Comments: Native Americans and Indian Policy in the Progressive Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherry Smith

For years, scholars of Native American history have urged U. S. historians to integrate Indians into national narratives, explaining that Indians' experiences are central to the collective story rather than peripheral to it. They have achieved some successes in penetrating and reworking traditional European-American dominated accounts. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the field of colonial history. In fact, for several decades now colonialists have placed Native Americans at the center, seeing them as integral to imperial processes and as forces that simply can no longer be ignored. To omit them would be to leave out not only crucial participants but important themes. Native people occupied and owned the property European nations coveted. They consequently suffered great losses as imperialists bent on control of land, resources, cultures, and even souls applied their demographic and technological advantages. But conquest did not occur overnight. It took several centuries for Spain, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Great Britain, and eventually the United States to achieve continental and hemispheric dominance. Nor was it ever totally achieved. That 564 officially recognized tribes exist in the early 2000s in the United States demonstrates that complete conquest was never realized.

Author(s):  
John Corrigan ◽  
Lynn S. Neal

Settler colonialism was imbued with intolerance towards Indigenous peoples. In colonial North America brutal military force was applied to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the United States, that offense continued, joined with condemnations of Indian religious practice as savagery, or as no religion at all. The violence was legitimated by appeals to Christian scripture in which genocide was commanded by God. Forced conversion to Christianity and the outlawing of Native religious practices were central aspects of white intolerance.


1969 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
John P. Marschall

In spite of the nativism that agitated the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church experienced a noticeable drift of native American converts from other denominations. Between 1841 and 1857 the increased number of converts included a significant sprinkling of Protestant ministers. The history of this movement, which had its paradigm in the Oxford Movement, will be treated more in detail elsewhere. The purpose of this essay is simply to recount the attempt by several converts to establish a religious congregation of men dedicated to the Catholic apostolate among native Americans.


2000 ◽  
Vol 73 (182) ◽  
pp. 221-238
Author(s):  
J. C. H. King

Abstract Identity in Native North America is defined by legal, racial, linguistic and ethnic traits. This article looks at the nomenclature of both Indian, Eskimo and Native, and then places them in a historical context, in Canada and the United States. It is argued that ideas about Native Americans derive from medieval concepts, and that these ideas both constrain Native identity and ensure the survival of American Indians despite accelerating loss of language.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroyuki Tsukada

Studies of early and Native American history in Japan have been stagnant for thirty years. Despite the “aboriginal turn” in the United States, Japanese scholars have not recognized the great progress even in this era of active interactions between and integration of the academic communities in Japan and the U.S., and have continued to treat European colonial history as early American history. This essay does not discuss why this generation-long neglect has occurred but aims to point out the lag and the specific shortcomings it has caused.


Author(s):  
Michael P. Guéno

Religion was a point of cultural conflict, political motivation, and legal justification throughout the European and American colonization of North America. Beginning in the 14th century, Catholic monarchs invoked Christian doctrine and papal law to claim Native American “heathenry” or “infidelity” as legal grounds that legitimized or mandated their policies of military invasion and territorial occupation. More progressive Christian thinkers argued for the recognition of Native Americans as human beings entitled to certain natural-law protections that morally obligated Spain to conquer and convert them for their own benefit. Spain and France worked with the church throughout the 16th and 17th centuries to establish missions throughout seized Native American territories, while English colonists often segregated Native Americans into “praying towns” for their moral benefit or the sanctity of the colonies. After the United States declared independence, American politicians quickly identified dissolution of Native American cultures as a necessary step in undermining tribal saliency and in ensuring the political dominion of state and federal governments. By the 19th century, policymakers were convinced that encouraging Indians to put aside their “savage ways” would help tribal populations achieve cultural and spiritual salvation through Christianity. In 1869, President Grant initiated a “Peace Policy” that granted Christian missions contracts and federal funding to civilize and Christianize the Native American peoples of assigned reservations. The federal government established boarding schools for the children of tribal communities to teach English, Christianity, and occupational skills in order to “Kill the Indian in him and Save the Man.” During the 19th and 20th centuries, federal legislation stripped Native Americans of lands, property, and rights, while federal agencies forbade the practice of indigenous Native American religions. Subsequent courts legitimated the historic claim of European nations to Native American lands pursuant to the “Doctrine of Discovery,” thus ruling these policies either legal or unreviewable. While judicial decisions throughout the 20th century also recognized tribal rights to land, water, and self-government as well as the legal obligation of the federal government to protect tribal resources, these rulings have been inconsistently realized. Throughout the history of the United States, law has articulated, in the language of privilege, right, and moral prescription, American values and visions of ideal relations. As American culture has changed, federal policy has swung back and forth among initiatives to relocate, terminate, assimilate, and appropriate Native American cultures. Religion and law have advanced agendas of conquest and colonization and become means by which Native Americans peoples have resisted those agendas.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Reith Schroedel ◽  
Roger J. Chin

The August 9, 2014, police shooting of Michael Brown reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement and triggered widespread media scrutiny of police use of lethal force against African Americans. Yet, there is another group, Native Americans, whose members have experienced very high levels of fatal encounters with the police, but whose deaths arguably have not generated media attention. In this research, we tracked the numbers of African American and Native American deaths associated with police use of lethal force as well as fatalities in police custody following arrest from May 1, 2014, through the end of October 2016. Then, we examined the extent of mainstream media coverage given to these fatalities in the 10 highest circulation newspapers in the United States. Finally, we considered the reasons for the disparities between the two groups.


