Removal, Reservations/Rancherias and Relocation Often known as the 3R’s, removal, reservations/rancherias, and relocation greatly affected Native people both individually and collectively. Tribal systems rely on community and the collective ability of our people to work together within a familiar environment to survive. Once we are moved and relocated, we are no longer in a familiar place with family or community. We are forced to try to survive on our own without any help. What happens to our traditions and what are the ramifications to our families, our tribes? Removal In 1830, President Andrew Jackson (also known by his political platform as “the Indian killer”) signed the Indian Removal Act, which empowered the federal government to take Native-held land east of Mississippi and forcibly remove and relocate Native people from their homes in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee to “Indian territory”, or what is now Oklahoma. Tribes affected were the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole. From the southeast alone, the federal government moved roughly 60,000 people to eastern Oklahoma. This atrocity known as the Trail of Tears, which occurred up until 1907 resulted in tens of thousands of Native Americans dying or being murdered after being forcefully removed from their homes in error. The “Trail of Tears” is well known but there was not just one “Trail of Tears”; there were many instances where the federal government used their military to forcibly remove and relocate tribes. For example, in California in the 1860’s, the Concow Maidu were forcibly moved to Round Valley. Known as the Nome Cult Trail or the Conkow Trail of Tears, which began on August 28, 1863; on that day, the Conkow Maidu people were rounded up by armed soldiers and began a grueling march from Chico to Round Valley. Of the 461 Conkow Maidu who began the journey, only 277 remained by the time they reached Round Valley. One hundred and fifty who were too exhausted, sick or malnourished to continue the journey had been left behind five days into the journey with only enough food to last them for a month. Others died of sickness, exhaustion, starvation, or thirst, while two managed to escape en route. Dorothy Hill writes in "The Indians of Chico Rancheria:" "Indian versions of the cruel hardships that their ancestors encountered on the drive to Round Valley are more explicit than the government accounts" (Hill, 1978). According to Beth Stebbins’ book, The Noyo: “The problems that had beset the coastal reservation were carried over to the Round Valley reservation” (Stebbins, 1986) a number of first-person accounts of conditions on the Nome Cult reservation described hard-working Native Americans who labored on the farm and yet had not the means to obtain clothing, nor had they received clothing allotments in two years. There were no schools for the children, a dire scarcity of supplies, and “no substantial buildings erected for the Indians to live in,” according to Condition of the Indian Tribes: Report of the Joint Special Committee (1865): Life on Nome Cult Farm was difficult in other respects as well. Not only did the original inhabitants of Round Valley, the Yuki, now have to confine their lives to only a small portion of their own ancestral land — Nome Cult Farm — they also had to live side by side with strangers from a number of other Native American tribes. Some of the tribes were enemies of the Yuki, and none had a common language (KCET, 2018). Ethnic cleansing has been defined as the attempt to get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of an ethnic group. Ethnic cleansing is also the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups from a given area, often with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Removal policies were acts of ethnic cleansing, and meant to take land from Native American tribes and place it in the hands of white invaders. The ideology of Manifest Destiny was also used to justify extreme measures to murder and decimate Native populations in order to “free” the land from its inhabitants, including forced removal and violent extermination. Proponents of Manifest Destiny led by the US government advocated for and pursued a policy of Indian Removal. The ideology of Manifest Destiny inspired a variety of measures designed to commit genocide through removal or destruction of Native people reinforcing settler colonialism, racist nativism and white supremacy. Reservations/Rancherias Reservations were one mechanism by which the federal government thought that they would be able to deal with “the Indian problem.” A federal Indian reservation is an area of land reserved for a tribe or tribes under treaty or other agreement with the United States, executive order, federal statute or administrative action as permanent tribal homelands, and where the federal government holds title to the land in trust on behalf of the tribe. Journalist Simon Moya-Smith (Lakota) writes “Indian reservations were first established as prison camps. The U.S. gave each prison camp a number. The Pine Ridge prison camp, for example, is prison camp 334. Then, the U.S. documented each Native by assigning them a number, too. That's why, today, we have enrollment numbers” (Moya-Smith, 2018). In California, most of the “reservations” are actually called rancherias. Rancherias were formed as land set aside for homeless Indians. Approximately 56.2 million acres are held in trust by the United States federal government for various Indian tribes and individuals. There are approximately 326 Indian land areas in the U.S. administered as federal Indian reservations (i.e., reservations, pueblos, rancherias, missions, villages, communities, etc.). The largest reservation is the 16 million-acre Navajo Nation Reservation located in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. One of the smallest is a 6 mile rectangular parcel in Oregon where the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Confederated Tribe’s Council Office is located. Many of the smaller reservations are less than 5 miles long or wide. Native landholdings have decreased over the years (156 million acres in 1881 to 50 million in 1934) (Dunbar Ortiz, 2014, p. 11-12). The fact that Native Americans, once confined to reservations and rancherias, did not have the resources to take care of themselves, tied into this stereotype and false imagery. Blaming Native people for their own impoverished conditions when they had nothing to do with it, helped to ingrain the “lazy Indian” image into the American psyche. Relocation Congress passed a resolution (House Resolution No. 108, 83rd Congress, August 1, 1953) beginning a federal policy of termination, through which American Indian tribes would be disbanded and their land sold. A companion policy of “relocation” moved Indians off reservations and into urban areas. Operation Relocation of 1952, which moved reservation Natives to urban areas, promised transportation, training, work and housing. This happened in major cities across the nation, including Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, etc. Relocation was successful in moving a majority of Natives to urban locations. By 1980, 50% of Native people lived in urban areas. The goal was to assimilate Natives by encouraging them to marry non-Natives. But this plan somewhat backfired. Although intermarriage occurred, many urban Indians did not melt into urban White America. Instead, they looked for ways to remain Native. Intertribal pow-wows were a way to retain connections and traditions. Urban Indians created ways to remain Native and never surrendered their identities.

The Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny According to the Upstander Project (2023), the Doctrine of Discovery established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and the seizure of land not inhabited by Christians. Foundational elements of the doctrine can be found in a series of papal decrees, beginning in the 1100's, which included expressions of territorial sovereignty for Christian monarchs supported by the Catholic Church. Two papal decrees that stood out include: "Romanus Pontifex" in 1455, granting the Portuguese a monopoly of trade with Africa and authorizing the enslavement of local people; “Inter Caetera” in 1493 to justify Christian European explorers’ claims on land and waterways they allegedly discovered, and promote Christian domination and superiority, and has been applied in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas. If an invader proclaims to have “discovered” the land in the name of a Christian European monarch, reports his “discovery” to the European rulers and returns to occupy the land, it is now his, even if someone else was there first. Furthermore, the “discoverer” can label the previous occupant’s way of living on the land as "inadequate" according to European standards, which justifies their claim to the land. This ideology supported the dehumanization of Native people, their dispossession, murder, and forced assimilation. The doctrine supported white supremacy as white European settlers claimed they were “instruments of divine design” and possessed cultural superiority. In an 1823 Supreme Court case, Johnson v. M'Intosh, the Doctrine of Discovery became part of U.S. federal law and was used to dispossess Native peoples of their land. In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall writes, “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands” and Native peoples certain rights of occupancy (Johnson & Graham’s Lessee V. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, 1823). The Doctrine of Discovery was the inspiration for Manifest Destiny, which justified American expansion westward by propagating the belief that the U.S. was destined to control all land from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond. Figure 4.4.1: "American Progress", 1872. (Public Domain; John Gast via Wikimedia Commons) Manifest Destiny, coined in 1845 by newspaper editor John O’Sullivan, is the idea that white, Christian Americans were divinely ordained to "settle" (invade and steal) North America. This included a belief in the inherent superiority of white Americans as well as the conviction that they were destined by the Christian God to “conquer” the people and territories of North America. The ideology of Manifest Destiny was used to justify extreme measures to murder and decimate Native populations in order to “free” the land from its inhabitants, including forced removal and violent extermination. Proponents of Manifest Destiny advocated for and pursued a policy of removal. The ideology of Manifest Destiny inspired a variety of measures designed to commit genocide through removal or destruction the Native population that already inhabited North America.

