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129 Chapter {6} Grassroots Indian Activism The Red Power Movement in Urban Areas On Thanksgiving Day in 1977 about forty American Indian women and men ate their holiday meal at a drug and alcohol abuse treatment center near Los Angeles’s skid row, run by United American Indian Involvement, Inc. (UAII). UAII was founded in 1973, with the assistance of the National Institute for Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, to provide hot meals, showers, beds, referrals, and emergency medical care to American Indians who walked in off the street. Its staff was made up entirely of Native people, because UAII director and cofounder Baba Cooper believed that “Indian [alcoholics] don’t relate well to non-Indians.” John Eagleshield, a twenty-eight-year-old Sioux Indian and the staff paramedic, was among the celebrants on this particular Thanksgiving. Eagleshield had recently received his degree from the Los Angeles Associated Technical College, with the help of a federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) grant administered through the Los Angeles Indian Center. He had spent the last few Thanksgivings involved with protests organized by the American Indian Movement, but he decided that this year the work he could do for UAII would be “more realistic and meaningful.”1 Shifts in U.S. Indian policy and American Indian activism influenced the efforts by UAII to serve the Indian community of Los Angeles, the funding and training of its staff, and decisions by individuals including Eagleshield to forgo public protest in favor of community service. American Indian historians have recently begun to study the most public protests of the “Red Power” movement, such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island and the activities of the American Indian Movement. They have shown how such highprofile events drew attention to the challenges faced by American Indians and encouraged federal policymakers to support “self-determination,” or the efforts by Native people to address their own needs after decades of Grassroots Indian Activism 130 both paternalism and neglect by government officials.2 A few scholars also have examined how Native people in cities received attention in this period and were awarded millions of dollars in local, state, and federal funding.3 Urban American Indian groups such as UAII were empowered by these grants to provide a myriad of social services, train a generation of Indian professionals, and develop institutional models that continue to be used today. Yet to be studied is how these local struggles to serve urban Indian populations were influenced by the public protests of the Red Power movement beyond the influx of new funds. Addressing this question reveals much about American Indian life in cities during the 1970s. It also contributes to new directions in scholarship on the civil rights movement that seeks to understand the relationships between local and national activism. Over a decade ago scholars such as John Dittmer and Charles M. Payne offered a corrective to the “top-down” approach that focused on Martin Luther King Jr. and other national leaders to the exclusion of local people. These studies showed that the foundation for the civil rights movement was established through decades of grassroots activism by unheralded individuals and was carried on during the 1950s and 1960s in localities all over the country.4 Recent work in American Indian history has similarly argued that the Red Power movement was predicated on a long history of political activism by Native people through early-twentieth-century Progressive organizations, reservation struggles to fight assimilation, and Cold War–era political debates , among other efforts.5 Some authors also have embraced a “bottomup ” approach to pay attention to how local people received and adapted national movements to particular conditions on the ground. A newly opened chapter of the Black Panthers in a Midwestern city, for example, might show considerable variation from the founding chapter in Oakland, Calif., because of the local population’s unique historical experiences and traditions of activism that shaped its understanding of Black Power.6 All of this work dovetails with that of scholars who have been thinking about a “long civil rights movement” that dates to the 1930s and was developed through various strains and trajectories of activism well into the 1970s.7 Scholars can gain a better understanding of how movements for social justice are reinterpreted and transform over time by understanding the connections between the local and the national within this extended, multilayered civil rights movement. The patterns that can be gleaned might hold clues for those seeking to understand both the causes...

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