Red Power Reloaded: From AIM Jackets to #NoDAPL Memes

#nativeamericanheritagemonth

The Kanienʼkehá꞉ka activist Richard Oakes was a key leader in the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island, which began on November 20, 1969. The occupation was carried out by a group called "Indians of All Tribes" to protest U.S. government policies against Native Americans and to demand the return of Alcatraz to Native control for the creation of a cultural and educational center. 📸 copyrighted by ilka hartmann

Red Power and #NoDAPL are often narrated as separate generational upsurges, yet when we follow their graphic languages, from hand-painted slogans on Alcatraz concrete to vector files circulating on Instagram, the continuity becomes hard to miss. From 1969 onward, Native activists have used posters, stencils, buttons, and later memes and livestreamed images as tools of visual sovereignty: ways of insisting on Indigenous presence, land rights, and self-determination in the very media systems that have historically rendered Native people invisible or stereotyped. The visual culture of Red Power and Standing Rock was never merely ornamental; it emerged from specific struggles over land and law, and it functioned as pedagogy, organizing infrastructure, and an archive of Indigenous futurity.

An image from Nov. 25, 1969 captures a moment in the 19-month Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz, which drew attention to Indigenous civil rights. (Associated Press)

The Occupation of Alcatraz (November 20, 1969 – June 11, 1971) was a 19-month long occupation of Alcatraz Island and its prison complex, then classified as abandoned surplus federal land, by 89 American Indians and their supporters.[1] The occupation was led by Richard Oakes, LaNada Means, and others, while John Trudell served as spokesman. The group lived on the island together until the occupation was forcibly ended by the U.S. government. The protest group chose the name Indians of All Tribes (IAT) for themselves. IAT claimed that, under the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) between the U.S. and the Lakota tribe, all retired, abandoned, or out-of-use federal land was to be returned to the Indigenous peoples who once occupied it. As Alcatraz penitentiary had been closed on March 21, 1963, and the island had been declared surplus federal property in 1964, a number of Red Power activists felt that the island qualified for a reclamation by American Indians. The Occupation of Alcatraz had a brief effect on federal Indian Termination policies and established a precedent for American Indian activism. Oakes was later shot to death in 1972. The American Indian Movement was targeted by the federal government and FBI in COINTELPRO and similar surveillance operations.

The story of early Red Power graphic languages is inseparable from the occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes between 1969 and 1971. Joseph Bruchac’s account of the occupation emphasizes how the first layer of visual messaging was improvised: red paint repurposed the federal penitentiary signage to read “Indians Welcome” and “Indian Land,” declaring the island a reclaimed Indigenous space rather than a decommissioned prison (Bruchac). National Park Service documentation and related photography show the now-iconic “Indians Welcome. United Indian Property. Alcatraz Island … Indian Land” inscriptions on signage and the water tower, which the Park Service now preserves as “historic graffiti” reflecting the politics of the takeover (National Park Service; Alcatraz Water Tower; Alcatraz Occupation). These blunt statements functioned as both territorial claims and graphic manifestos, condensing the occupiers’ legal arguments, rooted in treaty rights and surplus federal property, into a handful of legible words visible from tourist ferries. From the beginning, then, Red Power design language developed in situ, inscribed directly onto architecture rather than originating in studios.

Indians of All Tribes’ own graphics show how quickly Alcatraz became a pan-Indian symbol: the January 1970 newsletter (top left) pairs a stencil-like border of linked human figures and the words “Indians of Alcatraz / All Tribes” with a photograph of the San Francisco skyline seen from the island, while the February 1970 issue (top right) repeats the same pictographic masthead above two young occupiers raising peace and power signs. A later poster, The Occupation of Alcatraz (bottom left), distills the island’s silhouette, a tipi, and a long-haired organizer with a raised fist into bold red and yellow blocks, turning the prison into a warning sign that reads “KEEP OFF.” The commemorative image Alcatraz Proved a Point (bottom right) surrounds a central scene of a Native figure brandishing a staff toward Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, under a sky of thundering buffalo, with the names of dozens of tribal nations ringing the border, visually declaring that the occupation spoke for many peoples, not just one.

