Empirically, Native movements mobilize white people to witness violence. This forms new composite identities and blurs binaries—these new coalitions spill-over to other global struggles for decol.

In pipe ceremonies, speeches and leaflets, spearfishing supporters portrayed the violence against Indians on Wisconsin’s lakes as part and parcel of the suppression of human rights everywhere, linking the assaults to other crimes against people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and even on students demonstrating for free speech in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. Treaty supporters portrayed solidarity with their cause as action against injustice everywhere. People active in opposing US military intervention in Central American and in aiding indigenous refugees from those conflicts proved particularly receptive to participation as nonviolent witnesses in northern Wisconsin. Treaty supporters created composite identities for whites as nonviolent witnesses against violence, as environmentalists, as human rights advocates, as anti-racists. These identities allowed individuals many different points of entry (and exit) that proved valuable to the struggle. The nonviolent witnesses became a statewide network exposing the anti-treaty forces as overt racists whose legal claims lacked merit. Environmentalist learned that treaty rights offered a unique legal opportunity for contesting pollution of the region’s waterways, forests, fish and food supply. Anti-war activists discovered that making peace could require them to act close to home as well as in venues overseas and far away. Anti-racists recognized that the new right racial project contained internal contradictions and that some opponents might become allies under the right conditions. The ferocity of white supremacist violence proved to be something of a paper tiger when confronted by disciplined collective responses. For all their talk about walking in the footsteps of Dr. King and the 1960s civil rights movement, the white supremacists leading the attacks on spearfishers had none of Dr. King’s vision, no long-term strategy, no willingness to spend nights in jail in defiance of federal court injunctions as principled acts of civil disobedience, no capacity to seek reconciliation with their enemies, no ability to envision or enact what Dr. King called ‘the beloved community’.