Bartolome de las Casas

This tireless Dominican priest of the 16th Century made trips for fifty years back to the imperial courts of Rome and Spain to insist on the rights and inherent dignity of the native peoples of the Americas. He had to prove to Christians, who thought they knew the Scriptures, that Native peoples were also children of God. Opposed and persecuted by the new aristocracy of Mexico, he became much more concerned for the salvation of the Spanish conquistadors than for the Native peoples of Chiapas Mexico where he was bishop. He refused absolution to any Spaniard who would not free his slaves, and when persecution forced him back to Spain he said, “I leave in the Indies Jesus Christ, our God, scourged and afflicted and beaten and crucified not once, but thousands of times.” This is all the more amazing, when one realizes that he first came to the Americas as the royal chaplain to the Spanish conquest of Cuba and enjoyed the private service of Indian slaves himself.

Black Elk

Nicholas Black Elk, remained both a Lakota Medicine Man and a Catholic Catechist until his death. He is representative of the many Native leaders like Chief Joseph, Crazy Horse, Chief Seattle, and Sitting Bull who tried desperately to bridge the gap between their own Native religion and the new Christianity that had been given to them. Almost always they ended up “martyrs” to this cause, as American treaties were broken and their own often turned against them. Yet they remained bridge builders to the end, by the strength of their twice tested spirituality. Native peoples invariably lost at Western political games, in many ways because they did not know how to play them. It all looked so illusory and pretentious from their religious perspective. Like Jesus himself, they tried to ignore such political systems, but then were invariably ground up by the wheels and deceits of power.

There are 563 Federally recognized tribal governments in the United States. The United States recognizes the right of these tribes to self-government and supports their tribal sovereignty and self-determination. These tribes possess the right to form their own government, to enforce laws (both civil and criminal), to tax, to establish membership, to license and regulate activities, to zone and to exclude persons from tribal territories. Limitations on tribal powers of self-government include the same limitations applicable to states; for example, neither tribes nor states have the power to make war, engage in foreign relations, or coin money.^[10]

According to 2003 United States Census Bureau estimates, a little over one third of the 2,786,652 Native Americans in the United States live in three states: California at 413,382, Arizona at 294,137 and Oklahoma at 279,559.^[11]

As of 2000, the largest tribes in the U.S. by population were Navajo, Cherokee, Choctaw, Sioux, Chippewa, Apache, Lumbee, Blackfeet, Iroquois, and Pueblo. In 2000 eight of ten Americans with Native American ancestry were of mixed blood. It is estimated that by 2100 that figure will rise to nine of ten.^[12] In addition, there are a number of tribes that are recognized by individual states, but not by the federal government. The rights and benefits associated with state recognition vary from state to state.

Then there are Tribal Nations that have been denied recognition such as the Muwekma Ohlone[4] and the Miami tribe of Indiana. Many of the smaller eastern tribes have been trying to gain official recognition of their tribal status. The recognition confers some benefits, including the right to label arts and crafts as Native American and permission to apply for grants that are specifically reserved for Native Americans. But gaining recognition as a tribe is extremely difficult because of a Catch-22 in the process. To be established as a tribal group, members have to submit extensive genealogical proof of tribal descent, yet in past years many Native Americans denied their Native American heritage, because it would have deprived them of many rights, such as the right of probate.

Military defeat, cultural pressure, confinement on reservations, forced cultural assimilation, outlawing of native languages and culture, termination policies of the 1950s and 1960s and earlier, as well as slavery have had deleterious effects on Native Americans’ mental and physical health. Contemporary health problems include poverty, alcoholism, heart disease, diabetes, and New World Syndrome.

As recently as the 1970s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was still actively pursuing a policy of “assimilation”,^[13] dating at least to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. The goal of assimilation — plainly stated early on — was to eliminate the reservations and steer Native Americans into mainstream U.S. culture. In July 2000 the Washington state GOP^[14] adopted a resolution of “termination” for tribal governments. As of 2004, there are still claims of theft of Native American land for the coal and uranium it contains.^[15][16][17]

In the state of Virginia, Native Americans face a unique problem. Virginia has no federally recognized tribes, largely due to Walter Ashby Plecker. In 1912, Plecker became the first registrar of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, serving until 1946. Plecker believed that the state’s Native Americans had been “mongrelized” with its African American population. A law passed by the state’s General Assembly recognized only two races, “white” and “colored”. Plecker pressured local governments into reclassifying all Native Americans in the state as “colored”, leading to the destruction of records on the state’s Native American community

Where did we ever get the idea that it was our god ordained mission to conquer this land?

In the 19th century, the incessant Westward expansion of the United States incrementally compelled large numbers of Native Americans to resettle further west, often by force, almost always reluctantly. Under President Andrew Jackson, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the President to conduct treaties to exchange Native American land east of the Mississippi River for lands west of the river. As many as 100,000 Native Americans eventually relocated in the West as a result of this Indian Removal policy. In theory, relocation was supposed to be voluntary (and many Native Americans did remain in the East), but in practice great pressure was put on Native American leaders to sign removal treaties. Arguably the most egregious violation of the stated intention of the removal policy was the Treaty of New Echota, which was signed by a dissident faction of Cherokees, but not the elected leadership. The treaty was brutally enforced by President Martin Van Buren, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokees (mostly from disease) on the Trail of Tears.

