Turtle Island

The term “Indian” — originated from Columbus’s mistake thinking he travelled to India while being on a completely new land.

It was a term broadly used in a negative connotation — in the SA and parts of Mexico it was used to describe people racially disadvantaged, of poor financial standing, backwards.

It is a negative term.

But “American Indian” is more accepted as it is a unique term.

“Native American” has gained more traction in recent years, but many have opposed it as it essentially refers to anyone that had been born on the continent — non-Indian people in the 70’s strongly fought to have it be the main term, as if Indian Americans just like African Americans surely wanted to have that name changed.

“Native” is a broadly preferred term by academics, students and others. But truly, the proper term has never been truly settled. It’s based on region and its history and

culture.

  • Mexico — “Indian” is very insulting. “Indigenous” is used there. Many natives also oppose calling the region Latin America as many natives (who are not native Spanish speakers) don’t consider themselves Latin.

  • Canada — “First Nations” - aboriginal, native or first nation people.

What has been seen as consensus was calling them by specific tribe (i.e. Yupik, Yakama, Dakota etc) — or at least their names which they’ve been known since before the colonization.

Highest concentration if natives in cities — Minneapolis, Oakland for example BIA — Bureau of Indian Affairs DIA — Department of Indian Affairs

David Treuer “Heartbeat of the Wounded Knee”

The Plains Indians have won many battles in open war, which resulted in a treaty table => the second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) — large homeland for Lakota in southwestern South Dakota and northern Nebraska.

Battle of Little Bighorn (1876) — the US government had been trying to solve the “Indian problem” => negotiation, starvation and open war. The battle was Lakota and Cheyenne vs the US government

How did the Bighorn battle came to be?

  1. When gold had been found in the Black Hills, the treaty was violated by the government.

  2. The Lakota tried to force them out, enforcing the terms of the treaty

Throughout the battle

  • Custer and the Seventh Cavalry wiped out

  • The natives put away guns and finished them off with clubs and tomahawks => ritual slaughter

What came of it?

  • instead of a head-on approach US government began trying a more widespread approach

  • Taking away their clothes, food — reneging on treaty promises

  • Destroying the buffalo hers of the Plains (very important to natives)

“The Ghost Dance” — initially a vision a native got showing him next to God looking down at other natives. He told him they should stop fighting and work hard and make peace with white people. But as the story got told through various of sources it changed its meaning — the Lakota tribe got a version that if they the Ghost Dance right they would be able to reunite with their ancestors in the afterlife as well as the whole of white people would be wiped out of America.

The Ghost Dance alarmed the government as they saw it as a radical movement — they began dividing the bigger reservations (the Great Sioux Reservation) into smaller ones so they would not be able to create large gatherings. They sent native children to boarding schools far away from the reservations. They tried imposing individual ownership on the Lakota (they lived communally).

The Ghost Dance religion was banned — breaking their Constitutional rights. But Natives were 34 years away from citizenship, so essentially they were viewed as outsiders on their own land.

Tribe

in anthropology — social organization based on a smaller set of groups (bands)

In US law — federally recognized tribes are those of Native Americans [574 tribal nations recognized, out of them: 229 are in Alaska](recognized by United States Bureau of Indian Affairs — goes back i notes when talking about how natives are the only group that has a government-to-government relationship with the US federal government)

Tribal enrollment

based on shared customs, traditions, language, ancestry or how much native blood you have “blood quantum”

for example:

To be eligible for Cherokee Nation citizenship you must have one or more direct ancestors listed on Dawes (a federal census)

Indigenous ancestry among Hispanic Americans:

  • in 2020 almost 1,5 million Hispanic or Latino people identified as American Indian or Alaska native ⇒ many more identified themselves to have two or more races

  • reason: lots of indigenous people in Latin American countries

#LandBack

  • a decentralised campaign or movement

  • since late 2010’s among indigenous people in Australia, Canada, U.S. and other indigenous peoples and allies

