What Do We Mean When We Say “Native”?
It is impossible to know just how many millions of indigenous people there were in North America prior to 1492. What is certain is that contact with the Europeans was disastrous for them. The explorers brought with them the diseases of Europe, such as smallpox, to which the Native Americans had no immunity. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of the native population was wiped out by virulent epidemics. By the time European settlers began to arrive in large numbers, the indigenous population had already been reduced significantly. Military conflict, forced relocations, and other traumas added to the depopulation. By the early twentieth century, census figures reported the American Indian population above the Rio Grande to be just 490,000.76
Now, as of 2015, the number of people who self-identify as American Indians or Alaska Natives is 6.6 million, including those who choose more than one racial group on the census form. They represent 567 different cultural communities federally recognized as sovereign entities with which the United States has a government-to-government relationship.77
Each of these cultural communities has its own language, customs, religion, economy, historical circumstances, and environment. They range from the very traditional, whose members speak their indigenous language at home, to the mostly acculturated, who speak English as their first language. Most Native people identify with their particular ancestral community first and as American Indians second.78
The Native population grew slowly in the first half of the twentieth century but has grown rapidly in the second half due to a high birth rate and reduced infant mortality. Another source of the population increase, however, has been the fact that since 1970 a significant number of people have changed their census identification to American Indian from some other racial category on the census forms.79 This shift in self-identification raises the questions, who is Native and how is that category defined?
The answers depend on whom you ask. Each Indian nation sets its own criteria for membership. Some specify a particular percentage of ancestry (varying from one-half to one-sixty-fourth), others do not. Some nations specify Native language fluency as a prerequisite for service in their government, others do not. The US government requires one-quarter blood quantum (as indicated on a federal “certificate of Indian blood”) in order to qualify for Bureau of Indian Affairs college scholarships. Other federal agencies, such as the Census Bureau, rely on self-identification. Declining social discrimination, growing ethnic pride, a resurgence in Native activism, and the pursuit of sovereign rights may account for the growing numbers of racially mixed US citizens who are now choosing to identify themselves as American Indian.80
Despite the stereotypes to the contrary, there is great diversity among this population. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, a professor of American Indian studies, makes this point very clearly when she writes:
A fluent member of a Cherokee Baptist congregation living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, is different from an English-speaking, pow-wow-dancing Lakota born and raised in Oakland, California, who is different from a Hopi fluent in Hopi, English, Navajo, and Spanish who lives on the reservation and supports her family by selling “traditional” pottery in New York, Santa Fe, and Scottsdale galleries. The idea of being generically “Indian” really was a figment of Columbus’s imagination.81
However, there are general demographic statements that can be made about the Native population. The majority live in one of ten states: California, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, North Carolina, Washington, Alaska, New York, or South Dakota. Over the last forty years, significant numbers have moved from rural areas to major cities. In 1970, 45 percent lived in a metropolitan area; by 2010, that number had grown to 70 percent.82 The cities with the greatest number of indigenous people are New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, and Anchorage, Alaska. Only 22 percent of all American Indians (including Alaska Natives) live on reservations and trust lands, with the remaining percentage living in nearby rural communities.83 According to 2015 census data, the median income of single-race American Indian and Alaska Natives households was $38,530; the national median was $55,775. More Native people live in poverty than any other racial group. Approximately 27 percent of Native families are at or below the official poverty level, compared to a national poverty rate of approximately 15 percent. Among single-race American Indians and Alaska Native adults (twenty-five or older), 14.1 percent had earned a bachelor’s, graduate, or professional degree. Overall, Natives have the lowest educational attainment rates of all ethnic and racial groups in the United States and face some of the lowest high school graduation rates nationwide.84
Beyond these demographic patterns, there are shared cultural values that are considered characteristic of American Indian families. For example, as with Latinxs (who often have indigenous ancestry), extended family and kinship obligations are considered very important. Consequently, group needs are more important than individual needs. Communal sharing with those less fortunate is expected. Traditional Indian culture sees an interdependent relationship among all living things. Just as one seeks harmony with one’s human family, so should a person try to be in harmony with nature, rather than be dominant over it.85
Surviving the Losses
From the beginning of their encounters with Europeans, these and other Indian values were at odds with the individualistic and capitalistic orientation of the White settlers. US government leaders were convinced that changing Indian cultural values were the key to “civilizing” Indians and acquiring Indian-controlled lands.86
Following the establishment of reservations, one of the major strategies used to facilitate this cultural conversion was the establishment of off-reservation boarding schools for Indian children. The first such school was the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, established in 1879. Over the fifty years that followed, thousands of Indian children as young as five were forcibly removed from their families and placed in boarding schools, too far away for their poverty-stricken families to visit. Parental nurturing was replaced with forced assimilation, hard physical labor, harsh discipline, and emotional, physical, and often sexual abuse. Though the US government’s practice of removing children from their home environments was reversed in the 1930s, by then several generations of Indian children had lost their traditional cultural values and ways, and yet remained alienated from the dominant American culture.87
Further cultural disruptions occurred in the 1940s and 1950s when federal Indian policy shifted again, this time with the goal of terminating the official relationship between the Indian nations and the US government. Many Indians were taken from their homes and relocated in urban areas, in a manner reminiscent of the earlier forced removal to reservations.88 The upheaval brought on by the relocation process was devastating. Alcoholism, suicide, and homicide increased to epidemic proportions and continue to be among the leading causes of death among American Indians.89
The intergenerational impact of these disruptions can be seen in this Native woman’s narrative:
For 500 years, my people have been told in so many ways, “You’re no good. You are a savage. Change your ways. You are not civilized. Your ways are heathen and witchery. Your ways are not Christian!” My grandfather gave up his tribal religion and customs. He adopted Christianity. He, my grandmother, and the other people on the reservation did their best to give up the old ways, become farmers, quit hunting, go to church and be “good Indians, civilized Indians.” They wept when the federal agents rounded up their children to take them away to boarding school. Some of the children never came home. Some came home to be buried. My grandparents and the people wept again because their children grew up learning alien ways, forgetting their language and customs in schools too far away to visit.
My parents married soon after they came home from the boarding school. They came from different tribes. They left my father’s reservation encouraged by the U.S. government and the boarding school system to find jobs in the “real w
orld.”… The promised jobs never materialized and, stuck between two worlds, the big city and the reservation, the Indian world and the White, my father drank and beat my mother. My mother worked at menial jobs to support us. My life was built on this foundation. I was never parented because my parents, raised in government boarding schools, had nothing to give me. They had lost their languages and retained only traces of their cultures. They had never been parented themselves. Boarding school nurturing was having their mouths washed out with soap for talking Indian and receiving beatings for failing to follow directions.
So this is my legacy and the legacy of many Indians, both reservation and urban.… We are survivors of multigenerational loss and only through acknowledging our losses will we ever be able to heal.90
The legacy of loss is accompanied by a legacy of resistance. As they had in the past, Native peoples resisted the termination policy, and the policy ended in the 1960s following the election of John F. Kennedy. The civil rights era included Native demands for greater self-determination and the development of a pan-Indian movement based on the assumption that indigenous peoples shared a common set of values and interests. In response to American Indian activism, the federal government condemned its own destructive policies of the past and increased support for Indian self-determination, passing legislation in the 1980s and 1990s designed to promote Indian-controlled schools, protect American Indian religious freedom, and preserve traditional Indian languages.91 During the civil rights era, tribal colleges were established to improve postsecondary educational opportunities for Native communities on or near reservations. As of 2017, there are thirty-two fully accredited Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) in the United States. Diné College, established in 1968 by the Navajo Nation, was the first and is the largest of these tribally controlled institutions, awarding “associate degrees and certificates in areas important to the economic and social development of the Navajo Nation.”92
Given the poverty that has resulted from the long history of relocation, isolation, and cultural disruption, economic development is critical for Native communities. A significant development in the economic history of Native peoples in the United States was the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) in 1988, in which Congress “recognized the exclusive right of tribes to regulate gaming on their lands and sought to promote tribal economic development, self-sufficiency and strong self-government.”93 Specifically, Congress mandated that gaming revenues cannot be used for individual private gain but must be used primarily for public purposes, such as funding tribal government operations or programs, providing for the general welfare of the Indian tribe and its members, promoting tribal economic development, donating to charitable organizations, and funding operations of local government agencies. In addition, revenues can be paid on a per capita basis to individual tribal members with the approval of the secretary of the interior.94
The impact of this legislation has been quite dramatic. Revenues have grown from $225 million in 1987 (generated from tribal bingo operations) to $9.8 billion in casino gaming revenue in 1998 and $26.5 billion in 2009. Native American casinos now represent 40 percent of the gaming industry in the US. While not all American Indian nations have chosen to participate or are located near population centers that would make gaming success possible, by 2009 approximately 237 tribes were operating 442 gaming facilities in the US.95 Two of the largest—Foxwoods, operated by the Mashantucket Pequots, and Mohegan Sun, operated by the Mohegans, both in Connecticut—have been generating billions of dollars annually, dramatically improving the economic well-being of the two nation’s members. The gains for members of other tribal groups have been quite modest. American Indians on gaming reservations experience a 7.4 percent increase in per capita income and reductions in both family and child poverty rates as compared to those on non-gaming reservations.96
Those who have experienced gaming success have also experienced backlash from non-Native communities. “Local reactions to tribal sovereignty, often elicited in response to a tribe’s decision to pursue gaming, may belie historically anti-tribal and anti-Native attitudes, that while pre-dating Indian gaming, find new vitality in a decade of increasingly plausible Native viability.”97 The stereotype of “rich Indians” who are not paying “their fair share” has been part of the political discourse in California, in particular, home to more people of Native American heritage than any other state in the nation.98
Although we should recognize tribes’ limited economic alternatives to gaming, we should be ready to acknowledge as well the role of gaming in politicizing Native identity. Indian gaming has added “rich Indians” and “real Indians” to the vocabulary of policymakers and their constituents. It has served as fodder for caricatures on television and in newspapers, such as a Family Circus comic strip depicting a cowboy-dressed child playing a modern “cowboys and Indians” opposite a tuxedo-clad casino operator. At first blush, the Family Circus image may seem harmless, but it works, which is to say it is “funny” because it points up the incongruity of cultural perceptions. The subtext of such an image is that the tuxedo-wearing “Indian” is not really authentic, or is at a minimum less authentic than other representations of “Indian-ness.”99
“Have You Ever Seen a Real Indian?”
In 2001, the American Indian College Fund (AICF) launched an advertising campaign featuring accomplished Native professionals and tribal college students in an attempt to portray a contemporary and accurate image of Native American people, shown with the caption, “Have you ever seen a real Indian?” Richard Williams, then the executive director of AICF, said the organization’s goal was “to challenge the American public’s notions about who Indian people are and what they can become.”100 That 2001 challenge is still part of the Native American reality in 2017, due to both widespread invisibility in terms of contemporary images and continued and pervasive use of stereotypes rooted in the past.
Invisibility in classrooms is a common experience for Native students. In her article “Is There an ‘Indian’ in Your Classroom?,” Lee Little Soldier makes the point that teachers might find it hard to determine whether there even are Native American students in their classrooms.101 Natives often have European names, and because of the high proportion of mixed-heritage individuals, there are wide variations in physical appearance. While some are easily recognized as people of color, others have light skin, light eyes, and brown or blond hair and may be identified by others as White. Those who are products of Black-Native unions may simply be assumed to be African American. Particularly in those parts of the United States with small indigenous populations, many people may be surprised to discover that Natives still exist at all. For example, American Indian studies professor Donald Andrew Grinde Jr. described his own history professor’s response when he expressed an interest in studying American Indian history: “My advisor told me I needed to focus on an area such as American economic history to secure employment. When I told him I was an American Indian and thus still wanted to do research in this area, he smiled and murmured, ‘I thought that we had killed all of them.’”102 This perception is not surprising given the missing information about Native peoples in most US history curricula.
Viena, a Native American teen living on a reservation in northwest Washington, recalls her experience in a predominantly White elementary school off the reservation.
There was a time, I was in third grade, there was a film about Native Americans, something in the movie I knew wasn’t right and I came home really sad about the Paiute. The movie said the so-called pioneers came westward. They were in some fort and their fort was encircled by the Paiute and burnt to the ground. The whole class got to watch that film. The class was saying how horrible the Paiute were. My mom went in and talked to the teacher; she said to the teacher, “Did you know Viena is Paiute?” She could not deal with it. She could not deal with the fact—the European Americans did bring diseased blankets, how many people died. You cannot just say one side.… Our
people did not just attack people for no reason. It is true that Indians did burn down forts, but it is the way in which the story has been told [that bothers me]. Why did they have to defend themselves in this way?103
Historical omissions and distortions don’t just affect Native students, they also contribute to the miseducation of everyone else. The same can be said of the stereotypical images popularized by the use of American Indians as mascots. One consequence of the relative invisibility of Native peoples is that the knowledge most Americans have about them is “formed and fostered by indirectly acquired information (e.g., media representations of American Indians.)”104
The most highly visible example has been, and at this writing continues to be, the NFL football team in the nation’s capital, the Washington Redskins. The term redskin was widely used in the nineteenth century to describe the scalped head of a Native American for which state governments paid bounties. The ugliness of its history continues in the present, as it is now used as a derogatory racial slur.105 There is growing pressure on the Washington football team to change its name, and there are media outlets that now refuse to use it, referring to the NFL team as simply “the Washington football team.” The NFL owner asserts that the name will “never change.” As disturbing as that is, what is more problematic than the name of this national team is the use of similarly derogatory mascots in public K–12 schools.106
In 2001 the US Commission on Civil Rights issued a statement on the issue: “The stereotyping of any racial, ethnic, religious or other groups when promoted by our public educational institutions, teach all students that stereotyping of minority groups is acceptable, a dangerous lesson in a diverse society. Schools have a responsibility to educate their students; they should not use their influence to perpetuate misrepresentations of any culture or people.”107
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 29
