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Red Indian is a derogatory name for native north Americans, it is now considered a racial slur. The name American Indian came from Christopher Columbus who believed he had found islands in the Indian ocean.

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How did Red Indians get their name? - Times of India

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Sunday Times News: Red Indian is an offensive term for a native North American. In North America, the term is now considered a racial slur.

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"American Indian" is being widely debated to whether it is a derogatory name or not. Objections to the use of the word included the fact that it came from a historical error and does not reflect the origin of American indigenous people. Some also feel the name has become negative and demeaning considering the history of America. Supporters of the term argue that it has been used for so long that it people have become accustomed to it and do not consider it offensive. "American Indian" is also used often in treaties between the US government and Native Americans. However I do believe this word is offensive and can be considered racist, the argue for the name seems as if people are allowing racism to continue and no matter how long the word has been used for it doesn't change its origin or meaning.

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Native American name controversy - Wikipedia

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There is an ongoing discussion about the terminology used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to describe themselves, as well as how they prefer to be referred to by others. Preferred terms vary primarily by region and age. As Indigenous peoples and communities are diverse, there is no consensus on naming.

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This article highlights how even in modern days we use Native American clothing in an offensive way. Fashion brand Victoria secret allowed a white model to wear a traditional American headdress. This is offensive because its being used in the wrong context and also for the brands profit, it shows how companies want to make money from others culture but not let them represent them selves.

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WASHINGTON - Climate change is real; it's here, and we are on the frontlines of the battle to save America's land, water and air-that's the message Native American nations will bring to Washington April 29, the eve of President Donald Trump's 100th day in office, when they will march against federal policies they say are putting them in danger.

The march is being organized by a coalition of activists formed after the 2014 People's Climate March, when a record 400,000 people descended on New York City ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change. Among those organizers is Tom Goldtooth (Navajo/Dakota), executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which works to organize North American tribal people around environmental and economic justice issues.

"Populations such as ours that have a close relationship with nature, that still have traditional practices off the land and waterways, are experiencing these real effects, from Alaska to many of our tribal people here in the lower 48," he said. "Climate change is real. It's not, as some believe, just some conspiracy theory."

Goldtooth has seen the effects first-hand in Minnesota, where the New Mexico native now lives.

"We just ended what's called 'Sugar Bush'- maple syruping. The seasons change, the weather is unseasonably warm. And all this has impact on weather and when the sap is flowing," he said. "And it's the same way with the 'wild' rice, which our Dakota people call 'psin'. In certain areas here in the the Great Lakes area, the weather has been very unpredictable, and when water levels are down, it's very hard to have a harvest of this sacred food."

Mild winters have led to an increase in the populations of deer ticks and other disease carrying parasites. These have decimated Minnesota's population of moose, which have provided subsistence to tribes for generations.

Minnesota tribes are not alone, said Garrit Voggesser, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Tribal Partnership program. He is among the authors of a 2011 report, "Facing the Storm: Indian Tribes, Climate-Induced Weather Extremes, and the Future for Indian Country," which details the devastating impact of global warming on tribal peoples.

"If you're asking where climate is most impacting tribes, the simple answer is everywhere," he said. "Look at Alaska-that's always the most glaring example-where sea level rise and melting permafrost have forced whole tribal villages to relocate."

Increasing storm surges in the Pacific Northwest, for example, threaten the cultural and subsistence resources not just of tribes, but the region and nation as a whole. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 40 percent of the nation's hydropower is generated by winter snow in the Pacific Northwest and snow melt in springtime. Lower snow levels could reduce the supply of hydroelectricity.

"Looking at the U.S. Southwest-Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, California-there's been a 15-plus-year drought, and so if you look at the Navajo Nation, you see increasing siltation and the creation of sand dunes, which leads to dust storms that impact many, many other things," Voggesser said.

An when it does rain, the parched earth can't absorb the water fast enough. This results in floods, erosion and mudslides that can destroy buildings and tear out power lines. To wit: floods in July 2010 left the Hopi First Mesa without potable water or sewage, and they were forced to spend more than $900,000 to repair their infrastructure.

"Some tribes have the capacity and resources and are in a better position to address climate change," said Voggesser. "Others have barely even started. That's why it becomes increasingly important for tribes to connect with partners and collaborate, whether that's at the academic, government or nonprofit level, to identify resources that can help build their capacity."
Shift in US policy
Tom Goldtooth says tribes feel a special imperative to speak out, in light of a new White House that has shifted focus from energy conservation to energy independence.

"When we have a U.S. administration that is a denier of science and the facts, we have a serious problem that violates our treaty rights to fish and hunt and gather," said Goldtooth. "Theses aren't just rights that we negotiated in treaties with the United States. These are inherent rights."

One of President Trump's first actions in office was to sign a memorandum advancing the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines, which tribes fear could contaminate drinking water and destroy sacred sites.

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order rolling back the previous administration's Clean Power Plan, including a moratorium on coal mining on U.S. federal land. That same day, the new secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, signed two secretarial orders promoting coal, gas and renewable energy extraction on federal and tribal lands.

Trump's proposed 2018 budget that would cut the EPA budget by 30 percent. The Interior Department, which is divided into 9 bureaus including the chronically-underfunded Bureau of Indian Affairs, would see cuts of about 12 percent. Last year, the BIA awarded $8.6 million to 85 tribes as part of its Tribal Climate Resilience Program.

Native communities like Washington State's Swinomish Tribe have reacted with alarm.

"For over 100 years we have lived in a pollution based economy which has caused detrimental damage to the Earth," said Swinomish tribal spokesperson Debra Lekanoff via email. "We have spent just over 40 years in partnership with the United States to restore and protect what the Creator has provided to us. Today, now more than ever is our time to share a strong message to President Trump that we need to continue to support all of those agencies who put resources into cleaning up the environment."

It's a sentiment heard across Indian Country, according to Goldtooth, where tribes are asking Washington, "We're the ones most feeling the impact. Why are we being forced to change? Why doesn't the dominant society change what it's doing to Mother Earth and to our people?

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Native Americans Most at Risk From Impact of Climate Change

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Climate change is real; it's here, and we are on the frontlines of the battle to save America's land, water and air-that's the message Native American nations will bring to Washington April 29, the eve of President Donald Trump's 100th day in office, when they will march against federal policies they say are putting them in danger.The march is being organized by a coalition of activists formed after the 2014 People's Climate March, when a record 400,000 people descended on New York City ahead of a U.N.

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The St Regis Mohawks came under attack as they sought to open a second casino in the state of New York. Advertisements appeared in local media around the turn of the century claiming that the Native American tribe had a long history of drug dealing, smuggling and other crimes. New Yorkers were warned that the Mohawks' involvement in the gambling industry was making a dirty business even worse.

" Casino gambling stinks," said one of the advertisements. "It brings increased crime, bankruptcy, broken homes, divorce and, in the case of Indian gambling, violence."

The broadsides purported to be the work of an anti-gambling group called the New York Institute for Law and Society. But state regulators soon discovered the real story. They unearthed evidence that the man behind the anti-Indian messages was a rival casino owner who had a lot to lose if the Mohawks gained approval to expand their gambling operations in the state.

His name was Donald Trump and his handwriting was found on invoices approving the advertisements, according to the regulators. In response, New York officials alleged that Mr Trump and his associates, including conservative activist Roger Stone, had violated the state's lobbying law. Without admitting guilt, Mr Trump, Mr Stone's firm and the institute agreed in 2000 to pay a $250,000 civil penalty to settle the matter, including $50,000 for ads apologising to anyone deceived by the anti-Mohawk missives.

"Mr Trump had control over the content of the ads," said David Grandeau, who was the executive director of New York temporary state commission on lobbying at the time. "When you control the message content and the message delivery in a lobbying ad in New York state you are responsible to file a registration statement."

Waging war

Mr Trump's anti-Indian marketing effort received little attention outside his native New York, but it looms today as a preview of his presidential campaign. Before he characterised illegal Mexican immigrants as "rapists", or accused Muslim Americans of celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this year's presumptive Republican nominee made it his business to question the character of Native Americans.

For years, Mr Trump waged his own kind of Indian war in response to a 1988 federal law that paved the way for hundreds of Native American tribes to offer games of chance. His goal was to prevent his new competitors from undermining the three casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that he acquired during the 1980s when the seaside resort had a casino monopoly in the eastern US.

As a commercial strategy, the effort failed. Native American gaming revenues rose to $28.5bn by 2014, non-tribal areas looking for a piece of the action loosened anti-gambling laws and the US wound up with a casino glut. Mr Trump was among the losers. His Atlantic City empire fell into decline and he retreated from the big-time gambling business.

However, as a political exercise, Mr Trump's bitter Indian campaign bore fruit. Before he threw his hat into the ring, Mr Trump spent years refining a protectionist message that savaged weak-minded US officials for selling out domestic interests in favour of unsavoury people with racial or religious backgrounds different to his own.

The angry Mr Trump of the 2016 campaign trail who rails against unfair competitors speaks from experience as a business executive who suffered at the hands of Native American tribes operating with powers of self-government under the US constitution.

"Donald Trump always wanted the government to protect him," says Richard McGowan, a Jesuit priest who serves as an associate professor of finance at Boston College's Carroll School of Management and has written several books on the history of the gaming industry. "I don't think he ever banked on [Native American] competition."

Left with a bad hand

The political irony is that Mr Trump's interests were undermined by the policies of the patron saint of his party. On October 17 1988, one of the final days of his second term, President Ronald Reagan signed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which allowed the spread of Native American casinos.

The legislation was crafted in response to a 1987 Supreme Court decision that gave tribes greater leeway in offering gaming. But it also reflected Reagan's free-market ethos. As president, he sought dramatic cuts in aid to Indian tribes, believing that their reservations represented failed exercises in socialism. Running gambling operations was portrayed as a way for Indians to stand on their own feet.

For Mr Trump, the timing was terrible. As the 1990s began, he was weighed down by billions of dollars in debt used to assemble his property and gambling empire. In 1991, Trump Taj Mahal, his biggest casino, filed for bankruptcy protection, the first of four times his companies would be reorganised under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code.

Mr Trump emerged from the wreckage in the 1990s by doubling down on Atlantic City gambling. He said goodbye to assets including an airline, a 282-foot yacht and New York's Plaza Hotel, but retained control of his casinos, after making the case to his bankers that they would be better off letting him handle such a tricky business.

Donald Trump went on the attack when faced with the prospect of competition to his gaming centres from Native American casinos. Regulators found he went too far, says Gary Silverman, but his campaign rhetoric now owes much to his tactics then

By the mid-1990s, Mr Trump was being hailed as a comeback kid. His fall as a gambling kingpin only came later, when control of his casino company passed to his creditors. Billionaire Carl Icahn now owns the only Atlantic City property bearing Mr Trump's name - the Taj Mahal.

Mr Trump's ultimate decline coincided with the growth of competition for the gambling dollar. In 1992, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, backed by Genting of Malaysia, opened what became the largest gambling facility in the western hemisphere - the Foxwoods casino in Connecticut. In 1996, the Mohegan Sun, the state's second Indian casino, debuted.

Lacking flexibility, Mr Trump was poorly positioned to respond creatively to the challenge, for example, by enriching the casino experience with shopping, dining or entertainment options in the manner of Las Vegas operators such as Steve Wynn. Instead, Mr Trump fell victim to the rise of "convenience gambling", the tendency of bettors to frequent the nearest casino.

"Atlantic City made a lot of money in the 1980s being the only game in town," says David Schwartz, a former Trump Taj Mahal employee who is now director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. "When you have more convenient places open up, that's when Atlantic City ran into trouble."

Irresponsible testimony

Mr Trump saw the danger and he fought back in much the same way as he has during his campaign, taking to the airwaves and disparaging his opponents. During an appearance on Don Imus radio show in 1993, the politically incorrect host asked Mr Trump's opinion of a group of "drunken Injuns" who wanted to open a casino in New Jersey. The man who later came to question Barack Obama's birthplace said he doubted whether his new competitors were really Native Americans.

"I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations," Mr Trump said. "One of them was telling me his name is Chief Running Water Sitting Bull, and I said, 'That's a long name.' He said, 'Well, just call me Ricky Sanders.' So this is one of the Indians."

A few weeks later, Mr Trump appeared before a US House of Representatives subcommittee looking into the state of Indian gaming. He did not hold back.

Related article

Mr Trump, who tends to speak off the cuff on the campaign trail, put aside his prepared remarks and lambasted witnesses he accused of "saying everything is peachy-dory". Among them was a US justice department official who said the "belief held by some that Indian gaming operations are rife with serious criminality is not established by the data currently available".

Mr Trump claimed that Indian tribes were incapable of stopping mobsters from dipping into their gaming proceeds. He said he found it hard to believe that "an Indian chief is going to tell Joey Killer to please get off his reservation".

"Organised crime is rampant, is rampant - I don't mean a little bit - is rampant on the Indian reservations," he said. "It will blow sky high. It will be the biggest scandal ever or one of the biggest scandals since Al Capone in terms of organised crime."

He warned George Miller, the panel's chairman, that he was going to be "very embarrassed" by the fallout, prompting the California Democrat to respond: "In my 19 years on this committee, I don't know when I have heard more irresponsible testimony . . . You have cast upon the Indian nations of this country a blanket indictment."

Mr Trump upped the ante when the St Regis Mohawks, who opened a casino on their tribal land in April 1999, were seeking approval to open their second gambling facility in the Catskill Mountains region, about 100 miles from Manhattan. The Trump argument was no longer that Native American tribes were too weak to stop organised crime. Rather, his secretly funded advertisements argued that the St Regis Mohawks were a heavily armed mob and should be viewed with suspicion by New Yorkers and their officials.

"Are these the new neighbours we want?" one advertisement asked. "The St Regis Mohawk Indian record of criminal activity is well documented."

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. In an email, Mr Stone, Mr Trump's long-time confidante, stood by the content of the ads and said he believed Mr Trump had grounds for a legal challenge to the New York regulators but settled to avoid a "costly and time-consuming" court battle.

In the years that followed, Mr Trump, undeterred by the revelations in New York, sought to find his own Native American casino partners. But he struggled to find his place in the new gambling landscape.

In Connecticut, he made common cause with a group called the Eastern Pequots that hoped to open a casino. However, relations between the Indians and Mr Trump frayed, and federal officials ultimately decided against recognising Eastern Pequots as a tribe.

Far from Atlantic City, Mr Trump struck a five-year deal starting in 2002 to manage a casino for the 29 Palms Band of Mission Indians in Coachella, California. But this time, it was the Indians who were unimpressed. They paid $6m to buy out the last two years of Mr Trump's contract. Tribal leaders said the time had come for them to do the job on their own, without help from the man now running for president.

Federal assistance: 'Self-made' tycoons had Uncle Sam's helping hand

Donald Trump's difficulties in dealing with casino competition point to one of the paradoxes of his career. For all his talk about being a self-made man, he and his family business owe a good deal of their success to the government.

An early example came after the second world war when Mr Trump's father Fred, a New York homebuilder who left an estate worth an estimated $250m-$300m when he died in 1999 at age 93, was a beneficiary of lending schemes offered by the Federal Housing Administration, a creation of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Homebuilders with the right connections were able to obtain mortgage financing far in excess of their construction costs on a project and use the surplus for other purposes. Testifying in 1954 before a Senate committee, Fred Trump said his FHA-backed borrowings exceeded his building expenses by millions of dollars.

When Donald struck a deal in the 1970s to transform New York's run-down Commodore Hotel into a glittering Grand Hyatt, his father's political ties proved fortunate for his son. The city granted the project a 40-year tax abatement. Asked how he secured the 40-year break, Mr Trump said: "Because I didn't ask for 50."

Mr Trump made his move into Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the 1980s when the seaside resort had a casino monopoly in the eastern US. Gambling was introduced there in the previous decade in the hope of boosting its fortunes.

"Let's face it, the gambling industry is protected by the government," says Richard McGowan, associate professor of finance at the Carroll School of Management, Boston College. "It's the only industry I know where legislators say they want it to be a success. The rationale for Atlantic City was that gambling was going to revitalise Atlantic City. It didn't."

Mr Trump faltered when changes in federal law led to the construction of two big casinos on Native American land in the same region. "Unfortunately for Donald he was over his head with debt and couldn't compete," Professor McGowan says. "He was an old-fashioned casino operator who didn't adjust to the new reality."

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US presidential campaign: Trump's casino war

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The St Regis Mohawks came under attack as they sought to open a second casino in the state of New York. Advertisements appeared in local media around the turn of the century claiming that the Native American tribe had a long history of drug dealing, smuggling and other crimes.

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It's been three years since thousands of protesters, environmentalists and more than 95 Native American nations gathered in a field-turned-campsite on the fringes of Standing Rock reservation, attempting to stop the Dakota access pipeline from being built a short distance from the reservation's land.

Their efforts mostly proved in vain. Since June 2017, the pipeline - known as DAPL - has been carrying about 570,000 barrels of crude oil from the Bakken Formation in northwest North Dakota to Illinois every day.

And although Standing Rock's remote expanses across North and South Dakota have since turned quiet, local residents find themselves facing a new dilemma. Not only is the pipeline now set firmly underground, its parent company, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), in June announced plans to double DAPL's capacity.

Currently the pipeline carries crude oil on a route running within a mile of Standing Rock and under the nearby Missouri river, an important water source for communities and businesses across the reservation. The proposed increase would result in the equivalent of more than 70 Olympic-sized swimming pools of oil pass through the pipeline every day.

Possibility of major leak

Tribal leaders fear the heightened capacity could further increase the possibility of a major oil leak or spill, with the pipeline section buried deep under the Missouri river of particular concern.

"That's greatly increasing the risk, and the harm from a potential release," says Elliott Ward, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's emergency manager. "They [the operating company] say they have [leak] detectors, but we know their spill detection track record is grossly inefficient. If there's a spill that's less than one per cent, it won't detect it at all. That's still 6,000 gallons [a day] that could be leaking that their sensors won't detect."

A judge in North Dakota has granted the tribe a request to intervene in the increased capacity plan, and it will take part in a public hearing scheduled for November 13th.

This follows a long and keenly contested series of disputes involving multiple sides in recent years. In 2016, the tribe sued the US army corps of engineers, which regulates activities pertaining to waterways across the country, for allegedly failing to meaningfully respond to its initial concerns relating to the construction of the pipeline.

In December 2016, at the height of the protest movement, the corps denied ETP an easement - the right to use or cross land belonging to another entity - and called for alternative pipeline routes to be explored and assessed through an environmental impact statement.

Within days of taking office, however, President Donald Trump, who received $103,000 (€93,000) from ETP's billionaire chief executive during his 2016 presidential campaign, issued an executive memo calling on the corps to speed up its assessment.

Soon after, the corps withdrew the impact statement proposal, and on February 7th, 2017, approved the easement to allow the pipeline pass under the Missouri river.

Cody Two Bears, an environmentalist who lives in Cannon Ball, the town closest to the pipeline, says if a leak or breakage near or under the river were to occur, it could be weeks or longer before anyone except the operators find out. Towns such as Cannon Ball and Fort Yates, a 25-minute drive downstream, use Missouri river water for everyday use. "If something goes bad with the pipeline, we will be the worst affected," he says.

In 2016, the tribe opened a new water treatment plant 113km downstream of where the pipeline crosses the Missouri. Were oil to enter the river from the pipeline, it would take between nine and 13 hours to flow downstream and reach the treatment plant, according to Reuters.

A report assessing the impact of an oil leak released by the tribe in February 2018 warned: "The corps of engineers and DAPL's current estimates of a worst-case oil release into the Missouri river and underlying aquifer are based upon unrealistic assumptions, and the environmental impacts of an oil spill may be far greater than disclosed in the final environmental assessment."

Emails to ETP seeking comment on the pipeline's leakage detection technology and other queries went unanswered.

Though many energy companies claim that transporting oil through pipelines is safer than via rail, pipeline spills and leaks are far from uncommon. In July, a leak on a pipeline operated by Polar Midstream LLC saw 21,000 gallons of the toxic wastewater brine used in fracking processes spill into a tributary of the Missouri river several hundred miles upriver of Standing Rock.

Spillages

ETP, too, has had a chequered recent history with accidental spillages. Last September, a leak from a pipeline run by a subsidiary, Sunoco, in Pennsylvania led to a fire that destroyed a house. The company has also faced the wrath of officials in Ohio and West Virginia for causing environmental damage and water pollution on several occasions during the construction phase of a natural gas pipeline.

"Data collected from the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration shows that the ETP family of hazardous liquids pipelines experienced 527 incidents from 2002 to the end of 2017," found an April 2018 report from Greenpeace, "spilling ~87,000 barrels, and causing an estimated $115 million [€104 million] in property damage."

Back at Standing Rock, the field that became a temporary home and symbol of defiance for 15,000 activists and demonstrators in 2016 is today just an empty, wind-blown pasture. A sign attached to a fence ringing the field warns against trespassing by order of the US government. The prairies of this vast reservation may be quiet now, but for the people of Standing Rock the battle looks set to go on.

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Oil pipeline fuels fears in Native American reservations

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It's been three years since thousands of protesters, environmentalists and more than 95 Native American nations gathered in a field-turned-campsite on the fringes of Standing Rock reservation, attempting to stop the Dakota access pipeline from being built a short distance from the reservation's land. Their efforts mostly proved in vain.

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Treaty of Hopewell

In 1785, the Treaty of Hopewell was signed in Georgia-the largest state at the time-placing the native Cherokees under the protection of a young United States and setting boundaries for their land.

But it wasn't long before European settlers intruded on Cherokee land. The Cherokees cried foul and revolted against the white settlements. To reestablish peace between the Cherokees and the settlers, the Treaty of Holston was signed in 1791 in which the Cherokees agreed to give up all land outside of their established borders.

Not only did the federal government want Native Americans to give up their land, they also encouraged them to become farmers and Christians. In the early 19th century, settlers moved into southern Cherokee territory en masse and wanted their government representatives to claim the land.

The United States acted to remove all Indian nations from the southeast. Georgia agreed to cede her western land to the government in return for Indian land title.

Andrew Jackson

After the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson hoped to move eastern Indian tribes past the Mississippi River-but most Indians rejected his idea. When Georgia held lotteries to allocate seized Indian land, the battle-weary Creeks who'd sought sanctuary in east Alabama fought for their independence against the militia of Andrew Jackson, which included so-called "friendly Indians."

After suffering a devastating defeat at what became known as the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the Creeks yielded more than 20 million acres of land to the federal government.

Over the next several years, the government passed several acts to diminish Indian autonomy, despite the Cherokee forming a new constitution-based government of their own. And in December 1828, Georgia ordered the seizure of the remaining Cherokee land in their state.

