In Memory of Howard Adams, Metis Revolutionary

by Deb Simmons


Howard Adams, Metis activist and leader of the Red Power movement in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s, died of a sudden stroke on September 8. He is survived by his wife Marge, who supported his activism over the decades and occasionally edited his writings.

Howard grew up in a Metis community in Saskatchewan. He was proud to trace his heritage to Maxime Lepine , his great-grandfather who led the Metis Rebellion of 1885 alongside Louis Riel. He attended the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1960s when anti-colonial movements were gaining momentum. There he heard Malcolm X speak and began to apply his ideas about black nationalism to the experiences of Metis and aboriginal oppression in Canada.

In 1964, he returned to his birthplace. He soon became a leader in the germinal Red Power movement, which was mobilized in opposition to both the oppressive apparatus of the state and the corrupt official aboriginal leaderships. As the racism of the white-dominated union movement became apparent, he advocated a revolutionary form of nationalism, inspired by anti-colonial movements in developing countries.

Howardıs book, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, first published in 1975, became the classic statement of the politics of Red Power. The 1996 sequel to that book, A Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization, manifested his ongoing commitment to the radical politics of that period.

To the very end, Howard identified himself as a revolutionary, despite experiences of repression by the state and marginalisation by official aboriginal leaderships. When other radicals of his generation went into political retreat after the suppression of the Red Power movement in the mid-70s, Howard remained unwavering. During those long years of political isolation, he found his strongest allies among his university students in Saskatchewan and British Columbia.

I first met Howard in 1996 at a conference about the challenges for aboriginal self-determination under the regime of NAFTA and following the Zapatista rebellion of 1994. Howard, who had been looking for ways to demonstrate solidarity with the Zapatista movement, jumped at the opportunity to build links with aboriginal peoples across national boundaries. What most struck me was his ability to make the links between capitalism, class exploitation and aboriginal oppression. For him, a strategy of building socialist movements from below simply made common sense.

In the years following our first meeting, Howard spoke at a convention of the New Socialist Group, served as an Editorial Associate for this magazine and contributed a number of excerpts from A Tortured People for republication. He signed his name to a public letter in support of Quebecıs right to self-determination in the face of broad hostility to Quebec among the official aboriginal leaderships. In the fall of 2000, he spoke at the founding conference of Rebuilding the Left. He was a supporter of the growing international movement against globalization. He strongly believed in the renewal of a non-sectarian, anti-racist socialism.

Days after his death, as I marched in the first Toronto demonstration against Bushıs new racist war, I knew that this was the kind of movement he would have supported - a movement crossing the boundaries of gender, race and nation. It was heartening to be reminded that Howardıs spirit - the spirit of Red Power - will live on in the movements against the violence of racism, imperialism, and capitalism.

Deb Simmons is a member of the New Socialist Group