Project Description

21^st century Native North American activist efforts – including the NoDAPL and Wet’suwet’en pipeline protests and calls for justice for residential school survivors – have garnered increasing attention worldwide. This has led to a surge in interest in building solidarity with Indigenous peoples. Considering this context, our project investigates previous attempts to build solidarity, focusing on white-led organizations for Native North American rights in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

By critically analyzing the work of these organizations, our project seeks to identify and uncover both the advantages and limitations of engagement in solidarity work from a position of relative societal privilege and power. To achieve this, the project brings together the theoretical frameworks of whiteness and settler colonialism, using Indigenous Studies methodologies, to explore the ways in which what we call “white solidarity” is shaped by both explicit and underlying assumptions about land, possession, race, and Indigeneity.

The project focuses on the 1960s to the 1990s as a period in which the parameters of solidarity-building shifted. Before this period, white-led “Indian” organizations largely operated as paternalistic bodies accepting little input from Native people themselves. In the wake of 1960s decolonization movements, the need for Indigenous leadership began to be recognized within these organizations and new Indigenous-led movements were formed, both in North America and across Europe.

Much like today, the period from the 1970s into the early 1990s was a peak era of both national and transnational public attention to Native North American affairs, and inspired non-Indigenous efforts toward solidarity. This project focuses on the shifts and developments of this period to investigate how solidarity efforts were shaped and changed.

Our research addresses multiple questions related to these movements, including: How did white North Americans and Europeans conceive of their own position in relation to Indigenous peoples? What motivated efforts to build solidarity with Native North Americans? What were their aims and what tactics did they employ in their work? Through the use of archival materials, literary texts, and oral history interviews, our project will uncover key dynamics of white solidarity with Indigenous peoples, both nationally and transnationally.

What do we mean by “white solidarity”?

We use the term whiteness not as a biological fact, but to highlight persistent and varied societal structures and hierarchies that situate “white” people and their customs, cultures, and beliefs as the norm. Within our project, “white solidarity” refers to efforts to support the rights of Indigenous people carried out by people within this position of relative privilege and power. We use the term to denote the work of both white settler-citizens in the U.S. and Canada, and white Europeans in support of Indigenous rights in North America. A key aim of the project is to bring out nuances and differences, as well as similarities, between different solidarity organizations and movements within this time period.