The Aesthetics of Protest: Graffiti, Flags, and Theatre in the Red Power Movement

Since the publication of two key texts in 1996, the Red Power movement has enjoyed greater exposure as a discrete subject of study. Consequently, scholars boast a better understanding of what it is that constitutes Red Power. Typically, Red Power is now defined as an intertribal, direct-action movement for land and sovereignty, bookended by the Alcatraz occupation in 1969, and either the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 or the Longest Walk in 1978. Though this characterisation has commendably granted the movement greater narrative coherency, it has faced increasing criticism. Namely, scholars have challenged the rendering's rigid periodisation and, more fundamentally, its over-emphasis on direct action - which has had the consequence of spotlighting a handful of key protest events at the expense of the multiplicity of activism (both direct action and otherwise) that proliferated in the period. Calls to look beyond direct action and this handful of key events have risen to a crescendo in recent years, but, until now, few studies have substantively sought to radically deviate in their approach to the movement.

This thesis seeks to introduce a novel area of analysis to the study of Red Power, focussing on the movement's protest aesthetics. The analytic value of the aesthetic lens is unpacked across three cases studies: the Indians of All Tribes' graffiti on Alcatraz, the flag use of the Pit River Tribe and American Indian Movement, and the theatre of Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa and Delaware). These case studies boast varied relationships to the movement's central activism. Some protest aesthetics were created anew for direct-action protest events, whilst others saw activists (mis)appropriate pre-existing aesthetics for subversive, decolonial displays. Furthermore, whilst some aesthetic productions represented integrated components of direct action, others were created within what I have called the 'wider orbit' of the movement.

In decentring direct action in favour of aesthetics, novel facets of the movement are illuminated. Understudied ideological dimensions and debates in the period are clarified, such as those surrounding the concepts of power, nationhood, and representational sovereignty. Overlooked activism is similarly incorporated into this novel analysis, with the aesthetic lens enabling a seamless integration of tribal activism and understudied intertribal activism. The greatest divergence from extant narratives is the incorporation of novel Red Power agents: artists and artworks intersperse analysis, with art featuring as an essential analytic tool in the excavation of Red Power rhetoric and ideology. Most significantly, artists are situated as Red Power activists in their own right, with scholars encouraged to consider how artwork in the era represented an alternative arm of the movement.

Fundamentally, this study illuminates the centrality of aesthetics to the Red Power movement, both in and beyond the era's key protest events. Decentring direct action and allowing aesthetics to lead analysis evidences the capacity of alternative lenses of study to eschew the intellectual blinkers that currently restrict scholarship to yet further explications of the same direct-action protests. In turn, a call is forwarded to embrace the aesthetic archive, but more broadly to consider how alternative lenses may productively guide subsequent studies.