Native Americans in the United States

"[25] After the thirteen British colonies revolted against Great Britain and established the United States, President George Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox conceived the idea of "civilizing" Native Americans in preparation for their assimilation as U.S.

[citation needed] The history of Native Americans in the United States began before the founding of the U.S., tens of thousands of years ago with the settlement of the Americas by the Paleo-Indians.

The Eurasian migration to the Americas occurred over millennia via Beringia, a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, as early humans spread southward and eastward, forming distinct cultures and societies.

By the 19th century, westward U.S. expansion, rationalized by Manifest destiny, pressured tribes into forced relocations like the Trail of Tears, which decimated communities and redefined Native territories.

A justification for the policy of conquest and subjugation of the Indigenous people emanated from the stereotyped perceptions of Native Americans as "merciless Indian savages" (as described in the United States Declaration of Independence).

By the 21st century, Native Americans had achieved increased control over tribal lands and resources, although many communities continue to grapple with the legacy of displacement and economic challenges.

These tribes possess the right to form their own governments, to enforce laws (both civil and criminal) within their lands, to tax, to establish requirements for membership, to license and regulate activities, to zone, and to exclude persons from tribal territories.

Plecker pressured local governments into reclassifying all Native Americans in the state as "colored" and gave them lists of family surnames to examine for reclassification based on his interpretation of data and the law.

[91] The following is an excerpt from a statement from Mel Thom on May 1, 1968, during a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk:[89] (It was written by members of the Workshop on American Indian Affairs and the NIYC) We have joined the Poor People's Campaign because most of our families, tribes, and communities number among those suffering most in this country.

This is largely due to the number of Native Americans having dwindled since white settler colonialism, while those who survived were forcibly moved into reservations; both of these factors were referenced by Adolf Hitler in 1928 when he admiringly stated the US had "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage".

Among the most prominent of these were Elbridge Ayer Burbank, George Catlin, Seth Eastman, Paul Kane, W. Langdon Kihn, Charles Bird King, Joseph Henry Sharp, and John Mix Stanley.

These programs resembled the "sympathetic" yet contradictory film Dances With Wolves of 1990, in which, according to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, the narrative choice was to relate the Lakota story as told through a Euro-American voice, for wider impact among a general audience.

Gilio-Whitaker, highlights some of the ways in which these practices are reinforced, with the concept of environmental deprivation – "historical processes of land and resource dispossession calculated to bring about the destruction of Indigenous lives and cultures."

“The consequences of capitalist economics, such as deforestation, water pollution, the clearing of land for large scale agriculture and urbanization, generate immediate disruptions on ecosystems "rapidly" rendering them very different from what they were like before, undermining Indigenous knowledge systems and Indigenous peoples' capacity to cultivate landscapes and adjust to environmental change.”[143] The Miami tribe, which now occupies Oklahoma, once resided in Oxford, Ohio, where Miami University now is placed.

After they were familiarized with their smallholder status, Native American landowners were lifted of trust restrictions and their land would get transferred back to them, contingent on a transactional fee to the federal government.

[178] Examples of historical trauma can be seen through the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, where over 200 unarmed Lakota were killed,[179] and the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, when Native Americans lost four-fifths of their land.

For example, the re-introduction of the horse to North America allowed the Plains Indians to revolutionize their ways of life by making hunting, trading, and warfare far more effective, and to greatly improve their ability to transport possessions and move their settlements.

In the early years, as Native peoples encountered European explorers and settlers and engaged in trade, they exchanged food, crafts, and furs for blankets, iron and steel implements, horses, trinkets, firearms, and alcoholic beverages.

In the American Southwest, especially New Mexico, a syncretism between the Catholicism brought by Spanish missionaries and the native religion is common; the religious drums, chants, and dances of the Pueblo people are regularly part of Masses at Santa Fe's Saint Francis Cathedral.

Jim Thorpe, Lewis Tewanima, Joe Hipp, Notah Begay III, Chris Wondolowski, Jacoby Ellsbury, Joba Chamberlain, Kyle Lohse, Sam Bradford, Jack Brisco, Tommy Morrison, Billy Mills, Angel Goodrich, Shoni Schimmel, and Kyrie Irving are well known professional athletes.

With the win, he became just the fourth member of Team USA to capture the NBA championship and an Olympic gold medal in the same year, joining LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and Scottie Pippen.

Flutes and whistles made of wood, cane, or bone are also played, generally by individuals, but in former times also by large ensembles (as noted by Spanish conquistador de Soto).

In the International world of ballet dancing Maria Tallchief was considered America's first major prima ballerina,[224] and was the first person of Native American descent to hold the rank.

[233] Native artists such as Jeanne Rorex Bridges (Echota Cherokee) who was not enrolled ran the risk of fines or imprisonment if they continued to sell their art while affirming their Indian heritage.

For instance, Charles Eastman, a man of European and Lakota origin whose father sent both his sons to Dartmouth College, got his medical degree at Boston University and returned to the West to practice.

[248][249] In Colonial America, slavery soon became racialized, with those enslaved by the institution consisting of ethnic groups (non-Christian Native Americans and Africans) who were foreign to the Christian, European colonists.

Many surviving Native American peoples of the southeast strengthened their loose coalitions of language groups and joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection.