Indian Removal Act

On May 28, 1830, the Indian Removal Act was signed by President Jackson. The Act allowed the government to divide land west of the Mississippi to give to Indian tribes in exchange for the land they'd lost. The government would pick up the cost of relocating the Indians and helping them resettle.

The Indian Removal Act was controversial, but Jackson argued it was the best option since settlers had rendered Indian lands incompatible with sustaining their way of life.

Trail of Tears

Over the next few years, the Choctaw, Chicasaw and Creeks were forced to move westward on foot, often in chains and with little or no food and supplies. Even some Indians in the North were forced to relocate.

In 1838, President Martin Van Buren sent federal troops to march the remaining southern Cherokee holdouts 1,200 miles to Indian territory in the Plains. Disease and starvation were rampant, and thousands died along the way, giving the tortuous journey the nickname " Trail of Tears."

A group of Seminoles, however, refused to leave and hunkered down in Florida. They fought federal troops for almost a decade before their leader was killed and they finally surrendered.

The Indian Appropriations Act

As white settlers continued westward and needed more land, Indian territory shrank-but there was no more land for the government to move them to.

In 1851, Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act, which created the Indian reservation system and provided funds to move Indian tribes onto farming reservations and hopefully keep them under control.

Life on Indian Reservations

Daily living on the reservations was hard at best. Not only had tribes lost their native lands, but it was almost impossible to maintain their culture and traditions inside a confined area.

Feuding tribes were often thrown together and Indians who were once hunters struggled to become farmers. Starvation was common, and living in close quarters hastened the spread of diseases brought by white settlers.

Indians were encouraged or forced to wear non-Indian clothes and learn to read and write English, sew and raise livestock. Missionaries attempted to convert them to Christianity and give up their spiritual beliefs.

The Dawes Act

In 1887, the Dawes Act was signed by President Grover Cleveland allowing the government to divide reservations into small plots of land for individual Indians. The government hoped the legislation would help Indians assimilate into white culture easier and faster and improve their quality of life.

But the Dawes Act had a devastating impact on Native American tribes. It decreased the land owned by Indians by more than half and opened even more land to white settlers and railroads. Much of the reservation land wasn't good farmland, and many Indians couldn't afford the supplies needed to reap a harvest.

Prior to the Indian reservation system, Indian women farmed and took care of the land while men hunted and helped protect the tribe. Now, men were forced to farm, and women took on more domestic roles.

The Indian Reorganization Act

After a review of life on Indian reservations known as the Meriam Survey, it was clear the Dawes Act was severely detrimental to Native Americans.

The law was ended in 1934 and replaced with the Indian Reorganization Act with the goals of restoring Indian culture and returning surplus land to tribes. It also encouraged tribes to self-govern and write their own constitutions and provided financial aid for reservation infrastructure.

Modern Indian Reservations

Modern Indian reservations still exist across the United States and fall under the umbrella of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The tribes on each reservation are sovereign and not subject to most federal laws.

They handle most reservation-related obligations but depend on the federal government for financial support. On many reservations, the main sources of revenue are tourism and gambling.

According to the BIA, 567 federally-recognized American Indian tribes and Alaskan natives reside in the United States. The BIA is responsible for improving their quality of life, providing them with economic opportunities and improving their assets which the BIA holds in trust.

Despite their efforts, living conditions on reservations aren't ideal and are often compared to that of a third-world country. Housing is overcrowded and often below standards, and many people on the reservations are stuck in a cycle of poverty.

Health care on reservations is provided through Indian Health Services, but it's underfunded and, in some cases, practically non-existent. Many Native Americans die from lifestyle-related diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.

Infant mortality rates are significantly higher for Indians than for whites, and alcohol and drug abuse is on the rise. Many people leave the reservations for urban areas in search of employment and improved living conditions.

The Indian reservation system was originally established as a result of the greed and prejudice of early American settlers and the federal government. Despite its challenges then and now, Native American nations continue to hold on to their unique heritage and work to thrive as communities.

HISTORY Vault: Native American History

Sources

1851: Congress creates reservations to manage Native peoples. U.S. National Library of Medicine, Native Voices.
Bureau of Indian Affairs. USA.gov.
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA): Mission Statement. U.S. Department of the Interior: Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Cherokee Removal. New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Indian Removal Timeline. University of Houston Digital History.
Indian Treaties and the Removal Act of 1830. Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs.
Living Conditions. Native American Aid.
The Battle of Horseshoe Bend: Collision of Cultures. National Park Service.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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The Indian reservation system, which established tracts of land for Native Americans to live on as white settlers took over their land, were designed to bring indigenous people under U.S. government control, minimize conflict with settlers and encourage assimilation.

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Trump Advisors Aim to Privatize Untapped Oil Reserves on Native American Reservations

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President-elect Donald Trump's advisors want to free, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.

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An American Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose government is semi-sovereign, subject to regulations passed by the United States Congress and administered by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not to the U.S. state government in which it is located. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one of the 326 Indian reservations in the United States, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. Historical piecemeal land allocations under the Dawes Act facilitated sales to non-Native Americans, resulting in some reservations becoming severely fragmented, with pieces of tribal and privately held land being treated as separate enclaves. This jumble of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.

The total area of all reservations is 56,200,000 acres (22,700,000 ha; 87,800 sq mi; 227,000 km ²), approximately 2.3% of the total area of the United States and about the size of the state of Idaho.[citation needed ] While most reservations are small compared to the average U.S. state, twelve Indian reservations are larger than the state of Rhode Island. The largest reservation, the Navajo Nation Reservation, is similar in size to the state of West Virginia. Reservations are unevenly distributed throughout the country, the majority being situated west of the Mississippi River and occupying lands that were first reserved by treaty ( Indian Land Grants) from the public domain.

Because recognized Native American nations possess tribal sovereignty, albeit of a limited degree, laws within tribal lands may vary from those of the surrounding and adjacent states. For example, these laws can permit casinos on reservations located within states which do not allow gambling, thus attracting tourism. The tribal council generally has jurisdiction over the reservation, not the U.S. state it is located in or the U.S. federal government. Different reservations have different systems of government, which may or may not replicate the forms of government found outside the reservation. Most Native American reservations were established by the federal government but a small number, mainly in the East, owe their origin to state recognition.

The term "reservation" is a legal designation. It comes from the conception of the Native American nations as independent sovereigns at the time the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Thus, early peace treaties (often signed under conditions of duress or fraud), in which Native American nations surrendered large portions of their land to the United States, designated parcels which the nations, as sovereigns, " reserved" to themselves, and those parcels came to be called "reservations". The term remained in use after the federal government began to forcibly relocate nations to parcels of land to which they often had no historical or cultural connection. Compared to other population centers in the U.S., reservations are disproportionately located on or near toxic sites hazardous to the health of those living or working in close proximity, including nuclear testing grounds and contaminated mines.

The majority of American Indians and Alaska Natives live outside the reservations, mainly in the larger western cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles. In 2012, there were over 2.5 million Native Americans, with 1 million living on reservations.

The first reservation was established in southern New Jersey on August 29, 1758. It was called Brotherton Indian Reservation and also Edgepillock or Edgepelick. The area was 3,284 acres (13.29 km ²). Today it is called Indian Mills in Shamong Township.

In 1764 the "Plan for the Future Management of Indian Affairs" was proposed by the Board of Trade of the British government. Although never adopted formally, the plan established the British government's expectation that land would only be bought by colonial governments, not individuals, and that land would only be purchased at public meetings. Additionally, this plan dictated that the Indians would be properly consulted when ascertaining and defining the boundaries of colonial settlement.

The private contracts that once characterized the sale of Indian land to various individuals and groups-from farmers to towns-were replaced by treaties between sovereigns. This protocol was adopted by the United States Government after the American Revolution.

On March 11, 1824, John C. Calhoun founded the Office of Indian Affairs (now the Bureau of Indian Affairs) as a division of the United States Department of War (now the United States Department of Defense), to solve the land problem with 38 treaties with American Indian tribes.

Indian Treaties, and Laws and Regulations Relating to Indian Affairs (1825) was a document signed by President Andrew Jackson in which he states that "we have placed the land reserves in a better state for the benefit of society" with approval of indigenous reservations prior to 1850. The letter is signed by Isaac Shelby and Jackson. It discusses several regulations regarding indigenous people of America and the approval of indigenous segregation and the reservation system.

President Martin Van Buren negotiated a treaty with the Saginaw Tribe of Chippewas in 1837 to build a lighthouse. The President of the United States of America was directly involved in the creation of new treaties regarding Indian Reservations before 1850. Van Buren stated that indigenous reservations are "all their reserves of land in the state of Michigan, on the principle of said reserves being sold at the public land offices for their benefit and the actual proceeds being paid to them." The agreement dictated that the indigenous tribe sell their land to build a lighthouse.

Scholarly author Buck Woodard used executive papers from Governor William H. Cabell in his article, "Indian Land sales and allotment in Antebellum Virginia" to discuss Indigenous reservations in America before 1705, specifically in Virginia. He claims "the colonial government again recognized the Nottoway's land rights by treaty in 1713, at the conclusion of the Tuscaro War." The indigenous peoples of America had land treaty agreements as early as 1713.

The American Indigenous Reservation system started with "the Royal Proclamation of 1763, where Great Britain set aside an enormous resource for Indians in the territory of the present United States." The United States put forward another act when "Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830". A third act pushed through was "the federal government relocated "portions of [the] 'Five Civilized Tribes' from the southeastern states in the Non-Intercourse Act of 1834." All three of these laws set into motion the Indigenous Reservation system in the United States of America, resulting in the forceful removal of Indigenous peoples into specific land Reservations.

Scholarly author James Oberly discusses "The Treaty of 1831 between the Menominee Nation and the United States" in his article, "Decision on Duck Creek: Two Green Bay Reservations and Their Boundaries, 1816-1996", showing yet another treaty regarding Indigenous Reservations before 1850. There is a conflict between the Menomee Nation and the State of Wisconsin and "the 1831 Menomee Treaty ... ran the boundary between the lands of the Oneida, known in the Treaty as the "New York Indians". This Treaty from 1831 is the cause of conflicts and is disputed because the land was good hunting grounds.

The Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 says "In the 1834 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, the United States defined the boundaries of Indian County." Also, "For Unrau, Indigenous Country is less on Indigenous homeland and more a place where the U.S. removed Indians from east of the Mississippi River and applied unique laws." The United States of America applied laws on Indigenous Reservations depending on where they were located like the Mississippi River. This act came too, because "the federal government began to compress Indigenous lands because it needed to send troops to Texas during the Mexican-American War and protect American immigration traveling to Oregon and California." The Federal Government of America had their own needs and desires for Indigenous Land Reservations. He says, "the reconnaissance of explorers and other American officials understood that Indigenous Country possessed good land, bountiful game, and potential mineral resources." The American Government claimed Indigenous land for their own benefits with these creations of Indigenous Land Reservations .

States such as Texas had their own policy when it came to Indian Reservations in America before 1850. Scholarly author George D. Harmon discusses Texas' own reservation system which "Prior to 1845, Texas had inaugurated and pursued her own Indian Policy of the U.S." Texas was one of the States before 1850 that chose to create their own reservation system as seen in Harmon's article, "The United States Indian Policy in Texas, 1845-1860." The State of "Texas had given only a few hundred acres of land in 1840, for the purpose of colonization". However, "In March 1847, ... [a] special agent [was sent] to Texas to manage the Indian affairs in the State until Congress should take some definite and final action." The United States of America allowed its states to make up their own treaties such as this one in Texas for the purpose of colonization.

The passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 marked the systematization of a U.S. federal government policy of moving Native populations away from European-populated areas, whether forcibly or voluntarily.

One example was the Five Civilized Tribes, who were removed from their native lands in the southern United States and moved to modern-day Oklahoma, in a mass migration that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. Some of the lands these tribes were given to inhabit following the removals eventually became Indian reservations.

In 1851, the United States Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act which authorized the creation of Indian reservations in modern-day Oklahoma. Relations between settlers and natives had grown increasingly worse as the settlers encroached on territory and natural resources in the West.

Most Indian reservations, like the Laguna Indian reservation in New Mexico (pictured here in March 1943), are in the western United States, often in regions suitable more for ranching than farming.

Paul Brodie's Map Showing the Location of the Indian Reservations within the Limits of the United States and Territories, 1885

In 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant pursued a "Peace Policy" as an attempt to avoid violence. The policy included a reorganization of the Indian Service, with the goal of relocating various tribes from their ancestral homes to parcels of lands established specifically for their inhabitation. The policy called for the replacement of government officials by religious men, nominated by churches, to oversee the Indian agencies on reservations in order to teach Christianity to the native tribes. The Quakers were especially active in this policy on reservations.

The policy was controversial from the start. Reservations were generally established by executive order. In many cases, white settlers objected to the size of land parcels, which were subsequently reduced. A report submitted to Congress in 1868 found widespread corruption among the federal Native American agencies and generally poor conditions among the relocated tribes.

Many tribes ignored the relocation orders at first and were forced onto their limited land parcels. Enforcement of the policy required the United States Army to restrict the movements of various tribes. The pursuit of tribes in order to force them back onto reservations led to a number of wars with Native Americans which included some massacres. The most well-known conflict was the Sioux War on the northern Great Plains, between 1876 and 1881, which included the Battle of Little Bighorn. Other famous wars in this regard included the Nez Perce War and the Modoc War, which marked the last conflict officially declared a war.

By the late 1870s, the policy established by President Grant was regarded as a failure, primarily because it had resulted in some of the bloodiest wars between Native Americans and the United States. By 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes began phasing out the policy, and by 1882 all religious organizations had relinquished their authority to the federal Indian agency.

In 1887, Congress undertook a significant change in reservation policy by the passage of the Dawes Act, or General Allotment (Severalty) Act. The act ended the general policy of granting land parcels to tribes as-a-whole by granting small parcels of land to individual tribe members. In some cases, for example, the Umatilla Indian Reservation, after the individual parcels were granted out of reservation land, the reservation area was reduced by giving the "excess land" to white settlers. The individual allotment policy continued until 1934 when it was terminated by the Indian Reorganization Act.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, also known as the Howard-Wheeler Act, was sometimes called the Indian New Deal and was initiated by John Collier. It laid out new rights for Native Americans, reversed some of the earlier privatization of their common holdings, and encouraged tribal sovereignty and land management by tribes. The act slowed the assignment of tribal lands to individual members and reduced the assignment of "extra" holdings to nonmembers.

For the following 20 years, the U.S. government invested in infrastructure, health care, and education on the reservations. Likewise, over two million acres (8,000 km ²) of land were returned to various tribes. Within a decade of Collier's retirement the government's position began to swing in the opposite direction. The new Indian Commissioners Myers and Emmons introduced the idea of the "withdrawal program" or " termination", which sought to end the government's responsibility and involvement with Indians and to force their assimilation.

The Indians would lose their lands but were to be compensated, although many were not. Even though discontent and social rejection killed the idea before it was fully implemented, five tribes were terminated-the Coushatta, Ute, Paiute, Menominee and Klamath -and 114 groups in California lost their federal recognition as tribes. Many individuals were also relocated to cities, but one-third returned to their tribal reservations in the decades that followed.

Because Federally-recognized Native American tribes possess limited tribal sovereignty, they are able to exercise the right of self-governance, including but are not limited to the ability to pass laws, regulate power and energy, create treaties, and hold tribal court hearings. For this reason laws on tribal lands may vary from those of the surrounding area. The laws passed can, for example, permit legal casinos on reservations. The tribal council, not the local government or the United States federal government, often has jurisdiction over reservations. Different reservations have different systems of government, which may or may not replicate the forms of government found outside the reservation.

With the establishment of reservations, tribal territories diminished to a fraction of original areas and indigenous customary practices of land tenure sustained only for a time, and not in every instance. Instead, the federal government established regulations that subordinated tribes to the authority, first, of the military, and then of the Bureau (Office) of Indian Affairs. Under federal law, the government patented reservations to tribes, which became legal entities that at later times have operated in a corporate manner. Tribal tenure identifies jurisdiction over land-use planning and zoning, negotiating (with the close participation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs) leases for timber harvesting and mining.

Tribes generally have authority over other forms of economic development such as ranching, agriculture, tourism, and casinos. Tribes hire both members, other Indians and non-Indians in varying capacities; they may run tribal stores, gas stations, and develop museums (e.g., there is a gas station and general store at Fort Hall Indian Reservation, Idaho, and a museum at Foxwoods, on the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation in Connecticut).

Tribal members may utilize a number of resources held in tribal tenures such as grazing range and some cultivable lands. They may also construct homes on tribally held lands. As such, members are tenants-in-common, which may be likened to communal tenure. Even if some of this pattern emanates from pre-reservation tribal customs, generally the tribe has the authority to modify tenant-in-common practices.

Wagon loaded with squash, Rosebud Indian Reservation, ca. 1936

With the General Allotment Act (Dawes), 1887, the government sought to individualize tribal lands by authorizing allotments held in individual tenure. Generally, the allocation process led to grouping family holdings and, in some cases, this sustained pre-reservation clan or other patterns. There had been a few allotment programs ahead of the Dawes Act. However, the vast fragmentation of reservations occurred from the enactment of this act up to 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act was passed. However, Congress authorized some allotment programs in the ensuing years, such as on the Palm Springs/Agua Caliente Indian Reservation in California.

Allotment set in motion a number of circumstances:

individuals could sell (alienate) the allotment - under the Dawes Act, it was not to happen until after twenty-five years.

individual allottees who would die intestate would encumber the land under prevailing state devisement laws, leading to complex patterns of heirship. Congress has attempted to mollify the impact of heirship by granting tribes the capacity to acquire fragmented allotments owing to heirship by financial grants. Tribes may also include such parcels in long-range land use planning.

With alienation to non-Indians, their increased presence on numerous reservations has changed the demography of Indian Country. One of many implications of this fact is that tribes can not always effectively embrace the total management of a reservation, for non-Indian owners and users of allotted lands contend that tribes have no authority over lands that fall within the tax and law-and-order jurisdiction of local government.

The demographic factor, coupled with landownership data, led, for example, to litigation between the Devils Lake Sioux and the State of North Dakota, where non-Indians owned more acreage than tribal members even though more Native Americans resided on the reservation than non-Indians. The court decision turned, in part, on the perception of Indian character, contending that the tribe did not have jurisdiction over the alienated allotments. In a number of instances-e.g., the Yakama Indian Reservation-tribes have identified open and closed areas within reservations. One finds the majority of non-Indian landownership and residence in the open areas and, contrariwise, closed areas represent exclusive tribal residence and related conditions.

Spring roundup of Paiute-owned cattle begins at Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, 1973.

Indian Country today consists of tripartite government-i. e., federal, state and/or local, and tribal. Where state and local governments may exert some, but limited, law-and-order authority, tribal sovereignty is diminished. This situation prevails in connection with Indian gaming because federal legislation makes the state a party to any contractual or statutory agreement.

Finally, other-occupancy on reservations maybe by virtue of tribal or individual tenure. There are many churches on reservations; most would occupy tribal land by consent of the federal government or the tribe. BIA ( Bureau of Indian Affairs) agency offices, hospitals, schools, and other facilities usually occupy residual federal parcels within reservations. Many reservations include one or more sections (about 640 acres) of school lands, but those lands typically remain part of the reservation (e.g., Enabling Act of 1910 at Section 20). As a general practice, such lands may sit idle or be grazed by tribal ranchers.

In 1979, the Seminole tribe in Florida opened a high-stakes bingo operation on its reservation in Florida. The state attempted to close the operation down but was stopped in the courts. In the 1980s, the case of California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians established the right of reservations to operate other forms of gambling operations. In 1988, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which recognized the right of Native American tribes to establish gambling and gaming facilities on their reservations as long as the states in which they are located have some form of legalized gambling.

Today, many Native American casinos are used as tourist attractions, including as the basis for hotel and conference facilities, to draw visitors and revenue to reservations. Successful gaming operations on some reservations have greatly increased the economic wealth of some tribes, enabling their investment to improve infrastructure, education, and health for their people.

Serious crime on Indian reservations has historically been required (by the 1885 Major Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. §§1153, 3242, and court decisions) to be investigated by the federal government, usually the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and prosecuted by United States Attorneys of the United States federal judicial district in which the reservation lies.

Tribal courts were limited to sentences of one year or less, until on July 29, 2010, the Tribal Law and Order Act was enacted which in some measure reforms the system permitting tribal courts to impose sentences of up to three years provided proceedings are recorded and additional rights are extended to defendants. The Justice Department on January 11, 2010, initiated the Indian Country Law Enforcement Initiative which recognizes problems with law enforcement on Indian reservations and assigns top priority to solving existing problems.

The Department of Justice recognizes the unique legal relationship that the United States has with federally recognized tribes. As one aspect of this relationship, in much of Indian Country, the Justice Department alone has the authority to seek a conviction that carries an appropriate potential sentence when a serious crime has been committed. Our role as the primary prosecutor of serious crimes makes our responsibility to citizens in Indian Country unique and mandatory. Accordingly, public safety in tribal communities is a top priority for the Department of Justice.

Emphasis was placed on improving prosecution of crimes involving domestic violence and sexual assault.

Passed in 1953, Public Law 280 (PL 280) gave jurisdiction over criminal offenses involving Indians in Indian Country to certain States and allowed other States to assume jurisdiction. Subsequent legislation allowed States to retrocede jurisdiction, which has occurred in some areas. Some PL 280 reservations have experienced jurisdictional confusion, tribal discontent, and litigation, compounded by the lack of data on crime rates and law enforcement response.

Violence and substance abuse

A survey of death certificates over a four-year period showed that deaths among Indians due to alcohol are about four times as common as in the general U.S. population and are often due to traffic collisions and liver disease with homicide, suicide, and falls also contributing. Deaths due to alcohol among American Indians are more common in men and among Northern Plains Indians. Alaska Natives showed the least incidence of death. Under federal law, alcohol sales are prohibited on Indian reservations unless the tribal councils allow it.

Gang violence has become a major social problem. A December 13, 2009, article in The New York Times about growing gang violence on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation estimated that there were 39 gangs with 5,000 members on that reservation alone. As opposed to traditional "Most Wanted" lists, Native Americans are often placed on regional Crime Stoppers lists offering rewards for their whereabouts.

When the Europeans encountered the New World, the American colonial government determined a precedent of establishing the land sovereignty of North America through treaties between countries. This precedent was upheld by the United States government. As a result, most Native American land was purchased by the United States government, a portion of which was designated to remain under Native sovereignty. The United States government and Native Peoples do not always agree on how land should be governed, which has resulted in a series of disputes over sovereignty.

