- The chessboard of empire: the late 17th to the early 19th century
Developments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries
- Also called:
- American Indian, Amerindian, Amerind, Indian, aboriginal American, or First Nation person
- Key People:
- Hermon A. MacNeil
- Layli Long Soldier
- Walter Ufer
Native American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been characterized by continuities with and differences from the trajectories of the previous several centuries. One of the more striking continuities is the persistent complexity of Native ethnic and political identities. In 2000 more than 600 Indigenous bands or tribes were officially recognized by Canada’s dominion government, and some 560 additional bands or tribes were officially recognized by the government of the United States. These numbers were slowly increasing as additional groups engaged in the difficult process of gaining official recognition.
The Native American population has continued to recover from the astonishing losses of the colonial period, a phenomenon first noted at the turn of the 20th century. Census data from 2006 indicated that people claiming aboriginal American ancestry numbered some 1.17 million in Canada, or approximately 4 percent of the population; of these, some 975,000 individuals were officially recognized by the dominion as of First Nation, Métis, or Inuit heritage. U.S. census figures from 2000 indicated that some 4.3 million people claimed Native American descent, or 1–2 percent of the population; fewer than one million of these self-identified individuals were officially recognized as of native heritage, however.
The numerical difference between those claiming ancestry and those who are officially recognized is a reflection of many factors. Historically, bureaucratic error has frequently caused individuals to be incorrectly removed from official rolls. Marrying outside the Native American community has also been a factor: in some places and times, those who out-married were required by law to be removed from tribal rolls; children of these unions have sometimes been closer to one side of the family than the other, thus retaining only one parent’s ethnic identity; and in some cases, the children of ethnically mixed marriages have been unable to document the degree of genetic relation necessary for official enrollment in a particular tribe. This degree of relation is often referred to as a blood quantum requirement; one-fourth ancestry, the equivalent of one grandparent, is a common minimum blood quantum, though not the only one. Other nations define membership through features such as residence on a reservation, knowledge of traditional culture, or fluency in a Native language. Whether genetic or cultural, such definitions are generally designed to prevent the improper enrollment of people who have wishful or disreputable claims to native ancestry. Known colloquially as “wannabes,” these individuals also contribute to the lack of correspondence between the number of people who claim Indian descent and the number of officially enrolled individuals.
A striking difference from the past can be seen in Native Americans’ ability to openly engage with both traditional and nontraditional cultural practices. While in past eras many Native individuals had very limited economic and educational opportunities, by the turn of the 21st century they were members of essentially every profession available in North America. Many Native people have also moved from reservations to more urban areas, including about 65 percent of U.S. tribal members and 55 percent of aboriginal Canadians.
Despite these profound changes in occupation and residency, Indigenous Americans are often represented anachronistically. Depictions of their cultures are often “frozen” in the 18th or 19th century, causing many non-Indigenous people to incorrectly believe that the aboriginal nations of the United States and Canada are culturally or biologically extinct—a misbelief that would parallel the idea that people of European descent are extinct because one rarely sees them living in the manner depicted in history museums such as the Jorvik Viking Center (York, England) or Colonial Williamsburg (Virginia). To the contrary, 21st-century Indigenous Americans participate in the same aspects of modern life as the general population: they wear ordinary apparel, shop at grocery stores and malls, watch television, and so forth. Ethnic festivals and celebrations do provide individuals who are so inclined with opportunities to honor and display their cultural traditions, but in everyday situations a powwow dancer would be as unlikely to wear her regalia as a bride would be to wear her wedding dress; in both cases, the wearing of special attire marks a specific religious and social occasion and should not be misunderstood as routine.
Although life has changed drastically for many tribal members, a number of indicators, such as the proportion of students who complete secondary school, the level of unemployment, and the median household income, show that Native people in the United States and Canada have had more difficulty in achieving economic success than non-Indigenous individuals. Historical inequities have clearly contributed to this situation. In the United States, for instance, banks cannot repossess buildings on government trust lands, so most Native Americans have been unable to obtain mortgages unless they leave the reservation. This regulation in turn leads to depopulation and substandard housing on the reserve, problems that are not easily resolved without fundamental changes in regulatory policy.