Imperialism is an exploitative relationship between the United States and Tribes. The clearest example of imperialism in US history is the treatment of Native people. Treaties between the US government and Native nations recognized tribes as sovereign. The creation of the reservation system and the acquisition of reservation land in violation of treaties are textbook examples of imperialism and colonialism. The federal government created policies designed to promote either assimilation or extermination. Native lands were taken through conquest and incorporated into US territories, while Native Americans themselves were forced onto reservations and initially denied citizenship.

Image 4.3.1 is a cartoon of two students looking at each other after they have written on a chalk board how blood quantum is making them disappear with the caption beneath stating, "Hey wait a minute, we're disappearing!" This image represents how blood quantum is making our tribes disappear one person at a time. According to the U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an American Indian or Alaska Native is a person, “who has blood degree from and is recognized as such by a federally recognized tribe or village (as an enrolled tribal member) and/or the United States” (BIA, 2017, p. 1). According to Pevar (2012), “Congress has the authority to limit tribal sovereignty over membership determination, but unless Congress acts, each tribe enjoys the exclusive right to determine tribal membership for tribal purposes'' (p. 90). The fact that the U.S. government has taken control of identifying Native people in the first place through treaties and laws reveals that racism exists within the structure of the federal government which opposes tribal sovereignty and self-determination of Native nations, impacting Indian identity. The U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) issues certification of degree of Indian or Alaska Native Blood (CDIB) to tribal members. The CDIB recognizes the individual’s relationship to an enrolled member or members of a federally recognized tribe and states the person’s name, tribe, "blood quantum" of the individual, and birth date. American Indian or Alaska Native peoples are the only group in the United States that the federal government continues to demand calculated lineal ancestry to acknowledge formal belonging because of their economic ties through treaties to sovereign tribal nations. The U.S. Federal government, through treaty responsibility, is required to provide housing, food, jobs and education to federally recognized tribes; so the fewer recognized tribal members, the more likely a tribe will no longer exist and the federal government will no longer be required to fulfill their treaty obligations. The only comparable example in U.S. history is the "one drop rule" of African American blood which states that if a person has a “single drop” of "Black blood," that person will be identified as Black. This rule is also known as the "one Black ancestor rule" and some courts have called it the "traceable amount rule." For American Indians, the rule is the opposite. The federal government wants Native people to "blood quantum out" in order to not be considered Native. In this way the federal government is systematically "assimilating" Native people into becoming "non-Native" so that tribes cannot count these people as tribal citizens. This means that the federal government will not have to fulfill their treaty obligations to tribes because there will be no more tribes due to there being no tribal citizens. Blood quantum is determined through a formula that reduces by half each generation that is intermarried with someone other than a member of that same tribe going back to enrollees who were originally counted on Census rolls created by the federal government. There are many issues with blood quantum including self-determination, or the sovereign right of tribes to determine their own citizenship vs. the federal government imposing this requirement.

Sovereignty Sovereignty is a political concept that refers to dominant power or supreme authority. In modern democracies, sovereign power rests with the people and is exercised through representative bodies such as Congress or Parliament. A sovereign tribe would exercise power without limitation and work on behalf of their people without external interference by the federal government. The term also carries implications of autonomy; to have sovereign power is to be beyond the power of others to interfere. Native people have a unique legal history with the U.S. federal court system that centers on sovereignty between Native nations and the United States. In Felix Cohen’s (1941) Handbook of Federal Indian Law, the principles of tribal sovereignty are expressed as: adherence to three fundamental principles: (1) An Indian tribe possesses, in the first instance, all the powers of any sovereign state. (2) Congress renders the tribe subject to the legislative power of the United States and, in substance, terminates the external powers of sovereignty of the tribe. . . . (3) Those powers are subject to qualification by treaties and by express legislation by Congress, but save as thus expressly qualified, full powers of internal sovereignty are vested in the Indian tribes and in their duly constituted organs of government (pp. 122-123).

