For many years following the grant of American citizenship in 1924, states imposed barriers in their voting laws to prevent Indians from voting. These actions, not surprisingly, had the effect of inhibiting Indian participation in the American political system. With the passage of time and the enactment of federal civil rights laws addressing the disenfran-chisement of African Americans, the legal barriers to the exercise of the Indian vote were eliminated. Mohawks, however, did not immediately begin to vote in American elections. They were unfamiliar with the process, unable to read and write in English, and were otherwise passive about voting. Moreover, many thought the notion of participating in the colonizing nation's electoral process was seen as an abandonment of citizenship in one's Indigenous nation. In the words of one Mohawk woman, "my parents taught us that once you vote, you stop being Indian."

This view changed dramatically after the emergence of the Red Power movement in the late 1960s. During the twenty years prior to that time, the United States had adopted and carried out its Termination Policy--an effort analogous to the Allotment Policy of the late nineteenth century--that focused on denying the recognition of the separate political status of the Indian nations. Influenced heavily by the activist movement that was occurring nationally, Indians--mainly from urban centers--began to take more aggressive efforts to assert Indigenous political rights. It is well acknowledged that the RedPower movement was tied to the civil rights and anti- war protests common to the era. Indeed,

Red Power borrowed from civil rights organizational forms, rhetoric, and tactics but modified them to meet the specific needs and symbolic purposes of Indian grievances, targets, and locations. The black lunch counter "sit-in" became the tribal "fish-in"; "Black Power became "Red Power"; the term "Red Muslims", paralleling the Nation of Islam's "Black Muslims," was used for a short time in the 1960s to refer to American Indian militants similar to the Mohawk Warrior Society.

These activist efforts led to the emergence of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the foremost and most aggressive of the activist organizations, and such political activities as the "fish-ins" in the Pacific Northwest to assert treaty violations in the 1960s, the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 led by Mohawk Richard Oakes, and the takeovers of the BIA building in Washington in 1971 and 1972. While AIM and the Red Power movement eventually sought to move from civil rights activism to treaty rights activism--through such efforts as the Trail of Broken Treaties protest march to Washington in 1972 --it eventually moved toward violence, such as the siege at Wounded Knee.

The Red Power movement came to an end during the late 1970s and early 1980s as the result of many of the movement's leaders being repressed by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. Moreover, the federal government effectively co-opted many of the movement's leaders by including them in its Indian policy making process and incorporated the Indian nations themselves through recognition of Indigenous self-determination and the provision of considerable federal funding.
This era of Indian activism was "not only a political mobilization; it was also a wellspring of transformation and renewal." Instead of being perceived simply as victims, Indians following the Red Power movement were perceived as "victorious rather than victimized, confronting an oppressive federal bureaucracy, demanding redress of long-standing grievances, challenging images of Indians as powerless casualties of history, [and] redefining 'red', 'native', and 'tribal' as valued statuses imbued with moral and spiritual significance."

Unfortunately these positive benefits overshadow the fact that the Red Power movement contributed greatly to the assimilation of Indians into American society. This occurred in at least two ways. First, Indian advocacy was directed away from the government-to-government relationship between the Indian nations and the United States and shifted toward the individual rights orientation of the civil rights movement. Individual Indians, and not the recognized or even traditional Indian leadership, were the primary leaders and spokespersons of the Red Power movement. This blurred the conception of Indian status in the eyes of both Americans generally as well as the Indians involved in the movement.

By adopting the tactics of the civil rights movement, Indigenous people relinquished much of the power associated with being citizens of separate sovereigns located within the United States. This was realized later on by the movement's leaders when they sought to strengthen ties with the reservation Indians and their leaders. Unfortunately, the methods and tactics associated with the movement by then were not only foreign and frightening to many reservation Indians, but the nature of the advocacy was genuinely ill-suited to redressing the problems associated with Indigenous self- determination. Rather than participate in the much more important but less provocative day-to-day business of strengthening Indigenous sovereignty through, for example, the operation and management of tribal government, the movement became ideologically predisposed to attacking all governments on behalf of what it perceived to be the downtrodden and oppressed. This meant attacks on tribal government, as well as attacks on the federal government.

Second, the movement was unable to sustain itself against the federal government's efforts to co-opt the movement's leaders and to incorporate them into the American political process. Through such vehicles as the American Indian Policy Review Commission established by the federal government in 1975, many of the movement's leaders went "mainstream" in the effort to effectuate the Indian agenda from the "inside." This was combined with the fact that by the late 1960s, the first generation of Indigenous lawyers began to graduate from American law schools. Rather than relying on the direct political action associated with the movement, these new Native lawyers had been trained as part of the colonizing nation's legal system and were thus committed to working within that system for the betterment of Indigenous peoples. In addition to the efforts taken to co-opt the Indigenous leadership, Congress gave Indian tribal governments millions of dollars to effectuate their self-determination and thus their absorption into the American economic and political system.

The lasting legacy of the Red Power Movement, then, is that it promoted the absorption of the Indian nations into American society. The Movement led to broad acceptance of the view held by both Indians and non- Indians that the Indian nations are part of America, that Indians are Americans, and moreover, that Indians are simply members of a minority group-- "Native Americans"--on par with other minority groups like African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Vine Deloria, Jr., the renown Indigenous scholar, affirmed this conclusion when he said that:

"Until 1960, it would not have been proper to have discussed American Indians in the context of American minorities because few Indians saw themselves as a minority within American society .... As Indians became more familiar with the world outside the reservations, there is no question that they began to see themselves as another minority group within American society. The activism of the 1970s only confirmed this viewpoint and made it a regular part of the Indian perspective, even of the reservation people."

Additional evidence that Indigenous people have been absorbed into America's political culture is the seemingly well-settled belief that Indians are simply a racial minority group within American society. Even though Indigenous society is rooted in a sovereignty separate and apart from American sovereignty, Indians today appear to be suggesting that they should be treated in the same way as such racial minority groups as African Americans and Asian Americans. Primarily, this suggestion arises within the context of complaining about racism directed toward Indians. While it is certainly the case that Indians have long been thought to be of a different "race," protestations solely along racial lines can only serve to undermine the perception that Indian nations have a political existence separate and apart from that of the United States.

The problem, then, with fixating on "race" when dealing with discriminatory treatment faced by Indigenous people is that Indigenous people are thus only perceived by American society in terms of race. This is true notwithstanding the fact that many of these discussions about "race" actually focus on concerns about Indigenous sovereignty and self-government.

Ray Halbritter, Representative of the Oneida Nation of New York said:

"The fundamental difference between sovereignty and equal protection under the law makes our struggle to maintain our identity unlike that of any other ethnic group. Our governments, laws and cultures existed long before the United States and its laws came into being. Our sovereign rights are recognized in repeated treaties with the federal government. Yet that same federal government continually passes laws that infringe on those sovereign rights. And state and local governments often enact legislation and pursue court actions that completely disregard Indian sovereignty. Only the American Indian in this country is engaged in this never-ending struggle to protect our pre-existing inherent sovereign rights."