  • aims to reestablish indigenous sovereignty with political and economic control of their ancestral lands

Pre-Colombian cultures

Indigenous languages

  • +300 languages at time of contact

  • high diversity: 57 language fams, 14 large language fams

  • patchwork distribution

Cultural diversity

  • some tribes sedentary, some nomadic

  • diverse dwelling, clothing, equipment

  • mostly hunting and forging, some agricultural

  • diff roles of women in governance and economy

  • some based on consensus and some based on monarchy (e.g. Natchez)

*insert the screenshot of “culture areas” — simplified ways to discuss diversity

Political organization

  • highly diverse with a few mostly common characteristics:

    • political organization into bands, tribes and confederation (e.g. Oceti Sakowin, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe)

    • governance based on holding land in common, different relations to land than in Europe

    • Diplomacy and small scale wars

insert the screenshot of pop of ind*

Columbian history begins

1492 — Columbus lands in what he believed were “West Indies” ⇒ his arrival brought extreme violence to the Arawaks and other indigenous people of the isles

Indigenous pop. at the time of Europeans arrival was estimated to be at 5 to 30 million — some developed cities but most lives in towns and villages (Taos Pueblo, New Mexico)

Spanish explorers as well as British and French ones brought diseases — smallpox and measles ⇒ decimated the indigenous population by around 90%

After that many tribes reinvented and connected themselves in their new reality.

Proclamation of 1763 — prohibiting settlement to the West of the British colonies. Reserving land west of the Appalachian Mountains to Native Americans. Not accepted by the colonies, settlers and fur traders continued to settle on Indian land.

“Civilizing” the indigenous tribes

some natives in the southeastern tribes were slave owners (as they relied heavily on trade and agriculture = reliant on europeans) only elites though.

  • many members of the Southeast tribes disliked these developments — 1813-14= ⇒ war between Upper Creek (tribe who opposed U.S. expansion) and Lower Creek(sided with the US, Choctaw and Cherokees)

  • Red Sticks allied with Tecumseh, a Shawnee leader who tried to unite indigenous tribed against the U.S., and the British

“Civilizing” the Europeans?

  • Wendat leader Kandiaronk is thought to have influenced European Enlightenment

    • Do you seriously imaine that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris? To bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happens to have been born with an inheritance? Do you actually imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry? ~ Kandiaronk quoted by Baron de Lahontant (1699)

  • Gender relations among the Haudenosaunee inspired first feminists

  • Haudenosaunee relations also inspired Lewis H. Morgan and Friedrick Engels

GWY (The-Cherokee)

  • Sequoyah invented the syllabary to write the Cherokee language in 1810s-20s

  • Cherokees has bilingual newspapers and 90% literacy rate by 1830

  • they had a government, a constitution with New Echota as capital, and many had dual U.S.-Cherokee citizenship

“Five Civilized Tribes”

a term adopted in the mid-19th c. to describe the five main tribed of the Southeast who adopted European-American way of living:

  • Cherokee

  • Chochtaw

  • Muscogee (Creek)

  • Chickasaw

  • Seminole

The term was used to distinguish them from other tribes defined as “wild” or “savage” because they retained theit traditional cultural practices.

Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act

  • 1828 — Andrew Jackson elected the 7th president (populist campaign and promise of land-ownership for white settlers)

  • 1830 — signed the Indian Removal Act → displaced tens of thousands of Native Americans from theit ancestral homelands

The Trail of Tears

1829 — gold discovered in North Georgia mountains

1832-33 — Cherokee and Muscogee land in Georgia given away to white settlers in Land Lotteries

  • Cherokees of Georgia won their cse in the US Supreme Court against the forced removal

  • Andrew Jackson refused to acknowledge the judgement

  • forcibly removed over 15k Cherokees and 1,5k slaves west of Mississippi

  • about 4k Cherokees died during the journey

  • Most of the Chicksaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminoles were also removed to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma)