The Federal Government and The Lakota Sioux tribe members have been involved in sorting out a legal claim for the Black Hills since signing the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which created what is known today as the Great Sioux Nation covering the Black Hills and nearly half of western South Dakota. This treaty was acknowledged and respected until 1874 when General George Custer discovered gold, sending a wave of settlers into the area and leading to the realization of the value of the land from United States President Grant. President Grant used tactical military force to remove the Sioux from the land and assisted in the development of the Congressional appropriations bill for Indian Services in 1876, a "starve or sell" treaty signed by only 10% of the 75% tribal men required based on specifications from the Fort Laramie Treaty that relinquished the Sioux's rights to the Black Hills. Following this treaty, the Agreement of 1877 was passed by Congress to remove the Sioux from the Black Hills, stating that the land was purchased from the Sioux despite the insufficient number of signatures, the lack of transaction records, and the tribe's claim that the land was never for sale.

The Black Hills are sacred to the Sioux as a place central to their spirituality and identity, and contest of ownership of the land has been pressured in the courts by the Sioux Nation since they were allowed legal avenue in 1920. Beginning in 1923, the Sioux made a legal claim that their relinquishment from the Black Hills was illegal under the Fifth Amendment, and no amount of money can make up for the loss of their sacred land. This claim went all the way up to the Supreme Court United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians case in 1979 after being revived by Congress, and the Sioux were awarded over $100 million as they ruled that the seizure of the Black Hills was in fact illegal. The Sioux have continually rejected the money, and since then the award has been accruing interest in trust accounts and amounts to about $1 billion in 2015.

During President Barack Obama's campaign he made indications that the case of the Black Hills was going to be solved with innovative solutions and consultation, but this was questioned when White House Counsel Leonard Garment sent a note to The Ogala people saying, "The days of treaty-making with the American Indians ended in 1871; ...only Congress can rescind or change in any way statutes enacted since 1871." The He Sapa Reparations Alliance was established after Obama's inauguration to educate the Sioux people and propose a bill to Congress that would allocate 1.3 million acres of federal land within the Black Hills to the tribe. To this day, the dispute of the Black Hills is ongoing with the trust estimated to be worth nearly $1.3 billion and sources believe principles of restorative justice may be the best solution to addressing this century-old dispute.

Fort Stanwix, New York

While the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution, addressed land sovereignty disputes between the British Crown and the colonies, it neglected to settle hostilities between indigenous people-specifically those who fought on the side of the British, as four of the members of the Haudenosaunee did-and colonists. In October 1784 the newly formed United States government facilitated negotiations with representatives from the Six Nations in Fort Stanwix, New York. The treaty produced in 1784 resulted in Indians giving up their territory within the Ohio River Valley and the U.S. guaranteeing the Haudenosaunee six million acres-about half of what is present-day New York-as permanent homelands.

Unenthusiastic about the treaty's conditions, the state of New York secured a series of twenty-six "leases", many of them lasting 999 years on all native territories within its boundaries. Led to believe that they had already lost their land to the New York Genesee Company, the Haudenosaunee agreed to land leasing which was presented by New York Governor George Clinton as a means by which the indigenous could maintain sovereignty over their land. On August 28, 1788, the Oneidas leased five million acres to the state in exchange for $2,000 in cash, $2,000 in clothing, $1,000 in provisions and $600 annual rent. The other two tribes followed with similar arrangements.

The Holland Land Company gained control over all but ten acres of the native land leased to the state on 15 September 1797. These 397 square miles were subsequently parceled out and subleased to whites, allegedly ending the native title to land. Despite Iroquois protests, federal authorities did virtually nothing to correct the injustice. Certain of losing all of their lands, in 1831 most of the Oneidas asked that what was left of their holdings be exchanged for 500,000 acres purchased from the Menominees in Wisconsin. President Andrew Jackson, committed to Indian Removal west of the Mississippi, agreed.

The Treaty of Buffalo Creek signed on 15 January 1838, directly ceded 102,069 acres of Seneca land to the Ogden company for $202,000, a sum that was divided evenly between the government-to hold in trust for Indians-and non-Indian individuals who wanted to buy and improve the plots. All that was left of the Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga and Tuscarora holding was extinguished at a total cost of $400,000 to Ogden.

After Indian complaints, a second Treaty of Buffalo was written in 1842 in attempts to mediate tension. Under this treaty the Haudenosaunee were given the right to reside in New York and small areas of reservations were restored by the U.S. government.

These agreements were largely ineffective in protecting Native American land. By 1889 eighty percent of all Iroquois reservation land in New York was leased by non-Haudenosaunees.

The modern-day Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations are located in Northern Arizona, near the Four Corners area. The Hopi reservation is 2,531.773 square miles within Arizona and lies surrounded by the greater Navajo reservation which spans 27,413 square miles and extends slightly into the states of New Mexico and Utah. The Hopi, also known as the Pueblo people, made many spiritually motivated migrations throughout the Southwest before settling in present-day Northern Arizona. The Navajo people also migrated throughout western North America following spiritual commands before settling near the Grand Canyon area. The two tribes peacefully coexisted and even traded and exchanged ideas with each other. However, their way of life was threatened when the "New people", what the Navajo called white settlers, began executing Natives across the continent and claiming their land, as a result of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act. War ensued between the Navajo people, who call themselves the Diné, and new Americans. The result was the Long Walk in the early 1860s in which the entire tribe was forced to walk roughly 400 miles from Fort Canby (present-day Window Rock, Arizona) to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. This march is similar to the well known Cherokee "Trail of Tears" and like it, many of the tribe did not survive the trek. The roughly 11,000 tribe members were imprisoned here in what the United States government deemed an experimental Indian reservation that failed because it became too expensive, there were too many people to feed, and they were continuously raided by other native tribes. Consequently, in 1868, the Navajo were allowed to return to their homeland after signing the Treaty of Bosque Redondo. The treaty officially established the "Navajo Indian Reservation" in Northern Arizona. The term reservation is one that creates territorialities or claims on places. This treaty gave them the right to the land and semi-autonomous governance of it. The Hopi reservation, on the other hand, was created through an executive order by President Arthur in 1882.

A few years after the two reservations were established, the Dawes Allotment Act was passed under which communal tribal land was divvied up and allocated to each household in an attempt to enforce European-American farming styles where each family owns and works their own plot of land. This was a further act of enclosure by the U.S. government. Each family received 640 acres or less and the remaining land was deemed "surplus" because it was more than the tribes needed. This "surplus" land was then made available for purchase by American citizens.

The land designated to the Navajo and Hopi reservation was originally considered barren and unproductive by white settlers until 1921 when prospectors scoured the land for oil. The mining companies pressured the U.S. government to set up Native American councils on the reservations so that they could agree to contracts, specifically leases, in the name of the tribe.

During World War II, uranium was mined on the Diné and Hopi reservations. The dangers of radiation exposure were not adequately explained to the native people, who made up almost all the workforce of these mines, and lived in their immediate adjacency. As a result, some residents who lived near the uranium projects used the quarried rock from the mines to build their houses, these materials were radioactive and had detrimental health effects on the residents, including increased rates of kidney failure and cancer. During extraction some native children would play in large water pools which were heavily contaminated with uranium created by mining activities. The companies also failed to properly dispose of the radioactive waste which did and will continue to pollute the environment, including the natives' water sources. Many years later, these same men who worked the mines died from lung cancer, and their families received no form of financial compensation.

After the war ended, the American population boomed and energy demands soared. The utility companies needed a new source of power so they began the construction of coal-fired power plants. They placed these power plants in the four corners region. In the 1960s, John Boyden, an attorney working for both Peabody Coal and the Hopi tribe, the nation's largest coal producer, managed to gain rights to the Hopi land, including Black Mesa, a sacred location to both tribes which lay partially within the Joint Use Area of both tribes.

The mining companies, however, wanted more land but the joint ownership of the land made negotiations difficult. At the same time, Hopi and Navajo tribes were squabbling over land rights while Navajo livestock continuously grazed on Hopi land. Boyden took advantage of this situation, presenting it to the House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs claiming that if the government did not step in and do something, a bloody war would ensue between the tribes. Congressmen agreed to pass the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974 which forced any Hopi and Navajo people living on the other's land to relocate. This affected 6,000 Navajo people and ultimately benefitted coal companies the most who could now more easily access the disputed land. Instead of using military violence to deal with those who refused to move, the government passed what became known as the Bennett Freeze to encourage the people to leave. The Bennett Freeze banned 1.5 million acres of Navajo land from any type of development, including paving roadways and even roof repair. This was meant to be a temporary incentive to push tribe negotiations but lasted over forty years until 2009 when President Obama lifted the moratorium.[failed verification ] Still, the legacy of the Bennett Freeze looms over the region as seen by the nearly third-world conditions on the reservation - seventy-five percent of people do not have access to electricity and housing situations are poor.

The reservations of the Five Civilized Tribes that were the subject of McGirt v. Oklahoma

Much of what is now Oklahoma was considered Indian Territory from the 1830s. The tribes in the area attempted to join the union as the native State of Sequoyah in 1905 as a means of retaining control of their lands, but this was unsuccessful and the lands were merged into Oklahoma with the Enabling Act of 1906. This act had been taken to disestablish the reservation in order for the foundation of the state to proceed. In July 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the area, about half of the modern state, never lost its status as a native reservation. This includes the city of Tulsa. The area includes lands of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee and Seminole. The ruling is based on an 1832 treaty, which the court ruled was still in force, adding that "Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word."

Red Cliff Indian Reservation in Wisconsin during their annual pow wow

Many Native Americans who live on reservations deal with the federal government through two agencies: the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service.

The standard of living on some reservations is comparable to that in the developing world, with problems of infant mortality, low life expectancy, poor nutrition, poverty, and alcohol and drug abuse. The two poorest counties in the United States are Buffalo County, South Dakota, home of the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, and Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, home of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, according to data compiled by the 2000 census. This disparity in living standards can partly be explained by centuries long instances of settler colonialism which have systematically harmed indigenous people's relations with land, and have attempted to erase their cultural ways of life. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte has stated,

"While Indigenous peoples, as any society, have long histories of adapting to change, colonialism caused changes at such a rapid pace that many Indigenous peoples became vulnerable to harms, from health problems related to new diets to erosion of their cultures to the destruction of Indigenous diplomacy, to which they were not as susceptible prior to colonization."

This has resulted in an ever widening disparity between native peoples and the rest of the United States.

It is commonly believed that environmentalism and a connectedness to nature are ingrained in the Native American culture. However, this is a generalization. In recent years, cultural historians have set out to reconstruct and complicate this notion as what they claim to be a culturally inaccurate romanticism. Others recognize the differences between the attitudes and perspectives that emerge from a comparison of Western European philosophy and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Indigenous peoples, especially when considering natural resource conflicts and management strategies involving multiple parties.

The lands on which reservations are located are disproportionately low in natural resources and quality soil conducive to fostering economic prosperity. Starting in the mid twentieth century reservations came to be increasingly located in areas contaminated with toxic runoff from current or historical industrial activities conducted by outside entities including private corporations as well as the federal government. According to anthropologists Merrill Singer and Derrick Hodge: "The toxic and poor land quality of Native American lands is neither a historical accident nor the result of any cultural deficiency on their part, but rather is the result of aggressive westward economic expansion. This process was calculated and unconcerned with indigenous wellbeing. [...] Thus, federal policy, including the Indian Removal Act of 1830, was designed to displace Native Americans from coveted land and to relocate them to areas seen as relatively "valueless by nineteenth century standards"

Communities living on native reservations are also disproportionately affected by environmental hazards. Due to them being deemed as "undesirable", lands on and near reservations are often used by the U.S. government and private industries as areas for environmentally hazardous activities. These activities include uranium mining, nuclear waste disposal, and military testing. Due to this, many reservation communities have been subjected to adverse health issues. Specifically, according to scholar Traci Lynn Voyles, the Navajo Nation has been affected for decades by uranium mining and nuclear waste dumping:

"Radiation-related diseases are now endemic to many parts of the Navajo Nation, claiming the health and lives of former miners to be sure but also those of Navajos who would never see the inside of a mine. Diné children have a rate of testicular and ovarian cancer fifteen times the national average, and a fatal neurological disease called Navajo neuropathy has been closely linked to ingesting uranium-contaminated water during pregnancy".

Other reservation communities have been subjected to instances like this as well. According to scholar Winona LaDuke, the Paiute- Shoshone community was deliberately exposed to radiation throughout the latter half of the 20th century:

"In 1951 the Atomic Energy Commission set up the Nevada Test Site within Western Shoshone territory as a proving grounds for nuclear weapons. Between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. and UK exploded 1,054 nuclear devices above and below ground [...] According to Sanchez, the Atomic Energy Commission would deliberately wait for clouds to blow north before conducting tests, so that the fallout would avoid any heavily populated areas such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This meant that the Shoshones would get a larger dose."

Many Indigenous communities have also been subjected to the degradation of sacred lands in favor of resource extraction. Around 79 percent of the lithium deposits on U.S. soil are within 35 miles of Indian reservations. Thacker Pass is home to both one of the largest lithium deposits in the world and home to a sacred burial site of multiple tribes including the Pitt River and Paiute. The mining company, Lithium Nevada, was recently granted permission to mine the area by the Bureau of Land Management. Tribal members argue that these permits were unlawfully issued, and that "the BLM notified only three of Nevada's 27 tribes about the mine".

Historically, Indigenous Groups have had little say when it comes to which land they are designated to occupy, as well as what happens to the land. This can be explained by the following excerpt from an academic journal on the impacts of climate change in the Arctic: "While a government-to-government relationship is now officially required, these cases (which continue to define the indigenous/federal relationship in the U.S.) instituted a federal 'trust responsibility' for indigenous people in the U.S., codifying a legal relationship of paternalism that limits the autonomy of tribal governments. The United States government is thus under a legal obligation to protect the lands, resources and traditionally used areas of indigenous peoples, and government agencies are required to consult with tribal governments and Alaska Native Corporations in natural resource decision-making. While some view this form of representation as the best and only practical means of influencing Northern policy, the actual involvement of tribal governments has been limited, and seen as perfunctory, and may be precluded by the procedural and structural mandates of federal law and legal precedent." We can see this with the amount of Reservations placed near massive construction projects that lead to pollution, such as Landfills or the Dakotas Access Pipeline. In addition, the lands that Indigenous People are designated to occupy by the federal government typically have difficulties already. As explained by scholars Gregory Hooks and Chad Smith in their academic journal connecting the focus on production to environmental issues, "Federally owned and Native American lands tended to be in close proximity, and they had a great deal in common: they were concentrated in the states west of the Mississippi, and they tended to be lands that were too dry, remote, or barren to attract the attention of settlers and corporations."

Notes

Further reading

J. P. Allen and E. Turner, Changing Faces, Changing Places: Mapping Southern Californians (Northridge, CA: The Center for Geographical Studies, California State University, Northridge, 2002).

George Pierre Castle and Robert L. Bee, eds., State and Reservation: New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992)

Richmond L. Clow and Imre Sutton, eds., Trusteeship in Change: Toward Tribal Autonomy in Resource Management (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2001).

Wade Davies and Richmond L. Clow, American Indian Sovereignty and Law: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009).

T. J. Ferguson and E. Richard Hart, A Zuni Atlas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985)

David H. Getches, Charles F. Wilkinson, and Robert A. Williams, Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law, 4th ed. (St. Paul: West Group, 1998).

Klaus Frantz, "Indian Reservations in the United States", Geography Research Paper 241 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

James M. Goodman, The Navajo Atlas: Environments, Resources, People, and History of the Diné Bikeyah (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982).

J. P. Kinney, A Continent Lost: A Civilization Won: Indian Land Tenure in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937)

Francis Paul Prucha, Atlas of American Indian Affairs (Norman: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).

C. C. Royce, comp., Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 18th Annual Report, 1896-97, pt. 2 (Wash., D. C.: Bureau of American Ethnology; GPO 1899)

Imre Sutton, "Cartographic Review of Indian Land Tenure and Territoriality: A Schematic Approach", American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 26:2 (2002): 63-113.

Imre Sutton, Indian Land Tenure: Bibliographical Essays and a Guide to the Literature (NY: Clearwater Publ. 1975).

Imre Sutton, ed., "The Political Geography of Indian Country", American Indian Culture and Resource Journal, 15()2):1-169 (1991).

Imre Sutton, "Sovereign States and the Changing Definition of the Indian Reservation", Geographical Review, 66:3 (1976): 281-295.

Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, ed., Tiller's Guide to Indian Country: Economic Profiles of American Indian Reservations (Albuquerque: BowArrow Pub., 1996/2005)

David J. Wishart and Oliver Froehling, "Land Ownership, Population and Jurisdiction: the Case of the 'Devils Lake Sioux Tribe v. North Dakota Public Service Commission'", American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 20(2): 33-58 (1996).

Laura Woodward-Ney, Mapping Identity: The Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation, 1803-1902 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004)

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An American Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose government is semi-sovereign, subject to regulations passed by the United States Congress and administered by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not to the U.S.

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The use of art has been used as a form of expression in the Native American way of life for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Just like music plays an important role in Native American culture, art has a very special place as well. The use of art has been used as a form of expression in the Native American way of life for hundreds, even thousands of years. Most art was created as a symbol, such as a bear, walrus, eagle, or people. The materials to make this artwork varied from rocks, feathers, cloth, clay, and fabric.

Basket weaving was a very popular form of artwork that served a dual purpose. Reeds and cornhusks were woven together to create intricate baskets. The material would be dyed to make interesting tribal patterns, resulting in a beautiful piece of art that was also useful, as the baskets were used to transport fruits and vegetables. Blanket weaving was also a very common Native American art practice. Women would spend many hours weaving threads together to create unbelievable colorful blankets in a rainbow of patterns and designs. The Navajo tribe is very well known for their hand woven blankets.

In the colder regions, Native Americans enjoyed creating art as homage to their animal friends. Walruses were commonly carved out of whales' teeth, and eagles and bears were made of rock. Pendants and statues were often created to symbolize the respect the tribes had for the animals. Instruments and weapons were also considered a form of art for Native Americans, as everything they made was done with care and time. Totem poles were probably the most elaborate form of Native American art. These huge, tall wooden sculptures represented generations of family members. Each "face" in the totem pole was a different representation, ranging from animals' faces to people faces, and wings would often be protruding from the totem pole as well. This has long been a symbol of Native American heritage, and a truly important part of their culture of art.

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Responsive Website Design by Michael Rose http://www.rosemconsulting.com

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Just like music plays an important role in Native American culture, art has a very special place as well. The use of art has been used as a form of expression in the Native American way of life for hundreds, even thousands of years.

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Faust Gallery | Contemporary Art and Jewelry | Faust Gallery

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Indigenous art is a widely studied, revered, and celebrated field in global society. We spend significant amounts of time analyzing the layered meaning, context, and purpose of the native art form.

When it comes to Native American art, we have learned through the insights of American Indian peoples and the study of history much about the role it has and continues to play in its respective culture. Let's learn a little bit more about some of the most prominent functions of American Indian art, so we're able to better understand and appreciate the beauty of its traditional and modern forms!

Native American Art as a Practical Tool

Many early American Indian art pieces were actually made to serve a pragmatic function. Pottery, for example, was more than just ornamental sculpture. Creating pottery was a means of supplying dishes and storage for women to use for gathering and in the home. Women also partook in basket and blanket weaving-two very celebrated and useful styles of Native American art.

The design and construction of weapons, tools, and armor was another art form that served a practical purpose. Many of these pieces were painted with intricate symbols and patterns to protect the warriors and aid the men who used them.

Native American Art as an Expression of Culture

Traditional forms of indigenous art-most of which are still practiced today-were a means for Native Americans to pay homage to their societal values and customs. They used a wide variety of mediums to signify some of their defining individual and cultural beliefs.

Religion

As with every culture, religion has a powerful influence over the indigenous peoples. Art was and continues to be a way to celebrate their ideology. They weaved and painted religious symbols into crafts of all kind. Pieces were created to please deities, soothe angry gods wreaking havoc through nature, observe new spirits, and frighten away evil ones. Native Americans created a lot of their art in an effort to control their physical environment.

Heritage

American Indian art was also made to honor family and tribal ancestry. One of the most prominent emblems constructed to show respect for the family was a totem pole. These were large, elaborate, wooden sculptures carved in detail with the faces of ancestors or sometimes even animals representing them. Totem poles were erected, and other mediums used, to represent and esteem generations of family and prominent tribe members.

At the Faust Gallery, we use our exhibits to highlight distinguished American Indian art pieces that exemplify the important role art has in Native American culture! We also offer many of these works for sale, so they can function as stunning additions to your home and art collection. Contact us to learn more about our current exhibition and the remarkable selection of Native American art we have available!

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How Does Art Function in Native American Culture? | Faust Gallery

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Indigenous art is a widely studied, revered, and celebrated field in global society. We spend significant amounts of time analyzing the layered meaning, context, and purpose of the native art form. When it comes to Native American art, we have learned through the insights of American Indian peoples and the study of history much about the role it has and continues to play in its respective culture.

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Various Native American tribes, in addition to the Navajo, make distinctively fascinating pottery known as horsehair pottery. Horsehair pottery is actually an ancient process, and results in beautiful as well as cherished items of art. It's said that horsehair pottery was initially stumbled on by a pueblo artisan whose lengthy tresses blew up against new pottery she was extracting of a very hot kiln. The hair stuck and quickly carbonized. The outcome was so fascinating that she copied it using hairs from a horse's tail.

A number of the finest quality, traditional, Native American made craft and decor originates from tribal artisans in the Southwest. The Navajo Nation is actually the largest reservation within the United States, spread over over 26,000 square miles in northeast Arizona, southeast Utah and northwest New Mexico. The Navajos rely on the revenue that they obtain through marketing their hand crafted pottery, jewelry, rugs, crafts and artifacts. Navajo horsehair pottery has become extremely popular with southwestern art enthusiasts because of the extraordinary variations produced by hair taken from the mane or tail of a horse and added onto the pottery's surface while in the firing process.

Frequently utilized to honor the actual delivery of a foal, as well as the existence of an honored horse, this unique Indian pottery is created much as the name signifies, although it is a somewhat complex as well as at times a dangerous method. The process for making horsehair pottery is an ancient process, that has been updated for modern kilns, ceramics and pottery. The items are fired at low temperature (not to surpass 1700 degrees Fahrenheit) and the kiln is shut off and allowed to cool to about 1050 degrees Fahrenheit. The pieces are taken from the kiln one at a time and strings of horsehair are dropped about the very hot piece. The horsehair burns off and leaves the distinctive lines. The smoke from the combusting horsehair additionally results in unique shading on the glaze. Because of the individual piece at a time method as well as the fact that the horsehair is positioned on each piece manually, no two items will actually be exactly the same. Feathers and sawdust are also occasionally utilized in this process.

