About This Unit

In November 1969, a group calling itself Indians of All Tribes landed on Alcatraz Island and issued a proclamation offering to buy it from the federal government for "twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth" — the price paid for Manhattan. The occupation lasted nineteen months and announced a register of Indigenous politics this unit takes seriously: sovereignty asserted through performance, where the point is not spectacle for its own sake but the public enactment of a nationhood the settler state prefers to treat as extinguished. From Alcatraz through the encampments at Standing Rock — where thousands of water protectors from hundreds of Native nations made treaty rights, prayer, and ceremony the visible form of resistance to an oil pipeline — the unit examines how Indigenous movements have made sovereignty seen.

The unit's scholarship insists that the performances rest on a political theory. Audra Simpson's account of "refusal" — Mohawk insistence on their own citizenship against the recognition the settler state offers — and Glen Coulthard's critique of the "politics of recognition" together explain why so much Indigenous politics declines the terms of inclusion: recognition on the state's terms reproduces the colonial relationship it appears to soften. Nick Estes places Standing Rock in two centuries of Oceti Sakowin resistance, arguing that "our history is the future." The unit ends where the movements currently are: Land Back as practice — dam removals, land returns, Indigenous-led trusts — in which sovereignty stops being symbolic and starts being acreage. Alongside the Indigenous archive, the unit takes up a kindred colonial case — Bad Bunny's Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime performance, read through Díaz and Rivera-Rideau's account of Puerto Rican resistance. The comparison is itself part of the unit's work: Puerto Rican colonial subjection and tribal sovereignty share a colonial grammar but make different political claims — territorial status and belonging on one side; nationhood, treaties, and jurisdiction on the other — and Tuck and Yang's warning that decolonization is not a metaphor gives learners the tool for reading the two together without collapsing them.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain tribal sovereignty as a political and legal status — nationhood, treaty rights, jurisdiction — rather than an identity claim, and why "recognition" is contested terrain.
• Analyze an act of Indigenous protest or performance for how it enacts sovereignty: who speaks, in what form, invoking what authority, to what audience.
• Apply Simpson's "refusal" and Coulthard's critique of recognition to a contemporary controversy over Indigenous rights.
• Evaluate Land Back as a movement framework, using one concrete case of land or water restoration from claim through implementation.

Keywords

• Sovereignty
• Settler colonialism
• Refusal / politics of recognition
• Land Back
• Water protectors
• Visual sovereignty

Open Educational Resources

• The Bad Bunny Syllabus Project. Created by Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, 2023–present. Explore the project.

Open educational project (curated resource site) · Open access.

An open educational project by the two scholars behind the first university courses on Bad Bunny, gathering readings, podcasts, news, and videos that contextualize his work within Puerto Rican politics — the debt crisis, Hurricane María, the 2019 protests that ousted Governor Rosselló, LGBTQ rights, gentrification, and the politics of Spanish in U.S. media. A model of what an OER can be (and a kindred project to this one): scholarship organized around popular culture to draw general audiences into structural analysis. Direct companion to the unit's key scholarship and case study.

• Americans (online exhibition). National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. Curated by Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Cécile R. Ganteaume. Visit the exhibition.

Museum exhibition (online component) · Open access.

The NMAI's landmark exhibition on why American Indian images, names, and stories saturate American life — from the Land O'Lakes maiden and sports mascots to the Tomahawk missile and state names — when Native people themselves were being dispossessed and rendered politically invisible. The central gallery, "Indians Everywhere," assembles hundreds of commercial and governmental uses of Indian imagery from Paul Revere's generation to the present. Gives learners a vast primary-source archive of redface-adjacent imagery to analyze with Hughes's tools, and grounds the unit's case study.

• The #StandingRockSyllabus. NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective, 2016. Read the syllabus.

Open syllabus project (readings, glossary, timeline, teach-in videos) · Open access.