The effects of poorly considered government policies are also evident in less-obvious ways. For example, many former residential-school students did not parent well, and an unusually high number of them suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Fortunately, social service agencies found that mental health care, parenting classes, and other actions could resolve many of the problems that flowed from the boarding school experience.
While most researchers and Indigenous people agree that historical inequities are the source of many problems, they also tend to agree that the resolution of such issues ultimately lies within Native communities themselves. Thus, most nations continue to pursue sovereignty, the right to self-determination, as an important focus of activism, especially in terms of its role in tribal well-being, cultural traditions, and economic development. Questions of who or what has the ultimate authority over native nations and individuals, and under what circumstances, remain among the most important, albeit contentious and misunderstood, aspects of contemporary Native American life.
Although community self-governance was the core right that Indigenous Americans sought to maintain from the advent of colonialism onward, the strategies they used to achieve it evolved over time. The period from the Columbian landfall to the late 19th century might be characterized as a time when Native Americans fought to preserve sovereignty by using economics, diplomacy, and force to resist military conquest. From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th, political sovereignty, and especially the enforcement of treaty agreements, was a primary focus of Indigenous activism; local, regional, and pan-Indigenous resistance to the allotment of communally owned land, to the mandatory attendance of children at boarding schools, and to the termination of tribal rights and perquisites all grew from the basic tenets of the sovereignty movement. By the mid-1960s the civil rights movement had educated many peoples about the philosophy of equal treatment under the law—essentially the application of the sovereign entity’s authority over the individual—and civil rights joined sovereignty as a focus of Indian activism.
One, and perhaps the principal, issue in defining the sovereign and civil rights of Indigenous Americans has been the determination of jurisdiction in matters of Indigenous affairs. Historical events in Northern America, that part of the continent north of the Rio Grande, created an unusually complex system of competing national, regional (state, provincial, or territorial), and local claims to jurisdiction. Where other countries typically have central governments that delegate little authority to regions, Canada and the United States typically assign a wide variety of responsibilities to provincial, state, and territorial governments, including the administration of such unrelated matters as unemployment insurance, highway maintenance, public education, and criminal law. With nearly 1,200 officially recognized tribal governments and more than 60 regional governments extant in the United States and Canada at the turn of the 21st century, and with issues such as taxation and regulatory authority at stake, it is unsurprising that these various entities have been involved in a myriad of jurisdictional battles.
Two examples of criminal jurisdiction help to clarify the interaction of tribal, regional, and federal or dominion authorities. One area of concern has been whether a non-Indigenous person who commits a criminal act while on reservation land can be prosecuted in the tribal court. In Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978), the U.S. Supreme Court determined that tribes do not have the authority to prosecute non-Indigenous individuals, even when such individuals commit crimes on tribal land. This decision was clearly a blow to tribal sovereignty, and some reservations literally closed their borders to non-Indigenous individuals in order to ensure that their law enforcement officers could keep the peace within the reservation.
The Oliphant decision might lead one to presume that, as non-Indigenous people may not be tried in tribal courts, Indigenous individuals in the United States would not be subject to prosecution in state or federal courts. This issue was decided to the contrary in United States v. Wheeler (1978). Wheeler, a member of the Navajo nation who had been convicted in a tribal court, maintained that the prosecution of the same crime in another (federal or state) court amounted to double jeopardy. In this case the Supreme Court favored tribal sovereignty, finding that the judicial proceedings of an independent entity (in this case, the Indigenous nation) stood separately from those of the states or the United States; a tribe was entitled to prosecute its members. In so ruling, the court seems to have placed an extra burden on Native Americans: whereas the plaintiff in Oliphant gained immunity from tribal law, Indigenous plaintiffs could indeed be tried for a single criminal act in both a tribal and a state or federal court.
A plethora of other examples are available to illustrate the complexities of modern native life. The discussion below highlights a selection of four issues that are of pan-Indigenous importance: the placement of Native children into non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes, the free practice of traditional religions, the disposition of the dead, and the economic development of native communities. The article closes with a discussion of international law and Native American affairs.
