Charlie Kimber & Judy Cox - Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When workers were ready to dare

On day in May 1926 when my grandfather was on his way home from school in Plymouth, he was astounded to see a tram tipped over by a crowd of people. It was such a vivid moment in his youth that in his nineties he could still recall it. It was his only recollection of the British General Strike, but it stuck with him even though it was the closest he ever got to the trade union movement. 

This new book, written for the hundredth anniversary of the General Strike, has many such events in it. But I mention it as an opening to this review because it demonstrates one of the themes of Charlie Kimber and Judy Cox's important new book. May 1926 was a period of brutal class war, and the strikers were prepared to escalate and fight for victory. Responsibility for their defeat lay in the hands of the trade union leadership, not in their lack of courage.

This important corrective is needed because the General Strike has traditionally been remembered, outside of the radical left, as a time less of class struggle and more of classes rubbing shoulders. I remember being taught at school about strikers playing football with policemen. How surprised I would have been to hear that strikers derailed The Flying Scotsman the emblematic train of the time. My grandfather would have been less surprised. The authors give us a more examples:

On Wednesday 5 May, there were violent clashes between strikers and scabs in Poplar and Canning Town and around the Blackwall Tunnel [all in London] and cars were shashed and set alight. Newspapers reported that strikers 'tried to impede the progress of cars and motor buses', scabs driving buses had to run to escape violence and 'organised gangs' of strikers were baton-charged by the police. In Hammersmith seven buses were wrecked and fascists attacked strikers... A magistrate in Hammersmith declared, 'Women will be treated the same as men. They often inflame men's passions'.

Such reports demonstrate that this was no mere strike marked by peaceful picketing and protest. Rather, as the authors say:

In 1926, working class people made a huge leap of politics and of imagination by hurling themselves into the struggle. They did not know if they would win or not - but they were determined to try and assert the power of their class.

The General Strike was not an isolated event. It grew out of a long period of radicalism, which saw the British working class, like its comrades elsewhere, flexing its muscles and trying out its power. The run up to World War One and the immediate aftermath had seen strikes and revolutions across Europe. Britain had not been immune from that. 1919 had been a year of near revolution. 1926 saw the big battalions of the British working class taking action to defend their collective interests. The problem was that most workers had illusions in their trade union leaders. As the authors explain:

Trade union leaders and the full-time employees of the unions constitute a separate social stratum with their own set of interests distinct from workers on the one hand and the bosses who oversee and enforce their exploitation on the other. They become negotiators between workers and bosses instead of class fighters looking to end exploitation altogether... This makes them pull back from leading strikes in the militant direction which could lead to victory.

In 1926 the trade union leaders in Britain did everything they could to limit radicalism and undermine the strike. They were terrified of it getting out of hand. The worst of the leaders (including those in the Labour Party) made sure that the British ruling class knew that they were not under threat. Despite these flawed leaders, British workers demonstrated their desire to fight for real change. The authors write

Overall, strikers and other trade unionists set up some 300 Councils of Action during the strike. Some began to take over the local administration of society, the basis of elementary and temporary "dual power". It is in this sense that they gave a glimpse (no more than that) of workers' councils and soviets.

Workers "contested the way the TUC leaders had tried to constrain and narrow them politically". 

Even the best books on the General Strike can downplay the role of women in the struggle. Revisiting the General Strike on the other hand explores the centrality of women to the struggle usually as active supporters (as the Hammersmith magistrate mentioned earlier demonstrated). The authors quote one local strike newspaper, "We would like to pay special tribute to the brave, enthusiastic and effective co-operation that has been given by the wives and other women relatives of the strikers."

But this support wasn't just passive, it was active in the sense that women took part in protests, meetings and pickets. By the time the strike ended and the miners' were locked out, women had to play a new crucial role in sustaining their communities. Soup kitchens and communal kitchens were set up, and women played a central role in making these work, which "added greatly to the solidarity of the whole community". The strike, and the lock out, also transformed things in the mining areas one commentator noted "there were concerts in every street, and the sense of fellowship in the community was more marked than at any other time."

Women were also central to "mass community mobilisations against scabbing in the South Wales coalfields", and many were arrested and fined. 

The authors rightly describe the end of the strike as its "murder". The sell-out came as an enormous shock to strikers, most of whom were experiencing near total solidarity and an escalating number of workers' taking action. The trade union leaders turned off the dispute with vague promises from the government of no victimisation. The anger from below however was contained because there wasn't any political force capable of urging the workers on and taking control out of the hands of the leadership. The potential for that however is described by one of the most fascinating aspects to this book. These are the collection of dozens of telegrams from across the country and the trade union movement protesting the end of the strike. The authors have done an amazing job to get these into print for popular readers as they definitely demonstrate a different story to the one that will be made in May 2026 when various trade union leaders celebrate the anniversary. Let's quote a few:

Custom House: 14 May, Demand resumption of General Strike to safeguard positions of men who responded to the strike call.

Stafford: 13 May, Report extreme dissatisfaction with strike ending here

Hampstead: 14 May, There is a growing feeling locally that your leadership together with our standard of life is at stake

The telegrams once again demonstrate the key argument of Kimber and Cox - the strike showed of workers' growing confidence, their desire to fight for real change and a growing frustration with the established leadership. These were "Days of Hope". But they also were days when the British working class could have moved to a new level of struggle. Tragically the only significant socialist organisation at the time, the British Communist Party, had an incorrect understanding of the trade union leadership and despite its militants being the most frequently victimsed it had disarmed the movement by putting faith in the left trade union bureaucracy.

The book ends with two important final parts. The first is a study of the cultural impact of the Strike, particularly its influence on literature. Having never read Lady Chatterley's Lover I was intrigued to find that DH Lawrence had been inspired by the strike to include it in all three drafts, with growing levels of radicalism. But I was disappointed that the authors didn't mention my favourite example of the Strike in literature - its part in Goodbye Mr Chips (and it's imitator To Serve Them All My Days). The private schoolboys scab on the strike, but Chips surprises them with his sympathy for the workers. As the authors say the strike "shaped the work of the writers who lived through it. For some, it was a terrible reminder of the power of the working class struggle to uproot society. For others, it was a movement of inspiration and possibility).

Finally the book is aimed at a new, and emerging socialist movement. The book is not just a retelling of the history but an attempt to educate workers in the meaning of struggle and the lessons of the period. The inclusion of a glossary of keywords that are much forgotten today - pickets, rank and file organisation, solidarity - shows that the book is a tool to sharpen the struggle today. Read and use this excellent book and the anniversary of the General Strike to renew our fight against capitalism.

Related Reviews

Hinton & Richard Hyman - Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the early British Communist Party
Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926
Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939
Darlington - Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914

Len Deighton - Horse Under Water

*** Spoilers *** 

Len Deighton's follow up to The Ipcress File begins in the same seedy post-war Europe that the first novel did. The anonymous hero of Horse Under Water may, or may not, be the same "hero" of the first book. Deighton's 2009 afterword makes it clear he doesn't know himself. It does not really matter, because the point Deighton seems to be making is that spycraft in the 1950s and 1960s was in the context of a cold Cold War and the economic decline of Western Europe. 

Horse Under Water though has a difference, it's set in Portugal and Spain, by then they were holiday destinations - for a minority of people. Our spy hero meets his milkman on the flight Lisbon - but we aren't yet in an era of mass tourism. There's still an elements of exotic to the destinations, plane travel and general being abroad drinking coffee and eating local food. Deighton plays this well - not the fancy food of Ian Fleming, but the ordinary tasty working class fare that would appeal to his readers and to him as a cook.

The plot, as always, is convoluted. There's an old Nazi U-boat off the coast and the British want to get into it to grab forged cash that the Nazis had made to finance the resistance against Franco and for democracy. Other people also want the U-boat, but then it turns out that there might not be any cash, only drugs, and then it seems like the drugs are the tip of a rather nasty Nazi iceberg. In fact, it turns out that the Nazis who fled Germany on said U-boat, had in their possession a list of Nazi sympathisers from the Second World War who are now, leading figures in the British Tory Party. Who could have imagined it?

Either way our brave spy, naively hunts this list down in order to fight for democracy and against fascism, only to find out that his masters know already and don't really care. It's a bit grim. But realistic. British spies haven't exactly been known to be on the side of the angels.

Its a thrilling ride that leaves world-weary London with its fan heaters and damp behind, and gives the reader a glimpse of the sun and the exotic world of Southern Europe. There's a touch of the naive about it too. There's so exposition (bizarrely requiring a trip to the Welsh valleys) where the reader gets various types of drugs explained to them. Our hero still has to put in his expense claims at the end though, and there's little to show for it. A great little thriller and, it has to be said, it's a nifty pun title that you might only work out half way through.

Related Reviews

Deighton - The Ipcress File
Deighton - Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945
Ambler - Journey into Fear

Ivan Doig - Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

Ride With Me, Mariah Montana is the final volume in Ivan Doig's English Creek trilogy. It's a sweeping history of Monata set in Doig's remote, and fictional, Two Medicine Country, nestled up near the top end of the Rocky Mountains. After the Native American's were displaced and destroyed it was a part of the world built on sheep, cattle and tourism. The book is set in 1989 as Montana is about to celebrate its centenary, which it should be noted, reminds us just how young much of America is. 

One of Doig's strengths as a novelist is his books are not constrained by a format. He can write sweeping epics, and tight little stories focused on a handful of people. English Creek, the first but middle book of the trilogy is focused on Jick McCaskill, a teenager whose family is about to be torn apart as his elder brother falls in love and abandons the plans his family have made for him. The first volume, Dancing at the Rascal Fair also dealt with romance, but set against a breathtaking story of homesteading and the founding of a farming community. In Ride With Me, however Doig abandons both these styles and opts for a road trip featuring the now elderly Jick.

Jick, the bright teenager of English Creek, is now older and more cynical. He has just lost his wife and is bereft. As Montana's centenary approaches his daughter, Mariah approaches him. A photo-journalist, she has been commissioned to do a series of pieces about the centenary, and about Montana, with the star journalist Riley Wright from the local paper. Riley, unfortunately happens to be Mariah's former husband, whose spectacular falling out during the divorce appears to have been the talk of small town Montana. He also rejected Jick's offer to take over the ranch, threatening that the small farm would be subsumed into the big agricultural conglomerates that have been a disliked feature throughout the history of the state and the trilogy.

All this is a convoluted setup to explain why Jick is driving a Winnebago around the backroads of Montana with his daughter and ex-Son in Law in the back. It means that Doig is able to write about the places and people of Montana with his customary love and sensibility. There's plenty of history of course - including some sentimental stuff for Jick, and plenty of other stuff about the decline and fall of various Montana staples - the mining industry of Butte. I was also glad that Doig's characters acknowledged the Native American history, visiting Chief Joseph's final battle site (though oddly there's only a passing mention of the Little Big Horn). 

While all this is fun, and its particularly cute for anyone who has done a Montana road trip as you'll recognise places, roads and so on. It makes for a less engrossing story that the early books. It feels like a crude attempt to tie up loose ends from the earlier books. One scene has Jick going to a local library and finding letters from his grandparents back and forth to Scandinavia. These are all characters from Dancing at the Rascal Fair and it all felt contrived.

All in all this was a disappointed finale and not up to the standard of Doig's other works.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America
Doig - English Creek
Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Sheldon Krasowski - No Surrender: The land remains Indigenous

Between 1871 and 1921 a series of so called "numbered treaties" were signed between the First Nations of Canada and the (settler) Canadian government and the monarch. They covered issues such as access to land, resource extraction, farming, education and regular payments. The first seven of these are the subject of Seldon Krasowski's book. Krasowski's book is an intervention into a longstanding discussion about the treaties, which begins from the historical record, First Nation's oral traditions and history and other, often ignored or unpublished sources. The debates are not sterile. They have important implications for contemporary Canadian politics and social movements, and at their heart is a crucial question - whose land is it? As Krasowski says in their introduction:

Indigenous oral histories state that there was no surrender of lands through the treaty process. First Nations agreed to share their lands in exchange for the benefits offered by the Canadian government.

