Kent Blansett. A Journey to Freedom

While there are several books that deal with Red Power and Native American efforts to restore sovereignty, A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement is the first book-length study of Richard Oakes, who was one of the most influential Red Power activists in the 1960s. This book offers far more than a biographical analysis of Oakes. Kent Blansett masterfully delves into the history of Oakes’s Mohawk heritage to explain how his activism emerged in the context of his tribal culture rather than as separate from it. In other words, he argues that Oakes’s philosophy, activism, and outlook on self-determination cannot be understood in a vacuum. Blansett takes great care to link Oakes’s Red Power activism to tribal traditions. He then navigates the complexities of Oakes’s early childhood, family tensions, and his experience as an ironworker. Blansett maintains that Oakes’s experiences as a young man on the Akwesasne Reservation uniquely shaped his attitude toward intertribal alliances because of the complexities on a reservation that spanned two countries: Canada and the United States. Oakes, who is perhaps best known for his role in the Occupation of Alcatraz, emerges in the pages of A Journey to Freedom as a complex and often conflicted leader with a singular focus on trying to help Native Americans reclaim their land, government, and future. He pursued these efforts within the context of intertribalism and, as Blansett shows, Oakes proved to be among the most powerful articulators of intertribal sovereignty. This book adds much to our understanding of intertribalism, urban Indian space, the Occupation of Alcatraz, and Oakes’s involvement in other sovereignty struggles, such as with the Pit River Indians.

Context (archaeology) · Fatherland · Mohawk · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Sovereignty · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies