Red Power, White Discourse: Privilege Narratives and the American Indian Movement, 1973-2015

This dissertation investigates the evolution of the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) discursive field from 1973 to 2015 in order to unveil how dominant cultural narratives toward the movement, and American Indians more broadly, have served as an impediment to the alteration of the unequal white-Native racial order. Theoretically, I outline a model of “discursive field shift” to aid in the understanding of how dominant group bystanders discursively reconstruct social movements over time. I lend empirical support to the theoretical model by drawing on an innovative longitudinal research design that matches bystander AIM narratives from the 1970s to 2014/2015. By comparing discourse toward the movement from the same individuals over an approximately forty-year period, I provide evidence of a discursive field shift in the contexts of AIM’s most pronounced activism. In such contexts, AIM’s threat to the “privilege narratives,” or the stories that legitimate extant social inequalities, led to the temporal modification of the movement’s discursive field. This discursive field shift is argued to be an outcome of a sociocultural process whereby disrupted narratives of privilege encouraged the dominant culture’s privileging of narrative in order to more effectively delegitimize AIM grievances.