You can click here to see a variety of beautiful Native American Horsehair Pottery and Horsehair Sculptures created by the Master Navajo Artist, Tom Vail. He and his talented family live in New Mexico. His pottery is much sought after and every piece comes with a certificate of authenticity that guarantees their Native American origin. Many of the pieces shown here on our website are example pieces of Tom's work, and since each piece is carefully handmade and because of the unique character of horse hair pottery, your piece of Navajo pottery will be uniquely different from the ones pictured here.

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Various Native American tribes, in addition to the Navajo, make distinctively fascinating pottery known as horsehair pottery. Horsehair pottery is actually an ancient process, and results in beautiful as well as cherished items of art. It's said that horsehair pottery was initially stumbled on by a pueblo artisan whose lengthy tresses blew up against new pottery she was extracting of a very hot kiln.

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NAVAJO HORSEHAIR POTTERY is created by applying actual horsehair to the finished pottery piece. Immediately after the prepared ceramic clay pot has been fired, a thin layer of horsehair is evenly spread over the top of the pottery. Precise temperatures are required to allow the horsehair to properly burn onto the the pottery, creating the unique marble effect. The pottery is then wiped with a matte glaze finish. Each piece is one of a kind.
The horse is highly regarded in many cultures, representing the essence of stamina, agility, beauty and strength.

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American Indian Jewelry, Native American Gift Store Arizona | Joe Wilcox Indian Den

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NAVAJO HORSEHAIR POTTERY is created by applying actual horsehair to the finished pottery piece. Immediately after the prepared ceramic clay pot has been fired, a thin layer of horsehair is evenly spread over the top of the pottery. Precise temperatures are required to allow the horsehair to properly burn onto the the pottery, creating the unique marble effect.

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Pottery - Native American, Clay, Art | Britannica

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Pottery - Native American, Clay, Art: The American Indians are of Asiatic descent; their route to the New World was from Siberia into Alaska across the Bering Strait. The usually quoted period of their migration is between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago. Since they were nomadic peoples, it is unlikely that they brought the knowledge of pottery making with them. When pottery making did begin, it was fundamentally unlike any known work from the Old World, and the few remote resemblances to Oriental motifs are almost certainly fortuitous. The wheel remained unknown until the arrival of Europeans, although there is reason to think that a turntable,

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The earliest documented Native American pottery that's been discovered dates back to around 4,500 years ago. This could be considered relatively modern in the pottery world, given that the oldest pieces of pottery ever found date back around 20,000 years ago-crockery wares, unearthed in the Xianrendong Cave in China's Jiangxi Province.

As with most early pottery, Native American pottery was born out of necessity and its uses included cooking, storing grains, and holding water. It's thought that Native Americans began with covering cooking baskets (made of woven casings) with mud. Wood coals were then heated and placed within the basket to cook the food. They soon found out that the heat actually hardened the mud clay and made it durable enough to be used alone for cooking, without the need for the woven cased basket. Archeologists realized this methodology after many of the ancient clay pots that were found had indentions and textures, which had come from a basket.

How Was the Pottery Made?

The clay Native Americans used was usually collected from hillsides or nearby streams. The process is thought to have been a difficult one, as the clay had to be first mined and then purified. It's been documented that Native Americans put on ritual ceremonies when they were extracting the clay. As with all ancient methods of pottery, the mud clay had to be mixed with another substance to make sure there was less shrinkage (this is what causes cracks in pottery). Native American potters tended to mix the clay with materials such as sand, plant fibers, and, in some cases, ground mussel shells.

Most Native American pottery was made by hand (there's been little documentation of a wheel being used), using very traditional techniques. Coiling was the most popular method, and long coils were rolled out into thin sausage shapes and then built round and round on top of each other to make the walls of the shaped pot. Once all the coils were in place, the pot would have been smoothed carefully by hand. Wedging (to remove all of the air bubbles from the clay) was done by beating the piece of clay against a rock or stone. Pinch pots were also common and done by hand, although coiling tends to be an easier and more stable method for creating larger pots and vessels, particularly for deep bowls that were used to cook over an open fire. When finished, pots were left out in the sun to dry and then heated in a fire to make sure all the water was removed and the clay had turned to pottery.

Uses Across Different Tribes and Regions

Interestingly, not all Native American tribes used pottery as a large part of their daily life, because some tribes were nomadic and pottery, being fragile, did not transport well on their frequent journeys. Similarly, most of the pottery was found in tribes that relied on farming rather than hunting, as they had more to store. Within some tribes, they created pots with indented bases, so that they could be used to hold water and be carried on someone's head.

Native American pottery development is said to have spread from Mesoamerica up to Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi. While the techniques across the regions were fairly similar, it was in decoration and design that the Native American tribes' pottery differed. Southwestern tribes often used patterns like snakes or feathers or everyday scenes from life in their glazing, while Anasazi pottery is famed for its use of beautiful geometric shapes.

Potters from the Zuni tribes (who were based near the border of New Mexico) and the Hopi tribes (in north-western Arizona) were inspired by wildlife to decorate their pots, and drawings of things like flowers and even dragonflies were found etched onto the pots.

Over the years, color was introduced to Native American pottery, with more recent pottery being extremely colorful. Some tribes used designs to mark the bottom of their pottery, like a modern-day stamp. The Navajo potters were way ahead of the curve, using horsehair pottery. This decorative technique involves horsehair being put on the pot during the high firing process to create striking and creative markings.

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Everything You Need to Know About Native American Pottery

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The earliest documented Native American pottery that's been discovered dates back to around 4,500 years ago. This could be considered relatively modern in the pottery world, given that the oldest pieces of pottery ever found date back around 20,000 years ago-crockery wares, unearthed in the Xianrendong Cave in China's Jiangxi Province.

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Native American Technology and Art

FIRING NATIVE AMERICAN POTTERY OUTSIDE IN A FIRE PIT

Traditional Pottery Firing

Native Americans of New England fired their pottery outdoors. After drying slowly for several days, pottery is ready to be baked in a fire. On a windless day, a shallow pit is dug (1) and a preparation fire is built to warm the pots next to and to preheat the rocks (2) which the pottery will rest on during their firing. After the first fire has burned to ashes, the warmed pots (3) are placed upside down without their sides touching. Thickly split hardwood (4) is placed in a teepee style over the pots. Quicker burning thin kindling (5) is put under the pots and over the sides of the thicker wood. The temperature of the fire can reach 1500 degrees or more. Avoid any rapid temperature changes and allow the fire to burn down after 1 1/2 hours. Bank the fire with wet leaves or grass and then cover over with light sod, leaving a small smoke hole in the top. Allow this to cool for an hour before removing pots. In contemporary firings, a few tin sheets (6) will protect pottery from smoke and fire. Tin cans (7) can also be substituted for rocks.

Contemporary Pottery Firing

Return to Background of Southern New England Pottery

Pottery Bibliography and Books to Buy On-Line

Return to NativeTech's Main Pottery Menu

Text and Graphics
© 1994 -Tara Prindle
unless otherwise cited.

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NativeTech: FIRING NATIVE AMERICAN POTTERY

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Native American Technology & Art: a topically organized educational web site emphasizing the Eastern Woodlands region, organized into categories of Beadwork, Birds & Feathers, Clay & Pottery, Leather & Clothes, Metalwork, Plants & Trees, Porcupine Quills, Stonework & Tools, Weaving & Cordage, Games & Toys and Food & Recipes.

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Native American Issues Today | Current Problems & Struggles 2023

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Contemporary Native Americans face many challenges today. If you watch the news you'll see headlines about mascots, celebrities wearing headdresses, and %

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"We Are Still Here" --- A Documentary on Today's Young Native Americans

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NAA - Native American Aid - a program of National Relief Charities - Native American Aid

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A Program of Partnership With Native Americans (formerly National Relief Charities) © 2015 Native American Aid Contact Information: 2401 Eglin St. Rapid City, SD 57703 Toll-free: (877) 825-2983 Email: info@naaprograms.org Web site: www.naaprograms.org Privacy Policy

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Like many Indian reservations scattered throughout the United States, Pine Ridge is a place that is forgotten by many people living in South Dakota, and it is virtually unheard of across American society.

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is located in the Great Plains on the border of Nebraska, bypassed by those travelling along Interstate 90 as it winds its way towards the Black Hills and Rocky Mountains.

In the late 1800s, Native American reservations were set up throughout much of America, creating arbitrary divisions across tribal boundaries.

In 1890 approximately 350 men, women, and children were brutally murdered at the hands of US soldiers at the Wounded Knee Massacre. Today, Pine Ridge is in one of the poorest counties in the United States.

"A lot of people say [living on the reservation] is like trash - a lot of people leave, you know? But to me it's like living in the ghetto; it ain't no different from the city," explains Rich Lone Elk.

"People are fighting each other, shooting each other, someone's getting beat up every other night."

Over the years, the language and traditions of the Lakota people have become less prevalent among the younger generations, who frequently turn to gang culture in search of identity and belonging.

Throughout the reservation, the diabetes rate is 800 per cent higher than the national average with an average life expectancy of approximately fifty years old.

The unemployment rate of Pine Ridge hovers around eighty per cent, with a majority of the population living under federal poverty standards.

Despite the area's history of oppression, the culture and respect running through the Lakota people's way of life is unmatched. Throughout the reservation, residents show amazing resilience, respect for their culture and a willingness to embrace the future.

Many community elders are involved in ongoing efforts to inspire the youth, involving them in cultural and spiritual activities in the hope that they will reconnect with their cultural heritage and preserve it along the way.

Healthy food is difficult to come by on the reservation and is often more expensive. In addition, the commodity food provided by the federal government is largely inappropriate for the highly diabetic population.

"Parents nowadays aren't really being parents," she explains. "I have always said they need to step up to the plate and start teaching these children about our traditions and culture - showing them how we lived off of Mother Earth and what good lives we lived."

As Rich Lone Elk explains: "There's a lot of fear going on nowadays. Young people, they can't even walk the streets no more."

Many of the tribal elders feel a loss of tradition and respect among the youth, but some of the younger children remain in awe.

Rich Lone Elk (not pictured) explains the role rap music has come to play: "I redeem myself every time I rap. Whenever I rap, I release my demon. It's the way I live, ya know?"

Check out the portfolio of photographer Matthew Williams.

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What life on a Native American reservation really looks like

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For the residents of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, existence is caged by invisible borders.

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s I left my small, remote hometown of Joseph, Oregon, driving two hours to the nearest airport to fly south, I thought about my father, a Caddo/Delaware Native American man who spent most of his life in the Bay Area.

Dad arrived in California as a child due to the assimilation policies enacted by the US government in the 1950s, which forcefully relocated Native Americans from their land into urban areas to become "productive" members of society. It also intentionally placed Indian orphans into the homes of white families. Today, 78% of Native Americans live off-reservation, and 72% live in urban or suburban environments.

Those policies had devastating effects. Relocated tribal members became isolated from their communities. Low paying jobs and higher expenses, combined with the inability to return to reservations which had often been dissolved, left many in precarious circumstances.

In the case of my dad, this translated to growing up on the rough streets of Richmond, CA, and spending much of his life burying his trauma at the bottom of a bottle. He was orphaned twice; first when my Native grandmother died in our tribal territory, then when his adopted white mother passed when he was 16. Dad never knew who his birth father was, and his adopted father was also an alcoholic who died not many years after his wife.

My dad's love for his children was deep, but so was his pain.As a result, my father was barely a physical presence in my life, let alone an economic one. He was terrible with money: if he had it, he spent it.

Indigenous people are not supposed to have money. We were never meant to. My tribes occupied our homelands consistently for 13,000 years without it, and we were rich beyond our wildest dreams. We had advanced seasonal permaculture, hunting and fishing patterns, and vast amounts of leisure time. Yet we've had about 150 years to change 13,000 years of subsistence lifestyle into a complete dependence on money. To us, that is an incredibly weakened state.

With the civil rights movement, however, came a rebirth in self-determination. Groups such as the American Indian Movement were founded to put political pressure on the federal government. Many urban Natives found ways to rise above their challenges, eventually forming the "Native middle class". They began contributing back to their original communities.

This summer, I decided to document the experiences of some of the 140,000 Native Americans who call the Bay Area home. There, 18.50% of the Native population live below the poverty level, versus 10.4% of the white population. Among those living below poverty level, 24% of those are in "deep poverty".

According to Janeen Comenote, executive director of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition, "poverty remains one of the most challenging aspects to contemporary urban Indian life. While I do recognize that a sizable chunk of our populations are solidly middle class, every Native person I know has either experienced poverty or has a family member who is. Housing and homelessness remain at the top of the list of challenges."

Chah-tah Gould: ' Even the ones who are into gangs, they still go to powwows'

Chah-tah Gould stands in front of a banner listing the names of the companies that built stores on top of his tribe's burial shellmound. These days, it is known as the Bay Street Shopping Mall in Emeryville. He will not enter the plaza any further than this point due to it being a violation of his tribe's sacred protocol: the buildings are desecrating his ancestors' graves.

Sometimes, his friends will go to the mall and forget about his relationship with the land - he alwaysasks them to stop so he can get out of the car.

Chah-tah, a lifelong Oakland resident, is one of few Ohlone tribal members left. The Ohlone went nearly extinct after generations of slavery and colonization by Spain, Mexico, and the US; they are currently petitioning for federal recognition.

His mother, Corrina Gould, has been one of the lead organizers against the construction of the mall. While some graves were interred, many believe that hundreds of graves and human remains still lie underneath the development. On Black Friday every year, Native people gather to protest outside the mall and inform shoppers about the history of the place.

"A lot of city Natives grow up in foster care," says Chah-tah. "Growing up they try to fit in, and fitting in Oakland is getting into gang stuff, fighting, everything like that. It happens a lot, even to non-city Natives."

"I feel like on reservations, it's a whole different story. They grow up around their culture. But when they transition to here, it's a whole different game. To fit in, they start acting and thinking differently, and it gets to the point where it's almost like a disease. You know, to be cool, you start drinking, you start smoking, all this other stuff. I got into some stuff like that. Luckily for me I got away from all of it. I realized, 'this isn't who I am'."

There's hope, however. "Even the ones who are into gangs and stuff, they still go to powwows," Chah-tah says. "I like that a lot of Natives do know their culture."

I ask him how he stays away from negative influences. "There are a lot of centers and programs," he says. "But I feel like you have to put effort into staying in the Native community. Out here you have to deal with life - you know, the American-type life; taxes, jobs, everything like that. So it gets to a point where you have to choose. Materialistic things can become the priority and you miss out on the whole experience of what your people are about."

Michelle Lot: 'I can't find a spot that the government tells me I'm not trespassing on'

Sporting a large "No DAPL" pin on her hat in the photo above, Michelle Lot peels "bear root medicine" for her son, who suffers from a lung ailment. He is seated underneath a towel in the background steaming the root in a coffee pot to inhale the root's medicinal vapors.

I met Michelle and her son in a homeless protest camp in Berkeley, underneath the Bay Area Rapid Transit line (Bart), which can be seen screeching by above her. It was reminiscent of a miniature Standing Rock camp, with protest signs against corporate greed along with an upside down American flag and a Veterans for Peace flag. Michelle is a former nurse, and she serves as the camp medic and "aunty".

Michelle is a leader in the homeless activist group First They Came For The Homeless, which describes itself as "a group of unhoused people organized on the streets of Berkeley for mutual support and to promote a political message regarding homelessness, homeless people, income inequality, and the privatization of the commons in the US".

"My happiness is to use the wind, the water, and the sun to fulfill my needs, yet I can't find a spot that the government tells me I'm not trespassing on. But I'm an Earthling," says Michelle.

Michael Horse: 'I am still amazed at the lack of knowledge of Native culture'

Michael Horse, who is Yaqui of Sonora, is an award-winning artist currently starring in the TV series Twin Peaks. He was recently at the Oakland Planning Commission to speak on behalf of a recurring sweat lodge ceremony - a Native spiritual tradition - which was banned by the city after a group of neighbors complained about the smoke from the fire used to heat rocks for the lodge twice a month (some of the complainants can be seen in the first and second rows behind him).

Many other residents and neighbors came forward to testify that the smoke did not bother them, and compared it to the smoke from countless BBQ's that happen in the neighborhood uncontested, or other people's backyard campfire pits.

Well over 100 supporters showed up to testify on behalf of allowing the ceremony, citing the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act. The planning commission overturned the ban.

"I am still amazed at the lack of knowledge of Native culture," says Michael. "It has been a struggle for so many years to try to educate people, especially elected officials, about our rights under the laws of the US to practice our religions and ceremonies and to pray in our own ways."

Patricia St Onge: 'The overwhelming experience of racism was so transformative'

Patricia St Onge owns the property on which the contested sweat lodge is built. She is a descendant of the Mohawk Tribe, as well as adopted Lakota. I visited Patricia at her home, which also serves as a community spiritual space for local spiritual practitioners.

"I grew up in New Hampshire in a little French Canadian enclave," says Patricia. "Because I have white skin privilege, and was living in a community where there was no Indian community to speak of, I never felt culturally Native. I married an African American man, and we had kids. The overwhelming experience of racism that we experienced as a family in New England was so transformative. From the time my kids were little, we had neighbors petition our landlord to evict us."

After a series of moves to various urban localities in the late 1980s, they finally moved to Oakland so Patricia could go to graduate school. "When we got here, we found a place, we found jobs," says Patricia. "In Boston my husband was a social worker and had clients who would rather not have a social worker at all than have a black man for a social worker. We became really close as a family because of all of this."

Patricia's experiences with racism against her family led her to seek the connection with her Native heritage. "When we finally got to Oakland in 1987, one of the first things I did was to look for the Indian community, and I found the Oakland Intertribal Friendship House. So we started going there and getting involved."

Patricia went on to become the founding director of Habitat For Humanity Oakland and worked as a nonprofit consultant. It wasn't long before she had to face another cultural challenge to her family's identity though. About five years ago the complaints about the sweat lodge began, eventually leading the city to ban them.

It wasn't until the week I visited Patricia, this July, that the ban was finally overturned.

Decoy Gallerina: 'I've had endless love-filled experiences in my life'

Decoy Gallerina is part of performance art group known as Theatre Group International and Radical Medicine Photograph: Joe Whittle

I met Decoy Gallerina after she gave testimony about how traditional Native ceremonies have helped her heal from abuse and trauma.

Decoy, a Chiricahua Apache tribal member and artist, rents a bedroom in a rundown ranch style "mansion" located in the Oakland hills with multiple roommates. I interviewed her out by the home's once impressive poolside, which the landlady had recently allowed her to fill with water again.

"Two years after my mother and father married, they divorced due to alcoholism on both their parts," says Decoy. "My mother, grandmother, aunt and I moved to the Bay Area through the Relocation Act."

Decoy had complicated relationships with her mother and aunt, but her grandmother "recognized and accepted me completely. I don't remember her ever saying one negative word to me, only encouragement."

"When my 13th year came, my grandmother left to take care of my schizophrenic uncle. In the past, when she would travel on her own, she would always return. This time, she simply disappeared from my life and my whole world changed. I lost not only my connection with her, but all the presence, love and acceptance of hundreds of relatives in Mescalero and Oklahoma." As a result, she was left on her own in her mid-teenage years, with no parental support.

When she was 15, Decoy was raped by an 18-year-old man. She became almost completely silent and withdrawn. "I was raped again when I was about 18 by a man 23-years-old or so," she says. "I never identified it as rape until years later when I was in a support group for suicide attempt survivors. I heard someone else tell her story and I said to myself, 'That happened to me', with absolutely no emotional connection to the thought."

Among American Indian and Alaska Native women, 56.1% have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime (over 70% of the perpetrators are non-Native).

I was profoundly struck by Decoy's words when she told me she was "so blessed" to have never become a prostitute or addict. There wasn't an ounce of cynicism in those words, but rather wholehearted gratitude.

"I've had endless beautiful and love-filled experiences in my life," she says. "I've studied art my whole life - dance, singing, writing, visual arts, performance, bead work with amazing and famous artists since I was tiny. I have been blessed to have the ability to absorb and produce almost any artistic form. Creator chose me as a vehicle for these things, is all I can say. I am an artistic being who has PTSD, and I've suffered from chronic, deep suicidal depression, OCD, low self esteem, and self-abusive behaviors for most of my life. Side by side with that I am a courageous, tenacious, kind and ferocious spirit."

She hopes her story can be an inspiration to others facing similar struggles.

Isabella Zizi: 'We are a minority mixed within a minority group'

Isabella's grandmother, Wanda Jean Bulletti, was relocated to the Bay Area from her reservation in the 1950s. Wanda had been Christianized and had given up her traditional ways, but she quietly stayed active her whole life reaching out to disenfranchised groups. She eventually helped to create the Native American health and cultural centers in Richmond. Today, Isabella continues that work as an organizer.

Growing up off-reservation in an urban environment outside her tribal community turned out to be a challenge. "We aren't able to culturally find out who we truly are because we've been displaced. I feel like that puts historical trauma on us, and we really just want to disconnect. It makes us not feel welcomed and not feel complete because we are a minority mixed within a minority group."

So she struggled finding a place to fit in. Natives are so dispersed and statistically sparse that it rarely allows creation of a peer subgroup in an off-reservation environment. "What am I going to do? Who am I going to talk to?" she found herself thinking as a teenager. "Going through that stage creates depression. It shuts us down living in an urban city," she says.

As she grew older and became more involved in Native activism, Isabella found ways to strengthen her Indigenous identity. "I feel like I am breaking that stereotypical mindset that all Natives live on reservations," says Isabella. "Although I don't live in my own territory, I am still connected to my Indigenous ways. There are many ways we still practice our ceremonies. We're able to be in prayer, or just be in a beautiful circle with different Natives here in the Bay Area in one of the most urban places I know of," she says with a laugh.

Star Morgan: 'They didn't know about our struggle until we made our voices heard'

Star Morgan is an 18-year-old member of the Navajo Nation. I asked her if she'd like to meet somewhere where she feels connected to her culture. She chose Twin Peaks, a hilltop at the crown of San Francisco overlooking the entire Bay Area. Chilly coastal fog rolled in around us. Zipping up our jackets, I commented on its biting effects and Star laughed at the complaints: "I love this!"

When she was 17, Star found a way to travel to the Standing Rock protest camp with a bunch of strangers. She was on the Backwater Bridge when over 150 people contracted hypothermia from police water cannons spraying them in below-freezing temperatures. Countless injuries were sustained from police armaments, including the near losses of an eye and an arm for two young women not much older than Star (my own daughter was shot at with rubber bullets while kneeling on the ground praying).