As the occupation gained attention, the movement’s graphic vocabulary rapidly expanded into posters and broadsides. Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior show how Alcatraz catalyzed a broader pan-Indian political identity in which Cherokee, Diné, Lakota, Mohawk, and other activists forged common cause under the banner of “Indians of All Tribes” (Smith and Warrior). This pan-tribalism also appeared visually. Feest and Rostkowski’s catalogue Indian Posters of North America documents 1970s posters in which artists juxtaposed Pueblo cloud motifs, Northwest Coast ovoids, Plains dancers, and pan-Indian eagles within single compositions, making stylistic hybridity into a graphic corollary of political coalition (Feest and Rostkowski). Aesthetic choices here were neither naïve nor purely decorative; they encoded the Red Power argument that Indigenous nations, while diverse, confront shared structures of dispossession in the United States and Canada, a point also underscored in Joane Nagel’s analysis of the “ethnic renewal” of Native identity in these years (Nagel).

The Red Power movement was a social movement which was led by Native American youth who demanded self-determination for Native Americans in the United States. Organizations that were part of the Red Power Movement include the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). This movement advocated the belief that Native Americans should have the right to implement their own policies and programs along with the belief that Native Americans should maintain and control their own land and resources. The Red Power movement took a confrontational and civil disobedience approach in an attempt to incite changes in Native American affairs in the United States compared to using negotiations and settlements, which national Native American groups such as National Congress of American Indians had before. Red Power centered around mass action, militant action, and unified action. Flag of the American Indian Movement.

AIM looks like a movement, not an abstraction, in Dick Bancroft’s photographs: young Native organizers cluster around police in a tense street standoff; a column of helmeted officers marches through a housing project watched by residents from sidewalks and balconies; riot police form a wall along a chain-link overpass as Native youth and elders face them at close range; an activist is dragged away in handcuffs while community members line a low concrete wall, bearing witness; a circle of women and young people holds a sidewalk sit-in outside a federal building under the gaze of uniformed guards; a snowy storefront marked “American Indian Movement” anchors the geography of urban Indian organizing in Minneapolis; leaders and supporters pack a press conference, surrounding a small table crowded with microphones and tape recorders; and, in one of Bancroft’s most intimate portraits, two young men in headbands,.one wearing an “A.I.M. Indian Power” button, stare past the camera with a mixture of fatigue, determination, and defiance. Together these images show how Bancroft’s lens tracked AIM from the street to the meeting room, from neighborhood headquarters to national media, and made the lived texture of Red Power visible to the world.

Richard “Dick” Bancroft (1927–2018) was a self-taught documentary photographer from Minnesota whose most sustained body of work chronicles the American Indian Movement (AIM). Raised in the Twin Cities area, Bancroft initially photographed local peace and social-justice campaigns before being drawn into AIM organizing in Minneapolis around 1970. Over the next four decades he became, in Laura Waterman Wittstock’s phrase, AIM’s “unofficial photographer,” traveling with leaders and community members to occupations, marches, spiritual gatherings, and diplomatic missions across the United States and abroad. His photographs document pivotal episodes such as the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan, the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, and subsequent campaigns for treaty rights and sovereignty, while also recording the everyday labor of meetings, court appearances, community programs, and ceremonies. Bancroft’s most widely known collection is We Are Still Here: A Photographic History of the American Indian Movement (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013), which pairs his images with Wittstock’s narrative account and an introduction by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum. In obituaries and tributes, colleagues emphasized that he combined a lifelong passion for photography with a deep commitment to Indigenous rights, producing an insider’s visual history that challenged mainstream representations of Native people. His archive of AIM photographs has since been deposited in institutional collections, including recent acquisitions by the College of St. Scholastica, ensuring that future generations can study the visual record of Red Power through his lens.

