Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power by Sherry L. Smith (review)

In 1966 photographer and countercultural activist Stewart Brand, best known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog, exhibited a multimedia show in San Francisco based on his photographs of Indian peoples. He chose as the title of his show, “America Needs Indians,” a nod to what he saw as the Indians’ special ability to know the earth and live in harmony with it. He hoped non-Indians who viewed the show would be inspired enough by what they saw to make changes in their own world and perhaps even support Indian activists who were seeking change themselves. In Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power, author Sherry L. Smith deftly uses this phrase, and the era of countercultural rebellion it reflected, to frame a well-researched, balanced, and engaging exploration of the intercultural collaborations between Natives and non-Natives in the Red Power Movement.

Other histories of Red Power have typically focused on the Native activists who shaped and guided the movement through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, but Smith, while acknowledging the centrality of Indian leadership, and Indian agency more broadly, argues that not enough attention has been given to the interplay between Natives and non-Natives. Natives may have been the leaders of the movement, she asserts, defining the issues of tribal sovereignty, self-determination, treaty rights, and cultural revitalization, but they had help in their campaign from members of the counterculture who, through their different engagements with Indian culture, raised awareness of these issues among the broader public, making political change possible and setting in motion a “remarkable, even revolutionary, shift in attitude, practice and policy” (5–6) towards Indians. In this sense, Smith seeks not to diminish the accomplishments of Red Power leaders, but simply to “add an additional cast of characters” to our understanding of this dramatic period in American Indian and United States history (6).

The sentiment that “America needs Indians” could hardly have been imagined in the early 1960s, when the Termination policy dominated, ending federal support for Indian tribes and relocating reservation Indians to cities, where they could more easily be assimilated. Most Americans assumed Indians had vanished, or were marginal at best, in American society. But Smith suggests that this assumption began to change as Natives mobilized to challenge the policy on a number of fronts. Non-Natives, galvanized by the Civil Rights Movement, rebellion against conventional American values, and criticism of federal policies—both domestic and foreign—sought to construct a more just and inclusive nation. How Natives and non-Natives came together and developed cross-racial partnerships to achieve their goals is a complicated, sometimes thorny story, but Smith skillfully navigates this complexity while maintaining narrative coherence.

The book focuses on several key events and cultural moments between 1963 and 1973 that convey this story. Smith begins by examining the salmon wars of the Pacific Northwest, when Natives fought to restore treaty rights to fish along the Columbia River and its tributaries. They were some of the first Indians to challenge the assumption of Indian disappearance, and as she notes, this happened to coincide with the early counter-cultural “discovery” of Indians. Celebrities became involved, along with Students for a Democratic Society radicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, and many others who saw in the protests an opportunity to support minority rights and redress America’s imperialist past.

This cross-racial collaboration became a pattern by the late sixties and early seventies. Smith considers the countercultural enthrallment with Indians, and how it transformed into political support for the Alcatraz takeover in 1969, found expression in the back-to-the-land ethos of New Mexico communes, and led to a broader awareness of injustices towards Indians that established critical groundwork for Native activist groups like the American Indian Movement, and flashpoints like the Trail of Broken Treaties in 1972 and Wounded Knee the following year. Political radicals...