DEI Spotlight: America’s First Peoples

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A 2012 celebration of Indigenous People’s Day, which has superseded Columbus Day, in Berkeley, California. (Quinn Dombrowski from Berkeley, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

America’s First Peoples

It seems the time has finally come for telling the truth about American history, and I, for one, appreciate the celebration of cultures and ethnicities via the monthlong emphasis on each one. In full disclosure though, I would prefer we learn and celebrate 365 days a year. Let’s have textbooks in schools that reflect the authentic origins of America—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Based on the “where we have come in the telling the truth about America” scale, it will take decades for the historical narratives that reflect awareness, knowledge, and transparency to evolve to a more honest realm.

With that in mind, we commemorate November as Native American Heritage Month (formerly Alaska Native or American Indian Heritage Month), established to honor the First Peoples of this nation and to celebrate their heritage. We still have a long way to go in addressing and making up for the myriad injustices to Native Americans and others—such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which was used to force Native peoples to relocate, on foot, thousands of miles from their ancestral homelands over the infamous Trail of Tears.

This month, then, is not only a time to celebrate rich and diverse cultures and traditions but also the occasion to acknowledge the injustices and atrocities imposed on Native Americans. Heritage Month is also an opportune time to educate the general public about the First Nations, to raise awareness about the unique challenges Native peoples have faced both historically and in the present, to highlight the ways in which tribal citizens have worked to meet these challenges, and to applaud the important contributions of Native people to this democracy.

Native American women, like other women of color, were not welcomed in the suffragist movement. However, one of the movement’s radical leaders, Matilda Joslyn Gage, spoke on the matrilineal society of her neighbors, the Haudenosaunee Iroquois, whom she wanted to emulate. She believed that their culture—so vastly different from her own—regarded women as equals.

According to the book Votes for Women! A Portrait of Persistence, by Kate Clarke Lemay, “The suffrage narrative overlooked Native American women almost entirely, as most white suffragists knew very little about them. Nevertheless, white suffragists held that Native women in matriarchal societies, such as the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, did not see themselves as in need of “liberation.” The reality is that Native American rights under the federal government would be complicated for years. In 1924, the Citizenship Act granted U.S. citizenship to Native Americans, finally admitting them to the franchise more than fifty years after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Even so, Native Americans would experience voter suppression and outright denial of their right to cast a ballot in states from Arizona to Maine well into the twentieth century.

A Native American is turned away from the polls in this political cartoon by Thomas Nast, published in 1871—one year after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. (Library of Congress)

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in public schools in the South and the Midwest, I experienced history as whitewashed on so many levels. Since then, I have spent most of my reading energy on nonfiction books that help me see more clearly an honest, truthful narrative of American history. If you can relate at all to my early educational experience, you may appreciate why it is so important to celebrate the months that have been designated for various voices to be amplified. Please visit these links to learn more about American Native Heritage Month: