Confrontational Activism & Mnemonic Fields: Bystander Memories of the American Indian Movement

• In Event: 474 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 23. Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

How do dominant groups maintain inequitable power structures in the face of threatening social movement challenges by subordinate groups? While much has been written in the social movements literature on the role of state repression in stifling dissent (Davenport 2015; della Porta 1995), this paper examines the much less studied capacity of “bystander publics” (Turner 1970) to blunt social change efforts through a mixed-method longitudinal investigation into the dominant culture’s memory of and attitudes toward the American Indian Movement (AIM). By focusing upon Euro-American narratives surrounding AIM and American Indians, both at the peak of Red Power activism in the early 1970s and some forty years later in 2015, this paper sheds light on how dominant groups not only interpret and evaluate threatening protest and movements, but also how this culturally hegemonic “discursive field” (Wuthnow 1989; Spillman 1995; Snow 2008) is potentially reconstructed over time as a consequence of social movement threats to the extant social order.

Author

• David W. Everson, University of Notre Dame