Carlos Montezuma and the Emergence of American Indian Activism

Author(s):  
Maurice Crandall

Carlos Montezuma was one of the most influential Indians of his day and a prominent leader among the Red Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born to Yavapai parents in central Arizona, he was kidnapped by O’odham (Pima) raiders at a young age, and sold soon after into the Indian slave trade that for centuries had engulfed the US-Mexico borderlands. Educated primarily at public schools in Illinois, Montezuma eventually went on to be the first Native American graduate of the University of Illinois (1884) and one of the first Native American doctors (Chicago Medical College, 1889). Montezuma was a lifelong friend of Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and he firmly believed in the importance of Indian education. He insisted that educated Indians like himself must serve as examples of what Indians were capable of achieving if given the opportunities. He became deeply involved in the pan-Indian reform movements of the day and was one of the founding members of the Society of American Indians. Montezuma had a rocky relationship with the group, however, because many in the organization found his calls for the immediate abolition of the Indian Bureau and an end to the reservation system difficult to accept. From 1916 to 1922, he published his own journal, Wassaja, in which he relentlessly assailed the Indian Bureau, the reservations, and anyone who stood in the way of Indian “progress.” But Montezuma’s most important work was as an advocate for his own people, the Yavapais of Fort McDowell, Arizona, and other Arizona Indian groups. He spent the final decade of his life working to protect their water, land, and culture, and eventually returned to his Arizona homelands to die, in 1923. Although he was largely forgotten by historians and scholars in the decades after his death, Carlos Montezuma is now correctly remembered as one of the most important figures in Native American history during the Progressive Era.

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
György Tóth

Partly as a result of compartmentalized academic specializations and history teaching, in accounts of the global upheavals of 1968, Native Americans are either not mentioned, or at best are tagged on as an afterthought. “Was there a Native American 1968?” is the central question this article aims to answer. Native American activism in the 1960s was no less flashy, dramatic or confrontational than the protests by the era’s other struggles – it is simply overshadowed by later actions of the movement. Using approaches from Transnational American Studies and the history of social movements, this article argues that American Indians had a “long 1968” that originated in Native America’s responses to the US government’s Termination policy in the 1950s, and stretched from their ‘training’ period in the 1960s, through their dramatic protests from the late 1960s through the 1970s, all the way to their participation at the United Nations from 1977 through the rest of the Cold War. While their radicalism and protest strategies made Native American activism a part of the US domestic social movements of the long 1960s, the nature of American Indian sovereignty rights and transnationalism place the Native American long 1968 on the rights spectrum further away from civil rights, and closer to a national liberation struggle—which links American Indian activism to the decolonization movements of the Cold War.


2020 ◽  
pp. 299-302

Poet, storyteller, and essayist Marilou Awiakta explores the intersection of traditional and modern Appalachian life by blending her Appalachian and Cherokee heritages with the legacy of post–World War II nuclear energy research in her hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Born Marilou Bonham in Knoxville to a family with Scots-Irish and Native American roots reaching back to the 1730s, Awiakta (her middle name) was raised with an awareness of social and environmental responsibility. When Awiakta was nine, her family moved to Oak Ridge, where her father agreed to work for two years in the nuclear facility, known locally as “the secret city.” After graduating from the University of Tennessee in 1958, Awiakta moved to France with her husband, a physician with the US Air Force. While there, she worked as a liaison and translator for the base....


Author(s):  
Andrew Fisher

Despite decades of neglect by professional historians, the Pacific Northwest brings particular clarity to major themes in Native American history. On both sides of the Cascade Mountains and the US-Canadian border, Native communities have carried on the struggle for territorial integrity, political authority, economic viability, and cultural legitimacy that began in the late eighteenth century. Scholars, in turn, have broadened their studies temporally, culturally, and thematically to create a fuller picture of the region’s past. This chapter surveys recent trends in the ethnohistorical literature concerning the diverse indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast and Columbia Plateau. For the sake of brevity, it emphasizes three themes of particular salience in the Northwest: the porous character of cultural and political boundaries, the fluidity of racial and tribal identities, and the determination of Native nations to protect their ancestral lands and resources.