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa, Yurok and Karuk and an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California) Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy (Native American Studies, Humboldt State University) researches Indigenous feminisms, California Indians and decolonization. In her blog post titled “Give It Back: Publishing and Native Sovereignty,” Cutcha writes: I’ve become obsessed with the idea of finding out what would happen if I started mourning loss of land, loss of lives, loss of fish - if my grief was on display. As an academic I’ve internalized the message that somehow the work isn’t supposed to be deeply personal. Like I don’t carry the blood of my ancestors in my veins, blood that has run rivers red as we held on to the bodies of slaughtered children and wailed into the night sky asking ourselves “why” or “what are we supposed to do now?” Like we didn’t sing or dance for all those we lost. Like that song doesn’t come from me now. Like I don’t close my eyes and hug my daughter just a little bit tighter at night because there was a time when they would have ripped her from my arms and sold her. And I would never stop looking for her. I would do anything to find her again. Like my ancestors didn’t search until they couldn’t search any longer. Like we don’t continue to search, or grieve even now. And we live here in this space that they stole from us. This place where we buried our beloved. Where we sing and dance and laugh and love. This place where we cried tears of joy and sadness and from laughing so hard our stomachs hurt and from hurting so hard we thought we’d never laugh again (2020). In just 3 short paragraphs Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy describes what it is like to be a California Indian woman today. She bids us to think about land theft, loss and destruction. She makes us think about the significance of intergenerational trauma and how violence doesn’t just hurt the victim. Cutcha calls us to think about missing and murdered indigenous women and places that California Native people deem sacred. Her life is place based. She speaks and writes from an internal place that is spiritually, emotionally, and intrinsically connected to where her ancestors and she were raised, and where their creation happened. Colonization may have pushed many of us from our homelands, but we return. See more on Dr. Risling Baldy's work on the Hupa Coming-of-Age Dance as decolonizing praxis under Chapter 8, section 8.6: Transformational Liberation through Love.

Sidebar - Timeline - Important Events in California Indian History After Colonization by the U.S. 1900's 1905-06 – Kelsey (Special Indian Agent) conducts a census of non-reservation Indians. It counted at least 11,755 Indians that were not supported by the United States Government. 1917 – State court rules that non-reservation Indians are State citizens. 1924 – U.S. citizenship granted to all Indians. 1928 – California Indian Jurisdictional Act – Allowed the State of California to sue the United States on behalf of the Indians of California. 1933 – 1st Roll of California Indians. 1934 – Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) – also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act – was enacted to decrease federal control of American Indian Affairs and increase Indian self-government. 1944 – United States Court of Claims issues judgment in favor of California Indians, $17.5 million for land minus $12 million in expenses. 1946 – Indian Claims Commission Act – Created the Indian Claims Commission to hear any long standing claims of Indian tribes against the United States. 1953 – Public Law 280 – A federal law that states that the State may assume jurisdiction over reservation Indians. California becomes a mandatory PL 280 state. 1954-55 – California Indians Claims Case hearings in the Bay Area 1955 – 2nd Roll of California Indians. Indian people on this roll would be given $150.00 per capita payment. 1958 – California Rancheria Termination Act - 41 Rancherias vote for termination. The Act called for the distribution of the rancheria communal lands and assets to individual tribal members. 1,300 people/families received allotments of land. 1963-64 – California Indians vote to accept compromise for land settlement claim. 1969 – Occupation of Alcatraz Island – created a modern period of activism in Indian Country. 1969 September – Indians on the Hoopa reservation in Northern California believe the BIA has short changed them by as much as 500,000 dollars. They are complaining of the housing provided for them after the flooding of the Trinity and Klamath Rivers in 1964. BIA records show that as much as $427,000 - $1,417,000 has not been accounted for. May 18, 1970 – the Elem Pomo Indians reoccupied Mu-Do-N Island (Rattlesnake Island) in Clear Lake, California. They claimed the island was illegally acquired by Boise-Cascade Corporation. June of 1970 – the Pit River Nation began to reassert its ownership of ancient lands in California. Many Indians are arrested as the government refuses to recognize their rights. July 1970 – DQ University was incorporated as a tax exempt, non-profit institution. The initial incorporators were Kenneth Martin (Assiniboine), David Risling (Hoopa, Yurok, Karok), and Jack Forbes (Powhatan). October 29-30, 1970 – Senator George Murphy’s Office issues a press release dated October 28, that the DQ-U site is to go to the University of California. This is in spite of the fact that DQ-U has submitted the only legally complete request for the site. November 3, 1970 – Native American students occupy the former Army communication facility between Davis and Winters in support of DQ-U. DQ-U trustees initiate court action to prevent the illegal transfer of the site to the University of California. November of 1970 – about 24 Pomo (and other) activists occupied an abandoned CIA spy post near Santa Rosa. Used in the 1950's to monitor foreign broadcasts, it had been vacant for a decade. They were forcibly removed 3 days later with 5 arrests. Ultimately, though, title to this land was transferred to the Pomo (intertribal). It is now the Ya-Ka-Ama ("Our Land," in Pomo) American Indian Learning Center, just as had been demanded in 1970. It maintains a nursery for endangered and other Native plants, carries out related economic development projects, and educational and cultural programs, supported and participated in by all the Pomo bands. 1972 – 3rd Roll of California Indians, $668.51 per person settlement. 1980’s – Tillie Hardwick, a Pinoleville Pomo, sued the U.S. on the behalf of the terminated Pomo reservations. Victory restored federal status to 17 small California reservations, including many -- but not all -- Pomo bands, which continue their struggle for federal recognition.

