Beyond the Civil Rights Paradigm: Thinking about Class, American Indian Workers, and Colonial Legacies

Despite the growing interest in American Indian workers, their stories still seem "exceptional" or peripheral to labor and/or economic history.  Indeed, on the surface, American Indians seem irrelevant to the history of the US labor movement.  An American Indian equivalent of Cesar Chavez or A. Philip Randolph does not seem to have existed.  Given their absence it might seem that American Indians were contented in their jobs; yet we know that they confronted energy companies in the Southwest, entrenched labor unions on the Vancouver docks, and commercial farmers in California. They were certainly not satisfied with the status quo. Perhaps they were more skeptical than Black, Latino and white workers about the labor movement’s transformative potential. They might also have hoped that labor unions in industries on and off their reservation communities would serve as vehicles to end the types of discrimination they faced in American society, particularly in reservation border towns.  But, what does the labor narrative look like if inclusion in US civil society is not the broader social aim? Comparing Native American workers’ experience to other workers of color may help us understand their differences—both in the types of working and living conditions they endured, and in the divergent strategies – sovereignty or civil rights -- they pursued to bring about social change. 

This paper is an exercise in framing the questions for a new book project called Labor and Sovereignty:  The Transformation of Work in Indian Country, 1890-1990.  American Indians struggled for many of the same changes as their fellow workers of color. But, unlike Latino, Black and Asian-American workers, a legacy of colonialism in the US shaped Native Americans' relationship to the waged economy. Indeed, “labor rights” were civil rights, but for American Indians they were sovereignty rights as well.