Within this broader Red Power field, the American Indian Movement (AIM) developed one of the most recognizable visual identities of the late twentieth century. AIM’s round emblem, often rendered as a circle enclosing a feathered hand or a profile of a Native figure, appeared on jackets, berets, banners, and newsprint, anchoring photographs from Wounded Knee, courtrooms, and marches (Bancroft and Waterman Wittstock). Dick Bancroft’s longitudinal photographic record captures AIM organizers wearing jackets emblazoned with the AIM symbol, frequently paired with red berets and red-and-black color schemes, echoing both Black Panther aesthetics and more general leftist graphic conventions while maintaining distinct Indigenous references (Bancroft and Waterman Wittstock). Feest and Rostkowski’s catalogue notes how AIM-related posters sometimes combine clenched fists, feathers, and sunburst forms, visually connecting Indigenous nationhood to broader Third World and anti-imperialist struggles (Feest and Rostkowski). The semiotics of red and black, red as blood, land, and Indigeneity; black as mourning and militancy, became a recurring chromatic shorthand for Native resistance that persists in later designs, including #NoDAPL posters and contemporary streetwear.

Crow Dog’s Sundance poster (top left) shows how four-color silkscreen and offset could turn inexpensive paper into a ceremonial announcement, centering a buffalo head in a radiant sun disk surrounded by tipis, staffs, and hand-lettered text that links the 1978 Sundance at Crow Dog’s Paradise to the campaign to free Leonard Peltier. The workshop photograph (top right) pulls back to the production side: a small, crowded print shop where an artist works at a screen while cameras and assistants crowd the table, evoking the kind of community silkscreen spaces Lincoln Cushing describes as the backbone of Bay Area political poster culture. The National All Indian Youth & Elders’ Conference poster (bottom left) uses a single-color drawing of a beaver, elders’ faces, and a medicine wheel, with red type over cheap white stock, to advertise a 1980 gathering at the Muskogee Indian Round House in Okemah, Oklahoma; an example of how modest materials carried dense intergenerational imagery. The final image (bottom right), a Bay Area political poster from the All Of Us or None tradition, layers a halftone portrait under vibrating concentric orange and red lines and a bold blue dove, demonstrating the graphic experimentation that developed alongside Native silkscreens within the same low-cost, DIY print ecosystem.

These emergent visual languages were inseparable from the material conditions of low-cost printmaking. Lincoln Cushing’s study of Bay Area political posters shows how community silkscreen shops and offset presses made small runs of activist graphics affordable, enabling dozens of organizations, Native and non-Native, to flood campuses, telephone poles, and union halls with images (Cushing). He links the All of Us or None archive to a broader do-it-yourself and do-it-together print culture in which volunteer printers donated labor, repurposed equipment, and shared designs across movements. In tandem, Feest and Rostkowski describe how many Native posters of the 1970s were produced via four-color silkscreen and modest offset runs, often credited to specific community collectives or anonymous activist artists (Feest and Rostkowski). Posters such as Crow Dog’s Sundance and National All Indian Youth & Elders’ Conference, documented in their catalogue, use flat planes of color, hand-drawn lettering, and relatively inexpensive paper stocks, testifying to their origin in underfunded yet culturally dense networks of tribal colleges, Indian centers, and solidarity committees. Here, the technology of silkscreen enabled rapid, decentralized circulation: any community with a frame, emulsion, and access to ink could generate its own “broadcast” without relying on elite print houses.

Taken together, these four images trace how Red Power language moves from wall to wardrobe to poster. Urban Native Era’s stark black-and-white design “YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND” (top left) turns a simple typographic statement into a portable, everyday reminder of ongoing Indigenous presence, echoing the earlier hand-painted graffiti “YOU ARE ON INDIAN LAND” scrawled across a concrete barrier during the Red Power era (top right). A black clenched fist rising from the words “RED POWER” (bottom left) condenses Indigenous militancy into a single, bold emblem, while the contemporary “HONOR THE TREATIES” poster (bottom right), a child reaching into an orange sunrise, translates treaty law into a moral command, extending the same visual grammar of short, urgent slogans paired with iconic imagery.