Many accounts, even those sympathetic to the First Naitons, have suggested that the problem was that the indigenous people did not understand, or comprehend the treaties themselves, that "cultural differences impeded a mutual understanding of the treaty terms". It is fair to say that Krasowski's research makes it clear that this is wrong. The First Nations were extremely clear on what they were arguing and hoping to get from the treaties. But it was the Canadian governments negotiators who changed the terms of verbal agreement. One previous historian who rejected the "cultural misunderstanding" argument says of treaty nine, that the Anishinaabe and Cree "did not know what the parchment said when they touched the pen". Here, touching the pen, refers to the practice of the Indigenous signatories to the treaties touching the pen with their fingers before someone else wrote their names. It is not merely about whether or not the First Nations people could write, but Krasowski argues, it was also a way of separating the negotiations from the actual physical treaty. 

Context also matters in two ways. Firstly the pressures on First Nations peoples was forcing them into reliance with the Canadian government. As Krasowski says of the context to the first and second treatries, "by 1870 the declinging resource base, competition from free traders and a lack of support from the Hudson's Bay Company led to chjallenging economic times for the Anishinaabe.

But second there was also the context of the indigenous peoples' society, how they made decisions and how they understood their relationship with land. A quotation from Cree Elder Jimmy Myo makes this clear: "You cannot begin to understand the treaties unless you understand our cultural and spiritual traditions and our Indian laws".

The importance of the oral tradition is key here. As Chief Mawedo-peness said to Commissioner Morris, one of the government negotiators for treaty three, "you must remember that our hearts and our brains are like paper; we never forget". Thus the oral records of treaty three contain different understandings of the treaty text to the printed edition. Dawson recorded this speech from CHief Mawedo-peness:

And I trust, what we are about to do today is for the benefit of our Nation as well as for our white brothers - that nothing but friendship may reign between the Nation and our white brothers. And now I take off my glove to give you my hand to sign the Treaty. And now before you all, Indians and whites, let it never be said that this has been done in secret. It is done openly and in the light of day.

In the newspaper accounts of the speech though, the crucial line reads "I take off my glove and in giving you my hand, I deliver over my birthright and lands". Krasowski argues that this shows how the newspaper, as a public record, "might have been influenced by pressures to achieve a surrender of Indigenous Lands". Dawson was writing for himself and his account "does not conflice with Anishinaabe oral histories and in fact reinforces them". Krasowski concludes:

The addition of the clause "I deliver over my birthright and lands" in the official record of Treaty Three is significant because it suggests that Canada's representatives introduced the notion of a land surredner where none existed. This arose from a strategy of the Canadian negotiators to ignore land questions in favour of benefits. Such duplicity meant that quite quickly the First Nations were complaining about the Treaty and their benefits. It is clear here, and elsewhere in the various treaties, that the government's representatives were acting to downplay the impact of the treaties, to introduce arguments that had not been discussed and to lie. These were not misunderstandings, it was purposeful duplicity.

It is important not to neglect the role of the First Nations representatives who fought to ensure they got the best deals possible. Indeed one response to Treaty Three after the Nations felt they government had reneged on its promised was to highlight that their warriors were ready for battle. As Krasowski writes of Treaty Six, it is 

unique ecause a number of eyewitness accounts of the negotiations were record... These accounts contadict the offical accounts published by Treaty Commissioner Morris and emphasise the agency of the Chiefs who managed to expand the treaty terms beyound what had been authorised by the Canadian government, including protection from disease and famine, the medicine chest clause and assistance in the transition to agricutlure... Oral histories shared by Treaty Six Elders have emphasised that Indigenous Peoples did not surrender their Traditional Territories and eyewitness accounts noted that the surrender claused was not discussed by the commissioners... Chiefs focused their understanding of the treaty on the oral discussions and were less concerned with the reading of the treaty text.