The outplacement and adoption of indigenous children
From the beginning of the colonial period, Native American children were particularly vulnerable to removal by colonizers. Captured children might be sold into slavery, forced to become religious novitiates, made to perform labor, or adopted as family members by Euro-Americans; although some undoubtedly did well under their new circumstances, many suffered. In some senses, the 19th-century practice of forcing children to attend boarding school was a continuation of these earlier practices.
Before the 20th century, social welfare programs were, for the most part, the domain of charities, particularly of religious charities. By the mid-20th century, however, governmental institutions had surpassed charities as the dominant instruments of public well-being. As with other forms of Northern American civic authority, most responsibilities related to social welfare were assigned to state and provincial governments, which in turn developed formidable child welfare bureaucracies. These were responsible for intervening in cases of child neglect or abuse; although caseworkers often tried to maintain the integrity of the family, children living in dangerous circumstances were generally removed.
The prevailing models of well-being used by children’s services personnel reflected the culture of the Euro-American middle classes. They viewed caregiving and financial well-being as the responsibilities of the nuclear family; according to this view, a competent family comprised a married couple and their biological or legally adopted children, with a father who worked outside the home, a mother who was a homemaker, and a residence with material conveniences such as electricity. These expectations stood in contrast to the values of reservation life, where extended-family households and communitarian approaches to wealth were the norm. For instance, while Euro-American culture has emphasized the ability of each individual to climb the economic ladder by eliminating the economic “ceiling,” many Indigenous groups have preferred to ensure that nobody falls below a particular economic “floor.” In addition, material comforts linked to infrastructure were simply not available on reservations as early as in other rural areas. For instance, while U.S. rural electrification programs had ensured that 90 percent of farms had electricity by 1950—a tremendous rise compared with the 10 percent that had electricity in 1935—census data indicated that the number of homes with access to electricity did not approach 90 percent on reservations until 2000. These kinds of cultural and material divergences from Euro-American expectations instantly made Native families appear to be backward and neglectful of their children.
As a direct result of these and other ethnocentric criteria, disproportionate numbers of Indigenous children were removed from their homes by social workers. However, until the mid-20th century there were few places for such children to go; most reservations were in thinly populated rural states with few foster families, and interstate and interethnic foster care and adoption were discouraged. As a result, Native children were often institutionalized at residential schools and other facilities. This changed in the late 1950s, when the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs joined with the Child Welfare League of America in launching the Indian Adoption Project (IAP), the country’s first large-scale transracial adoption program. The IAP eventually moved between 25 and 35 percent of the native children in the United States into interstate adoptions and interstate foster care placements. Essentially all of these children were placed with Euro-American families.
Appalled at the loss of yet another generation of children—many tribes had only effected a shift from government-run boarding schools to local schools after World War II—Indigenous activists focused on the creation and implementation of culturally appropriate criteria with which to evaluate caregiving. They argued that the definition of a functioning family was a matter of both sovereignty and civil rights—that a community has an inherent right and obligation to act in the best interests of its children and that individual bonds between caregiver and child are privileged by similarly inherent, but singular, rights and obligations.
The U.S. Indian Child Welfare Act (1978) attempted to address these issues by mandating that states consult with tribes in child welfare cases. It also helped to establish the legitimacy of the wide variety of Indigenous caregiving arrangements, such as a reliance on clan relatives and life with fewer material comforts than might be found off the reservation. The act was not a panacea, however; a 2003 report by the Child Welfare League of America, “Children of Color in the Child Welfare System,” indicated that, although the actual incidence of child maltreatment in the United States was similar among all ethnic groups, child welfare professionals continued to substantiate abuse in native homes at twice the rate of substantiation for Euro-American homes. The same report indicated that more than three times as many native children were in foster care, per capita, as Euro-American children.
Canadian advocates had similar cause for concern. In 2006 the leading advocacy group for the Indigenous peoples of Canada, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), reported that as many as 1 in 10 native children were in outplacement situations; the ratio for nonnative children was approximately 1 in 200. The AFN also noted that Indigenous child welfare agencies were funded at per capita levels more than 20 percent under provincial agencies. Partnering with a child advocacy group, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, the AFN cited these and other issues in a human rights complaint filed with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a signal of the egregious nature of the problems in the country’s child welfare system.