Author(s):  
Roxanne T. Ornelas

This research paper is a review of ten years of sacred lands management and policy in the United States. The author reports from the unique position of having been involved in national and international meetings with communities of indigenous peoples and intergovernmental stakeholders during this time. Discussion includes an historical overview of such topics as environmental justice and the 2001 Native American Sacred Lands Forum, one of the first national meetings in the United States to specifically address the sacred lands of Native Americans. Further discussion draws attention to the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 as a gateway to better sacred lands management and policy for Native Americans in the future.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Edward C. Nwanegbo ◽  
Thor Swanson ◽  
Oluseyi Vanderpuye ◽  
Carlos F. Rios-Bedoya

Since the introduction of the Rubella vaccine in 1969, prevalence of congenital Rubella syndrome (CRS) has greatly declined in the United States. However, reports of sporadic adult cases of the disease and frequent identification of non-Rubella immune (NRI) women in prenatal units may result in outbreak of CRS in susceptible communities. Identifying populations with high rates of NRI will assist in evidence-based public health intervention that may prevent epidemic of CRS in the United States. Method. This is a retrospective, cross-sectional study involving chart audit of Rubella screening results of 642 women who attended a high-risk prenatal care at a northwestern Iowa clinic between January 1 and December 31, 2007. Results. NRI was found in 6.9% of the study population. The highest prevalence rate of 10.2% was found among adolescents. NRI was highest among Native American women at 17.3%, compared to Whites 7.3%, African Americans 5.9%, and Hispanics 4.6%. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that Native Americans were 2.5 times more likely to be NRI compared to Whites (OR 2.7; 95% CI: 1.1, 6.6). Conclusion. This study demonstrated higher rate of non-Rubella immunity among adolescent pregnant women and supports Rubella booster immunization for all non-pregnant teenage women. The observed high rate of NRI among Native Americans may require further studies and evaluation of Rubella vaccination programs in tribal communities.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Rockey Robbins

As a Native American, I wrote a letter to my grown son, recalling the onslaught of overt and subtle prejudices he endured as a direct result of his honoring traditional Native American ways. I focus primarily on my son’s unique heroic struggle in an oppressive and highly racialized society, but make glancing references throughout about Native Americans’ current intolerable predicament in the United States. I remind my son of lessons taught in tribal ceremonies about transforming the passionate aggressiveness of the warrior into a compassion that accomplishes lasting change. I write these things with my son’s permission.


The trickster is one of the most complex and widespread archetypes of Pan-African literatures and cultures, such as those from Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. It is a folk character who invokes a multiplicity of meanings, including transcendence of boundaries between good and bad, morality and immorality, truth and lie, and many other entities. Dwelling on third, sacred, innocuous, and marginalized spaces, the trickster is a universal figure whose location in crossroads or other unusual spaces epitomizes the forced or voluntary alienation of individuals and communities from around the world. Therefore, the trickster is more than the childlike character who enjoys duping other pranksters and being “naughty.” In Pan-African traditions, the trickster is an animal or human character whose situation and movements symbolize the harsh conditions of millions of people of African descent due to brutal historical forces such as slavery, colonialism, and other oppressions. In the Americas, Europe, and other locations where they were brought, enslaved Africans carried knowledge of the trickster persona from their folktales and cultures, and later blended this tradition with lore and customs of Europeans and Native Americans in the New World. Thus, although it was one of the most brutal human experiences, the transatlantic slave trade led to the formation of hybridity, or cultural mixing, embodied in the rich spoken and written Pan-African narratives in which trickster figures deploy various strategies to resist oppression, assert their humanity, and gain freedom. The works mentioned in this study reflect the historical, social, political, and cultural backgrounds out of which trickster icons of selected Pan-African folktales came. Such works reveal the hybridism and survival strategies that enslaved Africans developed in the United States and the Caribbean by mixing their African traditions with Native American, European, and other customs. Understanding such cultural diversity will enable scholars and students of Pan-African folklore to have the open-mindedness that is necessary to study the vast traditions that influenced such customs. To guide readers, this bibliography gives a comprehensive list of major collections of African, African American, and Caribbean folktales, tale-types, motifs, and scholarly studies of such narratives published since the early 20th century. The bibliography shows that enslaved Africans did not come to the New World as blank slates. Instead, these populations had folklore, knowledge, memories, and practices that helped them to resist oppression and affirm their humanity.


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