Relocation and Termination: Native American Radicalism Takes Root through US Assimilation Programs

Focusing on the aggressive political activism of the American Indian Movement’s restoration of the Ghost Dance during its occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, this paper examines the roots of Native American radicalism in U.S. assimilation policies and the multiple migrations they required. Scholars have tended to link “authentic” Native American identity to “traditional” reservation culture without fully considering the innovations in indigenous culture the federal reservation system and assimilation programs produced. This paper traces the emergence of a communal experiment and social protest led by urbanized Indians seemingly disconnected from “traditional” native culture at Wounded Knee. By examining their communalism within the context of the comprehensive assimilation programs initiated by the U.S. government during the twentieth century commonly known as “relocation and termination,” this paper connects federal Indian policy to AIM’s manifestation of the Ghost Dance.

This paper contends that much of what has been interpreted as political and not religious in AIM and its partnership with some “traditional” Sioux Indians to restore the Independent Oglala Nation and to revive the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee misrepresents the complicated mix of motivations and interpretations that guided the effort. Framing AIM as a restorationist movement, this paper argues that the organization articulated an innovative religious vision of native cultural renewal intimately connected to its political activism. Historiographical debates about religious authenticity have worked to divorce religion from politics, obscuring the role that U.S. policies and the migrations they organized had in creating “traditional” reservation culture and “secular” radicalism. This reconceptualization of the Ghost Dance advances an emerging historical discourse on how authority is structured in the United States and locates religion at its very center.