The poster, in this context, functioned as a manifesto both visually and linguistically. Early Red Power posters compressed complex legal and historical claims into urgent slogans, “Honor the Treaties,” “Indian Power,” “You Are on Indian Land”, often stacked in block capitals or stenciled letterforms, sometimes overlaid on archival imagery or stylized figures (Feest and Rostkowski; Cushing). As Smith and Warrior argue, Red Power rhetoric framed treaties not as archaic documents but as living contracts continually violated by federal and corporate actors (Smith and Warrior). The posters take up this legal argument in compressed form. A phrase like “Indian Land” simultaneously asserts ongoing Indigenous title, calls attention to treaty violations, and reframes viewers’ sense of where they stand. This condensation becomes even more striking when we track the phrase’s afterlives. National Park Service interpretive materials on Alcatraz emphasize the continued presence of “You are on Indian Land” graffiti, while contemporary designers such as Urban Native Era have transformed similar wording, “You Are On Native Land”, into a widely recognized graphic mark on apparel and prints (National Park Service; Urban Native Era). In each case, typography is not a neutral carrier of information; it is a voice, a demand, and a spatial reorientation.

Together, these three images trace how photography turned Wounded Knee into an enduring touchstone of Red Power memory. The first poster, Remember Wounded Knee, crops a photograph of an AIM warrior raising a rifle skyward, transforming a single moment of defiance into a stark, monochrome call to action. The book cover of We Are Still Here: A Photographic History of the American Indian Movement centers a silhouetted profile framed by large, assertive typography, insisting on Native presence and continuity rather than victimhood. The second Remember Wounded Knee poster pairs a solemn Lakota elder with a young child above the dates 1890–1973, visually binding the massacre and the occupation across generations and reminding viewers that Wounded Knee is not just an event in the past but a living inheritance carried by survivors and their descendants.

Photography played a crucial role as both documentation and ammunition in these graphic campaigns. Bancroft and Waterman Wittstock’s We Are Still Here assembles images from Wounded Knee, Washington, D.C., and reservation communities that were widely reproduced in movement broadsides and newsletters (Bancroft and Waterman Wittstock). At the level of poster design, this strategy is visible in objects such as the Library of Congress, held Prevent a 2nd massacre at Wounded Knee poster, which juxtaposes a large photograph of armed federal agents with bold red type urging solidarity with the “Indian nations” (American Indian Movement, Prevent a 2nd massacre at Wounded Knee). The Wisconsin Historical Society’s Remember Wounded Knee poster, produced by the RPM Print Co-op for Native American Week in 1973, pairs photographs from the 1890 massacre and the 1973 occupation, visually insisting on the continuity of state violence against Lakota communities (RPM Print Co-Op). Together, such works prefigure what Nick Estes later theorizes in relation to #NoDAPL; that images of Native people confronting militarized police on their own lands circulate as counter-archives, directly challenging mainstream narratives that depict Indigenous nations as relics rather than contemporary political actors (Estes).

The Warrior Women Project’s bold wordmark (top left) echoes Red Power typography while centering Native women as the narrative’s core. An earlier poster, “Native American Women in Action: Many Fronts, One Struggle” (top right), profiles leaders such as Sally Fixico, Janet McCloud, Barbara Means, and Yvonne Wanrow, visually asserting women’s central role in 1970s Indigenous activism. The Wounded Knee 50th Anniversary flyer (bottom left) extends that history into the present with a grid of portraits of women from Wounded Knee ’73, inviting new oral histories and a “circle of history” to honor their leadership. In the illustration “Follow the Matriarchs and Protect Mother Earth” (bottom right), a woman in traditional dress cradles the Earth, encircled by the command to follow matriarchs, making explicit the project’s message: Indigenous women are not supporting characters but the frontline guardians of land, memory, and future generations.

Despite the prominence of male leaders in much of this photographic and graphic record, scholarship on Red Power underscores the centrality of women, two-spirit people, and youth to the movement’s visual culture. Donna Hightower-Langston documents how Native women organized in urban centers and on reservations, coordinated logistics at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, and produced their own newsletters and graphics, even as mainstream coverage often focused on male spokesmen (Hightower-Langston). Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman similarly narrates the gendered labor of cooking, caregiving, and spiritual leadership that underpinned AIM actions, complicating the heroic warrior imagery often used in posters (Crow Dog). In terms of queer and two-spirit presences, Qwo-Li Driskill’s work on Cherokee queer and two-spirit memory argues that Native activism of the late twentieth century cannot be fully understood without recognizing the continuities of two-spirit traditions, even when they remain visually coded or absent from overt iconography (Driskill). Later Red Power, inspired designs and exhibitions begin to correct these occlusions. The Warrior Women Project and related visual histories of Wounded Knee, as well as more recent Red Power retrospectives, foreground photographs of women leaders and youth whose faces rarely appeared on 1970s posters but who now anchor new graphic narratives of the era (Bancroft and Waterman Wittstock; Hightower-Langston).