[265][266] As culture can vary widely between the 574 extant federally recognized tribes in the United States, the idea of a single unified "Native American" racial identity is a European construct that does not have an equivalent in tribal thought.

[271] Some tribes (particularly some in the Eastern United States) are primarily made up of individuals with an unambiguous Native American identity, despite having a large number of mixed-race citizens with prominent non-Native ancestry.

[301] The most popular theory is that human settlement of the Americas occurred in stages from the Bering sea coast line, with an initial 15,000 to 20,000-year layover on Beringia for the small founding population.

The cultural areas of Indigenous peoples of North America during the Pre-Columbian era , according to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber
A map showing the approximate location of the ice-free corridor and Paleo-Indian settlements during the era of Clovis culture
Shriver Circle Earthworks and the Mound City Group (on the left), c. 200 BCE to c. 500 CE , depicted in a 2019 portrait
The Rescue sculpture stood outside the U.S. Capitol between 1853 and 1958. Commissioned by the U.S. government , its sculptor Horatio Greenough wrote that it was "to convey the idea of the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes". [ 36 ]
A mass grave for the dead Lakota after the Wounded Knee Massacre , which took place on December 29, 1890, during the Indian Wars
Proportion of Indigenous Americans (including Native Hawaiians) in each U.S. state, Washington, D.C. , and Puerto Rico as of the 2020 U.S. census
Proportion of Indigenous Americans (Including Native Hawaiians) in each county of the fifty states , Washington, D.C. , and Puerto Rico as of the 2020 United States census
The American Indian and Alaskan Native (alone/single race) populations as of 2020
This U.S. Census Bureau map depicts the locations of differing Native American groups, including Indian reservations , as of 2000; present-day Oklahoma in the Southwestern United States , which was once designated as an Indian Territory before Oklahoma's statehood in 1907, is highlighted in blue.
Indian reservations in the continental United States
Native peoples are concerned about the effects of abandoned uranium mines on or near their lands.
A group of NIYC demonstrators holding signs in front of the BIA office.
National Indian Youth Council demonstrations, March 1970, Bureau of Indian Affairs Office
A discriminatory sign posted above a bar. Birney , Montana , 1941
Chief Plenty Coups and seven Crow prisoners under guard at Crow agency, Montana, 1887
Protest against the name of the Washington Redskins in Minneapolis, November 2014
Secotan Indians' dance in North Carolina . Watercolor by John White, 1585.
Eagle Dance of the Sac and Fox Indians, painting by George Catlin , c. 1845
Sandia Casino, owned by the Sandia Pueblo of New Mexico
Teacher with picture cards giving English instruction to Navajo day school students
An older Native American woman talks behind a table of beans, grains, and other produce. She is demonstrating the different traditional Native American foods.
A Native American woman talks behind a table of bowls of beans, grains, and other produce at an Indigenous food demonstration.
Three Native American women in Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Wasco County, Oregon (1902)
Geronimo , Chiricahua Apache leader. Photograph by Frank A. Rinehart (1898).
Pre-contact: distribution of North American language families, including northern Mexico
Oklahoma Cherokee language immersion school student writing in the Cherokee syllabary
The Cherokee language taught to preschoolers as a first language , at New Kituwah Academy
Ojibwe baby waits on a cradleboard while parents tend wild rice crops ( Minnesota , 1940).
Maize grown by Native Americans
Makah Native Americans and a whale, The King of the Seas in the Hands of the Makahs , 1910 photograph by Asahel Curtis
Baptism of Pocahontas was painted in 1840 by John Gadsby Chapman , who depicts Pocahontas , wearing white, being baptized Rebecca by Anglican minister Alexander Whiteaker (left) in Jamestown, Virginia. This event is believed to have taken place either in 1613 or 1614.
Saint Kateri Tekakwitha , the patron of ecologists , exiles , and orphans, was canonized by the Catholic Church
Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first Native American woman to become a physician in the United States.
Ball-play of the women, painting by George Catlin , c. 1835
Jim Thorpe , gold medalist at the 1912 Olympics, in the pentathlon and decathlon events
Ball players from the Choctaw and Lakota tribe in a 19th-century lithograph by George Catlin
Billy Mills crosses the finish line at the end of the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics .
Lillian Gross, described as a "Mixed Blood" by the Smithsonian source, was of Cherokee and European American heritage. She identified with the Cherokee culture in which she was raised.
The 1725 return of an Osage bride from a trip to Paris , France . The Osage woman was married to a French soldier.
Five Indians and a Captive , painted by Carl Wimar , 1855
Charles Eastman was one of the first Native Americans to become certified as a medical doctor , after he graduated from Boston University. [ 242 ] [ 243 ]
Buffalo Soldiers , 1890. The nickname was given to the "Black Cavalry" by the Native American tribes they fought.
Sharice Davids became one of the first two Native American women elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Ben Reifel of South Dakota, the only Lakota elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
Deb Haaland became the first Native American to be appointed as the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
Ada Brown , a citizen of the Choctaw Nation with mixed-African American heritage, nominated by President Donald Trump in 2019 to be a federal judge in Texas
Mary Peltola became the first Alaska Native elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Members of the Creek (Muscogee) Nation in Oklahoma around 1877; they include men with some European and African ancestry. [ 279 ]