ABSTRACT
The 1491s tour the nation, performing at colleges and in areas with signifi cant native populations, and sponsor a series of short videos starring young native people called “Represent,” which depict the wide variety of contemporary indigenous experiences. They encourage civic engagement and advocate voting and other forms of political activity. Their work functions, in Gerald Hauser’s (2008) terms, as vernacular assertions of agency. All of this sounds like the kind of actions with which most people are comfortable and that are easily placed within mainstream politics. But the 1491s can be anything but mainstream and their more controversial tendencies are the subject of this essay, for those tendencies allow me to both examine the ways in which web-based vernaculars intervene in political discourses and to observe how those interventions might strengthen minority voices in public debates (Hess, 2007; Howard, 2008).