The duplicity and lies of government negotiators has left a lasting political and legal legacy. As Krasowsku say.

The texts of the numbered treaties clearly state that the First Nations surrendered their 'rights, titles and privileges to the land.' However there is no evidence thatAlesander Morris or his fellow treat commissioners discussed the surrender clause during any of the treaty negotiations... The treaty commissioners' accounts claim that the interpreters read the terms of the treaties after the negotiations, but I argue that the interpreters were chosen because they supported the commissioners.

This "casts doubt on the validity of the complete surrender of Indigenous Lands". The question of land sovereignty remains central to the question of freedom and liberation of First Nations people in Canada today. It also casts doubt on the role of the Canadian government in the past and today. A recent victory by the Quw’utsun Nation, while not directly related to the numbered treaties, demonstrates the ongoing importance of questions of land ownership and social justice, as well as the potential for victory by social movements. Seldon Krasowski's book is an important and detailed argument for First Nations rights and a weapon those fighting racism and oppression in Canada today.

Related Reviews

McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
Estes - Our History is the Future
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction

Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature

This is a stimulating book that approaches key concepts of environmental politics and Marxist economics from a fresh point of view. It's central thesis is that the Free Gifts to capitalism, clean air, water, raw materials and so on, only look free because they are so defined within a system geared towards blind accumulation of wealth. These Free Gifts offer humanity much, but they are also taken from us in ways that undermine and destroy society. Alyssa Battistoni's book offers much food for thought, and I'm looking forward to reviewing it for another journal. I'll post the link here when it's complete.

Ken Liu - All That We See or Seem

One night Elli, a famous artist and extremely popular weaver of dreams, gets out of bed, closes the bedroom door on her still sleeping husband Piers, and walks out of the house. She vanishes. There's seemingly no reason for it. The police are baffled and Piers has no idea. Then he gets a phone call. Someone called The Prince has Elli, and is demanding that Piers return what she stole. The Prince tells Piers that he will kill her if he doesn't find the missing thing. The problem is that Piers doesn't seem to know what is missing and the Price is light on clues.

Piers finds Julia Z, a young woman who lives in the fringes of society. Its a world of data, surveillance and control. Everything from information about what you do, where you go and how you live is stored, bought and sold. Data is everything. Julia, in rejecting that, has learnt to live in the cracks and use her skills to earn cash through semi-legal schemes and also to resist the system itself. Julia, Piers hopes, can rescue Elli by identifying what is missing. 

So begins a romp through a future world that feels not very different to our own. This is Ken Liu's first techno thriller and he embraces the concept fully. Few pages pass without some new technological idea, equipment or concept being thrown at the reader. There's a lot of action, thrills and spills and some nasty bad guys - not least the Prince himself whose corporation manipulates data and knowledge to shift governments, opinion and, well anything. 

The problem is that its all a bit one-dimensional. Julia, the centre of the story, has a good back story that shows how she rejected society and entered the underworld. But she's just unbelievable as a person. Her skills are almost superhuman. At various points in the story she's able to reach into her rucksack and pull out a self-built gadget that can hack, store, video, fly or analyse. AI here is a tool to be used and key to modern life. Yet it's also a deus ex machina that fills every plot hole and drives the story foreward. There's no real innovation - the bad guys are comically bad, and the contrived plot let's Julia jump from escapade to escapade leaving the reader bored and unconvinced.

There's a good story here, trying to get out. But Ken Liu's world building, character development and overreliance on increasingly unbelievable technology as a problem solver didn't do it for me. As a commentary on our world of data and surveillance it failed.

Related Reviews

Stephenson - Snow Crash

Vine Deloria Jr - Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

When Custer Died for your Sins was first published in 1969 it came out in the midst of the growing and radicalising Civil Rights movement. It is an angry read, a rage against the American system that condemns Native Americans to poverty, disease and racism and offers a powerful manifesto to alter the imbalance of power and wealth. As such it is also a very contempory book. If many of the demands of the manifesto are now dated or too specific, the framing of the book and the context of which it sets itself remains highly relevant. The source of the book's infamous title is a bumper sticker produced by the organisation that Vine Deloria organised through - one that parodies and rejects the politics and actions of the Christian Churches that are tasked with "helping" the Indians. The title also reflects the humour and rage that makes this such a powerful read nearly sixty years after first publication.

