Oakes’s dive and the 18-month occupation of Alcatraz signaled the beginning of the Red Power movement, a name that functioned as commentary on the intertribal nature of the organizations that made up the movement. It was the natural development from the Native nationalism that had defined prior movements, and an attempt at establishing solidarity among hundreds of tribal nations. Through the power of direct action and partnering with popular non-Native public figures like Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando, Red Power vaulted conversations about self-determination into the mainstream American zeitgeist. But it also, in its messy ambitiousness, revealed the limits of a pan-Indian movement that lacked a central political ideology and was split on the use of violent force as a way to achieve sovereignty.
While the movement as defined by historians ended in the mid-1970s, the tenets of Red Power linger in modern pushes for sovereignty in all forms, from the struggle for protection of Lakota waters and land during the Standing Rock protests, to the legal challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act, to the attempts at securing the traditional lands of the Mashpee Wampanoag. But the politics that define these modern battles are now much clearer than they were in the time of Red Power. Conservatism has almost wholly aligned with the privatization of Native lands and the extraction of the natural resources in and underneath them. Yet the American left, even in its current resurgence, continues to lag behind on the issues of sovereignty and nationhood, leaving left-leaning Native peoples organizing their own multiracial, intertribal coalitions, trying to understand how best to infiltrate the American institutions of power to protect their lands and achieve true autonomy as nations.
The modern approaches to these issues still vary, but the goal—a healthier, equitable Indian Country built from the bottom up and not the top down—is the same vision that drove Oakes to dive into the bracing waters of the San Francisco Bay half a century ago.
The term Red Power is attributed to the late Vine Deloria Jr., the foremost intellectual to spring from the movement, thanks in part to his hugely influential manifesto, Custer Died for Your Sins. In the months after its 1969 publication and the beginnings of the Alcatraz occupation, several Native-led organizations formed or launched their own direct actions. Over a span of three years, occupations at Wounded Knee and the Bureau of Indian Affairs forced the same questions of sovereignty and broken obligations by the federal government, their supposed trustee.
