The United States government has used the month of November to recognize Native American heritage in some form or another for the past 100 years. In 1990. President George H. W. Bush approved a joint resolution designating November 1990 “National American Indian Heritage Month.”
From 1990 until this year, similar proclamations, with some variation on the name (including “Native American Heritage Month” and “National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month”), have been issued each year since that time, acknowledging the rich history and diverse accomplishments of our indigenous peoples.
There are more than 560 tribes and nations in the U.S., but if you add all the indigenous peoples in the Americas, the numbers grow very quickly. We have the Alaska Natives, including Eskimo-Aleut and Inupiat peoples, Native Hawaiians who are native to the islands now declared in the state of Hawaii, the Taino, the indigenous people of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, and the aboriginal people in Canada, including First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.
Independence means doing something about the Indians
The word “Indian” was given to the indigenous people by the first Europeans who set foot on these shores. They like Columbus -who thought he had reached the Indies, used the name and it apparently stuck. But regardless of their designation, native Americans were here first, and we treated them very badly.
After America won its independence from England, the U.S. steadily extended its borders westward and indigenous peoples struggled to retain their autonomy and cultural identities. Conflicts arose between Americans Indians and others – especially ranchers and homesteaders over land and border disputes.
By the early 1800s, there was an outright rebellion among the tribes as European settlers demanded more and more lands. It was President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act in 1830 that forced American Indian peoples remaining in the eastern states to relocate west of the Mississippi River. Between 1830 and 1850 approximately 100,000 people lost their homes.
Then, in 1838, the U.S. government forced over 16,000 Cherokee people from their lands in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to current-day Oklahoma. Close to 5,000 people perished due to the forced relocation in the journey known as the Trail of Tears.
The Trail of Tears is over 5,043 miles long and covers nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.
One thing is certain – through all this removal and relocation of the native peoples, the new owners of the land called America sought only one thing – to “Americanize” and “civilize” the Indians.
Birth of the American Indian Movement
During the 1800s, policymakers, social reformers, and religious groups came up with programs to force the minority groups to adopt the American way of life. They outlawed indigenous religious ceremonies and developed homesteading programs.
Boarding schools, such as the Pipestone Indian School Superintendent’s House in Minnesota, taught American Indian children the English language and Christian faith. In due course, native dialects disappeared and tribal customs and cultural ceremonies were forgotten.
By the early 1900s, opposition to the forced assimilation grew, until the Civil Rights movement came into being in the 1960s when activists founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) to address Native sovereignty, education, inadequate housing, unemployment, racism, and police harassment.
However, it took the “symbolic” occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay by Mohawk Indian Richard Oakes and a group of supporters on November 9, 1969, to bring national attention to American Indians’ demands for self-determination.
The occupiers held Alcatraz Island for 19 months before armed federal marshals, FBI agents, and Special Forces police halted the occupation on June 10, 1971. The result of that occupation has galvanized a political movement that continues today.
The Presidential Proclamation of 2019
This year, on October 31, President Trump also signed a proclamation, however, it wasn’t strictly acknowledging November as Native American Heritage Month. As a matter of fact, there is no mention of native Americans. He goes on and on extolling the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and our dedication to promoting liberty and justice over the evil forces of oppression and indignity.
Interestingly, the proclamation does not mention the only statement about Indigenous people found in the Declaration of Independence – the accusation that the British monarch “has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions.”
Christianna Silva, writing for MTV says it best: “But is that really a surprise, given the President’s history of routinely disparaging Native peoples? He regularly invokes a slur against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in order to capitalize on past false claims she made about Native heritage, and for which she has since apologized. He has also made jokes about the Wounded Knee Massacre and refuses to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day in favor of celebrating Christopher Columbus, a man who committed and encouraged the torture and murder of Indigenous peoples.”
In another column, we will look at some of the accomplishments of Native Americans over the years.
