“We Have Always Had These Many Voices”: Red Power Newspapers and a Community of Poetic Resistance

The era of Red Power in the 1960s and 1970s was a reassertion of the voice of American Indians. Through various activist organizations and institutions, the people began to fully articulate their communal concerns and realities within the US-Indigenous colonial relationship. Accompanying and extending from this activism, the number of Native newspapers and periodicals skyrocketed and served as an important catalyst for the cultural, political, and religious resurgence of the people across Indian Country.¹ Americans Before Columbus (hereafter cited as abc), Akwesasne Notes, Alcatraz Newsletter, the Indian News, the Indian Voice, and the Warpath were among the most active Red Power publications.² These publications helped disseminate the idea of Red Power, fostering American Indian unity through specific coverage and reports on a variety of pan-Indigenous protests—from the fishing rights protests in Washington, Oregon, and California throughout the 1960s to the Longest Walk in 1978.

“Red Power” was the expression of American Indians’ growing consciousness of pan-Indigenous identity and politics, a slogan that promoted Native sovereignty. And two of the most radical voices pioneering the idea of Red Power were abc and the Warpath, established by the National Indian Youth Council (niyc) and by the United Native Americans (una) in 1963 and 1968, respectively. During its early years, abc, the first Red Power newspaper, mostly propagated the message of the founders and leaders of niyc—Clyde Warrior (Ponca), Shirley Hill Witt (Mohawk), and Mel Thom (Walker River Paiute)—regarding the pan-Indigenous, unifying aspect of Red Power activism.³ Similarly, the Warpath expressed largely the ideas of Leman Brightman (Lakota/Creek), the president of una who inspired many Native students at Berkeley.

However, as was true for Red Power activism in general, the pan-Indigenous aspects of Red Power newspapers were informed not only by the well-known activists, the intellectuals and elites, but also by the contributions of ordinary people. abc and the Warpath, for instance, incorporated into their radical journalism a wide range of writers—people from communities large and small, including adults and high school students—whose writings were heavily influenced by oral tradition.⁴ The Warpath demonstrated a more overt, militant rhetoric with its stern and unremittingly vigilant slogans.⁵ At the same time, the newspaper encouraged community involvement in its readership by regularly announcing that it was “constantly hunting [for] news and human interest stories about Indian people, the Indian movement, poetry, or history. We encourage anyone who would like to write an article for The Warpath to please send it in.”⁶ abc took similar action, though gentler in tone. In a regular section entitled “our many voices” or “We have always had these many voices,” the newspaper featured readers’ contributions in poetry and prose, whether anonymous or signed.⁷

The reference to “voices” demonstrated how oral tradition spans time and space, connecting people, and how that traditional function was being carried on in those written forms: a voice within the oral tradition solidifies a human social bond through the construction of a relationship between speaker and listener, and over time the repetition of the message becomes “poetry.”⁸ The inclusion of ordinary people as “voices,” then, illustrates the imperative task of unmuting those made voiceless within the oral traditions silenced or overwritten by colonial narrative. A note from Tim Fields (Osage, Baxter Springs, Kansas) printed in abc's “our many voices” resounds: “I am sending more of my poetry. . . . I can't get any published around here because of so stereotyped people. . . . I want to be heard, heard as an Indian. . . . I speak as my grandfather, an echo from the past.”⁹ Through the synecdochical image, “echo,” Field introduces himself as a voice from his ancestors. This conscious word choice indicates that the voices of ancestors can be continued and reheard in the new context of print media and even the English language, yet those voices can and do remain an authentic literary articulation of tribal people.

Acoma writer Simon Ortiz, a Red Power activist through niyc, explicated this type of adaptive process...