Deploying
hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the
Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political conditions alter the landscape of dissent, Indigenous activists using a wide tactical array to further their demands is not anything new, the media's breathless claims notwithstanding.
Frederick E. Hoxie has composed a powerful new book highlighting this truth. In eight moving chapters stretching from the American Revolution to the contemporary period of self-determination,
This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made(Penguin 2012) introduces us to courageous men and women whose names might not be familiar but whose legacies are still felt. Facing down a settler state determined on their erasure, they struggled to carve out a place for Native nationhood within -- but not necessarily
of-- the polity that surrounded them.