These photographs capture the visual heartbeat of the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance at Standing Rock in 2016–2017. In one, a young water protector raises his fist against a bright winter sky, braids and red bandana echoing earlier Red Power imagery. Other images show rows of protectors holding Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life and “We Are Here to Protect” signs as armored vehicles loom behind them; youth and allies stand shoulder to shoulder with hand-painted banners that read DEFEND THE SACRED; riders on horseback carry staffs and tribal flags through camp; an activist chains themselves to a piece of heavy equipment to halt construction; Native teens lift signs that say “Rezpect Our Water” and “Native Land”; and delegations from many nations pose with tribal flags and “Water Is Life” placards. Together, they show Standing Rock as both prayer camp and frontline, where banners, bodies, horses, and handmade signs turned the landscape itself into a living protest image. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests were an Indigenous-led movement opposing a 1,172-mile oil pipeline designed to carry crude from the Bakken formation in North Dakota to Illinois. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies argued that routing the pipeline under the Missouri River just upstream from their reservation threatened their primary water source and desecrated sacred and burial sites, violating treaty rights and tribal sovereignty. From 2016 into 2017, thousands of Native nations and non-Native supporters gathered at camps such as Oceti Sakowin, Sacred Stone, and Rosebud to pray, march, ride, lock down construction sites, and broadcast the message “Water Is Life” to the world.

#NODAPL, also referred to as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, is a Twitter hashtag and social media campaign for the struggle against the proposed and partially built Dakota Access Pipeline. The role social media played in this movement is so substantial that the movement itself is now often referred to by its hashtag: #NoDAPL. The hashtag reflected a grassroots campaign that began in early 2016 in reaction to the approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States. The Standing Rock Sioux and allied organizations took legal action aimed at stopping construction of the project, while youth from the reservation began a social media campaign which gradually evolved into a larger movement with dozens of associated hashtags. The campaign aimed to raise awareness on the threat of the pipeline on the sacred burial grounds as well as the quality of water in the area. In June 2021, a federal judge struck down the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's lawsuit, but left the option of reopening the case should any prior orders be violated. Protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline project their hashtag on walls; Protesters walking the streets to protest the proposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline; North Dakota Protesters Vow They Will Not Back Down After Violent ClashesPolice used rubber bullets and tear gas on protesters who are against the construction of a pipeline that will span from North Dakota to Illinois.

Standing Rock resistance in print: bold posters by Indigenous and allied artists turn the language of NO DAPL into charging buffalo, sacred stone, coiling black-snake pipeline, and water protectors raising braid and voice beside the river. Set against sunrise gradients and turquoise water, these graphics call viewers to “Stand with Standing Rock,” “Protect the Water, Defend the Land,” and remember that the Missouri and its people are sacred, not sacrifice zones.

If we follow these visual strategies into the digital era, the continuities and adaptations become even more explicit. The Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock from 2016 to 2017 marked a decisive migration of Red Power aesthetics into networked media. Hayley Johnson examines the #NoDAPL hashtag and related social media practices, showing how images of law enforcement using water cannons, tear gas, and so-called less-lethal weapons against unarmed water protectors circulated globally and generated unprecedented digital solidarity for an Indigenous-led environmental struggle (Johnson). Robyn Lee’s analysis similarly emphasizes how affectively charged images, livestreams of police confrontations, photographs of elders in prayer, drone shots of camp formations, and portraits of youth, operated alongside the Facebook “check-in” phenomenon to transform Standing Rock into a felt, shared site for people far beyond the Missouri River (Lee). John Willis’s photographic volume Mni Wiconi/Water Is Life gathers many of these images into a coherent visual narrative, with portraits and camp vistas that were themselves often reworked into posters, memes, and profile images (Willis). The justseeds Standing Rock & NoDAPL portfolio, featuring contributions from Indigenous and allied artists like Dylan Miner, Christi Belcourt, Isaac Murdoch, Jesus Barraza, and Melanie Cervantes, makes explicit reference to Red Power poster traditions while embracing digital distribution and free download models (Justseeds Artists Cooperative).