Composed by a collective of Indigenous scholars and allies — including Audra Simpson, Sandy Grande, and Jaskiran Dhillon — to place the Dakota Access Pipeline struggle "in a broader historical, political, economic, and social context going back over 500 years," with fifteen curated thematic sections, a glossary, PDFs that route around paywalls, and a recorded Columbia teach-in. A movement-built OER and a model of scholarship mobilized in real time; the unit's orientation text and a kindred project to this one.

• "We Hold the Rock": The Occupation of Alcatraz. National Park Service, with the 1969 Alcatraz Proclamation. Read the page.

Public history page with primary source · Open access.

The Park Service's own account of the nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes, paired with the occupation's founding document — the Proclamation, whose satirical offer of beads and cloth and whose deadpan finding that the island "is more than suitable for an Indian reservation, as determined by the white man's own standards" (no running water, no jobs, residents held as prisoners) remains among the sharpest political texts of the era. Learners read sovereignty performed as both occupation and irony — and notice the layer of the federal government now interpreting the protest against itself.

• Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969. Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, 2023. Curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation). Visit the exhibition.

Museum exhibition (online materials) · Open access.

The first major survey to center performance in contemporary Native art — dating its story, precisely, from Alcatraz in 1969 — assembling work in which performance functions as self-determination: ceremony, theater, video, and protest refusing the "Stage Indian" in favor of forms Native artists control. The exhibition supplies the unit's art-historical register and its title concept in curated form; learners move between the gallery and the encampment and find the same politics in both.

Key Scholarship

• Díaz, Vanessa, and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau. P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2026. Publisher page.

Book.

Díaz and Rivera-Rideau — the scholars behind the Bad Bunny Syllabus — set Bad Bunny within the long history of Puerto Rican resistance, drawing on interviews with musicians, politicians, and journalists and on ethnographic research to read his career through the island's compounding crises: debt and austerity, Hurricane María, the 2019 protests that unseated a governor, and the politics of performing in Puerto Rican Spanish for U.S. audiences. The book's claim is the unit's bridge: performance can carry a colonial people's politics, fusing joy with protest. Companion to the Bad Bunny Syllabus above and to the unit's halftime case study.

• Hughes, Bethany. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. New York: NYU Press, 2024. Publisher page.

Book.

Hughes (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) provides the first history of redface in American theater, arguing it is not merely costume or makeup but a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make bodies legible as "Indian" — a legibility that naturalizes a particular national history and works to erase tribal nationhood and sovereignty. Tracing the "Stage Indian" from the early nineteenth century to mascots and "Pretendian" controversies, the book closes by rehearsing how to read for Indigenous performance rather than for "the Indian." The unit's Indigenous-studies anchor; pairs directly with the NMAI Americans archive.

• Hopkins, Candice, ed. Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance. Dancing Foxes Press / CCS Bard / Forge Project, 2023. Publisher page.

Edited volume (essays, interviews, oral histories).

The reader accompanying Indian Theater: essays, conversations, and documents tracing how Native artists have used performance to assert what scholars call visual sovereignty — control over how Indigenous peoples appear, to whom, on whose terms — from the American Indian Movement's media tactics through contemporary performance art. The unit's 2023 anchor and the bridge between its two registers: the volume treats the gallery, the powwow, and the blockade as one continuous field of sovereign self-presentation.

• Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London: Verso, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Estes (Lower Brule Sioux) writes Standing Rock from inside the Oceti Sakowin tradition it extended: two centuries of resistance — Red Cloud's war, the dams that drowned the Missouri River bottomlands, Wounded Knee 1973 — culminating in the #NoDAPL encampments, where "Mni Wiconi" (water is life) named a relation to land older than the state contesting it. The book is the unit's historical spine and its central claim in title form: the encampment performed a future drawn from, not despite, the past.

• Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Publisher page.

Book.

Simpson's (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk) ethnography of her own nation develops the unit's keyword: refusal. Kahnawà:ke Mohawks decline the citizenships, passports, and recognitions settler states offer — traveling on Haudenosaunee passports, policing their own membership — because to accept would concede the sovereignty the offers quietly extinguish. The book reorients what counts as politics: not the demand to be included, but the insistence on a polity that was never surrendered, performed in border crossings and membership rolls alike.

• Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Publisher page.

Book.

Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) argues, reworking Fanon, that the contemporary settler state's preferred mode — recognizing Indigenous identity, accommodating culture, negotiating reconciliation — reproduces colonial power by making the state the grantor of what Indigenous peoples already possess. Against recognition he sets resurgence: land-based practice, "grounded normativity," and direct action. With Simpson, the book supplies the theory the unit's performances enact — and the analytic for evaluating every settlement, apology, and acknowledgment learners will encounter.

• Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. Read the article.

Journal article · Open access.

Tuck (Unangax̂) and Yang argue that decolonization names something specific — the repatriation of Indigenous land and life — and is not a metaphor for other projects of social justice, however urgent those projects are. The essay catalogs "settler moves to innocence," the rhetorical routes by which settlers relieve discomfort without giving up land, and insists on incommensurability: struggles can be allied without being the same. In this unit the essay is the methodological guardrail — the tool for reading Puerto Rican and Indigenous performance together without collapsing the claims each makes.

Case Studies

• P FKN R at the Super Bowl: Language, Colony, and the Halftime Stage

Super Bowl LX halftime performance (February 2026), with press coverage · Media-analysis activity.

Bad Bunny's February 2026 Super Bowl LX halftime show — a record-smashing, Spanish-language performance in the same season as his Album of the Year Grammy — generated both celebration and political backlash, making it a live artifact of the unit's questions: whose bodies and language count as "American," and what happens when colonial subjects command the nation's biggest stage? Learners analyze the performance and its coverage — NPR's preview of the show and the PBS News Hour's assessment of its cultural impact — through P FKN R and the Bad Bunny Syllabus, mapping where the performance resists, where the stage commodifies, and where the comparison to Indigenous sovereignty holds or flattens.

• Indians Everywhere: A Virtual Gallery Walk

NMAI Americans online exhibition · Visual-analysis gallery walk.

Built on the NMAI Americans online exhibition: learners walk the "Indians Everywhere" imagery — the Land O'Lakes maiden, mascots, the Indian Chief motorcycle, the Tomahawk missile — and classify each use with Hughes's redface framework: who makes the body legible as "Indian," to whom, and what does the legibility erase? The walk ends with one contemporary example learners find themselves, in sports, fashion, or film. The Indian Theater exhibition serves as the counter-archive: contemporary Native performance as self-determination, for learners who want to set redface against the forms Native artists control.

Questions for Reflection

1. On the Alcatraz Proclamation: The document is satirical — beads and cloth, the island "suitable by the white man's own standards" — and entirely serious. What does the irony accomplish that a straightforward demand could not? Identify the legal and moral claims working underneath the joke.
2. On Simpson and Coulthard: Both argue that accepting the state's recognition can cost more than it grants. Apply the argument to one contemporary practice — land acknowledgments, reconciliation commissions, Indigenous Peoples' Day — and assess: when is recognition a gain, and when is refusal the stronger sovereign act?
3. On Estes: "Our history is the future" inverts the usual direction of political time. Using Standing Rock, explain what it means for a movement to draw its program from ancestors rather than from progress — and what that framing makes possible and difficult.
4. On performance: Choose one image or moment from the unit's materials — a proclamation read aloud, a prayer line facing police, a work from Indian Theater, a livestream — and analyze it as a performance of sovereignty: who is the audience, what authority is enacted, and what would be lost if the same claim were made only in a court filing?
5. On P FKN R: Díaz and Rivera-Rideau read Bad Bunny's career as Puerto Rican resistance in musical form — joy fused with protest, sung in Puerto Rican Spanish. When that performance moves to the Super Bowl's mainstage, what travels and what changes? Identify one element that remains resistant in the new venue and one the venue converts into product, and explain how you told them apart. Then run the comparison both ways: where does setting the halftime stage beside the unit's Indigenous performances illuminate, and where — per Tuck and Yang — does it flatten claims that are not the same?
6. Synthesis across the unit: Hughes shows performance making bodies legible as "the Indian" for settler audiences; Hopkins, Alcatraz, and Standing Rock show performance asserting a sovereignty Native nations never surrendered. Choose one redface artifact from the Americans archive and one sovereign performance from the unit, and explain what separates them — who controls legibility, before what audience, invoking what authority — and where Simpson's refusal or Coulthard's recognition critique locates the difference. Then test your line on the halftime case: on which side does it fall, and does the line hold?