  • the removal is now considered an ethnic cleansing or genocide

  • the removal was not without resistance → Seminoles opposed it particularly vehemently

Civil War

During Civil War all Five Tribes allied with the Confederacy

John Ross — the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1828-1866), in favor of the Confederates

Many non-slave owning and traditionalist tribal members wanted to remain neutral or side with the Union

Many indigenous volunteers from Indian Territory and African American who escaped slavery also opposed the Confederacy with guerilla warfare

1866 - slavery abolished in the Five Tribes

By 1890 — more than 30 native tribes were relocated to the area (Oklahoma), which was already occupied by Osage and Quapaw tribes

Land runs

  • 1880s — Congress enabled white settlement in “Unassigned Land” (native lands)

  • several “land runs” were organized to determine who can settle the plots (literal horseracing to see who can claim land)

  • settlement spread way beyond the “unassigned land”

Land Allotment

  • Native land in (nowadays) Oklahoma was subject to an allotment process — assigning plots of land to individuals

  • land of indigenous people was held in trust and managed by agents

  • this period also started official tribal enrollment based on broad categories and blood quantum

  • Allotment Act of 1887 — the whites argued that reservations had a defect as they did not go far because they all (the tribes) owned their land (communal living) — “There is no selfishness, which is at at the bottom of civilization”

  • it reduced native land base by about a half

  • 60 million acresceded as “surplus land”

  • shift from communal to private

  • alloted land was not a full ownership (native allottees were declared “incompetent” to handle their land affairs)

  • a lot of land taken away from natives was put in ads to sell to whites

Oklahoma

1907 — Oklahoma Territory was joined with the Indian Territory and admitted to the Union

  • the proposal to turn the Indian Territory into State of Sequoyah was rejected

  • policies aiming at dissolving tribal governments and reservations were enacted (partially reinstated in 1936)

Restoration of reservations

McGirt v. Oklahoma and Hogner v. Oklahoma (both in 2020) → enabled restoration of the reservations

The cases determined jurisdiction: the authority of a court or official organization to make decisions in certain topics or territories

podcast rec: This Land by Rebecca Nagel at Crooked Media

Oceti Sakowin (the Sioux)

group of Native American tribes and First Nations people from the Great Plains of NA.

“Seven Council Fires”

Lakota / Dakota

Cultural Practices

  • the Dakota (lived in the East) relied on fishing, agriculture and hunting

  • 1700s — the Lakota started using horses and relied increasingly on hunting Buffalo

Louisiana Purchase

1803-04 — the US purchased land (extended US sovereignty, nearly doubling the size of the country) — west expansion

Lewis & Clark expedition met the Lakota in 1804

Wars, treaties and reservations

1868 — Fort Laramie Treaty → signed by US, Lakota and Northern Cheyennes ⇒ established “The Great Sioux Reservation”

Black Hills (Pahá Sápa)

  • Hills that are sacred to the Lakota and other tribes (e.g. Inyan Kara mountain)

  • Fort Laramie Treaty exempted the Black Hills from all non-indigenous settlement “forever” (no one besides the natives could settle there)

  • 1874 — Custer Expedition to the Black Hills confirmed presence of gold → starting a gold rush

  • at first the US gov and army tried to stop the settlers and miners but then decided to just remove the Sioux

Great Sioux Wars

reason:

  • incursion into Black Hills and failed attempts to buy the area

The Great Sioux War of 1976

  • attack by General Custer on Lakota village on the little Bighorn River led to Custer’s death (aka Custer’s Last Stand)

  • the US forced them to surrender and land cessions by cutting rations at agencies

Buffalo killing

  • by laye 1870s — 5,000 buffalo’s were killed by settlers and the US Army PER DAY

  • reduction from tens of millions to a few hundred

  • used and traded hides and bones — aided by railroads — meat was left to rot

  • destroying Lakota and their people’s livelihoods and creating economic dependence

American Indian Boarding Schools

  • R.H. Pratt “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” (1892)

  • uprooting languages, religious and cultural practices, social ties, and skills of economic self-sufficiency

  • socializing to Christianity, providing basic Western education, and preparing for manual labor

  • from mid-17th to mid-20th c.