Running through the book is the influence of the US Civil Rights movement. Deloria writes

Indian Affairs today suffers from an intellectual stagnationl that is astounding. Creative thought is sparse. Where the younger black students were the trigger to the Civil Rights movements with sit-ings in the South, young Indians have become unwitting missionaries spreading ancient anthropogical doctrines which hardly relate to either anthropology or to Indians. The young blacks invented Black Power and pushed the whole society to consider the implications of discrimination which in turn created racisl nationalism. Young Indians  have barely been able to parody some black slogans and have created none of their own.

If this seems, in hindsight, a little unfair, it is a reflection of the author's frustration. Timing was everything. As Deloria was writing the book the American Indian Movement which famously took control of Wounded Knee in 1973 was just being formed. Movements take time to grow and generate politics and ideas of their own. The Civil Rights movement was clearly an impetous that would grow over time. Nonetheless there are some important insights that Deloria offers, centred on one of his great hates - anthropologists. He writes positively of the Apaches, who "don't worry about what type of Indianism is 'real'" and counters this other young Native Americans who

attend workshops over and over again. Folk theories pronounced by authoritative anthropologists become opportunities to escape responsbility. If, by definition, the Indian is hopelessly caught between two cultrues, why struggle? Why not blame all one's lack of success on this tremendous gulf between two opposing cultures? Workshops have beomce therefore, summer retreats for non-thought rather tahn strategy sessions of leadership enhancement.

But, this was not unique to the Native American movement. It was also true of those whose response to US imperialism, inequality and racism was to "tune in and drop out" and form hippy communes. But Deloria is making a point about the need for a movement that struggles for demands and poltiics. Indeed he argues that it is not enough to "talk of Civil Rights", because this "lessens our chances of understanding the forces involved in the rights of human beings... we should begin talking about actual econoic problems; and in realistic terms we are talking about land".

Deloria argues that 1968 represented a crisis for the Native Americans and the Civil Rights movement. The murder of Martin Luther King and the explosion of riots, Deloria says, meant simply taking a colour TV. "America, rioters seemed to be saying, is a colour TV and this is what we want from here". This is a crude analysis that mirrors what the mainstream were saying, but it arises, Deloria argues out of a contradiction about what was wanted from "Civil Rights":

When the black seeks to change his role by adjusting the laws of the nation, he merely raises the hope that progress is being made. But for the majorty of blacks progress is not being made. Simply because a middle-class black can eat at the Holiday Inn is not a gain. People who can afford the best generally get it . A socio-economic rather than legal adjustment must consequently be the goal.

Indeed, Deloria is frustrated that while King made a turn in 1968 toward economic issues he lumped "all minority communities [together] on the basis of their economic status." But the "real issue for Indians - tribal existence within the homeland reservation - appeared to have been completely ignored". Native American poverty was awful, but alieviating it required a more radical approach.

Deloria ends the book hopeful. While his manifesto contains much in the way of detailed suggestions about politics, land control and the US government, he has as an amibition a wider aim - the protection of Indian space within US society. Here he celebrates the story of the Tiguas, a tribe in Texas that won recognition as an Indian tribe after having seen a steep social and economic decline. The fact that they had protected their culture meant that a campaign was able to win a protected reservation and recognition for them and "a chance to build a sound economic base for the future". Deloria says:

Ever since Indians began to be shunted to reservatiosn it has been assumed by both Indians and whites that the eventual destiny of the Indian people was to silently merge into the mainstream of American society and disappear. The thought of a tribe being able to maintain traditions, socio-political structure, and basic identity within an expanding modern American city would have been so preposterous an idea had it been advanced prior to the discover of the Tiguas, that the person expounding the thesis would have been laughed out of the room. 