1992 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Anna Clay

The question of whether independent living (IL) services can be provided to Native Americans with disabilities living on reservations is introduced. Native American history is briefly reviewed. The cultural and practical connections and obstacles to implementing several key components of the IL philosophy are discussed. An actualizing process – one that recognizes the tremendous diversity across reservations and individuals – is discussed as one method for merging these two perspectives and implementing IL services on reservations. This is only the start of a process which will be developed to examine the need for a model which addresses the issues and problems facing American Indians with disabilities.


Ethnohistory ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 588
Author(s):  
William A. Starna ◽  
Frederick E. Hoxie ◽  
Bruce G. Trigger ◽  
Wilcomb E. Washburn

Polar Record ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naohiro Nakamura

ABSTRACTThe challenges faced by indigenous peoples in repatriation negotiations vary across the globe. In 2012, three Ainu individuals launched a legal case against Hokkaido University, demanding the return of the human remains of nine individuals and a formal apology for having conducted intentional excavations of Ainu graveyards, stolen the remains and infringed upon their rights to perform ceremonies of worship. This action marked the first of such legal cases in Japan. The Ainu experienced both legal and ethical challenges during negotiations with the university; for example, while the claimants applied the Ainu concept kotan as a legal argument for collective ownership of the remains, Hokkaido University claimed the lack of assumption of rights relating to worship under the Civil Code of Japan. There has been significant progress recently on repatriation, mainly due to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the US, and several meaningful recommendations have been made to ease the repatriation process. However, such recommendations are often case specific and variations in the experiences of indigenous peoples from country to country have not been widely documented. This article discusses the challenges faced by the Ainu in repatriation negotiations in Japan, with a particular focus on the difficulties of applying indigenous customs and philosophies within legal frameworks.


2007 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Paulet

In a Brule Sioux legend, Iktome, the trickster, warns the various Plains tribes of the coming of the white man: “You are the Ikche-Wichasha—the plain, wild, untamed people,” he tells the Lakota, “but this man will misname you and call you by all kinds of false names. He will try to tame you, try to remake you after himself.” Iktome, in essence, describes the conflict that occurred when American Indians encountered Euro-Americans, who judged the Indians in relation to themselves and found the Indians lacking. Having already misnamed the people “Indians,” Euro-Americans proceeded to label them, among other things, “savages.” By the latter half of the nineteenth-century, such terms carried scientific meaning and seemed to propose to Americans that Native Americans, having “failed to measure up” to the standards of white society, were doomed to extinction unless they changed their ways, unless they were “remade.” And that was, indeed, the aim of American endeavors at Native American education, to remake or, in the words of Carlisle president Richard H. Pratt, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” These educational efforts at restructuring Native American lifestyles were more than the culmination of the battle over definitional control; they were precedents for future American imperial expansion as the United States discovered, at the turn of the century, that “Indians” also lived overseas and that, just like those at home, they needed to be properly educated in the American way of life. The United States' experience with American Indians thus provided both justification for overseas expansion, particularly into the Philippine Islands, and an educational precedent that would enable Americans to claim that their expansion was different from European imperialism based on the American use of education to transform the cultures of their subjects and prepare them for self-government rather than continued colonial control.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha W. Rees

Much has been written about the costs—and benefits--of migration--in terms of the costs to the US (or receiving regions) and of the benefits to migrants. Massey (2005) concludes that because (Mexican) immigrants pay taxes, they are not a drain on public services. In fact, migrants are less likely to use public services, and pay taxes for services they don’t use. Almost two-thirds have Social Security taxes withheld, only 10% have sent a child to public schools, and under 5% or have used food stamps, welfare, or unemployment compensation. They also pay sales taxes. In terms of criminality, Rumbaut and Ewing (2007) refute the myth that migrants bring crime. They find that Mexican immigrant men have a lower rate of incarceration (0.7%) than US born Latinos (5.9%) or for US born males (3.5%).


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