Religious freedom
The colonization of the Americas involved religious as well as political, economic, and cultural conquest. Religious oppression began immediately and continued unabated well into the 20th—and some would claim the 21st—century. Although the separation of church and state is given primacy in the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791) and freedom of religion is implied in Canada’s founding legislation, the British North America Act (1867), these governments have historically prohibited many Indigenous religious activities. For instance, the Northwest Coast potlatch, a major ceremonial involving feasting and gift giving, was banned in Canada through an 1884 amendment to the Indian Act, and it remained illegal until the 1951 revision of the act. In 1883 the U.S. secretary of the interior, acting on the advice of Bureau of Indian Affairs personnel, criminalized the Plains Sun Dance and many other rituals; under federal law, the secretary was entitled to make such decisions more or less unilaterally. In 1904 the prohibition was renewed. The government did not reverse its stance on the Sun Dance until the 1930s, when a new Bureau of Indian Affairs director, John Collier, instituted a major policy shift. Even so, arrests of Sun Dancers and other religious practitioners continued in some places into the 1970s.
Restrictions imposed on religion were usually rationalized as limiting dangerous actions rather than as legislating belief systems; federal authorities claimed that they had not only the right but the obligation to prevent the damage that certain types of behavior might otherwise visit upon the public welfare. It was argued, for instance, that potlatches, by impoverishing their sponsors, created an underclass that the public was forced to support; the Sun Dance, in turn, was a form of torture and thus inherently harmed the public good. These and other public good claims were contestable on several grounds, notably the violation of the free practice of activities essential to a religion and the violation of individual self-determination. Analogues to the prohibited behaviors illustrate the problems with such restrictions. Potlatch sponsors are substantively comparable to Christian church members who tithe or to religious novitiates who transfer their personal property to a religious institution. Likewise, those who choose to endure the physical trials of the Sun Dance are certainly as competent to make that decision as those who donate bone marrow for transplant; in both cases, the participants are prepared to experience physical suffering as part of a selfless endeavor intended to benefit others.
By the late 1960s it had become increasingly clear that arguments prohibiting Indigenous religious practices in the name of the public good were ethnocentric and were applied with little discretion. In an attempt to ameliorate this issue, the U.S. Congress eventually passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA; 1978). AIRFA was intended to ensure the protection of Native American religions and their practitioners, and it successfully stripped away many of the bureaucratic obstacles with which they had been confronted. Before 1978, for instance, the terms of the Endangered Species Act prohibited the possession of eagle feathers, which are an integral part of many Indigenous rituals; after AIRFA’s passage, a permitting process was created so that these materials could legally be owned and used by Native American religious practitioners. In a similar manner, permits to conduct indigenous religious services on publicly owned land, once approved or denied haphazardly, became more freely available.
If allowing certain practices was one important effect of AIRFA’s passage, so was the reduction of certain activities at specific sites deemed sacred under Native religious traditions. For instance, Devils Tower National Monument (Wyoming), an isolated rock formation that rises some 865 feet (264 meters) over the surrounding landscape, is for many Plains peoples a sacred site known as Grizzly Bear Lodge. Since 1995 the U.S. National Park Service, which administers the property, has asked visitors to refrain from climbing the formation during the month of June. In the Plains religious calendar this month is a time of reflection and repentance, akin in importance and purpose to Lent for Christians, the period from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur for Jews, or the month of Ramadan for Muslims. Many native individuals visit the monument during June and wish to meditate and otherwise observe their religious traditions without the distraction of climbers, whose presence they feel abrogates the sanctity of the site; to illustrate their point, religious traditionalists in the Native community have noted that free climbing is not allowed on other sacred structures such as cathedrals. Although the climbing limits are voluntary and not all climbers refrain from such activities, a considerable reduction was effected: June climbs were reduced by approximately 80 percent after the first desist request was made.