Toypurina (Kimivit - Gabrielino - Tongva) The invasion of Spanish people destroyed the land. The Spanish efforts to steal and occupy the land was what some authors call a dual revolution. The Spanish were also concerned with dominating the land and thus cleared the land for agricultural and pastoral production. Clearing the land was often the first step in settler colonialism. Spanish colonists also introduced livestock which then devastated the usual and accustomed places that California Indian people hunted, fished, gathered, and harvested. Domesticated livestock grew exponentially in California. The livestock were just set free to graze and roam, consuming grasses and acorns on which indigenous people subsisted. Livestock overgrazed areas and that allowed plants native to Europe to replace native plants and scare away deer and other animals. In an attempt to regain control over their lands (and bodies) and prevent further decimation by livestock and missionaries, Kumeyaay shot cattle at night and killed animals when they came too close to their towns. Some indigenous people did more. In 1784, a Tongva man named Nicolas Jose, an alcalde at Mission San Gabriel, went to the town of Japchavit and met Toypurina. Toypurina was known as a healer and they spoke about attacking the mission. Jose gifted her with beads in exchange for her to call together the unbaptized indigenous peoples from the area. Toypurina agreed and gathered people together to plan an attack. However, on the night of the planned attack, someone had betrayed the Tongva and the Mission guards were ready for them. Toypurina was captured and she and other leaders of the rebellion were put on trial. When asked about the attack, Toypurina is quoted as saying that she participated in it because she ‘‘was angry with the Padres and the others of the Mission, because they had come to live and establish themselves on her land.’’ Spanish officials found her and the three other men on trial to be guilty of leading the attack. The three men were held at the prison (presidio) in San Diego, and Toypurina was imprisoned at the prison in San Gabriel while they awaited word of their punishment. In June 1788, nearly three years later, their sentences arrived from Mexico City: Nicolás José was banned from San Gabriel and sentenced to six years of hard labor in irons at the most distant penitentiary in the region. Toypurina was banished from Mission San Gabriel and sent to the most distant Spanish mission. She ended up at Mission San Carlos Borromeo as an exile. She continued to move for the rest of her life and eventually passed away in 1799 at Mission San Juan Bautista. Toypurina's story is an example of indigenous resistance (Akins & Bauer, 2021).

Missionization In an effort to not glorify the Mission system and the horrible acts that took place because of the Missions, this chapter will not describe the creation of the California Mission system by Spain and the Catholic Church (this is a practice of decolonization). However, it will highlight California Native women who have made significant contributions to this world with their actions, words, and being.

