Dr. Scott Rutherford 
RED POWER AND THE GLOBAL SIXTIES 
 
My talk will discuss histories of “Red Power” in Canada within a broader context of global anti-colonial and anti-racist movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. I want to make sense of the complicated ways that global reference points were used to describe local protests; how mainstream media, police and government, for example, often framed such high profile moments, to borrow Trouillot’s words, as impossible events that only took place because of various “outside” influences. I will then discuss how Indigenous activists challenged such discourse by insisting that, for example, park occupations, border protests and rights marches be understood within longer histories of empire and resistance; ideas and actions that were shaped both by local experience as well as transnational processes.