Flags of dozens of Native nations whip in the wind, tipis glow under a star-filled sky, and water protectors raise their fists beside illuminated letters spelling “PROTECTORS” at the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock; a living village of resistance built to defend the land and the water.

Standing Rock’s physical encampments were themselves organized as visual environments. Estes describes the Oceti Sakowin, Sacred Stone, and other camps as places where flags of Native nations lined roadways, banners draped along fences and tipis, and hand-painted signs marked kitchens, legal tents, medic stations, and sacred fires (Estes; Willis). Museum exhibitions such as Beyond Standing Rock at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture have since displayed camp banners and photographs, emphasizing how the arrangement of tipis, trailers, and tents created a living installation that made visible the scale of intertribal and international solidarity (Beyond Standing Rock). Photographs compiled in the NoDAPL Archive show trucks painted with Native American Church imagery, hand-lettered directional signs, and elaborate altar spaces, extending Red Power’s longstanding practice of turning occupied or contested space into a communicative surface (NoDAPL Archive; Water Protector Camps). In this sense, Standing Rock extended Alcatraz’s territorial inscriptions, “Welcome to Indian Land,” “You are on Indian Land”, into a far larger, more explicitly spiritual and ceremony-centered visual field.

“Water is Life” in four voices: a bold Mni Wiconi / #NoDAPL design, Isaac Murdoch’s thunderbird figure with a heart of fire, Christi Belcourt’s pregnant water carrier linking future generations to clean rivers, and the youth-led Rezpect Our Water poster; each turning Indigenous teachings about water, land, and responsibility into instantly legible protest icons.

Within this environment, the phrase “Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life” emerged as the central verbal icon of the movement. As Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon’s collection Standing with Standing Rock makes clear, Mni Wiconi is not a mere slogan but a Lakota teaching that frames water as a living relation, and the pipeline struggle as a defense of that relation (Estes and Dhillon). Willis’s book title and sequences reinforce this interpretation, pairing the words “Water Is Life” with portraits of protectors, images of frozen river surfaces, and scenes of prayer (Willis). The phrase circulated on banners, painted shields, and social media headers, often rendered in blue palettes or paired with wave and droplet motifs. Anishinaabe artist Isaac Murdoch’s Thunderbird Woman image, depicting a woman raising a feather staff beneath a thunderbird, became one of the most reproduced visualizations of water protection, printed on banners, T-shirts, and posters distributed freely by the Onaman Collective and adopted by water campaigns across Turtle Island (Murdoch; Onaman Collective). Jackie Fawn’s Protect the Sacred / Defend the Sacred illustration, featuring a woman confronting a black snake pipeline, similarly condensed the structural violence of fossil fuel extraction into a single mythic confrontation (Fawn). These graphics, widely shared as jpegs and PNG files, fused Indigenous spiritual epistemologies with the visual logic of global branding: consistent color schemes, clear silhouettes, and short textual tags legible on mobile screens.

From a blazing orange faucet pouring out “Water Is Life” over waves labeled Flint, Standing Rock, and Line 3, to portraits of water protectors, a buffalo crushing the red-and-black “black snake” pipeline, and a figure lifting a braid toward an eagle, these images center Indigenous leadership in the fight against DAPL. Above Mount Rushmore, the faces of Native leaders rise like clouds, a neon #NODAPL crest radiates feathers, drums, and sunrise, and a snarling cartoon pipeline exposes the project as a toxic, needless serpent; graphic reminders that defending water is defending life itself.