Further Readings and Resources

• Lakota Nation vs. United States. Directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, 2022. Film page.

Documentary film.

A documentary history of the Black Hills claim — the treaty guarantee of 1868, the seizure after gold was found, and the 1980 Supreme Court award of monetary compensation that the Lakota have refused to accept, since taking the money would concede the land. The land at the center of LANDBACK's first campaign, rendered as film; the refusal of the settlement is the unit's refusal concept in courtroom form. Pairs with the unit's Standing Rock materials.

• Dhillon, Jaskiran, and Nick Estes, eds. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Edited volume.

The movement anthology: water protectors, scholars, lawyers, and organizers writing from inside the #NoDAPL struggle, collected by two scholars who were part of it. The volume gathers the encampment's many registers — testimony, analysis, poetry, legal argument — and preserves the movement's own account of what Standing Rock was and demanded, before retrospection settled the story. A companion in participants' voices to the unit's Standing Rock thread, and a documentary record of scholarship and struggle produced together.

• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

Resurgence as everyday practice: Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) locates Indigenous freedom not in state recognition but in the daily regeneration of Nishnaabeg intelligence, land relations, and political forms — what she calls living as we have always done. The Nishnaabeg counterpart to Coulthard's argument, written from practice rather than critique: where he diagnoses the recognition trap, she describes the world-building that refusal makes room for.

• Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Publisher page.

Book.

The synthetic history beneath the unit: four centuries of United States history retold with settler colonialism as the through-line, from the doctrine of discovery and the Indian Wars to termination, relocation, and the sovereignty struggles of the present. Dunbar-Ortiz gives learners the national-scale framework the unit's episodes sit inside — the policy history that makes Alcatraz, Standing Rock, and Land Back legible as one continuous contest over land.

• TallBear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Publisher page.

Book.

Sovereignty at the level of membership and biology: TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) examines how genetic ancestry testing recasts tribal belonging as a molecular fact, displacing the political relations — kinship, citizenship, treaty — through which Native nations actually constitute themselves. The book sharpens the unit's refusal thread against DNA-identity claims: who counts as Native, and who gets to decide, is a question of sovereignty, not of chromosomes.

• Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999 [1994]. Publisher page.

Book.

The source of "survivance" — survival as active presence and continuance, not mere endurance — and the literary-theoretical deep background to the unit's performance thread. Vizenor (White Earth Anishinaabe) reads the "Indian" as a simulation manufactured by manifest manners, the literature of dominance, and sets against it the postindian: Native presence that outruns the invented image. The vocabulary behind much of the unit's scholarship on representation and refusal.

• Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. 1969. Publisher page.

Book.

Published the year of Alcatraz, and the era's defining statement: Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) on termination policy, treaties, missionaries, and federal paternalism, delivered with the wit that made the book a manifesto rather than a report. Its chapter on anthropologists — the discipline arriving each summer to study Indians who had not asked — remains the one every social scientist should sit with. The intellectual companion to the occupation that opens the unit.

• "The Occupation of Alcatraz" — Radio Free Alcatraz recordings and archival audio. American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Listen to the recordings.

Archival audio (primary source set) · Open access.

John Trudell's broadcasts from the occupied island: Radio Free Alcatraz, carried on Pacifica stations, brought the occupation's voice — interviews, statements, plans for the island — to a national audience in real time. The recordings let learners hear the occupation in its own register rather than through news framing, and add sound to the unit's archive of sovereignty performed: a radio station as an instrument of nationhood.