After a decade marked by the 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee and the creation of the International Indian Treaty Council, U.S.-based Indigenous activists 1980s found themselves in a difficult position. Even though Indigenous issues were presented at the United Nations and there was a growing call to foster trans-hemispheric Indigenous unity, the Sandinista/Contra political crisis in Nicaragua, and claims of Sandinista violence towards the country’s Indigenous populations, forced a divided movement to confront how it would respond. Rather than uniting, the crisis in Nicaragua divided activists and extinguished the spark that had been created at Wounded Knee. Jared L. Eberle is an instructor at Oklahoma State University, where he received his Ph.D in July 2018. His dissertation, “'No Longer Objects of History': Indigenous Activism in the Late Twentieth Century” examined Indigenous activists in the United States after the Occupation of Wounded Knee and the traditional end of the Red Power era. He he currently working on revising the dissertation into a manuscript for submission.
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