Every November since 1990, cultural and educational institutions across the US recognize the Indigenous peoples of this country with programming dedicated to celebrating Native American History Month. For The Repatriation Files, it is a good time to reflect on the past year in Indian Country—this highs and the lows—and to reacquaint readers with news and events from the more than 500 Native Nations recognized by the federal government.
The year 2019 began with a confrontation between high school students wearing MAGA hats and Native activist Nathan Phillips—an event chronicled in a January issue of this blog (“Nathan Phillips: An Elder for All Americans”).
“as the non-Indian struggles in solitude and despair, he curses the Indian for not coveting the same disaster.”
August saw the last edition of News from Indian Country, a Native owned and operated news outlet from Hayward, Wisconsin. Longtime editor, Paul DeMain recalled the early days of the publication:
News From Indian Country started publishing in 1987 and all three of these men [Pipe Mustache, Archy Mosay, and Richard LaCourse], along with Indigenous women like Janet McCloud, Rose Mary Robinson and Wilma Mankiller, and even a young woman named Winona LaDuke could be found in the pages of our earliest newspaper, the one now putting its last hard copy to bed.
We have survived the controversies of the last 40 years, a written testament to opinions of the widest dimensions. Treaty rights, taxing authority, identity, spiritualism, healing, war, trauma, battles between relatives, nations and international personalities (“33 Years of Publishing”).
Out west, the Yurok Nation was successful in its quest to have the Klamath River, the lifeblood of the Yurok homeland, the rights of personhood under the law. Following the example of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who used the concept to designate wild rice (manoomin) as deserving the same protections as human beings.
“From New Zealand to Colombia, the powerful idea that nature has rights is taking root in legal systems.”
Following the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, more tribal communities have sought to rethink how they might protect sacred sites and their environment. According to High Country Times, “Legal personhood provides a different framework for dealing with problems like pollution, drought and climate change, though no case has yet been brought to put the Whanganui, Manoomin or Klamath rights to the test in court. The crucial aspect to establishing these legal frameworks, Indigenous lawyers say, involves shifting relationships and codifying Indigenous knowledge — in other words, recognizing non-human entities not as resources, but as rights-holders.
2019 was also the year that the Ponca leader Standing Bear was honored as a civil rights pioneer with a statue in the US Capitol building. As the Washington Post and the Smithsonian Magazine have reported, the statue commemorates the efforts of Standing Bear to overturn US law that in 1879 ruled that “an Indian was neither a person nor a citizen.” Standing Bear, the first Native person to offer testimony in federal court, argued that he and his community had the right to remain in their homeland, rather than be removed to Oklahoma. The presiding judge eventually agreed, ruling that “an Indian is a ‘person’ within the meaning of the laws of the United States” and that “no rightful authority exists for removing by force any of the relators to the Indian Territory.”
“That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same god made us both.”
Read more: Standing Bear
In the next post, we will explore Native American history month from the perspective of a recent presidential declaration that has overlaid this commemoration with something called “National American History and Founders Month.”