Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism: 05 (New Directions in Native American Studies Series) - Hardcover

Bradley G. Shreve (author) & Shirley Hill Witt (Foreword By)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0806141786 ISBN 13: 9780806141787

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011

Synopsis

From the end of Pontiac’s War in 1763 through the War of 1812, fear—even paranoia—drove Anglo-American Indian policies. In Red Dreams, White Nightmares, Robert M. Owens views conflicts between whites and Natives in this era—invariably treated as discrete, regional affairs—as the inextricably related struggles they were. As this book makes clear, the Indian wars north of the Ohio River make sense only within the context of Indians’ efforts to recruit their southern cousins to their cause. The massive threat such alliances posed, recognized by contemporary whites from all walks of life, prompted a terror that proved a major factor in the formulation of Indian and military policy in North America. Indian unity, especially in the form of military alliance, was the most consistent, universal fear of Anglo-Americans in the late colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. This fear was so pervasive—and so useful for unifying whites—that Americans exploited it long after the threat of a general Indian alliance had passed. As the nineteenth century wore on, and as slavery became more widespread and crucial to the American South, fears shifted to Indian alliances with former slaves, and eventually to slave rebellion in general. The growing American nation needed and utilized a rhetorical threat from the other to justify the uglier aspects of empire building—a phenomenon that Owens tracks through a vast array of primary sources. Drawing on eighteen different archives, covering four nations and eleven states, and on more than six-dozen period newspapers—and incorporating the views of British and Spanish authorities as well as their American rivals—Red Dreams, White Nightmares is the most comprehensive account ever written of how fear, oftentimes resulting in “Indian-hating,” directly influenced national policy in early America.

About this title

About the Author

Bradley G. Shreve is Managing Editor of the Tribal College Journal, a publication of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium.

Shirley Hill Witt is a founder and former vice president of the National Indian Youth Council. A distinguished anthropologist and former foreign service officer, she is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Wolf Clan.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0806141786
• ISBN 13: 9780806141787
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272