‘A flag of deceit’: the American Indian Movement’s subversive use of the Stars and Stripes as a protest tool

This article documents the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) subversive display of the American flag between 1970 and 1973. Analysing AIM’s flag deployment in Plymouth, Massachusetts; Gordon, Nebraska; Washington D.C.; and Wounded Knee; it is shown how AIM subversively appropriated the American flag in a variety of ways. AIM’s creation of spectacle; their critical engagement with the American national character; and their play with flag height, power, and territoriality are all shown to be illustrative of the organisation’s keen awareness of flag semiotics. Whilst centring aesthetics as an oft-forgotten component of Red Power protest, this article situates flag play as a common thread interweaving much of the American Indian Movement’s major activism. Although the American flag has typically been understood by Native Americans as a symbol of historical and ongoing oppression, such technologies of oppression can double as subversive, reinvented tools of protest, both harnessing and redirecting their original power.