Red Power graphic languages in both eras have also relied heavily on the appropriation and sabotage of corporate logos and state emblems. Cushing notes that Bay Area social justice posters often reworked corporate marks, U.S. seals, and advertising motifs into critiques of war, police violence, and imperialism (Cushing). Feest and Rostkowski’s catalogue includes posters in which U.S. national monuments or patriotic vistas are relabeled as sites of Indigenous dispossession, as in Shrine of Hypocrisy, which recasts Mount Rushmore in relation to treaty violations in the Black Hills (Feest and Rostkowski). Contemporary #NoDAPL art extends this tactic; the Vice feature on Standing Rock art documents posters that recast pipeline schematics as serpents, transform corporate logos into black snakes, or rebrand the Dakota Access Pipeline as a skull-adorned threat to water and children (How Art Immortalized #NoDAPL). Justseeds designs like Water is Life by Shaun Slifer and Solidarity with Standing Rock by Barraza and Cervantes likewise deploy oil drops, skulls, and pipeline silhouettes against blue water and red land forms to indict corporate extraction while affirming Indigenous stewardship (Justseeds Artists Cooperative). In all of these cases, parody and détournement function as graphic sabotage, undermining corporate aura by exposing the violence that underwrites it.

Urban Native Era has built a platform showcasing the diversity and strength of indigenous nations across the globe, reclaiming the narrative of what it means to be indigenous in modern contexts. In 2013 the brand gained notoriety for its continued efforts using apparel & design as a tool to increase visibility of indigenous people, places, and news. Today, UNE has evolved in an internationally recognized brand for people of all communities to represent.

Land back looks like this: bold “YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND” hoodies, crews, and beanies, glitch-art streetwear remixing archival portraits, and graphic art reminding viewers that treaty rights are living law, not history; everyday wear that turns land acknowledgment and sovereignty into something you carry on your body.

The digital migration of Red Power aesthetics has coincided with a broader movement to decolonize design practice. Elizabeth Dori Tunstall’s Decolonizing Design argues that design institutions have long excluded Indigenous, Black, and other communities of color, and calls for a transformation that centers their values, protocols, and visual systems (Tunstall). Indigenous designers have operationalized these principles in concrete ways. Urban Native Era, founded by Joey Montoya (Lipan Apache), explicitly frames its mission as bringing Indigenous visibility through fashion and design, with the phrase “You Are On Native Land” functioning as a recurring typographic mark across caps, hoodies, and limited-edition prints (Urban Native Era). Beyond its commercial success, the design extends the Alcatraz-era claim about land into everyday streetwear, inviting non-Native wearers to confront their own positionality while also circulating an Indigenous-led narrative of ongoing presence. Other Indigenous streetwear brands and design studios likewise mobilize AIM-era colors, pan-tribal iconography, and treaty-centered text in ways that respond to contemporary struggles, from Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements to language revitalization campaigns, thus extending Red Power’s visual lexicon into new media and markets (Urban Native Era; Dunbar-Ortiz).

From street to gallery wall: the iconic raised fist of protest sits alongside Standing Rock posters, camp photographs, and a tipi installation in “Beyond Standing Rock,” while visitors move through exhibitions of political graphics and contemporary Indigenous art; showing how movements for land, water, and justice leave their mark not only on the streets but inside museums and archives.

The afterlives of Red Power and #NoDAPL graphics in archives and museums raise further questions about ownership, interpretation, and the ethics of display. Cushing’s catalogue for All of Us or None, produced for the Oakland Museum of California, foregrounds how activist posters often make a fraught journey from street walls and community bulletin boards into institutional collections, where they risk being depoliticized or aestheticized (Cushing). Feest and Rostkowski’s Indian Posters of North America likewise began as a museum exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme, one of the first shows to present Native political posters as ethnographic and artistic artifacts (Feest and Rostkowski). More recently, institutions such as the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and various university libraries have acquired Standing Rock banners, photographs, and born-digital materials, as seen in the Beyond Standing Rock exhibition and the NoDAPL Archive’s collaborations with librarians and archivists (Beyond Standing Rock; NoDAPL Archive; Johnson). These curatorial moves can provide essential preservation and visibility, but they also risk re-framing active struggles as concluded episodes. Indigenous scholars and designers, including Tunstall, therefore emphasize the need for collaborative protocols that keep protest graphics connected to the communities and campaigns that produced them, whether through co-curation, community access agreements, or the integration of contemporary activist voices into exhibition design (Tunstall; Estes and Dhillon).

