From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie: The Alliance for Sovereignty between American Indians and Central Europeans in the Late Cold War (SUNY series, ... Studies in American Indian Nation Building)

From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie examines the history of the transatlantic alliance between American Indian sovereignty activists and Central European solidarity groups, and their entry into the United Nations in the 1970s and 1980s. In the late Cold War, Native American activists engaged in transnational diplomacy for nation building by putting outside pressure on the US government for a more progressive Indian policy that reached for the full decolonization of Native American communities into independence. By using extensive multinational archival research complemented by interviews, György Ferenc Tóth investigates how older transatlantic images of American Indians influenced the alliance between Native activists and Central European groups, how this coalition developed and functioned, and how the US government and the regimes of the Eastern Bloc responded to this transatlantic alliance. This book not only places the American Indian radical sovereignty movement in an international context, but also recasts it as a transnational struggle, thus connecting domestic US social and political history to the history of Cold War transatlantic relations and global movements. A historical analysis of the transatlantic relations of the American Indian radical sovereignty movement of the late Cold War. From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie examines the history of the transatlantic alliance between American Indian sovereignty activists and Central European solidarity groups, and their entry into the United Nations in the 1970s and 1980s. In the late Cold War, Native American activists engaged in transnational diplomacy for nation building by putting outside pressure on the US government for a more progressive Indian policy that reached for the full decolonization of Native American communities into independence. By using extensive multinational archival research complemented by interviews, Gyrgy Ferenc Tth investigates how older transatlantic images of American Indians influenced the alliance between Native activists and Central European groups, how this coalition developed and functioned, and how the US government and the regimes of the Eastern Bloc responded to this transatlantic alliance. This book not only places the American Indian radical sovereignty movement in an international context, but also recasts it as a transnational struggle, thus connecting domestic US social and political history to the history of Cold War transatlantic relations and global movements. Gyrgy Ferenc Tth is Lecturer of US History and Transatlantic Relations at the University of Stirling in Scotland. "Playing Indian revisited" : American Indians in the transatlantic cultural landscape There ain't no red in the American flag : the Indian sovereignty movement as a transnational challenge to the U.S. nation state The rise of the transatlantic sovereignty alliance The politics of solidarity in the transatlantic sovereignty alliance "Red" nations : Marxist solidarity and the radical Indian sovereignty movement A trail of new treaties : performing American Indian rights at the United Nations States of control : U.S. government responses to the transnational sovereignty movement Conclusion: The transatlantic sovereignty alliance and its legacy.