"We gotta stick together, because there's not very many of us," Star says with a chuckle. "We're supposed to stick together, and be unified. That's why when I went to Standing Rock, it was amazing. Over 300 tribes came together just to protect water! We stood our ground. It felt really empowering. People went to Standing Rock with little or no money and just the clothes they had on their back to stand up for what's right."

Star has struggled intensely with depression, anxiety and PTSD, and has witnessed severe violence in her life. She saw her brother, who suffers from bipolar disorder, beaten by police who didn't understand his strange behavior; he now has permanent brain damage. (According to the Center on Juvenile Crime and Justice, Native Americans are the most likely race to experience police violence in the US.)

She has been a mentee in the Native Mentorship in Public Health Program, which encourages physical, spiritual and mental wellness for Indigenous youth. The program provides a variety of activities to help prevent substance abuse and promote leadership, communication and self-empowerment skills.

"I don't want to be one of the ones to stay silent," she says. "I want to go and do something. It was healing to know people came from all over [to Standing Rock] just to protect the water. It was like a balance of really bad and really good at the same time."

My conversation with Star left me reflecting on the fact that no matter where I go in Indian Country, I see the same Indigenous values - ones that transcends far beyond economics. It's a value system that has nothing whatsoever to do with money.

Even though money is here to stay, so are our Indigenous ways. Is it possible for the two to exist in congruity? I don't know. But I can say that it is possible for Indigenous people to survive and thrive despite the incongruities that may be placed in their paths. It is illustrated time and again, whether in the refusal of the Standing Rock Sioux to take pipeline payoffs, in teenagers putting their bodies on the line, or in the resistance of the Ohlone to having their graves desecrated by consumerism.

An excellent demonstration of that value system is still exhibited today among many of the Pacific Northwest tribes who practice Potlatch culture, where the value of someone's wealth is measured by how much they are able to give away to their tribe and honored relations and guests. The more you are able to give away, the more social esteem and value as a "wealthy" person you earn. Your value within the culture is measured by how much you give, not by how much you take and accrue.

To me, values like that explain the humbling strength and resilience I found in every Native person I met in the course of this story.

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Most Native Americans live in cities, not reservations. Here are their stories

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s I left my small, remote hometown of Joseph, Oregon, driving two hours to the nearest airport to fly south, I thought about my father, a Caddo/Delaware Native American man who spent most of his life in the Bay Area.

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Finding an address on a map can be taken for granted in the age of GPS and smartphones. But centuries of forced relocation, disease and genocide have made it difficult to find where many Native American tribes once lived.

Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has pinpointed the locations and original names of hundreds of American Indian nations before their first contact with Europeans.

As a teenager, Carapella says he could never get his hands on a continental U.S. map like this, depicting more than 600 tribes - many now forgotten and lost to history. Now, the 34-year-old designs and sells maps as large as 3 by 4 feet with the names of tribes hovering over land they once occupied.

"I think a lot of people get blown away by, 'Wow, there were a lot of tribes, and they covered the whole country!' You know, this is Indian land," says Carapella, who calls himself a "mixed-blood Cherokee" and lives in a ranch house within the jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation.

For more than a decade, he consulted history books and library archives, called up tribal members and visited reservations as part of research for his map project, which began as pencil-marked poster boards on his bedroom wall. So far, he has designed maps of the continental U.S., Canada and Mexico. A map of Alaska is currently in the works.

What makes Carapella's maps distinctive is their display of both the original and commonly known names of Native American tribes, according to Doug Herman, senior geographer at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

"You can look at [Carapella's] map, and you can sort of get it immediately," Herman says. "This is Indian Country, and it's not the Indian Country that I thought it was because all these names are different."

He adds that some Native American groups got stuck with names chosen arbitrarily by European settlers. They were often derogatory names other tribes used to describe their rivals. For example, "Comanche" is derived from a word in Ute meaning "anyone who wants to fight me all the time," according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

"It's like having a map of North America where the United States is labeled 'gringos' and Mexico is labeled 'wetbacks,' " Herman says. "Naming is an exercise in power. Whether you're naming places or naming peoples, you are therefore asserting a power of sort of establishing what is reality and what is not."

Look at a map of Native American territory today, and you'll see tiny islands of reservation and trust land engulfed by acres upon acres ceded by treaty or taken by force. Carapella's maps serve as a reminder that the population of the American countryside stretches back long before 1776 and 1492.
Take a closer look at Aaron Carapella's map of the continental U.S. and Canada and his map of Mexico. He sells prints on his .
Carapella describes himself as a former "radical youngster" who used to lead protests against Columbus Day observances and supported other Native American causes. He says he now sees his mapmaking as another way to change perceptions in the U.S.

"This isn't really a protest," he explains. "But it's a way to convey the truth in a different way."

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The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast Finding an address on a map can be taken for granted in the age of GPS and smartphones. But centuries of forced relocation, disease and genocide have made it difficult to find where many Native American tribes once lived.

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Wikimedia Commons

The modern Middle Eastern crisis searing today was created the moment Europeans drew the boundaries at the end of the First World War. With the inconsiderate divisions, the Middle Easterners are rendered in a perpetual state of war over ethnic lineages and religious differences - a characteristic shrewdly reinforced by colonial masters.

Before the First World War began, the British Empire was the epitome of power as the largest colonial empire in the world, controlling nearly a quarter of the globe. Britain had kept feeding its desire for dominance and continued to ignore its responsibilities toward its colonies for over two centuries.

The British took extensive measures to exploit their colonies' resources and manpower for the benefit of their motherland. They collected taxes that met Britain's financial requirements and forced production of raw materials needed for Britain's industries and exports, thereby ruining the colonies' integrated and self-sustaining economies.

They ensured every spark of united opposition against them was suppressed with their policies such as the "divide and rule" strategy. The British highlighted religious differences to create discord as a means to facilitate their continued control of the colonies and to diffuse agitation against their misrule.

This bigoted approach created deep-seated rivalries amongst religions that have yet to resolve, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An invisible wall stands rigid in people's minds and the violence generated has left indelible marks in people's psyche.

While the British claimed to be on a civilising mission, their actions weren't even remotely aligned to this objective and failed to demonstrate a liberal approach. The concept of civilizing such ancient cultures was a flawed concept to begin with.

Compounded by unsatiated greed and imperialistic obsession, history has left no room to defend the British for the massive plundering and desolation placed over these countries.

The British displayed short-sightedness in their promises during the First World War when they promised the Jews a separate homeland in modern-day Palestinian region, while they'd already promised the same to the Arabs.

The Allies carved out nations thoughtlessly, without considering the ethnic and religious distinctions. Thus, they failed to ensure the future prosperity of the region.

In Saudi Arabia, anti-semitic views are instilled in children at an early age, according to "Saudi Arabia Uncovered," a documentary by James Jones. As ruthless as these teachings might be, they're an unhappy, important reminder of how deeply rooted these divisions have become.

Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates have been successful in building their new society not on European norms, but rather on the essence of what seemed viable for their society and culture. Many women in the Middle East still wear burqas as a cultural obligation and the official languages of these countries are native.

While Middle Eastern nations adopted Western emphasis on scientific and political advancement, they only inculcated the best for their country instead of imitating the world of the West in totality. Engagement with the Westerners equipped people with superior skills making the country potentially capable of competing with the West. And today, the abundance of oil and other natural resources has elevated the trading status and wealth of nations such as Egypt.

Despite the flourishing commercial sector of these nations, the political system isn't thriving today. The U.S., in conjunction with Britain, invaded Iraq to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein. While the invasion initiated the setup of a parliamentary form of government in Iraq, it also set ablaze insurgencies against the government and the rise of jihadist groups, such as ISIS.

While U.S. intervened in Iraq under the guise of humanitarian goals, the circumstances didn't move toward betterment. Moreover, the invading countries haven't demonstrated an initiative for rectifying the situation.

Actions of these so-called powerful countries show the game of establishing superiority hasn't receded. Countries edge and elbow each other to win international dominance: whether that be on military power, politics or economic matters.

Over the years, people from these countries have migrated to countries of the West that are supposedly secure with proper law enforcement. Unfortunately, they aren't received openly, struggle to be documented immigrants and are denied their rights. It's hard to deny that immigrants experience unequal treatment in the U.S. and not all of them find a place for themselves.

In this race to be the most powerful nation, humanitarian actions are no longer innate.

Intervening for selfish interests by overlooking human responsibility doesn't make a nation more powerful. Although the human species is a single community, divisions have been drawn as provinces, countries and continents. It's thus imperative and obligatory to openly provide selfless assistance of an unworldly nature looking beyond the contrived boundaries.

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Consequences of Colonialism: How It's Still Having an Effect Today

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The modern Middle Eastern crisis searing today was created the moment Europeans drew the boundaries at the end of the First World War. With the inconsiderate divisions, the Middle Easterners are rendered in a perpetual state of war over ethnic lineages and religious differences - a characteristic shrewdly reinforced by colonial masters.

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Recently an academic article, asserting the historical benefits of colonialism, created an outcry and a petition with over 10, 000 signatures calling for its removal.

The Case for Colonialism, published in Third World Quarterly by Bruce Gilley, argues Western colonialism was both "objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate" in most places where it existed.

Gilley, an associate professor of political science at Portland State University, claims the solution to poverty and economic underdevelopment in parts of the Global South is to reclaim "colonial modes of governance; by recolonizing some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch."

Understandably, the article faces widespread criticism for whitewashing a horrific history of human rights abuses. Current Affairs compared Gilley's distortion of history to Holocaust denial.

Last week, after many on the journal's editorial board resigned, the author issued a public apology for the "pain and anger" his article may have caused.

(Shutterstock)

Whether the article is ultimately retracted or not, its wide circulation necessitates that its claims be held up to careful historical scrutiny. As well, in light of current public debates on censorship and free speech versus hate speech, this is a discussion well worth having. Although this debate may seem as though it is merely academic, nothing could be further from the truth.

Although it may seem colonialist views are far behind us, a 2014 YouGov poll revealed 59 per cent of British people view the British Empire as "something to be proud of." Those proud of their colonial history outnumber critics of the Empire three to one. Similarly, 49 per cent believe the Empire benefited its former colonies.

Such views, often tied to nostalgia for old imperial glory, can help shape the foreign and domestic policies of Western countries.

Gilley has helped to justify these views by getting his opinions published in a peer review journal. In his article, Gilley attempts to provide evidence which proves colonialism was objectively beneficial to the colonized. He says historians are simply too politically correct to admit colonialism's benefits.

In fact, the opposite is true. In the overwhelming majority of cases, empirical research clearly provides the facts to prove colonialism inflicted grave political, psychological and economic harms on the colonized.

It takes a highly selective misreading of the evidence to claim that colonialism was anything other than a humanitarian disaster for most of the colonized. The publication of Gilley's article - despite the evidence of facts - calls into question the peer review process and academic standards of The Third World Quarterly.

Colonialism in India

As the largest colony of the world's largest imperial power, India is often cited by apologists for the British Empire as an example of "successful" colonialism. Actually, India provides a much more convincing case study for rebutting Gilley's argument.

With a population of over 1.3 billion and an economy predicted to become the world's third-largest by 2030, India is a modern day powerhouse. While many attribute this to British colonial rule, a look at the facts says otherwise.

From 1757 to 1947, the entire period of British rule, there was no increase in per capita income within the Indian subcontinent. This is a striking fact, given that, historically speaking, the Indian subcontinent was traditionally one of the wealthiest parts of the world.

As proven by the macroeconomic studies of experts such as K.N. Chaudhuri, India and China were central to an expansive world economy long before the first European traders managed to circumnavigate the African cape.

During the heyday of British rule, or the British Raj, from 1872 to 1921, Indian life expectancy dropped by a stunning 20 per cent. By contrast, during the 70 years since independence, Indian life expectancy has increased by approximately 66 per cent, or 27 years. A comparable increase of 65 per cent can also be observed in Pakistan, which was once part of British India.

Although many cite India's extensive rail network as a positive legacy of British colonialism, it is important to note the railroad was built with the express purpose of transporting colonial troops inland to quell revolt. And to transport food out of productive regions for export, even in times of famine.

This explains the fact that during the devastating famines of 1876-1879 and 1896-1902 in which 12 to 30 million Indians starved to death, mortality rates were highest in areas serviced by British rail lines.

(Shutterstock), CC BY

Colonialism did not benefit the colonized

India's experience is highly relevant for assessing the impact of colonialism, but it does not stand alone as the only example to refute Gilley's assertions. Gilley argues current poverty and instability within the Democratic Republic of the Congo proves the Congolese were better off under Belgian rule. The evidence says otherwise.

Since independence in 1960, life expectancy in the Congo has climbed steadily, from around 41 years on the eve of independence to 59 in 2015. This figure remains low compared to most other countries in the world. Nonetheless, it is high compared to what it was under Belgian rule.

Under colonial rule, the Congolese population declined by estimates ranging from three million to 13 million between 1885 and 1908 due to widespread disease, a coercive labour regime and endemic brutality.

Gilley argues the benefits of colonialism can be observed by comparing former colonies to countries with no significant colonial history. Yet his examples of the latter erroneously include Haiti (a French colony from 1697 to 1804), Libya (a direct colony of the Ottoman Empire from 1835 and of Italy from 1911), and Guatemala (occupied by Spain from 1524 to 1821).

By contrast, he neglects to mention Japan, a country that legitimately was never colonized and now boasts the third largest GDP on the planet, as well as Turkey, which up until recently was widely viewed as the most successful secular country in the Muslim world.

These counter-examples disprove Gilley's central thesis that non-Western countries are by definition incapable of reaching modernity without Western "guidance."

In short, the facts are in, but they do not paint the picture that Gilley and other imperial apologists would like to claim. Colonialism left deep scars on the Global South and for those genuinely interested in the welfare of non-Western countries, the first step is acknowledging this.

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Colonialism was a disaster and the facts prove it

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Recently an academic article, asserting the historical benefits of colonialism, created an outcry and a petition with over 10, 000 signatures calling for its removal. The Case for Colonialism, published in Third World Quarterly by Bruce Gilley, argues Western colonialism was both "objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate" in most places where it existed.

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Remnants of British imperialism remain. StarrGazr/flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND

Considerable attention has been directed at the plight of EU immigrants living in the UK following the Brexit vote, not least their role as "bargaining chips" in Britain's forthcoming exit negotiations from the EU. Less attention has been paid to the government's ongoing discriminatory immigration policies against its own citizens.

If you marry, as I did, a non-British or non-European spouse, make sure you have a minimum income of £18,600 (or £22,400 if you have a child). You'll also need thousands of pounds of additional cash for visa fees, biometric testing, and the newly-introduced £200 annual "health surcharge" if you want to have the privilege of remaining in your own country with your spouse and not be forced into exile or a life apart from your family.

Such policies reveal a state that, in order to ensure its welfare and security, is capable of rendering all of its citizens into what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has termed "bare life": individuals who are denied the protection of law and whose lives are therefore disposable.

In recent decades, the net of those reduced to "bare life" has widened to capture the white middle-class as well as the marginal sections of the population who are working-class or non-white. But the British state, through its empire, has a long history of reducing people - often entire populations - to this state of powerlessness. Few people today seem to remember or acknowledge this.

In a YouGov poll conducted in January 2016, 43% of those surveyed regarded empire as a "good thing". In a similar poll carried out two years ago, 49% of respondents thought that "former British colonies are now better off for having been part of the empire". Disturbingly, a third of participants also wished that Britain still had an empire.

Such attitudes reveal a lack of understanding of the nature and effects of colonial conquest and rule, spurred by insufficient education about the realities of empire. Historical analysis of empire has also tended to evaluate empire either "neutrally", or offer a triumphalist narrative that heralds the benefits of empire for Britain while ignoring its devastating impact on the peoples whose lands were taken, cultures transformed, and economic well-being was decimated.

The reality

Take the case of India. In the 17th century, it produced a quarter of the world's income - equal to the whole of Europe combined - and its per captia GDP was 80% that of Britain's. But standards of living in India fell rapidly following what the historian William Dalrymple has described as "the supreme act of corporate violence in world history" - the gradual conquest, plunder and subjugation of India by an English trading company with one of the most powerful armies in the world.

In just the half century following the dissolution of the East India Company and the imposition of crown rule in 1858 - the start of what is popularly known as the "Raj" - per capita income declined by over 50%, life expectancy fell by 20%, and between 12m and 29m Indians died in famines that the colonial regime largely facilitated instead of alleviating. So rather than leaving the colonised "better off", empire led instead to the creation of what some now term the "third world".

While the British liked to boast that they were bringing the "rule of law" to lawless peoples, they instead supplanted indigenous systems of law with ones that were alien, discriminatory and imposed by force. Colonial regimes also frequently suspended the "rule of law" in the face of real or imagined threats to their security. This meant that British colonies largely devolved into states of exception, in which the colonised were reduced to "bare life".

Them and us

There is another reason why we continue to regard empire in a positive light: the British largely see the effects of empire as being one-sided, as affecting "them" and not "us". But in Britain, even supporters of empire have long been troubled by the dangerous effects of empire on Britain itself. It's not possible to govern a quarter of the world's population despotically (as was the case at the height of Britain's empire) without profoundly shaping Britain in the process - including methods of managing "undesirable" segments of the population.

Such methods include the reduction of British citizens and their families to a state of "bare life". This is apparent in policies ranging from the immigration rules that have affected my own family, to the government's austerity measures, which a recent UN report declared a breach of international human rights. Empire is no longer merely "out there" in other parts of the globe. The disdain for human life that underpinned it has been brought "home".

The new British prime minister Theresa May has promised to retain at least some of the protections provided by EU law, such as those for workers' rights - at least during her premiership. But when Britain "takes back its sovereignty" upon leaving the EU, even more segments of the population will undoubtedly find themselves subject to a sovereign "rule of law" that has been constructed in conjunction with the subjugation of large swathes of humanity. Now, we are all, potentially, "bare life".

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The ongoing effect of empire - in Britain

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Considerable attention has been directed at the plight of EU immigrants living in the UK following the Brexit vote, not least their role as "bargaining chips" in Britain's forthcoming exit negotiations from the EU. Less attention has been paid to the government's ongoing discriminatory immigration policies against its own citizens.

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Since I began this blog, I have endeavoured to create resources for people unfamiliar with specific aboriginal topics. I like to call them Indigenous Issue Primers, because they are introductions to topics you could spend a lifetime specialising in. Not every post I put up is a Primer, so I've decided to list them below topically, for ease of reference (and so I remember what I've already addressed!).

My focus is very much on what I call "myth debunking". I have found it very difficult over the years to have discussions about anything related to indigenous peoples because so many bizarre beliefs get in the way. Try discussing what happened at Oka, for example, and you'll quickly realise you've got to explain a lot of history and address a lot of misunderstandings before you can even get to that topic.

For me, this is a time saving device. A series of resources for myself and anyone else who wants them, so that some of the most prevalent myths can be quickly and clearly addressed, allowing a bigger conversation to (hopefully) happen.

These pieces have been written over a number of years, so many hyperlinks will probably no longer work.

Specific Myths or Misunderstandings

Identity and Culture

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Articles About Attawapiskat

Elsipogtog

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Since I began this blog, I have endeavoured to create resources for people unfamiliar with specific aboriginal topics. I like to call them Indigenous Issue Primers, because they are introductions to topics you could spend a lifetime specialising in.

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tânisi!

I see you are confused about what constitutes cultural appropriation. I would like to provide you with resources and information on the subject so that you can better understand what our concerns are. I would also like to provide you with this stellar guide from Simon Fraser University called " Think Before You Appropriate ".

However, I also want you to have a brief summary of some of the more salient points so that you do not assume you are merely being called a racist, and so that I do not become frustrated with your defensive refusal to discuss the topic on those grounds.

If at all possible, I'd like you to read the statements on this BINGO card. If any of those have started whirling through your head, please lock them in a box while you read this article. They tend to interfere with the ability to have a respectful conversation.
RESTRICTED SYMBOLS

Some items are restricted items in specific cultures. Examples from Canada and the United States would be: military medals, Bachelor degrees (the actual parchment), and certain awards representing achievement in literary, musical or other fields.

These items cannot be legitimately possessed or imitated by just anyone, as they represent achievements earned according to a specific criteria.

Yes, some people will mock these symbols. However in order to do this, they have to understand what the symbols represent, and then purposefully desecrate or alter them in order to make a statement. They cannot then claim to be honouring the symbol.

Some people will pretend to have earned these symbols, but there can be serious sanctions within a culture for doing this. For example, someone claiming to have earned a medical degree (using a fake parchment) can face criminal charges, because that 'symbol' gives them access to a specialised and restricted profession.
UNRESTRICTED SYMBOLS/ITEMS

Other items are non-restricted. Flags, most clothing, food etc. Accessing these things does not signal that you have reached some special achievement, and you are generally free to use these.

If you do not use these items to mock, denigrate or perpetuate stereotypes about other people, then you can legitimately claim to be honouring those items.
HEADDRESSES IN NATIVE CULTURES
For the most part, headdresses are restricted items. In particular, the headdress worn by most non-natives imitate those worn by various Plains nations. These headdresses are further restricted within the cultures to men who have done certain things to earn them. It is very rare for women in Plains cultures to wear these headdresses, and their ability to do so is again quite restricted.

So unless you are a native male from a Plains nation who has earned a headdress, or you have been given permission to wear one (sort of like being presented with an honorary degree), then you will have a very difficult time making a case for how wearing one is anything other than disrespectful, now that you know these things. If you choose to be disrespectful, please do not be surprised when people are offended... regardless of why you think you are entitled to do this.

Even if you have 'native friends' or are part native yourself, individual choices to "not be offended" do not trump our collective rights as peoples to define our symbols.
TRY REAL CELEBRATION INSTEAD OF APPROPRIATION
It is okay to find our stuff beautiful, because it is. It is okay to admire our cultures. However I think it is reasonable to ask that if you admire a culture, you learn more about it. Particularly when the details are so much more fascinating than say, out-dated stereotypes of Pan-Indian culture.

You do not have to be an expert on our cultures to access aspects of them. If you aren't sure about whether something is restricted or not, please ask someone who is from that culture. If people from within that culture tell you that what you are doing is disrespectful, dismissing their concerns because you just don't agree, is not indicative of admiration.

If you really, really want to wear beaded moccasins or mukluks or buy beautiful native art, then please do! There are legitimate and unrestricted items crafted and sold by aboriginal peoples that we would be more than happy to see you with. Then all the nasty disrespectful stereotyping and denigration of restricted symbols can be avoided, while still allowing you to be decked out in beautiful native-created fashion.