Sidebar - Timeline - Important Events in California Indian History After Colonization by the U.S. 1800's 1834 - The California missions ended after Mexico became independent of Spain. The newly independent Mexican government eventually passed laws that called for an end to the mission system through a process called “secularization.” 1848 – Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo - Signed between the United States of America and Mexico to end the Mexican-American War. This Treaty gave the U.S. ownership of California. 1849 – Gold Rush – Devastated Indian communities in California. Those people and tribes that had survived colonization and missionization now had bounties on their heads as settlers flocked to California in search of gold and wealth. The California Indian population dramatically decreased (Exact numbers vary between sources). 1850 – California State Constitution was ratified. 1851-52 – Eighteen unratified Treaties with California Indians. These unratified treaties allowed the State of California to take Indian land without paying for it. 1853- 1857 – Seven military reserves established by Congress. 1863 – Section 3 of the Act for the Governance and Protection of Indians was repealed. Indians in California could no longer legally be indentured servants. 1881-82 – State Superior Court decides that Indians on land grants can stay, however this decision was reversed on appeal to the Federal Court. 1883 – “On the Conditions and Needs of the Mission Indians of California” was published as a special report to the Commissioner of Indians Affairs by Jackson-Kinney. 1887 – Dawes Allotment Act permits granting of lands to individual Indians on and off reservations.

There are currently 574 federally recognized Tribes, Nations, Bands, Pueblos, Native communities and villages. The Federal Register (Federal Register Request Access, n.d.. Indian Entities Recognized) published by the Bureau of Indian Affairs maintains the current list of tribes eligible for funding and services from the federal government and more importantly recognizes that tribes have a "unique" political relationship with the U.S. federal government. This relationship, as well as problems and issues that arise from a structurally racist government, as well as the ramifications of colonialism, and the resiliency of Native people will be discussed throughout this chapter. There are even more Tribes that are not Federally Recognized. There are many reasons for this, including but not limited to: false claims of extinction by anthropologists/census takers, genocide, and the very difficult Federal Acknowledgement Process.

Indigenous ways of knowing refers to the way of knowing that a band or tribe of people accumulates over generations of living in and experiencing a specific environment, resulting in them making sense of their world. Indigenous ways of knowing inform decision-making about fundamental aspects of day-to-day life. This knowledge is integral and fundamental to Indigenous cultures that encompasses language systems, sustainable resource use practices, cultural and social interactions, ritual and spirituality. Today Indigenous ways of knowing are one of the core concepts taught in American Indian/Native American Studies.

In northern California Maidu belief, the world begins with Helin Maideh (Great Person), who first created water and air. He floated on a raft with Turtle at the beginning in that formless world with no sun, no moon, no stars. He was lonely, so he thought into creation Kodoyampeh (World Maker), and together, the three set out to make the world. Turtle dove into the water over and over for days on end—until finally he returned with a tiny bit of earth from the bottom of the waters. They took the dirt, formed it into a cake, anchored it with four white feathered ropes, and that became the world, with its hills and mountains, lakes and streams. Helin Maideh next made the animals, fishes, birds and plants. Then the three set out to populate the earth. There are many stories and many versions, but in one, Kodoyampeh put a willow stick under each arm, and went to sleep. When he woke, the first man and woman were there to greet him.

Each nation has their own creation story telling of the way things came to be: plants, animals, water, rivers, lakes, rain, the earth, mountains, valleys, wind, fire, stars and people. Not only do these stories tell us about ourselves and our creation, but they reveal how everything is related, connected, and intertwined. Important information is passed down generation after generation in stories. For example, there is the Karuk story about how fire came to the people; and the Iktomi (the spider) trickster stories among the Lakota that teach us about how Iktomi lives in each of us when we trick others and laugh about it. We also understand that it is not fun being the one who is tricked and through this we learn humility and to laugh at our response to being tricked in the first place. These stories teach us about how things came to be and how they still continue to affect us every day. Reasons why we plant, what we plant, how we plant and how we harvest sustainably is passed on through storytelling. Stories tell us about what to gather and hunt as well as when to do so. Some stories tell us about medicine, while other stories warn us of poison and sometimes one plant can be both depending on how you prepare it. Specific stories can only be told during certain times of the year. Every story has a lesson which often includes how to behave and how not to behave in certain situations. Our creation stories root us here in our homelands in North America. These stories reveal our ties to everything here and provide evidence that attest to this as our homeland, our place of creation. Our stories are not fairytales. They teach us how to live in the world.

