Return to Wounded Knee. 27 February 1973, Italy and the Native Americans

During the ‘long decade’ that was the 1970s, the mobilization of the native peoples of the United States coincided (and interwoven) with a reactivation of the collective imagination worldwide. This is related to two main areas in particular. First is the question of indigenous peoples: attitudes to human rights acquired an increasingly transnational dimension, under the long ripple effect of the worldwide 1968 protest movements, coinciding with war in Vietnam and revolutions in Latin America. This essays analyzes the impact of the American Indian movement on the Italian society during the 70s. American West was transposed to postcolonial contexts, the historical massacres and asymmetric conficts of the ‘Indian wars’ found an echo in the ‘small wars’ and regional conficts of a Cold War undergoing transformation. Reviving anti-imperialist attitudes, and a certain kind of antiAmericanism rekindled by the Vietnam War, seemed to draw on such memories, thronging the collective imagination on an increasingly global scale. The trend even crossed the Iron Curtain, where condemnation of the United States blended with tacit anti-Soviet criticism.3