A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 441nomic, political, and social rights. For instance, the American Indian
Movement [AIM] attempted to start a national debate on the plight of
Native Americans, who suffered tragic rates of poverty and alcoholism on
government reservations. In 1968, militant Indians fought with Washington
state officials over fishing rights and the following year Native Americans in
San Francisco invaded and occupied Alcatraz Island. Vine DeLoria’s Custer
Died for Your Sins and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee helped
propel an Indian cultural renaissance and more militancy. In 1972, AIM
occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C. and
in 1973 staged a 71-day protest at Wounded Knee, South Dakota—the site
of an 1890 massacre of hundreds of Sioux by the U.S. Army—until driven
off by government forces. Indeed, political ferment was widespread through-
out the decade.
The issues of Civil Rights, women’s inequality, Chicano and Indian dis-
crimination, gay politics, and environmentalism of course preceded the 1960s,
but all grew significantly and publicly in that decade. All occurred, too, with
Vietnam as the backdrop. The war was central to the militancy of the era,
creating a mass movement by bringing together people working on different
FIGuRE 8-13 Antiwar demonstration at the White House gates, including
Coretta Scott King and Dr. Benjamin Spock, 1967