The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) has long been seen as a thoroughly ‘un-American’ organisation, not least by Cold War historians. Over recent decades, the claim that Communism only ever appeared in the US as a hostile Soviet plot has been roundly refuted in scholarship. Instead, scholars have established the importance of Communists to thoroughly American cultural traditions, civil rights struggles, and feminist organisations.

US Communists faced the same accusation of ‘un-Americanism’ early in the twentieth century. It was made by their right-wing opponents, but also by Moscow authorities, who regarded the US party as being too dominated by European immigrant populations. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the CPUSA sought to prove their critics on the right and the left wrong by demonstrating that they were authentically American. The surest test of this was their recruitment of Indigenous members and supporters: the ‘real red reds’.

Despite decades of innovative and revelatory work on the history of US Communism, historians have scarcely registered any encounters between interwar US Communists and Indigenous populations. But when we mined major Communist newspapers of the period, such as the Daily Worker and the Western Worker, we were able to establish numerous examples of such encounters.

Take the example of Chief Thundervoice. He made regular appearances in Communist newspapers in the early 1930s, claiming to be an Iroquois leader and donning Indigenous dress. He spoke at Communist rallies, complaining that ‘we Indians cannot live on the land we have’, and characterising capitalism as a system of ‘robbery’. Thundervoice was even pictured alongside a rising Communist star in 1930, James Ford, who would shortly become the first Black candidate for vice-president in US history. Thundervoice, we argue, personifies a wider pattern of Communist-Indigenous relations.

These relationships were ones of solidarity: Communists in some areas succeeded in organising with Indigenous populations who were making demands on the New Deal state. But relations between Communists and Indigenous people were also complicated. Thundervoice’s performances in the pages of the Daily Worker frequently read as just that: performances. Given the long history of non-Indigenous people ‘playing Indian’, and the confounding politics around Native authenticity (which has long been measured using racist blood quantums) it is impossible to verify the reality of Thundervoice’s claims. His seemingly deliberate deployment of tropes about Native people nevertheless satisfied the Communists’ desire for a ‘real’ American comrade.

Beyond Thundervoice’s story, we found numerous examples of Communists writing histories of US settler-colonialism that struggled to be sympathetic both to Native resistance and ‘progressive’ movements among white settlers. There are even some traces of Communist Party members making halting efforts to theorise Native sovereignty in relation to class struggles. As problematic, shallow, and contradictory as the encounter was between Communists and Indigenous Americans, the archive is also richly suggestive of discussions and meetings that ought to be remembered, and that can still excite our political imaginations.

‘Real red reds’: Indigenous Americans and the Communist Party of the USA, 1924–1939 by Owen Walsh (University of Aberdeen, UK) and Kathryn Berry (University of Aberdeen, UK) is part of the Radical Americas special series, Histories of socialism and Indigeneity, and published in Radical Americas, volume 10

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