Why was Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL campaign so historic? Factors affecting American Indian participation in social movement collaborations and coalitions

Abstract

Is the #NoDAPL mobilization, which was historically unusual as a national scale grassroots campaign featuring American Indians grassroots activists and tribal governments in coalition with others, an indicator of future similar efforts? Or, will the Standing Rock resistance be a relative aberration, based on a unique set of circumstances? To explore these questions, I draw upon theory and historical scholarship about American settler colonialism; cross-group collaborations and social movement coalitions; and American Indian movements. A variety of within-group, intergroup and larger structural factors pose significant obstacles to American Indian participation in grassroots social movement coalitions. However, striking threats, the existence of social ties between American Indian movements and environmental movements, and overlap between ideologies and frames generated by each movement were sufficient to generate robust coalitional mobilization.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.