Native American civil rights
Native American civil rights are the civil rights of Native Americans in the United States. Native Americans are citizens of their respective Native nations as well as of the United States, and those nations are characterized under United States law as "domestic dependent nations", a special relationship that creates a tension between rights retained via tribal sovereignty and rights that individual Natives have as U.S. citizens. This status creates tension today but was far more extreme before Native people were uniformly granted U.S. citizenship in 1924. Assorted laws and policies of the United States government, some tracing to the pre-Revolutionary colonial period, denied basic human rights—particularly in the areas of cultural expression and travel—to indigenous people.
Although the many tribes and peoples indigenous to the United States have varying civil rights priorities, there are some rights that nearly all Native Americans are actively pursuing. These include the protection of voting rights and resistance to the cultural assimilation of Native Americans. Many tribes that live on Indian reservations are currently facing the destruction of surrounding environments and water sources, depressed economies, sexual violence against women, and substance abuse.
Precontact with Europeans
The Americas were populated thousands of years before Europeans arrived in North and South America. As a consequence of this long-term existence in the continent, Native American cultures, origins, religions, and languages became vastly diverse. Agriculture and written language had developed independently in the Americas before European contact, with the domestication and cultivation of beans, squash, maize had been particularly important.Religious practices
Traditional religious practices among Natives range from individual prayers, rituals, and offerings to large intertribal ceremonies. Precontact religion was often closely tied to the land and the environment. These concerns include the omnipresent, invisible universal force, and "the three 'life crises' of birth, puberty, and death", spiritual beings, revelations, human intercessors into the spirit world, and ceremonies that renew communities.1585–1786: Initial meetings
In 1585, an American Indian tribe on the eastern coast of North America made contact with English explorer Richard Grenville, who set up a settlement called Roanoke Colony. The Native people proved hospitable and receptive to Grenville, however, when a small silver cup was stolen from him, Grenville and his men sacked and burned down an entire village in revenge. By 1586, the English settlement had been abandoned. Grenville returned to England with a Native American captive called Raleigh.In 1607, decades after the interaction between the tribe's folk and Grenville, Captain John Smith established the colony of Jamestown in the middle of the Powhatan confederacy in what is now Virginia. Powhatan, the leader of his tribe, refrained from attacking the colonists as they established their settlement. Despite this, conflicts quickly broke out between the colonists and the Powhatan. Chief Powhatan wrote in a letter to John Smith:
I have seen two generations of my people die...I know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my country... Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that is it much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them and to lie cold in the wood, feed on acorns, roots, and such trash, and be so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep... Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all die in the same manner.
In the winter of 1609 through 1610, the residents of Jamestown had little food or effective shelter as they experienced the Starving Time. In December 1609, John Ratcliffe, who succeeded Smith as president of the colony, and around 50 colonists went to meet with a group of Powhatan Indians to bargain for food. However, they were ambushed and only 16 survived. Ratcliffe was captured and later tortured to death. This marked the beginning of First Anglo-Powhatan War. The Powhatan tribe integrated and cared for some of the colonists who deserted Jamestown to live with them, as they were much more prepared for the harsh winter. In the summer of 1610, when the governor of Virginia Colony, Lord De la Warr requested that Powhatan return the runaways, the Powhatan chief showed no intention to bring them back. In response, the colonists raided and sacked the Paspahegh capital, which was a tributary tribe to the Powhatan, killing at least 15 Natives, and kidnapping the wife of the village chief and their children. The war lasted until 1614, however, conflict resumed in 1622, when the Powhatan massacred Jamestown in March 1622, killing around a third of the inhabitants, 347 colonists. This caused second Anglo-Powhatan War that would last until 1632.
Christianization and assimilation
Many European missionaries believed that it was their sacred duty and calling from God to convert Native Americans to Christianity. Spaniards practiced Christianization in the New World using Pope Alexander VI's papal bull, Inter caetera. This allowed rulers to assert control over countries and islands "discovered" by Columbus, including their residents and inhabitants, and convert them to Catholicism.English missionaries developed "praying towns" to create "orderly Christian communities filled with model converts who were living and working under the watchful eye of a priest or pastor". Within these communities, converts to the Christian faith would be placed in a separate area from the remainder of the tribe in order to prevent regression back to their native beliefs. Missionaries such as John Eliot, a Puritan, and Isaac McCoy, a Baptist, led the way in the spread of their beliefs within these types of towns and among the natives. These towns led the way to the future separation of the natives from the remainder of society in Native American reservations.
1787–1899: Creating the Constitution
See the Indian Appropriations Acts.The 1851 Indian Appropriations Act allocated funds to move Western tribes onto Indian reservations where they would be protected and enclosed by the United States government. According to the federal government at that time, reservations were to be created in order to protect the Indians from increasing numbers of White Americans moving to the West.
1900–1945
Criticizing colonialism
Native peoples have been active in educating nonnatives on the cultures, histories, and experiences of their tribes since the beginning of colonization. Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation in Montana and Alfred Kiyana of the Meskwaki Settlement in Iowa spoke to historians, anthropologists, and journalists through translators to criticize the idea of "American progress" and to express pride and faith in the identities of their own cultures.Charles Eastman, a Mdewakanton and Wahpeton Sioux and physician, published books and articles in English for American people to show that it is not savage that Native people celebrate what Mourning Dove called the "ancient way". In 1902, Gertrude Bonnin told the Atlantic Monthly that the traditions of her tribe, the Yankton Dakota Sioux, were not only equal to European Americans, but that their values were superior.
Involvement with United States politics
In 1903, Charles Eastman, a Santee Dakotan and Native representative, was requested by Theodore Roosevelt to help Sioux people choose English names in order to protect their lands from being taken. Lands registered with the birth and natural names of Natives were often lost due to confusion the United States government employees had with filling paperwork.The United States government has a strong history making deals with Native Americans and not keeping them. Thomas Bishop, a Snohomish man, recorded his elders' memories of U.S. promises and compared them to the actual texts in treaties. He published a piece based on these discrepancies in 1915 titled "An Appeal to the Government to Fulfill Sacred Promises Made 61 Years Ago". Following this, he and other citizens of Pacific Northwest tribes organized all the Tulalip agency reservations and several off-reservation communities into the Northwestern Federation of American Indians with the goal of redeeming promises made in treaties.
Post World War II: 1946–1959
Many Native Americans aided the United States in World War II. Veterans came back from serving, only to find that the U.S. government and American people would not recognize their contributions to the war effort. This encouraged Natives to begin moving towards activism that was more focused on tribal sovereignty and self-determination.Advocacy groups, such as the National Congress of American Indians, which was founded in 1944, began representing tribal interests to the public and to Congress. The NCAI's founding members came from a wide variety of professionals including veterans, anthropologists, lawyers, elected state and federal officials, and a professional baseball player, George Eastman, and half of them had previously served on Indian Rights Association-chartered tribal councils. At least four of them were also members of the Society of American Indians.