If you are an artist who just loves working with aboriginal images, then please try to ensure your work is authentic and does not incorporate restricted symbols (or perpetuate stereotypes). For example, painting a non-native woman in a Plains culture warbonnet is just as disrespectful as wearing one of these headdresses in real life. Painting a picture from an archival or modern photo of a real native person in a warbonnet, or in regalia, or in 'street' clothes is pretty much fine. Acknowledging from which specific nation the images you are using come from is even better. "Native American" or "Indian" is such a vague label.
MIYO-WÎCÊHTOWIN, LIVING TOGETHER IN HARMONY
It's okay to make mistakes. Maybe you had no idea about any of this stuff. The classiest thing you can do is admit you didn't know, and maybe even apologise if you find you were doing something disrespectful. A simple acknowledgement of the situation is pure gold, in my opinion. It diffuses tension and makes people feel that they have been heard, respected, and understood.

If you make this kind of acknowledgement conditional on people informing you of these things 'nicely' however, that is problematic. The fact is, this issue does get people very upset. It's okay to get heated about it too on your end and maybe bad words fly back and forth. My hope is that once you cool down, you will accept that you are not being asked to do something unreasonable.

Remember that BINGO card above? It demonstrates how not to go about the issue. You and I both know this issue is not the end of the world. But it is an obstacle on the path to mutual respect and understanding.

Thanks for listening.

êkosi

This article is adapted from a longer article I wrote previously, but I like the changes here enough that I wanted to ensure this version was also available.

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An Open Letter to Non-Natives in Headdresses

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tânisi! I see you are confused about what constitutes cultural appropriation. I would like to provide you with resources and information on the subject so that you can better understand what our concerns are. I would also like to provide you with this stellar guide from Simon Fraser University called " Think Before You Appropriate ".

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A Party City store near Fargo, N.D. ((Courtesy of Glory Ames))
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Glory Ames, from the White Earth reservation, is frustrated that despite the presence of several reservations near Moorhead, Minn., local Halloween stores still feature a western section with costumes such as "pow wow princess."

Even worse, despite a long-running debate about racism and cultural appropriation, often prompted by backlash against celebrities and politicians for donning offensive costumes, people continue to wear such costumes.

Last Halloween, Ames spotted a photo on Instagram of a girl dressed as a Native American with a bullet in her forehead. She immediately reported it to the social media platform and had it removed.

"They blatantly take certain aspects of our culture, race, religion, and use it for their advantage and ignore the people living it," said Ames, co-president of the American Indian Student Association at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

But beyond simply calling out such behavior, some cultural experts advise, education and empathy are in order. Some colleges are going even further, offering training and workshops.

"Good people sometimes make bad decisions. What we try to do is turn those bad decisions around. We're not shaming, we're guiding," said Jered Pigeon, director of diversity and inclusion at Ames's school, which holds workshops on cultural appropriation.

Maura Judkis on Post Reports: Sexy Mr. Rogers. Sexy tariffs. It's quicker to ask what costume manufacturers won't make.

Seeing that princess costume made Ames angry, and then embarrassed.

"Non-Natives can 'pretend' to be Native for one day of the year, and it's all the 'cute' or 'sexy' parts of being Native, but there are so many people who can't just put on or take off the costume, they have to live with all the other aspects of being born Native," said Ames, 22, who is majoring in sustainability and cultural anthropology.

Ohio University launched a poster campaign in 2011 called "We're a Culture, Not a Costume." Other schools have since opted in, including the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Oregon and the University of Denver, which expanded the posters into a training program through its housing and residential education department.

"If you say you can't wear this, you're shutting down the opportunity for conversation, versus if you say shouldn't, you can expand on why and link it to a plethora of history," said Rajhon White, resident director at the University of Denver. "Another huge piece is we encourage students to do their homework, do their research, because we live in a time where you can Google anything. You shouldn't be reliant on those marginalized to explain. That work should be done by the person seeking that knowledge."

So far, students seem receptive. A year and a half ago, there was an incident involving a student in blackface on the social media platform Yik Yak. Students did comment on the photo, but instead of outright shaming, they wanted to sit down to talk to the offender about his choice, said Ebenezer Yebuah, associate director of residential education at the university.

"Some of the students never interacted with diversity in general," said Angelica Granados, a 20-year-old first-generation Mexican American student and second-year resident adviser who has participated in several role-playing workshops. "I really appreciate the university working toward everyone feeling included."

It's not just college students who have been linked to offensive costumes. Several U.S. political figures, including Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D), were engulfed in controversy over incidents involving blackface. And Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau 's reelection campaign was rocked after video and a photo turned up of him in blackface and brownface.

Third incident of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau in racist makeup emerges

A growing trend among music festival attendees to wear Native American headdress also has come under scrutiny, leading one festival in San Francisco, Outside Lands, to ban the practice. And, most recently, country singer Kacey Musgraves sparked outrage among the Asian American community both for combining Indian and Vietnamese traditional costumes and for hypersexualizing the look.

People need to consider how the costumes may be perceived by the community whose culture is being represented, said Mia Moody-Ramirez, who co-authored the book " From Blackface to Black Twitter: Reflections on Black Humor, Race, Politics, & Gender."

"Ask yourself the question, does the culture you're imitating have a history of oppression? Are you benefiting from borrowing from the culture? Are you able to remove something when you get tired of it and return to a privileged culture when others can't?" said Moody-Ramirez, director of American studies at Baylor University in Waco, Tex.

Critics accuse Kacey Musgraves of degrading a traditional Vietnamese garment

But it's not always about prohibiting others from participating in different cultures. Anhlan Nguyen wasn't upset that Musgraves wore the Vietnamese dress, just that she did it wrong. The singer wore the Vietnamese ao dai, a traditional dress that includes a high-collared tunic with pants, but she opted to skip the bottom.

"I'm her fan and would have been proud to show off her dress," said Nguyen, co-chairwoman of the Vietnamese Culture and Science Association in Houston. "But without the pants, and the way she posed, leads to the indication of promoting sexuality. For Asian girls, people exploited Asians for their [perceived] submissive attitude, and maybe she didn't have this intention, but it unfortunately reminded us a lot of those stereotypes."

Nguyen helps coordinate Vietnamese events in Houston, where children of different backgrounds wear the same Vietnamese dress that Musgraves wore, but with pants included.
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"I would be so happy to see other people wear my cultural costume," Nguyen said. "America would not be America without combining cultures. People should not forget - all these people are from all different parts of the world."

The responsibility of explaining the significance of any cultural expression or artifact often falls on the shoulders of the offended party. It can be burdensome. But it's also important to be included in the conversation, said Granados, who is majoring in political science and Spanish, with a minor in critical race and ethnic studies. Previously, cultural training wasn't led by students of color at her school, so they suggested they lead instead.

"I don't want to be the one always educating people, but if we don't, we can't get mad," Granados said.

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How to handle cultural appropriation during Halloween.

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About 22% of our country's 5.2 million Native Americans live on tribal lands (2010 U.S. Census). Living conditions on the reservations have been cited as "comparable to Third World," (May 5 2004, Gallup Independent). It is impossible to succinctly describe the many factors that have contributed to the challenges that Native America faces today, but the following facts about the most pressing issues of economics, health, and housing give a hint of what life is like for many first Americans.

Typically, Tribal and Federal governments are the largest employers on the reservations. Many households are overcrowded and earn only social security, disability or veteran's income. The scarcity of jobs and lack of economic opportunity mean that, depending on the reservation, four to eight out of ten adults on reservations are unemployed. Among American Indians who are employed, many are earning below poverty wages (2005 BIA American Indian Population & Labor Force Report).

The overall percentage of American Indians living below the federal poverty line is 28.2% (2008, American Indians Census Facts). The disparity for American Indians living below poverty on the reservations is even greater, reaching 38% to 63% in our service area (2006, National Center for Education Statistics, and other sources).

Often, heads of household are forced to leave the reservation to seek work, and grandparents take on the role of raising their grandchildren. In order to survive, extended families pool their meager resources as a way to meet basic needs. The relative poverty still experienced by these blended families is best understood as the gap between the overall need and the need that goes unmet.

There is a housing crisis in Indian country. Despite the Indian Housing Authority's (IHAs) recent efforts, the need for adequate housing on reservations remains acute. One legislator deplored the fact that "there are 90,000 homeless or underhoused Indian families, and that 30% of Indian housing is overcrowded and less than 50% of it is connected to a public sewer." (March 8, 2004, Indian Country Today).

In addition, many American Indians are living in substandard housing. About 40% of on-reservation housing is considered inadequate (2003, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights). The waiting list for tribal housing is long; the wait is often three years or more, and overcrowding is inevitable. Most families will not turn away family members or anyone who needs a place to stay. It is not uncommon for 3 or more generations to live in a two-bedroom home with inadequate plumbing, kitchen facilities, cooling, and heating.

Further increasing the concerns with reservation housing is the noticeable absence of utilities. While most Americans take running water, telephones, and electricity for granted, many reservation families live without these amenities. On a seriously stretched budget, utilities are viewed as luxuries compared to food and transportation. Overcrowding, substandard dwellings, and lack of utilities all increase the potential for health risk, especially in rural and remote areas where there is a lack of accessible healthcare.

"The average life expectancy for Native Americans has improved yet still trails that of other Americans by almost 5 years" (2010, HHS Indian Health Disparities Fact Sheet). About 55% of American Indians rely on the Indian Health Service for medical care (2006, Indian Health Facts). Yet, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act only meets about 60% of their health needs (2003, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights).

Due to underfunding, Indian Health Service facilities are crisis-driven and leave a wide gap in adequate and preventative health care for many Native Americans on the reservations. Pharmacies and doctor's offices outside of hospitals are completely non-existent in some communities.

The pressures to shift from a traditional way of life toward a Western lifestyle has dramatically impacted the health and welfare of the Native peoples and created a terrible epidemic of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, tuberculosis, and cancer. The statistics are alarming.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for American Indians (2003, Center for Disease Control).

Due to the link between heart disease, diabetes, poverty, and quality of nutrition and health care, 36% of Natives with heart disease will die before age 65 compared to 15% of Caucasians (2001, HHS Office of Minority Health).

American Indians are 177% more likely to die from diabetes (2011, Indian Health Disparities).

500% are more likely to die from tuberculosis (2011, Indian Health Disparities).

82% are more likely to die from suicide (2011, Indian Health Disparities).

Cancer rates and disparities related to cancer treatment are higher than for other Americans (2005, Native People for Cancer Control).

Infant death rates are 60% higher than for Caucasians (2001, HHS Office of Minority Health).

The facts presented are important realities about the living conditions faced by many Native Americans in this country - facts that every non-Native American needs to know.

How can I help?

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Native American Living Conditions on Reservations - Native American Aid

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Living Conditions on American Indian reservations: It is impossible to succinctly describe the many factors that have contributed to the challenges that Native America faces today, but the following facts...

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What Defines Cultural Appropriation? | i-D

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Cultural appropriation refers to the use of objects or elements of a non-dominant culture in a way that reinforces stereotypes or contributes to oppression and doesn't respect their original meaning or give credit to their source. It also includes the unauthorized use of parts of their culture (their dress, dance, etc.) without permission.

In this way, cultural appropriation is a layered and nuanced phenomenon that many people may have trouble understanding and may not realize when they are doing it themselves.

It can be natural to merge and blend cultures as people from different backgrounds come together and interact. In fact, many wonderful inventions and creations have been born from the merging of such cultures (such as country music).

However, the line is drawn when a dominant cultural group makes use of elements of a non-dominant group in a way that the non-dominant group views as exploitative.

Elements of Cultural Appropriation

Taking a step backward, how do we define cultural appropriation? It helps to consider what is meant by each of the terms in the phrase, as well as some related terms that are important to understand.

Culture refers to anything associated with a group of people based on their ethnicity, religion, geography, or social environment. This might include beliefs, traditions, language, objects, ideas, behaviors, customs, values, or institutions. It's not uncommon for culture to be thought of as belonging to particular ethnic groups.

Appropriation

Appropriation refers to taking something that doesn't belong to you or your culture. In the case of cultural appropriation, it is an exchange that happens when a dominant group takes or "borrows" something from a minority group that has historically been exploited or oppressed.

In this sense, appropriation involves a lack of understanding of or appreciation for the historical context that influences what is being taken. Taking a sacred object from a historically marginalized culture and producing it as part of a Halloween costume is one example.

Cultural Denigration

Cultural denigration is when someone adopts an element of a culture with the sole purpose of humiliating or putting down people of that culture. The most obvious example of this is blackface, which originated as a way to denigrate and dehumanize Black people by perpetuating negative stereotypes.

Cultural Appreciation & Respect

Cultural appreciation, on the other hand, is the respectful borrowing of elements from another culture with an interest in sharing ideas and diversifying oneself. Examples would include learning martial arts from an instructor with an understanding of the practice from a cultural perspective or eating Indian food at an authentic Indian restaurant.

When done correctly, cultural appreciation can result in deeper understanding and respect across cultures as well as creative hybrids that blend cultures together.

Types of Cultural Appropropriation

There are four main types of cultural appropriation:

Exchange: This form is defined as a reciprocal exchange between two cultures that are approximately equal in terms of power and dominance.

Dominance: This type involves a dominant culture taking elements of a subordinate culture that has had a dominant culture forced upon it.

Exploitation: This type is defined as taking cultural elements of a subordinate culture without compensation, permission, or reciprocity.

Transculturation: This form involves taking and combining elements of multiple cultures, making it difficult to identify and credit the original source.

Context of Cultural Appropriation

Learning about the context of cultural appropriation is important for understanding why it is a problem. While some might not think twice about adopting a style from another culture, for example, the group with which the style originated may have historical experiences that make the person's actions insensitive to the group's past and current experience.

For example, consider a White American wearing their hair in cornrows. While Black Americans have historically experienced discrimination because of protective hairstyles like cornrows, White Americans, as part of the dominant group in the U.S., can often "get away" with appropriating that same hairstyle and making it "trendy," all the while not understanding or acknowledging the experiences that contributed to its significance in Black culture in the first place.

Examples of Cultural Appropriation

When considering examples of cultural appropriation, it's helpful to look at the types of items that can be a target. They include:

In the United States, the groups that are most commonly targeted in terms of cultural appropriation include Black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic and Latinx Americans, and Native Americans.

The following are some real-world examples of cultural appropriation to consider.

In the 1950s, White musicians "invented" rock and roll; however, the musical style was appropriated from Black musicians who never received credit. In fact, music executives at the time chose to promote White performers over Black performers, reinforcing the idea that cultural appropriation involves a negative impact on a non-dominant group.

Sweat Lodge

In 2011, motivational entrepreneur James Arthur Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide after the death of three participants in his pseudo sweat lodge. This is an extreme example of the cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of Native American traditions.

Do you remember the "voguing" craze made popular by Madonna back in the 1990s? Voguing as a dance actually had its roots in the gay clubs of New York City and was pioneered by Black members of the LGBTQ+ community. Madonna defends her right to artistic expression, but the question remains-how many people still mistakenly think she invented voguing?

Team Mascots

There is a history of major sports teams in the United States and Canada being involved in the cultural appropriation of Indigenous cultures through their names and mascots. Past and present examples include the Chicago Blackhawks, Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, and Edmonton Eskimos. (The Redskins and Eskimos have since undergone name changes.)

How to Know If Something Is Cultural Appropriation

If you are unsure how to decide if something is cultural appropriation, here are some questions to ask yourself:

What is your goal with what you are doing?

Are you following a trend or exploring the history of a culture?

Are you deliberately trying to insult someone's culture or are you being respectful?

Are you purchasing something (e.g., artwork) that is a reproduction of a culture or an original?

How would people from the culture you are borrowing from feel about what you are doing?

Are there any stereotypes involved in what you are doing?

Are you using a sacred item (e.g., headdress) in a flippant or fun way?

Are you borrowing something from an ancient culture and pretending that it is new?

Are you crediting the source or inspiration of what you are doing?

If a person of the original culture were to do what you are doing, would they be viewed as "cool" or could they possibly face discrimination?

Are you wearing a costume (e.g., Geisha girl, tribal wear) that represents a culture?

Are you ignoring the cultural significance of something in favor of following a trend?

Explore these questions and always aim to show sensitivity when adopting elements from another culture. If you do realize that something you have done is wrong, accept it as a mistake and then work to change it and apologize for it.

How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation

You can avoid cultural appropriation by taking a few steps, such as these:

Ask yourself the list of questions above to begin to explore the underlying motivation for what you are doing.

Give credit or recognize the origin of items that you borrow or promote from other cultures rather than claiming them as your original ideas.

Take the time to learn about and truly appreciate a culture before you borrow or adopt elements of it. Learn from those who are members of the culture, visit venues they run (such as restaurants) and attend authentic events (such as going to a real luau).

Support small businesses run by members of the culture rather than buying mass-produced items from big box stores that are made to represent a culture.

A Word From Verywell

Cultural appropriation is the social equivalent of plagiarism with an added dose of denigration. It's something to be avoided at all costs, and something to educate yourself about.

In addition to watching your own actions, it's important to be mindful of the actions of corporations and be choosy about how you spend your dollars as that is another way of supporting members of the non-dominant culture. Do what you can when you can as you learn to do better.

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Cultural appropriation involves people adopting elements of a minority culture. Learn how such appropriation can be disrespectful and exploitive and how to avoid it.

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After 1867, all Native Americans had to live on ' ' which were small areas of tribal land promised to the Indians by the US government.

In 1887, the government passed the ' ' which went a step further by dividing these reservations into 'allotments' or smaller areas of land owned by individual Native Americans.

The act stated that the head of each family would receive 160 acres of tribal land and each single person would receive 80 acres. Title to the land would be held by the government for 25 years.

After 25 years, each individual would receive United States citizenship and be allowed to keep their land.

The aim of this act was to create responsible farmers in the white man's image. However, under the Dawes Act, Indian life deteriorated, for example:

The structure of the tribe was weakened;

Many Indians who had previously roamed the Great Plains freely were prevented from doing so and were unable to adjust to an agricultural existence;

Life on the reservation came to be characterised by disease, filth and poverty;

Unfortunately, the act also provided that any "surplus" land would be made available to whites. A report in 1921 showed most Native American land was being farmed by non-tribe members.

So, although Native Americans continued to live on reservations, the allotments they owned were too small for profitable farming.

Life on the reservations was deliberately designed to destroy the Indian way of life. For example, Indians did not have the same rights as other Americans and the reservations were run for them by the US government.

The most serious exploitation of the Native Americans was when white businessmen and the American Government's Indian Office worked together to develop the reservations' natural resources, such as coal, for the benefit of non-Native Americans.

There was no compensation given to the Native Americans for the taking of these resources. Indeed, in Montana, Native Americans had to pay for the coal mined on their land while white people were given it free.

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Exploitation of Native Americans - Life for Native Americans - CCEA - GCSE History Revision - CCEA - BBC Bitesize

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After 1867, all Native Americans had to live on ' ' which were small areas of tribal land promised to the Indians by the US government. In 1887, the government passed the ' ' which went a step further by dividing these reservations into 'allotments' or smaller areas of land owned by individual Native Americans.

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Cover image from Radical Indigenous Survivance and Empowerment (R.I.S.E.). To honor and respect the tribes mentioned in this article, no visual representation of any sacred items, dances, ceremonies, photographs, etc. will be shown.

History of Native Imagery in Art

If you have ever seen historic black and white photographs of Native Americans in documentaries, books, stationary, or even on posters, it is very likely that it is one of the enumerable works of photographer, Edward S. Curtis. Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) was a photographer and ethnologist most known for his multi-volume series, The North American Indian. The photographic images in this series were taken between 1907-1927 and were meant to be a journal, of sorts, that documented "the vanishing race" of Native Americans. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the western U.S. was exploding with colonialist ventures. For the U.S. government, their biggest obstacle was conquering Native Americans and establishing power and control over their land and their resources.

By the sixteenth century, Native American communities drastically decreased due to colonization. According to Raphael Lemkin, there are two stages of genocide associated with colonization. The first is the destruction of the Indigenous community's way of life. The second stage is imposing the colonizer's way of life on the Indigenous group[1]. Lemkin believed that colonization in of itself was intrinsically genocidal. When settlers brought their hopes and dreams across the Atlantic, they also brought epidemic diseases, slavery, massacring of entire villages, the destroying of food sources, forced relocation, reservations, assimilation, and ethnocide.[2] For centuries, Native Americans had battled against the constant threats that colonization had thrown their way. Edward S. Curtis recognized their struggle, but he believed that extinction was inevitable. This sense of mortality inspired his vision: to photograph the beauty of Native American culture before it faded away.

For centuries, European settlers had depicted Native Americans as the "Bloody Savage" or "Bad Indian" - violent, wild, blood-thirsty, and less than human. Over the course of four centuries, that depiction has rarely changed. In addition to Curtis, George Catlin and Frederic Remington shared similar morbid beliefs and sought to redefine long standing negative depictions of Native Americans. Curtis, Catlin, and Remington wanted their documentation to focus on the lesser known "Noble Savage" or "Good Indian." The "noble savage" was in touch with nature, mystical, beautiful, brave, and dignified. Staying true to this depiction, the artists were able to capture a romanticized "purity" of the "vanishing" Native Americans that seemed to look as if they were completely untouched by colonization.

Fans of Edward S. Curtis see him as unassailable because of the content and nature of his work. In contrast, critics of Curtis believe that he peddled a romanticized archetype of "what real Native Americans should look like." However respectable Curtis' methods, interactions, and intentions were, it would be irresponsible to disregard valid criticism of how his work continues to affect Native Americans and non-Natives alike. The archetype upheld through his imagery has been transformed into powerful stereotypes that affect modern day Native Americans. In The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions, Christopher M. Lyman writes:
Roughly stated, Curtis's generation believed that Indians were only real Indians when they behaved as they were imagined to have behaved prior to contact with Whites. Scientists of his generation therefore studied Indians largely in those terms. These general beliefs led to the creation and perpetuation of stereotypes of "Indianness" still prevalent in American culture.[3]
He also states:
In keeping with traditions in White thought, Curtis was so affected by his perceptions of Indian "otherness" that he often overlooked the extreme diversity of the cultures he confronted and described Indians in terms of an imagined racial unity as the Indian.[4]
Native Activism Portrayed in the Media

In the nineteenth century, manifest destiny prevailed throughout the United States. This ideology stemmed from the belief that "...the expansion of the United States was divinely ordained, justifiable, and inevitable."[5] In turn, this false doctrine is responsible for the removal and genocide of thousands of Native Americans. Edward S. Curtis not only believed in manifest destiny, he perpetuated the idea through his photography. Curtis attempted to remove any sense of colonization that Native Americans had already been adapting to and adopting in their own lives. In lieu of this, Curtis made the artistic choice to "disavow Native agency, neglect colonial violence, and present Native peoples and their cultures as a 'vanishing race.'"[6] Whether Native Americans were portrayed as bloody savages or as romanticized, peaceful figures, their imagery was utilized to portray the various degrees of colonialism. Native imagery has always been used as tool by non-Natives to push the agenda for colonization.