The explicit US policy of Indian Removal forced or coerced the relocation of major Native American groups in both the Southeast and the Northeast United States, resulting directly and indirectly in the deaths of tens of thousands. The subsequent process of assimilations, though a less active means of a ethnic cleansing, was no less devastating to Native American peoples. Tribes were generally located to reservations on which they could more easily be separated from traditional life and pushed into US society. Some Southern states additionally enacted laws in the 19th century forbidding non-Indian settlement on Indian lands, intending to prevent sympathetic white missionaries from aiding the scattered Indian resistance.

Conflicts, generally known as “Indian Wars“, broke out between U.S. forces and many different tribes. U.S. government authorities entered numerous treaties during this period, but later abrogated many for various reasons. Well-known military engagements include the Native American victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, and the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890. On January 31, 1876, the United States government ordered all remaining Native Americans to move into reservations or reserves. This, together with the near-extinction of the American Bison that many tribes had lived on, set about the downturn of Prairie Culture that had developed around the use of the horse for hunting, travel and trading.

American policy toward Native Americans has been an evolving process. In the late nineteenth century, reformers, in efforts to “civilize” or otherwise assimilate Indians (as opposed to relegating them to reservations), adapted the practice of educating native children in Indian Boarding Schools. These schools, which were primarily run by Christian missionaries,^[6] often proved traumatic to Native American children, who were forbidden to speak their native languages, taught Christianity instead of their native religions and in numerous other ways forced to abandon their various Native American identities^[7] and adopt European-American culture. There are also many documented cases of sexual, physical and mental abuses occurring at these schools.^[8][9]

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 gave United States citizenship to Native Americans, in part because of an interest by many to see them merged with the American mainstream, and also because of the heroic service of many Native American veterans in World War I.

The European colonization of the Americas decimated the populations and cultures of the Native Americans. During the 15th through 19th centuries, their populations were ravaged by displacement, disease, warfare against the British and later against the independent descendents (white Americans), and enslavement.

The first Native American group encountered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, were the 250 thousand to 1 million Island Arawaks (more properly called the Taino) of Boriquen (Puerto Rico), Dominican Republic (Quisqueya), the Cubanacan (Cuba), and Haiti. It is said that only 500 survived by the year 1550, and the group was considered extinct before 1650. Yet DNA studies show that the genetic contribution of the Taino to that region continues, and the mitochondrial DNA studies of the Taino are said to show relationships to the Northern Indigenous Nations, such as Inuit (Eskimo) and others.^[1]

In the 15th century, Spaniards and other Europeans brought horses to the Americas. Some of these animals escaped and began to breed and increase their numbers in the wild. Ironically, the horse had originally evolved in the Americas, but the early American horses were game for early human hunters, and went extinct about 7,000 BC, just after the end of the last ice age. The re-introduction of the horse had a profound impact on Native American culture in the Great Plains of North America. This new mode of travel made it possible for some tribes to greatly expand their territories, exchange goods with neighboring tribes, and more easily capture game.

Europeans also brought diseases, against which the Native Americans had no immunity. Chicken pox and measles, though common and rarely fatal among Europeans, often proved fatal to Native Americans, and more dangerous diseases such as smallpox were especially deadly to Native American populations.^[2] It is difficult to estimate the total percentage of the Native American population killed by these diseases. Epidemics often immediately followed European exploration, sometimes destroying entire villages. Some historians estimate that up to 80% of some Native populations may have died due to European diseases.^[3]

I think its important to truly understand who we are. Part of who we are culturally is defined by the history of our nation. And we do ourselves and others a disservice (and sometimes injustice) by not realizing or ignoring the reality of our past.

This week I’ll be posting some things pertaining to Thanksgiving. My hope is that we will be able to simultaneously give thanks for our lives while still working to right the wrongs of the past and give due consideration to others who may have been affected by our ancestors’ actions.

The indigenous peoples of the Americas (IPOTA) were the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those historical peoples. (The precise definition of the term is the subject of the Native American name controversy.)

According to current scientific knowledge, human beings did not evolve in North or South America but instead arrived by sea or by a land bridge that formerly connected North America with Asia. Most (if not all) of those indigenous peoples descended from peoples living in Siberia. They entered North America more than 16,000 years ago and diversified into hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes.^[1]

While many of these indigenous peoples retained a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle until modern times, others lived in permanent villages and were primarily farmers. In some regions they created large sedentary chiefdom polities, and had advanced state level societies with monumental architecture and large-scale, organized cities. Scholars’ estimates of the total population of the Americas before contact vary enormously, from a low of 10 million to a high of 112 million.^[2] Whatever the figure, scholars generally agree that most of the indigenous population resided in Mesoamerica and South America, while about 10% resided in North America.^[3]

Smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, measles and other epidemics swept in after European contact, killing a large portion of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, causing one of the greater calamities in human history.^[4] At least 93 waves of epidemic disease swept through Native populations between first contact and the early 20th century.^[5]