John Redhouse
Foreword by Jennifer Denetdale, Introduction by Melanie K. Yazzie

Copublished with Red Media

A one-of-a-kind lyrical and fast-paced memoir of the frontlines and trenches of Native liberation in the Four Corners and Southwest in the 1970s.

From the late summer of 1972 to the late summer of 1974, John Redhouse and many other Navajo and Indian rights activists threw all they had into mass movement organizing and direct action. And they were pretty good at it too in terms of effectiveness and impact. 

Written in the first-person and above all, with a collective spirit of generosity and witness, John Redhouse describes the hot temper of the times in the racist and exploitative border towns in the Four Corners area of the Southwest region. 

As John Redhouse says, “Without the People, you have nothing. But back then, we had a lot of people WITH us.” Yes, the Power of the People, the collective human spirit of the emerging local and regional Indian civil movement, thousands of us marching in the streets of Gallup and Farmington in northwestern New Mexico with our demands. A bold citizens arrest at city hall, a downtown street riot, burning images of enemy leaders in effigy. And more marches, demonstrations, and direct actions. 

Above all, though, there was that Spirit—that unbroken, unconquerable spirit—that moved us, that drove us, that led us. And that was just in the border towns. In that turbulent decade, there was also the rapidly rising and spreading with-the-people, on-the-land resistance struggles in the coal, uranium, and oil and gas fields, and in disputed territories in the San Juan and Black Mesa basins that were targeted for ethnic cleansing and mineral extraction.

Bordertown Clashes, Resource Wars, Contested Territories: The Four Corners in the Turbulent 1970s brings readers to the enduring issues of the day, traced over half a century ago, where John Redhouse and many more were in the middle of a revolution that unfolds to this day.