The American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) is a civil rights organization founded in the late 1960's to uphold and restore Native American autonomy, self-determination, spiritual practice, sovereignty, and treaty rights. During the height of A.I.M. in the 1970's, national media coverage followed the group of activists intently. However, the media often failed to focus on the issues A.I.M. hoped to highlight. Instead, the media focused their narratives on what their majority white audience would have considered "newsworthy." Media outlets frequently neglected to investigate historical and contemporary issues that were at the heart of A.I.M. In a Time story in the late 1960s, A.I.M. activists were described as "the new American Indian" who were "no longer content to play the obsequious Tonto to the white man's Lone Ranger."[7] In contrast, during and after the Occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, the media simplified the events as dangerous, militant activism. The media framed A.I.M. members as fictional characters battling each other, which played a role in how they were perceived across the nation. This certainly reduced the gravity of Native American issues in the United States.

In 2016, construction began on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The initial pipeline route crossed the Missouri River north of Bismarck, ND.[8] The route was later rejected citing concerns over its proximity to water sources for Bismarck and surrounding areas. The finalized route passed through stolen treaty-land and Lake Oahe, the main water source for the Standing Rock Lakota Nation. A leak in the pipeline would cause severe environmental damage and would pose health risks to residents of Standing Rock. Native Americans and other Indigenous people came together in an unprecedented act of solidarity against the DAPL. For over a year, water protectors stood their ground, prayed, and conducted ceremonies in a peaceful protest. In response, the U.S. government sent heavily armed, militarized police from 24 counties, 16 cities, and 9 different states.[9] Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline operator, hired private security guards who used attack dogs and noxious chemical agents on protectors. Throughout the movement, the media coverage constantly portrayed Native American water protectors in pervasive nineteenth century perspectives of the "good Indian." In a CBC news article, Duncan McCue shared an interesting perspective on the role the media plays in shaping Native American imagery. He states that in order for Native Americans to get [any] media coverage, they have to follow the "WD4 rule" which is that they have to be warriors, drumming, dancing, drunks, and dying.[10]

Native American Mascots in Sports

When Native American leaders, movements, and activism are not represented in the media, where do non-Natives see Native Americans represented? Native mascots are a common theme in sports. We see these mascots on clothing, mugs, stickers and even acting as ads promoting products. However, opposition towards these mascots are an unfamiliar subject for most people. The dispute between the NFL team, Washington R*dskins, and Native American people is one of the most well-known and publicized controversies. However, Native Americans have been battling with the Washington team since the late 1960's. In recent years, the movement has gained fervor and transparency among news corporations, media agencies, and within the general public. The Center for American Progress released a report in response to concerns that Native mascots are not only symbolically ignorant, they are also psychologically and culturally harmful to Native American youth. The study revealed that Native mascots and names contribute to a negative educational environment:
"Research shows that these team Indian-oriented names and mascots can establish an unwelcome and hostile learning environment for AI/AN students. It also reveals that the presence of AI/AN mascots directly results in lower self-esteem and mental health for AI/An adolescents and young adults. And just as importantly, studies show that these mascots undermine the educational experience of all students, particularly those with little or no contact with Indigenous and AI/AN people. In other words, these stereotypical representations are too often understood as factual representations and thus 'contribute to the development of cultural biases and prejudices.'"[11]
However, Native youth are not the only community members being harmed. There has been a surge of racist, anti-Native sentiments, attitudes, and behaviors toward Native mascot opposition since the dispute gained attention. While negative publicity and studies show the detrimental impacts of Native mascots, the team has gone above and beyond to promote the idea that they are unequivocally " honoring" Native Americans, not harming them. Dan Snyder, the owner of the Washington team, even established the Washington R*dskins: Original Americans Foundation in 2014 to combat negative media attention. Twenty five tribes were originally part of the foundation, but as of April 2017 that number has dwindled to fourteen. Society is becoming more informed about the harm Native mascots have on real people, and it remains of high importance to question the integrity of Native imagery and its effects.

It is important to remember that Native imagery depicted through the lens of settlers have always perpetuated stereotypes. They are ill-conceived perceptions and expectations of romanticized ideas that settlers have maintained for centuries. As Robert F. Berkhofer writes in The White Man's Indian:
White hopes for the exploitation of Indians and their lands certainly shaped their perceptions of Native Americans from the very beginning of contact...If the primitivistic version of Indian goodness promised easy fulfillment of European desires, the image of the bad Indian proved the absolute necessity, if difficulty, of forcing Native Americans from 'savage' to European ways through the exploitation of their physical bodies, spiritual souls, or tribal lands...In fact, the whole debate...over the nature of the Indian can be viewed as a dispute among colonists, clergy, and crown officials about the proper method of exploiting the native, for the consequences of the arguments benefited some groups at the expense of others.[12]
The Exploitation of Native Imagery for Capitalism

Walmart is now selling pillows, blankets, t-shirts, aprons, posters, and a variety of other items printed with Edward S. Curtis photographs. The items retailed for as much as $105.00. My friend, Kayla Begay, is a Hoopa Valley Tribal member and is of Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk descent. Kayla immediately reported the items and demanded that Walmart remove those items from their website. As mentioned, the bulk of Curtis' photographs were taken between 1907-1927. Since then, over five generations of Native people have thrived on Turtle Island (the original name of the land that is now called "the United States"). Over five generations of Native people have resisted systemic oppression. Over five generations have fought and died for the survival of their culture. Over five generations of Hupa ancestors passed through this world only to have their photographs be printed on items and sold by Walmart.

The items printed with images of Hupa tribal members were ancestors to living relatives. One relative reported that a man in one of Curtis' photos was "...an uncle's father and that he has many grandchildren." In Hupa tradition, you are not allowed to say deceased people's names without permission or else you are cursing at their relatives. Kayla stated the sale of the items is even more abhorrent. Many Hupa tribal members also stepped forward to voice their frustration at the disrespect being shown to their ancestors:
"This is also why we don't take pictures of dances and/or post/share on Facebook, or anywhere on the internet." "...people need to stop taking pictures of the ceremonies and posting them. Never know who will end up on a bag. People will hate on Indians, but quick to make a buck off of them." -Anonymous
"This is so wrong on many levels - to gain profit on Our Ceremonial ways and to show no regard to Our Elders We Hold so Dear. Where is the RESPECT from Walmart Corporation?" -Anonymous

Walmart quickly responded to Kayla with an apology and assured her they were working on taking down the items with Hupa photographs on them. However, even after Walmart removed those items, hundreds of other items printed with Curtis' photographs remained on the website. A poster of a famous Curtis photograph, a Navajo Ye'ii Bicheii dancer and mask, retailed for $104.98. Selling the photos of sacred items for hundreds of dollars is despicably offensive.

In addition to the Hupa and Navajo, many Native American tribes have strong beliefs that uphold a balance between the physical and spiritual worlds that we inhabit. Respect for the living as well as those who have passed on is critical in maintaining this balance. Native ceremonies, regalia, and sacred objects are used to connect, strengthen, and show appreciation for this balance. Therefore, they are honored as living beings that have souls.

Walmart selling Native images on products is only one example of the continued exploitation of Native imagery and culture. As Native people, we see how Native imagery has been co-opted by non-Natives to secure their own agendas - whether it's pushed by capitalism, being the white savior, cultural appropriation, or even furthering the acceptance of pan-indianism. The dehumanization of Native people runs deep through the veins of this country. Native people are stripped of their autonomy and agency when they are called racial slurs, when non-Natives ban them from practicing their traditional ways of life, when non-Natives wear headdresses at music festivals, when non-Natives appropriate Native ceremonies and traditions, when non-Natives dress up as Pocahontas, when non-Natives further harmful stereotypes, and especially when non-Natives completely neglect to acknowledge the colonial violence embedded within their thoughts, actions, and history.

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Exploitation of Native Imagery For Profit - Terra Incognita Media

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Walmart selling Native images on products is only one example of the continued exploitation of Native imagery and culture. As Native people, we see how Native imagery has been co-opted by non-Natives to secure their own agendas - whether it's pushed by capitalism, being the white savior, cultural ap

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Earlier this month, the National Gallery of Art in Washington announced it had made history - it bought a painting by a Native American artist for the very first time.

The gallery purchased I See Red: Target, a 1992 piece by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a response to the colonization of America by Christopher Columbus.
How artwork shows the impact of climate crisis on Indigenous Americans
Though the museum already owns dozens of works on paper by Indigenous artists (which have rarely, if ever, been on display), the museum calls it "the first painting by a Native American artist to enter the collection".

One has to wonder: why did it take so long for a national museum to acquire contemporary Native American art? "Good question," says Smith, 80, to the Guardian from her home in Corrales, New Mexico. "Because of popular myth-making, Native Americans are seen as vanished. It helps assuage the government's guilt about an undocumented genocide, as well as stealing the whole country."

Smith, who is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai nation in Montana, adds that the acquisition comes at a poignant time in history, considering the changes in the world.

"My painting is caught in a perfect storm: Black Lives Matter, the death of George Floyd, Covid-19, the presidential election, the Standing Rock Sioux temporarily winning a stay on the pipeline and add to that the supreme court saying the Creek Indians do exist and their treaty is valid," she says. "These are possible reasons that caused my painting to be purchased."

This historic moment is what Smith calls breaking the buckskin ceiling. "I have mixed emotions; I wonder how is it that I am the first Native American artist whose painting is collected by the National Gallery?"

She refers to other prestigious Native artists whose work should also be in the National Gallery of Art's collection, such as Leon Polk Smith, a painter from Chickasha, Oklahoma, who co-founded hard-edge abstraction; Fritz Scholder, a Luiseño pop art painter; and Kay WalkingStick, a Cherokee landscape painter, who is 85.

"It's like we don't exist, except in the movies or as mascots for sports teams, like the Washington Redskins or the Cleveland Indians," says Smith. "I hope this means they will make a concerted effort now to form a collection of Native American art."

Smith was born in 1940, on the Flathead reservation in western Montana. After studying art in Washington in 1960, she saw her rise as an artist throughout the 1970s, fusing together American advertising, pop art, Native identity and history into her prints and abstract expressionist paintings, which are environmentally conscious.

Her artwork always tells a story. Browning of America taps into cultural oppression and environmental loss, while Untitled (Wallowa Waterhole), honors the birth of Lore Momaday, the daughter of the Pulitzer-winning Native American fiction writer N Scott Momaday.

Smith's artwork, too, represents how alienated Native Americans are in modern culture, while tapping into overlooked history. Her painting Tribal Map pastes on the names of Native American tribes - from Cherokee to Potawatomi and Chippewa - on to a map of the United States. ("I only named half of the states, the ones that carry Native American names, and left out all the states with European names.")

Her 1992 artwork, I See Red: Target, is an 11ft-tall mixed media piece on canvas. It was created in response to the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in America, and can be viewed in the East Building pop art galleries alongside artworks by Louise Bourgeois and Jasper Johns.

Smith references Johns' famous Target painting from 1958, which depicts a painted bullseye. Here, she flips it to represent the Native American perspective, by placing a dart game target at the crown of the artwork, in addition to arranging darts in the shape of headdress feathers.

On the canvas underneath, she has collaged it with newspaper photos from the Char-Koosta News (the official publication of the Flathead reservation, where she was raised), in patterned rows.

"I placed the photographs in linear rows to mimic Andy Warhol's Orange Car Crash because I was presenting a tragedy."

The artwork reads "Destroy the Myth," alongside photos of Natives from Smith's tribe, patterned across the surface. "The myth is that Native warriors were at war all the time like the Europeans," she says. "Only we didn't have horses or steel swords or guns."

As a reflection on the commercial exploitation of Native culture, it feels timely. Just last week, Washington's NFL team agreed to drop their name and logo after pressure from sponsors.

"This issue has existed my whole lifetime," says Smith. "There are over 2,000 secondary schools in the country, colleges and other sports teams that have Native American names, so my painting should remain viable for some time to come."

She recalls being a student herself, remembering that as a young artist, Native American art wasn't deemed "collectible".

"Those of us who went to college were overlooked or disqualified as not being authentic, so our artwork was considered to be bastardized," she says. "Many of our museums are filled with antiquities, but no contemporary art made by living Indians."

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Smith's Tribal Map, from 2000. Photograph: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This moment could signal a shift for museums to collect more Native American art. "I yearn for the day when Native history is taught in public schools across the nation," says Smith. "The only state that teaches Native American history and current life in public school curriculum is Montana. This is a shocking fact."

Smith, who will be showing this fall at the Garth Greenan Gallery in New York City, doesn't mince words when it comes to describing the hardest part of her career as a female artist, one who has had over 125 solo exhibitions, and having been included in over 680 group exhibits. Her answer is simple: "White men."

For young artists today, she dispels the dream of the ego-driven art star. "Don't think for a minute that because you see your name in the paper that you've made it - that's good for 15 minutes, as Warhol pointed out.

"Particularly when we have political and racial motivations for improving justice, animal rights, women and children's rights, and our endangered planet, we need to keep talking, teaching, painting, writing and staying engaged. We can never retire."
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'It's like we don't exist': Jaune Quick-to-See Smith on Native American artists

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Earlier this month, the National Gallery of Art in Washington announced it had made history - it bought a painting by a Native American artist for the very first time. The gallery purchased I See Red: Target, a 1992 piece by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a response to the colonization of America by Christopher Columbus.

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Pop culture and design loves to appropriate grossly stereotypical elements of percieved Native American cultures (do I really need to bring up Coachella?), learned from normalized racially insensitive media portrayals such as the "Piccaninny Tribe" in Disney's Peter Pan. Contemporary multi-disciplinary artist Merritt Johnson, a descendant of the Blackfoot and Kanienkehaka Tribes, writes that most people think of "beads and feathers" when they hear the term "Native American art." This pigeonholing, among being immensely generalized and demeaning, fails to the acknowledge unique individual expression between and within Native American communities. There are 567 federally recognized Native American nations in the United States. Amongst those tribes exists a great deal of diversity in culture, language, and elements of day-to-day life such as food preparation and dress. Conflating Native American cultures disregards this diversity, and effectually silences Native American voices.

This is what makes the Jimmie Durham controversy so complicated. In case you missed it: Durham has long been regarded as the central, or at least the most well-known figure of Native American Art. He has historically identified with Cherokee descent (along with a bizarre slew of celebrities including Johnny Depp, Cher, Miley Cyrus, and Johnny Cash), and this identity is a central aspect of his work. Durham's recent retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has sparked a massive controversy, as multiple Cherokee artists and curators claim that Durham is not in fact recognized by any of the three Cherokee nations. In an article published on Indian Country Today, contributors write that "Durham continues to misrepresent Cherokee language, history, and culture. Throughout his career, he has misrepresented other's tribes' practices (giveaways, vision quests, Trickster Coyote, feasts of the dead) and said they are Cherokee. His fabrications insult not only us but also the other tribes whose cultures Durham has misappropriated."

The controversy is complex, as Durham was a fervent activist with the American Indian Movement in the '70s, and his work has always relied on themes of Native American identity and the destructive nature of colonization. In a recent New York Times article, Durham admits, "I am perfectly willing to be called Cherokee.... But I'm not a Cherokee artist or Indian artist, no more than Brancusi was a Romanian artist." (Brancusi was born in Romania.) But it also sounds a whole lot like that time "Iron Eyes Cody," the actor in the infamous 1970s "Crying Indian: Keep America Beautiful" PSA video who earned a number of roles on the premise that he was Native American, was "outed" as second-generation Italian.

It's about time that Native American artists start getting recognition and support for their work, apart from the media representations by non-Native folks. Meet these eight groundbreaking artists of Native American descent, working in a variety of mediums, who are making moves to counter the stereotypes of Native American art and culture in contemporary society.

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Nicholas Gallanin
Born in Sitka, a borough of Juneau, the capital of Alaska, Nicholas Gallanin is a conceptual artist and a musician of Tlingit and Unangax descent. Gallanin has a way of making artworks that mix completely contemporary-looking aesthetics with historical or traditional elements of his culture. For example, a series of prints use images of Native Americans overlaid with text, rendered in the style of Pop Art, with bright colors and Warhol-eque graphics. For his video Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan 1, which won the 2008 ImagineNative Film Festival, he paired video footage of a break dancer and audio of a traditional Tlingit song. In another video, he paired traditional Tlingit dance with sparse electronic music. Gallanin often repurposes objects like handcuffs used to remove Indigenous children from their homes, and makes clear society's tendency to bury historical truths. He writes "culture is rooted in connection to land; like land, culture cannot be contained."
Wendy Red Star
Wendy Red Star, a Native American artist of the Apsáalooke (Crow) lineage, born in Billings, Montana in 1981, is known for her funny, surreal, but biting self-portrait photographs that poke fun at white American culture's tendency to misrepresent Native American history. Red Star's photography practice is her way of navigating her experience growing up on a Crow Indian Reservation, juxtaposed with her experience of mainstream contemporary society. Using materials like Target-brand Halloween costumes and inflatable animals, Red Star counters the stereotypical trope that all Native American people are "one with nature." In her Four Seasons Series, Red Star photographs herself dressed in traditional Apsáalooke clothing against four different richly saturated panoramic Western landscape backdrops (which she is careful to leave with creases and wrinkles to exemplify their artificiality), reminiscent of dioramas one might see at a history museum, populated with artificial, store-bought materials such as fake plants, cardboard cutouts of animals, and astroturf. Her photo series Home is Where My Tipi Sits features collections of photographs from the reservation she grew up on after she returned from UCLA, where she received her MFA. The photographs are grouped by category, and feature broken down cars, churches, and decrepit living structures covered in blankets that stand in opposition to the stereotyped romantic perception of Native American life.
Post-Commodity
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary activist/arts collective consisting of Native American artists Kade L. Twist, Raven Chacon, and Cristóbal Martínez. You may recognize Postcommodity from the collective's contribution to the Whitney Biennial earlier this year: a dizzying four-channel video sped up and slowed down in conjunction with sound, tracing the fences that line the US-Mexico border. The installation, titled A Very Long Line, demonstrates the "dehumanizing and polarizing constructs of nationalism and globalization through which borders and trade policies have been fabricated." In their artists's statement, the collective writes "Postcommodity's art functions as a shared Indigenous lens... to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence." Borders seem to be a recurring theme; Repellent Fence (2015), an ephemeral land-art installation comprised of 26 enlarged replicas of an ineffective bird-repellent balloon, hovered 50 feet above a two-mile long stretch of land connecting the US and Mexico. The group hopes to incite a constructive conversation about social, political, and economic forces that are destroying communities globally.
Duane Slick
Duane Slick is a Native American painter and storyteller of the Meswaki Nation. His photo-realist paintings on glass and linen have a dream-like, spiritual quality, using subtle shadows, light studies, and layering. His series Disagreeable Coyotes (2015-2016) consists of nine acrylic-on-panel minimal paintings of coyote heads, layered in bright reds, blues, and yellows, reminiscent of a full color 3D film watched without the glasses. Of the paintings, Slick writes, "In narrative traditions, to tell the story of tragedy one must always begin by telling the ending first. I once believed that the weight of such expectations functioned as a cultural given for the artist of Native American descent. Its rules stated that we cry for a vision and place ourselves in a single grand narrative of history and representation... but the laughter of Coyote saturated and filled our daily lives. It echoed through the lecture halls of histories and it was so powerful and it was so distracting that I forgot my place in linear time and now I work from an untraceable present." Slick is represented by Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, and his work appears in a number of collections across the United States including the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. He teaches printmaking and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Merritt Johnson
Merritt Johnson is a multi-disciplinary artist of Blackfoot, Kanienkehaka, Irish and Swedish descent. She works in sculpture, painting, and video, but has a special affinity for performance art, for the way it allows her to embody the past, present, and future all at once. Her work speaks to the relationship between Native American history and "American" history. She comments on the boundaries that humans create (borders, fences, state lines), as juxtaposed with the natural boundaries of nature (airflow, waterflow). In her performance Clouds Live Where, viewers watch from above as Johnson delineates space using tape, wood barricades, and fabric. The artist attempts to navigate this barricaded space, transporting water back and forth from clouds to land. Says Johnson "tongues and knives cut the intersections of land, culture, sex, and body, so I weave together seen and unseen; looking with closed eyes open, breathing in and out." Another recurring theme in her work is camouflage, illuminating the complete disregard of indigenous people as part of American society. Her work plays with the unseen, exploring its "precarious possibility (of) endless creation and destruction. She is interested in the ways that indigenous and non-indigenous people's interpretations of her work differ, specifically with regards to the treatment of land and nature: on the one hand respected and imbued with spiritual qualities and on the other looked at as a resource. Without judgement, she says, humans can feel that all things are ultimately intertwined.

Teri Greeves

Teri Greeves (b. 1970), originally from the Wind River reservation in Wyoming, is known primarily for her use of the traditional Kiowa art of beading, which she learned from her grandmother. She writes that her grandmother expressed herself through beadwork, and despite working menial jobs as a dishwasher and a cleaner, she was always primarily an artist. Greeves has been working with beads since she was 8 years old, and for her, being an artist is about giving a voice to her ancestors before her. She writes, "I am compelled to do it... I have no choice in the matter. I must express myself and my experience as a 21st Century Kiowa and I do it, like all those unknown artists before me, through beadwork... and though my medium may be considered 'craft' or 'traditional,' my stories are from the same source as the voice running through that first Kiowa beadworker's needles. It is the voice of my grandmothers." Greeves merges her cultural history with contemporary objects, as in the case of her tennis shoes series (shown above). She blends traditional geometric traditional Kiowa styles with figurative elements of the Shoshone, while also commenting on the derivation of American modernist abstraction from traditional Native American designs. Her figures are adorned with both traditional and contemporary clothing items, as a commentary on being a Native American woman in the modern world. Her work appears in numerous public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Heard Museum, and more.
Matika Wilbur
Matika Wilbur is a photographer and storyteller of the Tulalip and Swinomish Tribes. She has been traveling across the country for over 5 years, taking portrait photographs of Indian Tribes across the country to reclaim the Native American image, and to effectually change the way that Native Americans are represented. Wilbur has a background in fashion and commercial photography, and despite being very successful in her career, she knew in her heart that she had to use her voice to expose the diverse, unique individual personalities amidst America's indigenous communities, who are too often either neglected or misrepresented. She began her portrait photo-series titled Project 562 in order to communicate the lives of neglected and/or misrepresented peoples. Her portraits capture a sense of intimacy and genuine raw emotion, likely because of Martika's process. Her subjects choose where they want to be photographed, and Martika spends up to multiple days with them, bringing gifts and sharing songs and prayers. She seeks to bring the individual to life in her works, placing her photos side by side with text from the subject. She views herself as a "creator and messenger," and her project is a form of re-education, offering a comprehensive visual curriculum of contemporary Native culture. She writes "while holding true to my heritage and tradition, I aim to empower contemporary visions. I believe that my work is the answered prayers of my ancestors, as I walk the path they fought to pave." Wilbur has travelled to over 300 sovereign nations so far, and her photographs capture the vast diversity within and between indigenous communities.
Frank Buffalo Hyde
In his vibrant, richly saturated, satirical graphic realist paintings, artist Frank Buffalo Hyde (b. 1974) juxtaposes 21st century pop culture signifiers with symbols and themes from his Native American heritage. Born in Santa Fe and raised on his mother's Onandaga reservation, Hyde seeks to dismantle stereotypes of Native American culture with his work. He takes imagery from pop culture, politics, films, television shows, etc. and overlaps the references to replicate what he refers to as "the collective unconsciousness of the 21st century. In his painting series "In-Appropriate," Hyde paints satirical portraits of people wearing "jacked-up portrayal(s) of Native American imagery" that are at once funny and revolting. Hyde overtly defies the aesthetics of what people might think Native American art "should" look like, including subjects such as selfie-sticks, iPhones, cheerleaders and plates of buffalo wings. His narrative series I-Witness Culture explores life as a Native American in the digital age. Hyde's work addresses contemporary America's fear of the "other," and the tendency to homogenize indigenous cultures to counter this fear (which ultimately materializes as racist mascots and costumes). Hyde's work has been exhibited internationally, and he was artist-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe.

