"It's Not A Treaty, It's A Legal Binding Agreement": Fort Lawton, Red Power, and the Struggle for Indigenous Land Reclamation
Abstract
In 1970, over one hundred Native American activists occupied the Fort Lawton military base in Seattle, Washington. The protestors, disgruntled over the federal government’s termination of tribal lands and lack of support for urban Indians, demanded that the base be given to Seattle’s Native community. Combining confrontation with negotiation, the demonstrators scored an unexpected victory when government officials returned twenty of the base’s acres. Despite this success, Fort Lawton receives only limited attention in scholarship concerning the Red Power Movement and its assertion of Native sovereignty. Most often, it is overshadowed by the two protests that bookended it: the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island and the 1972 occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters. These protests also sought the return of Indigenous land and used direct action to secure a platform from which to negotiate. However, the Alcatraz and BIA protestors failed to procure any concessions when they remained committed to demonstration. This thesis compares Fort Lawton with these better-known events, illustrating that confrontation and compromise could work in tandem to advance Native land rights.
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- OU - Theses [2217]