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Lyda Conley Series on Trailblazing Indigenous Futures
Reinventing the Warrior

Reinventing the Warrior

Masculinity in the American Indian Movement, 1968-1973

by Matthias Andre Voigt

Series: Lyda Conley Series on Trailblazing Indigenous Futures

Sales Date: September 2024

442 Pages, 6.00 × 9.00 in

Hardcover
9780700636976
Published: September 2024

$54.99

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eBook
9780700636983
Published: September 2024

Ebook delivery via VitalSource

$54.99

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On February 27, 1973, a group of roughly 300 armed Indigenous men, women, and children seized the tiny hamlet of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, at gunpoint, took hostages, barricaded themselves in the hilltop church, and raised an upside-down American flag. Taking place at the site of the infamous massacre in 1890, the highly symbolic confrontation spearheaded by the American Indian Movement (AIM) ultimately evolved into a prolonged, seventy-one-day armed standoff between law enforcement officers and modern-day Indigenous warriors. Among these warriors were Vietnam War veterans armed with Vietnam-era equipment and weaponry. By organizing in defense of the newly proclaimed Independent Oglala Nation, the AIM activists at Wounded Knee linked their nationalist quest for sovereignty and self-determination with a warrior masculinity they constructed from a mix of Indigenous cultures and contemporary cultural elements, including the Black civil rights movement, the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the antiwar movement.

As Matthias André Voigt shows, the takeover of Wounded Knee was only one moment among many in the complex interplay between protest activism, gender, race, and identity within AIM. While AIM is widely recognized for its militancy and nationalism, Reinventing the Warrior is the first major study to examine the gendered transformation of Indigenous men within the Red Power movement and the United States more generally. AIM activists came to regard themselves, like their ancestors before them, as warriors fighting for their people, their lands, and their rights. They sought to remasculinize their Indigenous identity in order to confront hegemonic masculinities—and, by implication, colonialism itself. By becoming “more manly,” Indigenous men challenged the disempowering nature of white supremacy.

Voigt traces the story of the reinvention of Indigenous warriorhood from 1968 to the takeover of Wounded Knee in 1973 and beyond. His trailblazing work explores why and how Indigenous men refashioned themselves as modern-day warriors in their anticolonial nation-building endeavor, thereby remaking both self and society.

"All told, Voigt provides a laudatory addition to the field of Indigenous masculinity studies. His use of oral history collections, Indigenous newspapers, and interviews of Red Power activists underscores the transformative power of alternative gender practices."—Western Historical Quarterly
"A fascinating exploration into the intersections of masculinity and nationalism within the American Indian Movement (AIM)."—Journal of Arizona History
"Voigt’s work is a masterful reexamination of AIM’s fight for sovereignty and the manifestation of Indigenous masculinity within that fight. He addresses a complex and troubled history of the Movement in a skillful and nuanced way that enhances both our understanding of Indigenous resistance in the 1960s and ’70s and the multi-faceted influences and impositions on Indigenous manhood that ultimately informed it."—The Global SIxties
"Clear, comprehensive writing offers instructive reading, providing one of the finest histories of this period to be found anywhere."—Choice
“In this masterful analysis of the American Indian Movement, Matthias Voigt explains the sui generis warrior tradition embedded in Indigenous men. This Native patriotism manifested in the civil rights era with AIM warriors of this modern masculinity willing to fight and die for Native sovereignty.”—Donald L. Fixico (Muscogee, Seminole, Shawnee, and Sac and Fox), author of The American Indian Mind in a Linear World
“An archivally driven and theoretically sophisticated analysis of Indigenous masculinity during the height of the Red Power Movement has long evaded this period—until now. Matthias André Voigt has written one of the best books on the Indigenous freedom struggle and its connection to gender, self-determination, and nationalism. A well-researched, conceptually sound book, you will no doubt want to add this to your bookshelves and syllabi if you want to understand this period from a unique and important vantage point.”—Kyle T. Mays, author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States and City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit
“Matthias André Voigt has inaugurated what one can only hope will be the next generation of scholarship on an era desperately in need of new perspectives and approaches. Rather than rehashing a celebratory narrative of resistance, this work delves beneath the surface to examine critically the construction of gender—and specifically masculinity—in the context of the American Indian Movement’s brand of Red Power. That it does so with an eye toward speaking to scholarship on anticolonial movements globally makes it that much more compelling.”—Daniel M. Cobb, author of Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887
“Reinventing the Warrior is an extraordinary and meticulously researched contribution to understanding Indigenous protest and warriorhood in the 1960s and 1970s. Situating the book within broader political and social contexts, Voigt offers a vivid and engaging historical investigation of identity, performance, and confrontation.”—Denise E. Bates, author of The Other Movement: Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep South and Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884–1984
“Previous studies of masculinity note the colonial tendency to feminize Indigenous men, but they largely overlook the agency of these men in constructing—and over time reimagining—what it means to be male. Matthias André Voigt’s work offers a compelling corrective to this absence. Reinventing the Warrior not only provides keen insight into the American Indian Movement, but it does so through a gendered lens that reveals how traditions of warrior culture, US military service in Vietnam, and Red Power converged in the construction of a new strain of warrior masculinity or ‘Indigenous protest masculinity.’ This important book is a must-read for students of activism, Native American history, and gender.”—Sarah Eppler Janda, author of Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962–1972