This paper deals with issues of political dissent and the geography of state power through the lens of a particular law and its deployment by the US state in the context of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota by American Indian Movement activists and local residents. I explore how the state responded to the highly mediated nature of the Wounded Knee occupation through tactics that minimized the visibility of its efforts to contain the protest. These efforts, I argue, also constituted a broader politics of scale. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the intersection of protest, scale and publicity. I then use the empirical example of the H Rap Brown Act to show how these dynamics were being reworked in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, I place the emergence of the H Rap Brown Act within a context of changing geographies of race and state power, more specifically as they were articulated around the unrest that was engulfing American cities. I then analyze how the law was deployed by the state during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of what the case of the H Rap Brown Act has to tell us more broadly about our theoretical understandings of the geographies of public protest.[T]he most serious domestic crisis facing America today is the ominous threat of riots and mob violence that hangs like a pall over many of our cities. We believe that the vast majority of the people share this opinion.… The majority of the committee has responded to this crisis by ordering reported a bill which will give added protection to roving fomenters of violence, such as Stokely Carmichael and H Rap Brown. 1 (US Senators James Eastland and Strom Thurmond in US Senate 1967:15)

Drawing on recent theories of citizenship that argue the city as the pre-eminent ‘difference machine’, this paper argues that it is also a crucial site for the production of resistance as a social identity and practice. This argument is presented through an analysis of an example from the ‘Red Power’ movement in the US in the 1960s and early 1970s. The paper examines how American Indian activism—while often dramatised in rural reservation locations and centred on rather grand abstractions quite far removed from typically urban concerns and politics—also has a profoundly urban historical geography.

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This paper presents an historical examination of a signi®cant period in which state authority and citizenship came together around the question of dissent in the US. Drawing on congressional records, news accounts and legal documentsÐand deploying theories of citizenship and spaceÐit presents an argument about how state power and geographical space came together around the question of the`race riots' that swept American cities in the late 1960s. I focus in particular on how government of®cials and others constituted the ®gure of the`outside agitator' as the cause of illegitimate dissent and the subject of state intervention. Such arguments about the geography of authority and dissent were themselves interventions in the politics of citizenship. More broadly, then, the paper argues for closer attention to issues of differenceÐand the geography of differenceÐin the constitution of state power.

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