Anthropologists are quick to put dates on our existence in North America because of their colonized mindset to attempt to "prove" we have no history or "not enough" history in our homelands to lay claim to it. By trying to date our existence closer to the invasion of the Americas, they are attempting to dismiss our connection to our place of origin and our creation. The Bering Strait Theory is one such attempt. More and more evidence is being found that dates the bodies of our ancestors before the Ice Ages. We don’t need their scientific evidence to prove we were created here, we have our stories of creation that mention in detail specific locations with landmarks, extreme weather events, stars and their locations in the sky to document our creation, existence, and so much more. It is the scientist who needs our stories and Indigenous ways of knowing to connect the past to the present and future survival of humankind. If you ask an American Indian person how long they have been in a place, their response will most likely be “since time immemorial.”

Anthropologists are quick to put dates on our existence in North America because of their colonized mindset to attempt to "prove" we have no history or "not enough" history in our homelands to lay claim to it. By trying to date our existence closer to the invasion of the Americas, they are attempting to dismiss our connection to our place of origin and our creation. The Bering Strait Theory is one such attempt. More and more evidence is being found that dates the bodies of our ancestors before the Ice Ages. We don’t need their scientific evidence to prove we were created here, we have our stories of creation that mention in detail specific locations with landmarks, extreme weather events, stars and their locations in the sky to document our creation, existence, and so much more. It is the scientist who needs our stories and Indigenous ways of knowing to connect the past to the present and future survival of humankind. If you ask an American Indian person how long they have been in a place, their response will most likely be “since time immemorial.”

We have always been here. We learned to respect and appreciate the land, water, plants and animals as living beings, and know them as our equals, as family; because without them there is no us. We were created here, and we shall remain. Each nation has their own creation story telling of the way things came to be: plants, animals, water, rivers, lakes, rain, the earth, mountains, valleys, wind, fire, stars and people. Not only do these stories tell us about ourselves and our creation, but they reveal how everything is related, connected, and intertwined. Important information is passed down generation after generation in stories. For example, there is the Karuk story about how fire came to the people; and the Iktomi (the spider) trickster stories among the Lakota that teach us about how Iktomi lives in each of us when we trick others and laugh about it. We also understand that it is not fun being the one who is tricked and through this we learn humility and to laugh at our response to being tricked in the first place. These stories teach us about how things came to be and how they still continue to affect us every day.

American Indian students and community leaders including Indian activists from the American Indian Movement (AIM), United Native Americans (UNA) and the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) as well as other organizations influenced the national political climate by providing information to the media that the general public did not know, which in turn pressured a response from the federal government and local colleges and universities. This movement specifically addressed broken treaties, unlivable conditions on reservations, and the lack of fair and equitable representation of Native people in academia and scholarly research.

Student activism focused attention on the inequity evident in the low enrollment and success rates of Black, Chicano, Asian American and American Indian students on college campuses as well as the lack of coverage of these core groups within the college curriculum. American Indians had long been the subject of study in disciplines like sociology, history, art and anthropology, but these disciplines only viewed Native people from an "outsider" perspective, treating us as subjects of study, often reinforcing stereotypes. Vine Deloria Jr., enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, author, historian and activist for Native American rights, concerned with the establishment of federal policy based on inaccurate academic studies, often criticized anthropologists and historians in his writings (ie. Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto).

American Indian Studies (AIS) or Native American Studies (NAS) is an academic discipline that formally began in the late 1960’s when Native American student activists coordinated with Asian American, Chicana/o/x, Puerto Rican and Black students to demand change within higher education. During this time, American Indian students at San Francisco State (Student Kouncil of Intertribal Nations - SKINS), Berkeley, UCLA and UC Davis were speaking out about American Indian rights, criticizing federal Indian policy and laws, discussing American Indian identity, and seeking to preserve tribal cultures.