Taken together, the visual cultures of Red Power and Standing Rock reveal a half-century of Indigenous experimentation with the graphic toolkit, brush, stencil, silkscreen, photocopier, offset press, DSLR, smartphone, vector software, not as neutral instruments but as contested infrastructures. From the red-painted declarations on Alcatraz walls to AIM’s circular emblem on jackets and buttons; from the offset posters catalogued by Feest and Rostkowski to the Mni Wiconi banners seen across the Oceti Sakowin camp; from the “You Are On Indian Land” slogan to its contemporary rearticulation as “You Are On Native Land,” Indigenous artists and organizers have continuously reworked graphic design into a language of land, law, kinship, and future-making. These images do more than “raise awareness.” They instruct viewers in a counter-cartography of Turtle Island, map treaty territories, visualize women’s and two-spirit leadership, and embed ceremony into the everyday surfaces of cities and screens. As debates about artificial intelligence, data colonialism, and visual culture continue, the history traced here offers a different model for what graphic media can do; not simply sell products or aestheticize resistance, but hold open spaces where Indigenous nations name themselves, defend their homelands, and invite others into relationships of responsibility rather than consumption.

References:

American Indian Movement. Prevent a 2nd massacre at Wounded Knee: show your solidarity with the Indian nations. 1973. Poster. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Bancroft, Dick, and Laura Waterman Wittstock. We Are Still Here: A Photographic History of the American Indian Movement. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013.

Bruchac, Joseph. Of All Tribes: American Indians and Alcatraz. Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2023.

Crow Dog, Mary, with Richard Erdoes. Lakota Woman. Grove Press, 1990.

Cushing, Lincoln. All of Us or None: Social Justice Posters of the San Francisco Bay Area. Heyday, 2012.

Driskill, Qwo-Li. Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory. University of Arizona Press, 2016.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014.

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

Estes, Nick, and Jaskiran Dhillon, editors. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the NoDAPL Movement. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Feest, Christian, and Joëlle Rostkowski. Indian Posters of North America. Archiv für Völkerkunde, vol. 36, 1982, pp. 1–32.

Fawn, Jackie. Protect the Sacred / Defend the Sacred. 2016. Digital poster and print. Amplifier Foundation and independent online distribution.

Hightower-Langston, Donna. American Indian Womens Activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Hypatia, vol. 18, no. 2, 2003, pp. 114–132.

How Art Immortalized #NoDAPL Protests at Standing Rock. Vice, 28 Feb. 2017.

Johnson, Hayley. Number Sign NoDAPL: Social Media, Empowerment, and Civic Participation at Standing Rock. Library Trends, vol. 66, no. 2, 2017.

Justseeds Artists Cooperative. Stand with Standing Rock portfolio. Justseeds, 2016–2017.

Lee, Robyn. Art, Affect, and Social Media in the No Dakota Access Pipeline Movement. Theory, Culture and Society, 2023.

MacPhee, Josh. The Occupation of Alcatraz. Celebrate Peoples History poster series. Justseeds, 2006.

Murdoch, Isaac. Thunderbird Woman, Water Is Life. 2016. Print and banner design. Onaman Collective and allied campaigns.

Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. Oxford University Press, 1996.

National Park Service. Alcatraz Water Tower. Alcatraz Island, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, U.S. National Park Service, 2021.

NoDAPL Archive. NoDAPL Art of Standing Rock Water Protector Camps and Supporters. NoDAPL Archive, 2016–2017.

RPM Print Co-Op. Remember Wounded Knee. 1973. Poster. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. The New Press, 1996.

Tunstall, Elizabeth Dori. Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook. MIT Press, 2023.

Urban Native Era. You Are On Native Land. Limited edition print and apparel line. Urban Native Era, San Jose and Los Angeles, 2013–present.

Willis, John. Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life: Honoring the Water Protectors at Standing Rock and Everywhere in the Ongoing Struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty. George F. Thompson Publishing, 2019.