  • started off as Christian missions, and on-reservation schools

  • a federal policy in the Assimilation period (1880s onwards)

  • Carlisle Indian Industrial School (est. 1879) → a template for more than 300 off-reservation schools

The truth about Indian Boarding Schools

  • physical, emotional, and sexual abuse

  • starvation and malnutrition

  • infectiuous diseases, inadequate health care and sanitation

  • suicides, bounties after escape

deaths:

  • at least 500 in 53 burial sites (Interior Department)

  • 1000 Iin fourt studied locations, estimated 40k in total (Preston McBride)

Wounded Knee Massacre (1890, South Dakota)

300 Lakota people killed by U.S. troops sent to disarm them

Pick-Sloan dams

  • several dams created in Missouri Basin in 1940s to improve flood protection, navigation, irrigation, create recreational opportunities

  • it flooded important parts of Native reservations ⇒ often most fertile riverside areas ⇒ relocating whole communities (over 900 families)

  • “Pick-Sloan was . . . the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.”

Relocation to cities

  • mid-190s to mid-1960s → US gov. introduced termination and relocation policies

  • more than 100 tribal govs. were dissolved, much land sold and/or transferred

  • gov. provided job training and relocation funds

  • approx. 100,000 natives moved to urban centres

Native Protests against oppression

Mount Rushmore occupation

  • relocation to cities ⇒ side effects: stimulating social movements, e.g. American Indian Movement

  • 1970, AIM, United Native Americans, Lakota activists occupied Mount Rushmore ⇒ renamed it Crazy Horse Mountain

  • called the monument an act of vandalism and “a shrine of hypocrisy”

Wounded Knee occupation

  • 1973 — AIM occupied Wounded Knee massacre site in protest against federal policies, violence in border towns and new tribal government

  • wanted traditional governance restored and treaties honored

  • few Native activists and two FBI officers killed in 71-day siege

Dakota Access Pipeline protest

  • 2016-17 → Lakota people and allies protested construction of Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock

  • because: potential leaks from it created threat for reservation’s water supply

  • original route was changed in the end but because it threatened Bismarck town water supply

Ideologies of colonization

Colonialism

  • a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another

  • related to controlling a distant location from a metropole, and extracting resources from peripheries

  • often justified by narratives of supremacy

Settler colonialism

  • mode of domination that seeks to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settler

  • distinguished from other forms of colonialism — looser connection to the metropole, establishment of a new political entity, and policy of eliminating, replacing, or assimilating the indigenous population

Doctrine of discovery

  • a policy enacted in 15th c. Catholic Church ⇒ proclaming right of Christian nations to take possession of the lands of non-Christians, deprive them of sovereignty, and subdue them into slavery

  • related to terra nullius principle and the myth of emptiness

  • Pope Alexander VI

terra nullius — “a territory without a master”, describes a space that can be inhabited bc land not owned by anyone

myth of emptiness — self explanatory

Manifest Destiny

  • used to justify settlement, miining, railroad building, and the subjugation or assimilatio of indigenous people

  • Europeans “ordained by destiny” to rule all of America as they were the “dominant race”

Louisiana Purchase

maps that portray historical evets in the context of current extent of the US and its states do so for readability purposes but also create an illusion that the current extent of the borders was inevitable

Columbus day

  • Oct. 12th or the second Monday of October

  • federal holiday in the US

  • particularly delebrated by Italian Americans (often to celebrate their contribution to the American culture as Italian Heritage Day)

Indigenous People’s Day

  • observed by many states and cities in US

  • often replaces Columbus Day

  • yearly proclamation by president Joe Biden since 2021