"Buffalo Soldiers . . . It's Time to Refuse to Ride": Indigenous Resistance, Third World Radicalism, and Tyree Scott's Black Radical Political Education

• Published in: Kalfou (Santa Barbara, Calif.) Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 7 - 34
• Main Author: Castañeda, Michael Schulze-Oechtering
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Santa Barbara Temple University - of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education On behalf of Temple University Press 01.04.2023
• Subjects: Activists; Colonialism; Political activism; Radicalism; United States > US; Pacific Northwest
• ISSN: 2151-4712; 2372-0751

Castañeda delves into Tyree Scott's views on past and present Buffalo Soldiers and examines not only his nuanced reading of race, class, and colonialism but also the social environment that cultivated his critiques. He argues that Scott's conception of the "new Buffalo Soldiers" was a product of a series of intimacies that were emblematic of the dynamics of race, radicalism, and repression in the Pacific Northwest throughout the 1970s. These intimacies offered Scott a political education that compelled him to study and reframe the history of the Buffalo Soldiers for the purposes of multiracial and anti-imperialist movement building. He also examine key moments in Scott's political education: his exposure to the Nisqually Nation's struggles to preserve treaty-protected fishing rights and community integrity; the meetings of the American Friends Service Committee's Third World Coalition that saw Black and Indigenous activists argue over the Quaker organization's allocation of financial resources; and back in Seattle, Scott's efforts to cultivate a multiracial movement that linked institutionalized racism in the building trades to a critique of monopoly capitalism and US imperialism.