Are You Aware? Native Americans 101
This is part I in our “Nation to Nation” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here.
In the United States today, the federal government recognizes 574 tribal communities as sovereign nations. Dozens more are recognized within the boundaries of states. Canada recognizes 674 First Nations communities as sovereign nations, and in Mexico 89 different Indigenous languages are spoken. First Nations and Indigenous Mexicans are all Indigenous and relatives of the Native communities within the United States’ current borders.
Understanding a bit of history and the existence of tribal communities today is an important undergirding of any movement toward an “ethical” governance on these lands.
We must be considered, because any discussion about government in North America is premised on Indigenous dispossession.
We talk about ourselves as “sovereign” nations because the U.S. has historically viewed us as treaty partners — a category reserved only for those nations who have the agency to make decisions and come to agreements on a nation-to-nation basis. People enrolled in their tribal community effectively have citizenship in the U.S., their tribal nation, the state in which they reside, and any other municipality.
At the national level, tribal communities have their own government systems — judicial, executive, and legislative. Each community is able to establish and execute their own laws, with a few critical exceptions (I’ll return to those). Each community differs in the way it has created government, following the needs of its community, its traditional governance structures, or following mandates that were given by the U.S. federal government.
In the U.S., tribes are both political and cultural entities. Our status is legally defined. We carry cards and documentation that define our blood lineage — the only community to be defined by our blood since the “one-drop rule” determined voting ineligibility for Black Americans. Blood quantum is not a traditional form of identification for most Native communities. Rather, we have traditional kinship systems and structures that define belonging within our communities.
All of the land — 100% — in North America belongs to Native Americans, either legally or culturally.
Our belonging to land is rooted in those kinship structures that have defined our cultures for millennia: Our cultures contain teachings about connections to land and other non-human life-forms, which grow out of our presence on the land. Most communities teach of the obligations we have toward our relatives that live on this earth with us. This isn’t a romantic platitude — it is a serious mandate that calls us to defend the lands, waters, winds, and other beings that coexist with us on the earth.
Our cultures are rooted in place — for some of us that means we are familiar with, and in relation to, large swaths of land. For others, it means an intimate knowledge with a certain area that our ancestors lived on for a thousand generations.
We are as diverse as the land of North America because our cultures are rooted in this land. We are also tied to land through legal processes like treaty-making and through the establishment of reservations. Native land bases have been eroded through various processes in American history, but Indigenous communities maintain our cultural practices that tie us to land in important ways.
The loss of access to our homelands throughout the history of the U.S.’ existence has been an immense burden on Native cultures, leading to many of the social problems we experience today. Many of our spiritual practices affirm our connections to the land, a fact that raised fear in earlier generations of Americans. The U.S. federal government responded to this by outlawing many of our spiritual practices until 1978. We were legally forbidden to perform many of our dances and ceremonies — an overwhelming display of violence to religious liberty. My mother was an adult — in 1978 — when she was legally permitted to engage in our ancestors’ spirituality!
I can only reason that our spiritual traditions must be immensely powerful if they were viewed as such a threat to the unfolding of America as a nation.
The U.S. ratified (and broke) more than 370 treaties with various tribal Nations, and earlier settlers on these lands had made dozens more. These should not be viewed singularly as “Indian treaties,” they should also be understood as American treaties — the upholding of which is vital to the ethical and legal existence of the United States of America. Treaties were used as a means for U.S. westward expansion, which, of course, led to the erosion of Native landholdings.
Most treaties were not signed in good faith, and some of the most important treaties were violated before the ink was dry on the paper. The only treaty whose provisions are mostly upheld is the Jay Treaty of 1794, which allows Indigenous Canadians free passage into the U.S.*
I come from the Assiniboine Nation. Our reserved land base (shared with two other tribal nations) is in what is currently known as the state of Montana. As people who followed herds of bison, our homelands are also in the Canada prairies (in fact, we used to have a prairie province named after us!), so this provision has been vitally important for members of my community-dwelling in what is now known as Canada.
But the fact that most treaties have been so routinely and casually violated is immensely damaging to Native America at large. It is also damaging to the legitimacy of the U.S. and has built an inherently eroded trust of the various North American federal governments into many Indigenous communities.
Legally, a set of cases has come to define the special relationships that the U.S. and individual states can have with tribal nations. Of special importance are cases that established doctrines of Indigenous sovereignty, personhood, and the restrictions of criminal litigation on tribal lands. These precedent cases, from as far back as the days of colonial settlements, continue to define the ways Indigenous and settler nations interact today.
In some ways, the restrictions placed on us contribute to the ongoing social problems we face, including the overlapping pandemics of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (#MMIWG), poor health outcomes, low infant and maternal mortality rates, high incidence of drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic violence. These are serious threats to our communities. Other Native women will be addressing some of these issues over the coming month on this forum via Mormon Women for Ethical Government. I am grateful for their work and their willingness to share their knowledge and experience with me.
One of the biggest challenges for us is the way we have been/are routinely erased from memory.
Most Americans know very very little about Indigenous history and about whose community had to suffer for them to live on whatever land they reside on/own. We are routinely left out of statistics about other racialized communities and barely register in reports of violence — perhaps because violence to us has been so normalized and foundational that America forgot to care. It is an accepted norm in mainstream culture to know nothing about the original inhabitants of these lands. Such ignorance leads to rampant stereotyping and misappropriation of our cultures. It leads to us being social pariahs, depicted as mascots, or at the very worst — dead.
As a professor, I sometimes issue a challenge to my classes. I have them take their phones out and perform a google image search for “Native American woman.” For years, the results that would turn up were entirely black and white photographs from the long 19th century (people long dead), or “sexy” Halloween costumes. Fortunately, recent activism and artistic interventions have begun to shift away from the overwhelming willful disappearance of us as living people.
And that is where I would hope to leave this discussion — with a note that through all the challenges we have faced and continue to face as peoples, we remain. Native culture is vibrant and thriving. We didn’t die off in the 19th century. We aren’t costumes. We suffer some of the most egregious injustices, but Native people are strong. We have adapted and still respond to the immense challenges we face, and we grow beautiful and resilient cultures from the ashes of violence.
Yes, 574-plus sovereign Nations within the U.S. have lived through immense darkness and despair, and we are still here.
*The establishment of the US Customs and Border Patrol (2003) in the wake of 9/11, under the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the recent international border closures due to COVID-19 pose serious threats to the provisions of the Jay Treaty.
Additional reading: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/9/23/20872713/native-american-indian-treaties.
Alicia Harris is an assistant professor of Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma. Her work centers on Indigenous relationships with place and the sophistication of Indigenous cultures. She has written about her experiences being a Native American and also a descendant of Utah Mormon pioneers, advocacy for rematriation of land, and respect for Indigenous inherent sovereignty. Alicia is an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes in Northeastern Montana.
