to add this to your bookshelves and syllabi if you want to understand this period from a unique and important vantage point.”—Kyle T. Mays, author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States and City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit
“Matthias André Voigt has inaugurated what one can only hope will be the next generation of scholarship on an era desperately in need of new perspectives and approaches. Rather than rehashing a celebratory narrative of resistance, this work delves beneath the surface to examine critically the construction of gender—and specifically masculinity—in the context of the American Indian Movement’s brand of Red Power. That it does so with an eye toward speaking to scholarship on anticolonial movements globally makes it that much more compelling.”—Daniel M. Cobb, author of Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887