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8 Contemporary Native American Artists Challenging the Way We Look at American History

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Pop culture and design loves to appropriate grossly stereotypical elements of percieved Native American cultures (do I really need to bring up Coachella?), learned from normalized racially insensitive media portrayals such as the "Piccaninny Tribe" in Disney's Peter Pan.

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This exhibition celebrates artwork from the Pacific islands, a majority of the work displays the true history of European settlers. However the RA romanticises the exhibition and takes pride in the European influences. The exhibition was free for all people with a new Zealand passport which comes across as an insult considering the history tied to work.

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https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/yinka-shonibare-ra

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British Museum is world’s largest receiver of stolen goods, says QC

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Geoffrey Robertson says it should ‘wash its hands of blood and return Elgin’s loot’

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What happens when a large portion of your country's archaeological treasures are "owned" by another country that stole them? That's the position non-western nations around the world find themselves in, with most of their cultural heritage residing in European and U.S. museums-but especially London's British Museum.

Take Nigeria, for example. In 1897, British troops stole some 4,000 sculptures after invading the Kingdom of Benin (now southwestern Nigeria). Over a century later, surviving bronzes are on display at museums in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and the United States, but not in Nigeria, their country of origin. The 2018 film Black Panther nodded to this issue during a heist scene set in the fictional "Museum of Great Britain" where characters reclaimed artifacts stolen from the African country of Wakanda (also fictional).

Nigeria has been asking the U.K. to return its Benin bronzes for decades, and in late 2018, the countries struck a deal in which the British Museum will send some bronzes to Nigeria for the Royal Museum the country plans to open in 2021. But crucially, the British Museum says it is only loaning the sculptures-it still expects Nigeria to return the goods that Britain stole.

Around the same time as the British Museum announced that it will loan Nigeria its own artifacts, a protest theatre group called "BP Or Not BP?" organized a "Stolen Goods Tour" at the British Museum. The tour highlighted artifacts like the Gwaegal shield, which the British stole from Aboriginal Australians in the late 18th century. Similarly to the Benin bronzes, the British Museum refused to repatriate the Gwaegal shield to Australia for a 2016 museum exhibit. Instead, the British Museum loaned the shield and reclaimed it afterward.

The list of stolen artifacts the British Museum refuses to give up goes on and on. Egypt wants its Rosetta Stone back and Easter Island has asked the museum to return its Moai head statue. Even Greece, a fellow member of the E.U., wants the museum to return some Parthenon marbles that are often called the "Elgin marbles" after the Scottish nobleman who took them.

Of all the European countries with stolen artifacts, France has been the most responsive to calls for repatriation. French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that the Quai Branly Museum in Paris will return 26 stolen objects to the country of Benin (not to be confused with Nigeria's former Kingdom of Benin). He has also said he wants to change French law so that France must return stolen objects whenever a country asks for them back.

In contrast, the British Museum has specifically said that it has no plans to repatriate stolen artifacts. In response to the Quai Branly Museum's return of 26 items, British Museum Director Hartwig Fischer told The New York Timesthat "the collections have to be preserved as whole." The pressure to return them, however, will likely continue.

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Will the British Museum Ever Return These Stolen Artifacts? | HISTORY

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Countries are calling on the museum to return looted items like the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles and 4,000 bronze sculptures from the Kingdom of Benin.

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The British Empire once infamously covered a quarter of the globe.

One way to write about the history of the world is through the history of empires built up by conquest.

Historians in the 20th and 21st centuries often write about them as aberrations, doomed to fall, yet they've actually formed the most common and cohesive political structure for centuries, far more common than modern nation states.

In this sequence of empires, Britain was just one of the more recent.

The famed expression once applied to the British empire "upon which the sun never sets", was first used to describe the Spanish empire to Charles I of Spain (1512-1556).

While the sun now does set on the British empire (and increasingly earlier during the Winter months), in terms of British conquests, the country still covers the globe.

Here's a map of all the countries Britain has invaded (pink).

And the ones we haven't invaded... yet (purple).

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The following countries have escaped Britain's pink tentacles.

Andorra

Burundi

Belarus

Bolivia

Central African Republic

Chad

Côte d'Ivoire

Republic of the Congo

Guatemala

Kyrgyzstan

Liechtenstein

Luxembourg

Monaco

Marshall Islands

Mali

Mongolia

Paraguay

São Tomé and Príncipe

Sweden

Tajikistan

Uzbekistan

Vatican City

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A map of every country Britain has ever invaded

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The British Empire once infamously covered a quarter of the globe. One way to write about the history of the world is through the history of empires built up by conquest. Historians in the 20th and 21st centuries often write about them as aberrations, doomed to fall, yet they've actually formed the most common and cohesive political structure for centuries, far more common than modern nation states.

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A short post with some thought provoking questions

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Long before Europeans arrived in the land that would become America, the ancestors of today's indigenous people built and maintained thriving communities. Their languages, cultural practices, and oral histories were passed down to their descendants, who have maintained them as well as possible considering the war, genocide, disease, and cultural destruction that began almost as soon as the Europeans arrived. But the ancestors also left physical evidence of their history: Structures (often elaborate and enormous) of dirt, rock, and sometimes shell for burial, ceremonial, and other purposes - some known, some unknown. In English, these structures are called mounds.

Naturally, the Europeans could not imagine that the people they considered "primitive" would have been able to build such structures. For a long time, they believed that another "race" had lived on the land before the indigenous people they met, and those people had built the mounds. In 1787, Benjamin Smith Barton proposed that the mounds were built by Vikings. And in 1836, the "Walum Olum" hoax suggested that wooden tablets (forged, of course) revealed that the mound builders came from Asia across the Bering Strait - a theory that held on to for quite some time even after the tablets were revealed to be a hoax. And, of course, there were those who believed the mound builders were from Atlantis or were aliens.

But what are indigenous mounds, really? They have been lots of things to lots of different people over the generations, from leaders to looters, and they are still important to indigenous people today. For example, in August 2017, the Mvskoke (Creek) people repatriated the remain s of 113 of their ancestors, along with 42 funerary objects, in the Ocmulgee Mounds in Macon, Georgia. The Mvskoke people have lived in Oklahoma since the 1830s, when they were forced from their ancestral home in what is now Alabama/Georgia by President Andrew Jackson's removal policy, AKA the Trail of Tears.

American indigenous mounds have survived hurricanes, floods, archaeologists, looters, and tourists. They are classified according to archaeological time periods as Archaic (9600-1000 BCE), Woodland (1000 BCE-900 CE), and Mississippian (900 CE-1600 CE). Today, some are preserved as parks or cultural centers while others are on private land, often inaccessible to the descendants of their builders. There are way too many mounds to include all of them, but this list presents a short history of indigenous mounds in America.

Monte Sano - Baton Rouge, LA

Why isn't this a picture of Monte Sano Mounds? Because in 1967, they were demolished to build a highway. Why not? They were only the oldest indigenous mounds in America, according to some archaeologists. However, it's something those in the know continue to argue about. Most agree that they were built prior to 5000 BCE.

Before the were destroyed, archeologists had three days to salvage inside the mounts. Platforms that they found inside the mounds included cremated remains and funerary objects, suggesting at least some of the mounds were used for burial. The Monte Sano mounds are part of the King George Island Mound Site, most of which is now underneath the city of Baton Rouge.

The picture shows the nearby LSU Campus Mounds, named because, of course, they are located on the current Louisiana State University campus. They are 6,000 years old, and still, they are younger than the Monte Sano mounds were upon their destruction.

Poverty Point - Pioneer, LA

Poverty Point is a pretty ironic name for an enormous mound complex built by a group of rich people. The name comes from a plantation that used to be located on the grounds in the 1800s - a theme among mounds in the Southeast.

Poverty Point is the largest-known complex of its time, which was around 3,000 years ago. The largest mound is currently around 70 feet tall but was probably once closer to 100 feet in height. It is surrounded by six concentric semi-circles, which are around a foot tall today but were probably around 6 feet tall - with dwellings on top of them - in their time. The complex also included circular wooden structures of unknown purpose. The entire complex was (most likely) an extremely active trading and ceremonial center, with people from many different tribes living in or near it as well as passing through it for trade.

So what happened to it? Nobody is really sure. The complex had not been used for thousands of years by the time the Europeans arrived and severely damaged the oral history of tribes in the area. They also plowed fields and built houses all over the area, as happened to mound sites all over the country.

But it wasn't just cultural issues that kept Poverty Point hidden in plain sight. The complex takes up 2,700 acres. It's too big to see from the ground. Even when the Army Corps of Engineers took aerial photos of the area in 1938, nobody noticed that the ridges that made plowing fields and building houses complicated were in a pattern, or that the huge mound on the otherwise flat land might be something unusual. It wasn't until 1952 that archaeologist James Ford saw the pictures and began to investigate.

Today, of course, it is recognized as a marvel of architecture and engineering, and as of 2014, it is protected as a a UNESCO World Heritage site. So, even though a highway runs through it, Poverty Point is in much less danger of destruction than it used to be.

Serpent Mound - Peeblesville, OH

The 1,300-foot-long, 3-foot-high Serpent Mound in Ohio is perhaps the most famous of all the mounds in what is now the United States. It is the world's largest surviving animal effigy mound.

Recent research suggests it was built around 321 BCE and that it is a construction of the Adena people, who also built the adjacent conical mound near it. The purpose of the Serpent Mound is not entirely clear, but it was ceremonial. Dating the era of the mound was complicated by the fact that it had been repaired several times, but many agree that the most recent dating reveals that its builders were the ancestors of today's Anishinaabeg, Miami-Ilinois, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Meskwaki, and Asakiwaki people.

In 2015, a man broke through barriers in the middle of the night for a joy ride over one of the mounds in the complex in a truck. A few years before that, a group of people was caught attempting to plant crystals in the Serpent Mound itself. Increased security cameras were installed to protect the mounds both from those who don't respect their significance and those who want to appropriate the mysteries of their culture.

Cahokia Mounds - Collinsville, IL

Some people might know Cahokia from its appearance in Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry fiction series, where faeries who immigrated to the United States during Jefferson's administration settle in it. In fact, it was built and settled by a sophisticated Mississippian society in 800-1400 CE.

The Cahokia Mounds site is second in size only to Poverty Point. Cahokia is located on 2,220 acres on the border between Missouri and Illinois, near St. Louis - and it includes Monks Mound, the tallest earthwork in the country at 100 feet. The mound is named for Trappist monks who used to live on some of the nearby mounds. They didn't live on Monks Mound, however. Its terraces were used for terrace farming. (Why not? What better use of an ancient monument than to grow peas?)

Cahokia has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982, so there's no farming there now. People did gather on Monks Mound to watch the 2017 solar eclipse, however. But Bill Iseminger, assistant director of the site, discouraged ceremonies. "We don't sanction those kinds of activities because we don't know what would be appropriate for the people who once lived here,'' he said. So, Cahokia's mounds and mysteries are more respected these days.

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The History Of Indigenous Mounds In America

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Long before Europeans arrived in the land that would become America, the ancestors of today's indigenous people built and maintained thriving communities. Their languages, cultural practices, and oral histories were passed down to their descendants, who have maintained them as well as possible...

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At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida-land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. By the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States.

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Indian removal act

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Indian Removal Act, (May 28, 1830), first major legislative departure from the U.S. policy of officially respecting the legal and political rights of the American Indians. The act authorized the president to grant Indian tribes unsettled western prairie land in exchange for their desirable territories within state borders (especially in the Southeast), from which the tribes would be removed. The rapid settlement of land east of the Mississippi River made it clear by the mid-1820s that the white man would not tolerate the presence of even peaceful Indians there. Pres. Andrew Jackson (1829-37) vigorously promoted this new policy, which became incorporated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Although the bill provided only for the negotiation with tribes east of the Mississippi on the basis of payment for their lands, trouble arose when the United States resorted to force to gain the Indians' compliance with its demand that they accept the land exchange and move west.

A number of northern tribes were peacefully resettled in western lands considered undesirable for the white man. The problem lay in the Southeast, where members of what were known as the Five Civilized Tribes ( Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee, and Creek) refused to trade their cultivated farms for the promise of strange land in the Indian Territory with a so-called permanent title to that land. Many of these Indians had homes, representative government, children in missionary schools, and trades other than farming. Some 100,000 tribesmen were forced to march westward under U.S. military coercion in the 1830s; up to 25 percent of the Indians, many in manacles, perished en route. The trek of the Cherokee in 1838-39 became known as the infamous " Trail of Tears." Even more reluctant to leave their native lands were the Florida Indians, who fought resettlement for seven years (1835-42) in the second of the Seminole Wars.

The frontier began to be pushed aggressively westward in the years that followed, upsetting the "guaranteed" titles of the displaced tribes and further reducing their relocated holdings.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Indian Removal Act | Definition, History, Significance, & Facts

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Indian Removal Act (1830), first major legislative departure from the U.S. policy of officially respecting the legal and political rights of the American Indians. The act authorized the president to grant Indian tribes unsettled western prairie land in exchange for their desirable territories within state borders.

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The Founding Fathers certainly studied their history, drawing upon influences from ancient Rome to John Locke to help create their fledgling country. Yet the ideas the Founding Fathers got from Native Americans hardly ever receive due credit from historians, though their democratic procedures largely shaped the democracy Americans know today. As the European settlers waged centuries of war against the "savages" in the Americas while stealing their land and slaughtering innocent people, they also ripped off their ideas. Whose ideas were the Founding Fathers influenced by? The most influential group was the Iroquois, who created the first participatory democracy in North America.

The Native influence on the Founding Fathers provided them with numerous ideas about democracy and politics, and is probably something you never knew about America's founding. Native Americans shaped the Founding Fathers' conception of a successful republic and even the symbols of a new nation. Yet, in the end, they remain shut out of history books in favor of the Magna Carta and ancient Greeks. But no longer will the influence of the Iroquois people be pushed to the side of American history.

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"All American" Ideas The Founding Fathers Actually Took From Native Americans

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The Founding Fathers certainly studied their history, drawing upon influences from ancient Rome to John Locke to help create their fledgling country. Yet the ideas the Founding Fathers got from Native Americans hardly ever receive due credit from historians, though their democratic procedures...

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derogatory names for tribes

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Though often overlooked, the history of Native Americans is far more complex than many choose to acknowledge. The political, social, and cultural identities of Native American peoples are usually consolidated into a single homogenous group despite the diversity of peoples, languages, and cultures. Throughout much of American history, Native Americans were first depicted as "barbaric savages," a people uncivilized and willing to wipe out any form of European civilization, then as "noble savages" who lived at peace with nature and the Earth. However, these sweeping generalizations of America's indigenous people simplify Native American societies and the conflicts they faced.

One legacy from this overgeneralized history are the names applied to many Native American nations today. Common names we use are often not what members call themselves, but instead come from outside observers and historical enemies. Monikers like Apache or Comanche may reflect a physical trait or indicate some behavioral characteristic assigned to them by a group of peoples who were their political enemies previous to European contact. The names became part of the lexicon once Europeans began colonizing North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. European settlers made alliances with certain peoples, appropriated the names their allies gave to others, and changed them to fit a European tongue regardless of whether or not those they were naming referred to themselves in that same way.

The exonyms (names given by others) of many native peoples are derived from adversarial relationships. The words often translate to something similar to "enemy;" they can be derogatory in nature because they have their roots in a historical enemy. However, their autonyms (names they call themselves) are often translations of "the people." Though these distinctions may seem miniscule and inconsequential to some, they affect our understanding of native people and the role they play in history, and show how our perceptions of native peoples derive from an unintentional historical bias.

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Well-Known But Derogatory Names Of Native American Nations Given To Them By Historical Adversaries

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Though often overlooked, the history of Native Americans is far more complex than many choose to acknowledge. The political, social, and cultural identities of Native American peoples are usually consolidated into a single homogenous group despite the diversity of peoples, languages, and...

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Current life of native Americans

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In 1851, the US government passed the Indian Appropriations Act, creating reservation lands for Native Americans. For decades prior, the US government had forcefully moved and abused Native American tribes, most notably through the Indian Removal Act and subsequent Trail of Tears under President Andrew Jackson.

In placing them on reservations, the US government often forced Native Americans to live on subpar lands under harsh conditions. Reservation rules were also oppressive and unfamiliar. By 1887, the government took further action with the Dawes Act. President Grover Cleveland signed the act, which aimed to assimilate Native Americans into white culture and improve their lives. It did the opposite. By taking more land away from Native Americans, splitting up land they already held, depriving them of productive and profitable farmland, and sending them into abject poverty, the US government only made matters worse.

During the 20th century, Native American life was directly tied to the reservation system. Until the 1950s, most Native Americans lived on reservations. Today, the majority of Native Americans live in cities, but life on a reservation is still difficult for those who remain. Poverty, inadequate health care, crime, and alcohol abuse characterize reservation life - but so do cultural strength and pride in tradition.

The Per Capita Income On Some Reservations Is Under $10,000

The median income for Native Americans and Alaska Natives was $37,227 in 2014, but some indigenous people living on reservations reportedly earn less than $10,000 a year. For example, Oglala Lakota County, SD, home to the Pine Ridge Reservation, has a per capita income of $8,768 - the lowest in the nation.

Income levels may be rising: In 1989, the per capita income on reservations was $4,478 and "ranged from about $3,100 on the Papago and Pine Ridge Reservations to over $4,500 on the Blackfeet ($4,718) and Hopi ($4,566) Reservations."

But Native Americans not living on reservations earn almost twice as much - something that has caused tension within reservations. According to one story in Native News:

Native Americans face a constant conflict: A push to move into a city, go to school, find a job, perhaps start a family and a pull to stay on the reservation, where there's family and generations of support. The conflict is reasonable, tribal reservations are often impoverished and have unemployment rates well into the double digits. Urban areas are increasingly becoming rife with promise and opportunity... Tribal government has a high turnaround rate, which can lead to economic uncertainty because the majority of jobs are tied to tribal government.

Dustin Monroe, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, corroborated this, saying, "People are drawn off reservations because of instability."

The Life Expectancy Is The Lowest In The United States

The life expectancy for Native Americans is reportedly up to 20 years shorter than the national average. Racism in the health care system and a general lack of access to health care may contribute heavily to this statistic.

Between 2009 and 2011, Native American life expectancy was more than five years below that of other racial groups in the United States. Native Americans and Alaska Natives live an average of 73 years, while the rest of the population lives roughly 78. This is an improvement from 1970, when the life expectancy for Native Americans was only 44 years, a third less than that of average Americans.

The life expectancy for Native Americans varies by state and by reservation. At the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, life expectancy hovers in the upper 40s for men, and the mid-50s for women - far below the state's already low average.

Drug Abuse And Alcoholism Remain Major Problems

White colonizers first introduced Native Americans to alcohol. Native Americans modeled their drinking behavior on what they saw from Europeans during their expansion across North America. Alcohol took on economic and political roles in the relationship between Native Americans and white settlers on the frontier, from positive social aspects to more negative outcomes, including excess drinking.

Today, both drug abuse and alcoholism remain problematic. Olowan Martinez, a member of the Lakota Tribe, described the reservation she grew up on as "a hole," adding, "It's been based on liquid genocide for generations." Technically, two-thirds of reservations in the US are mandated "dry" by the tribal governments to combat high alcoholism rates, but there are countless bars and liquor stores just outside reservation boundaries.

Drugs like methamphetamine are a bigger problem for younger Native populations. Between 2006 and 2014, drug cases on reservations reportedly increased drastically. Studies show teenagers on reservations are much more likely to use drugs. Calls for prevention programs, especially in the face of high fetal alcohol syndrome numbers and incidents of babies born addicted to meth, emphasize the importance of local support systems.

Given Native Americans' underfunding and the long history of identity struggles, breaking the cycle of alcohol and drug abuse remains complicated. Nick Estes, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico and a citizen of the Lower Brulé Sioux Tribe, wrote, "Misunderstanding the ways in which Native bodies are made poor and criminalized makes it impossible to understand the structure of settler colonialism as a precondition for that poverty."

Public Health Suffers Due To A Lack Of Resources

Native Americans living on reservations rely on Indian Health Services (IHS) for medical care. The IHS, organized by the federal government, is underfunded and has been since its creation in the 1970s. The IHS receives a lump sum of money each year to treat and care for all Native Americans living on reservations, regardless of need or number. While more than half of Native Americans now live off-reservation, the health care gap between Native populations and other Americans demonstrates the continued lack of access, opportunity, and information among Native groups.

Clinics on reservations often have limited hours, do not let patients make appointments, and lack equipment like MRI machines. According to Donna Keeler, the director of South Dakota Urban Indian Health, even federal prisoners receive more care than people living on reservations. In 2013, the IHS spent "$2,849 a person, compared with $7,717 for health care spending nationally."

With a lack of access to adequate health care and substance abuse treatment facilities, Native Americans are more than four times more likely to die of liver disease, three times more likely to die of diabetes, and almost twice as likely to die of pneumonia or influenza.

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What Life On A Native American Reservation Is Really Like

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In 1851, the US government passed the Indian Appropriations Act, creating reservation lands for Native Americans. For decades prior, the US government had forcefully moved and abused Native American tribes, most notably through the Indian Removal Act and subsequent Trail of Tears under President...