Awakening the Red Giant: American Indian Anti-Imperialism and the First Decade of the International Indian Treaty Council

The founding of the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974 marked a pivotal shift in the politics of the American Indian Movement. AIM activist John Thomas calls this transformation part of the prophecy of the sleeping Red Giant, which once awakened, would spread Red Power activism across North America and eventually the world. Originally a local activist organization founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1968, focusing on combatting police violence and discrimination against urban Natives, AIM saw itself increasingly as a national liberation movement as it also turned toward internationalism. In its first decade of existence, the Treaty Council sought to make connections with the world’s national liberation movements, resulting in AIM and Treaty Council activists sending delegations to socialist and Third World nations, thus helping shape an explicit rhetoric and practice of American Indian anti-imperialism. It was the Treaty Council’s relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization, however, that helped it theorize an explicit theory of anti-imperialist struggle against settler colonialism. This article draws on oral history interviews with AIM and Treaty Council activists as well as several archival collections of AIM and Treaty Council publications.