Deloria hoped this would lead to a great revival of Native American culture and life. Ultimately however, he wants the "recolonisation" of "the unsettled areas of the nation by groups of Indian colonists".  With this Deloria hoped/expected that "traditional Indian customs will come to predominate" within the communities. Indeed there is a hope that this would go further and lead to the rejection of capitalism:

Where ordinary white corporations serve to produce income from capital invested, corporations will not do so in the new Indian scheme. Rather they will serve to coordinate community life. Earnings will be used to provide services ordinarily received from various governmental agencies. As economic independence becomes greater, independence in other areas of life will follow. Indians can thereby achieve a prosperity not seen since the landing of the white man.

Sixty years later this has not happened. Indeed Native American reservations remain some of the poorest parts of the United States. Racism, imperialism and the politics of settler colonialism continue to divde and rule and keep the Native Americans in poverty. Part, perhaps of the problem, was that the Native American movement was too separated from wider Civil Rights struggles. Deloria himself repeatedly seems to reject radical and revolutionary (he says "violent") struggles. But it was Wounded Knee in 1973 when Native Americans literarily took up arms and fought of the US state which helped shift the narrative (and the occupation of Alcatraz). Nonetheless his agenda is assuredly against the system. Nick Estes has written recently that "Deloria's calls for peoplehood... were a step toward national self-determination: Black and Indigenous peoples taking charge of their own lives and destinies. To do so first required the restoration of Indigenous governmnce and territories, a project long in the making, as well as the abolition of the colonial system". It is an inherently revolutionary project.

Is the prospect of Native American reemergence within wider "white" society possible still? I would suggest it is, but it will require the dismantling of US capitalism. In winning this Native Americans will surely fight alongside all the poor and oppressed people of America. 

Custer Died for your Sins was enormously influential (not least among shamefaced anthropologists). It forms the base for much later theoretical and revolutionary work and those interested in Settler Colonialism, as well as Native American struggles, will get much from reading it. I found it hard to get hold of a copy in the UK, but I recommend that you try.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
King - The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Miller - Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story
Marshall III - The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History
Wooster - The Military & United States Indian Policy 1865-1903
Nerburn - Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

qntm - There is no Antimemetics Division

The online SCP Foundation, via the SCP Wiki, has been a source of excellent fictional writing focused on the idea that various secret organisations exist that study and fight paranormal, alien and (sometimes comic) supernatural creatures and species. Qntm, the pen-name of Sam Hughes, has produced an excellent novel based on their writing on the SCP Wiki and various short stories. There is No Antimemetics Division is based around Marie Quinn, the leader of the Antimemetics Division which fights various alien and supernatural creatures, most I think of which appear on the SCP Wiki.

The story begins with some of the more mundane events, where it becomes clear that there are many existing threats to the Division and to humanity in general. But what also slowly emerges is that there are layers on experiences and knowledge that are hidden from the characters themselves. Fighting monsters that can live in ideas, or thoughts, or their awareness of you, means sometimes having to forget key pieces of information. Then there is the problem that some of the monstrous threats alter or destroy memories. So the joke of the book's inner flap "Welcome to the Antimemetics Division, this is not your first day" is a very real one for employees of the Division.

What quickly becomes clear is that there is a very big conspiracy that is threatening reality itself. Quinn is central to fighting this, but she's not entirely aware of her role, and some of the best bits of the novel are those where characters like Quinn find hidden information or even special firewalled offices that allow them to discuss infomation they have forgotten.

One of the great things about the SCP Foundation has always been the way it gives the reader tantalising glimpses of wider stories. If this was all qntm's novel did it would probably work - especially because frequently these glimpses come through the character's own discovery of knowledge of their forgotten memories. But the novel really works because there is a good story here too. Quinn discovers that the Division is shrinking. They are losing their war. This is deeply personal for her and this loss is at multiple levels. In fact the reader is not just an observer - we know things that Quinn forgets. This allows a level of horror to develop beyond that of just that caused by death and destruction.

Related Reviews

Lacroix - Here and Beyond
Elliott - Awakened
Moore - The Great When
Bester - The Demolished Man