An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People

Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapter 9-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapter 9-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 9 Summary: “The Persistence of Sovereignty”

Historian Fredrick Jackson Turner influenced the concept of American exceptionalism during the late 1800s. According to the Turner thesis, Americans refined the concept of democracy on the frontier, and Indigenous peoples were obstacles to progress. Even sympathetic settlers saw these cultures as primitive and dangerous. This spurned efforts to assimilate Native peoples into American culture.

The Indian Civilization Act of 1819 funded missionary schools, and in the 1870s Congress provided $100,000 for boarding schools to assimilate Indigenous peoples into American society. Sites like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, often far from reservations, employed practices from POW camps. Schools for juvenile delinquents made Indigenous children adopt European names and dress while training them for low-income jobs. According to accounts by Sun Elk, a resident at the Carlisle School, the curriculum depicted Indigenous people as violent and backwards. Some parents sent their children due to the squalid conditions at the reservations, and agents took other children by force. Beatings and sexual assault by instructors contributed to lifelong issues like post-traumatic stress disorder.

US expansion continued beyond the Pacific coast. The Kanaka Maoli of Hawai’i recognized the threat of European powers and formed a written language, established democratic institutions, and earned recognition as an independent nation. However, the haole, descendants of Calvinist settlers, conspired with the US military to weaken the Constitution in 1887 and overthrow leader Liliuokalani in 1893. The United States annexed Hawai’i in 1898 against the Kanaka Maoli’s nonviolent resistance.

The Indigenous peoples of present-day Alaska struggled under Russian control since 1784. As the fur trade died, the Russians sold the region to the United States for $7.2 million, leading to a series of destructive gold mining and fishing rushes. The Americans also brought segregationist policies that excluded these people from businesses and schools. Formed in the early 1900s, the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood became the oldest Indigenous civil rights organizations in the country, and they convinced the territorial legislature to ensure voting rights in 1922 and wider civil rights in 1945.

Between 1872 and 1956, Indigenous nations fought several legal battles for their rights and sovereignty. As the 1872 Yellowstone Park Act opened wilderness for public use, several nations exercised their reserved rights to hunt and fish on those lands. The Pueblo defeated legislation that would give land and water rights to non-Indigenous peoples on Pueblo territory, and the Pueblo Lands Act of 1924 created a commission for land negotiations. The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act extended voting rights to all Indigenous peoples. John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin D. Roosevelt, worked with communities to pass the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA), which ended allotment, committed the government to restoring reservation-adjacent land, encouraged constitutionally representative governments, and recognized Indigenous sovereignty for the first time.

However, Collier and other allies lost their positions in the Harry Truman administration. The 1946 Indian Claims Court and Indian Claims Commission, which gave Indigenous peoples a chance to reclaim or receive reparations for illegally seized land, often delivered mixed results. The 1940s and 1950s marked the “Termination Era,” in which Congress and President Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to repeal the IRA and end tribal sovereignty. Affected nations would lose federal funding and self-governance. By 1966, more than one hundred nations lost their recognition with many still fighting to regain it today. Public Law 280 transferred policing authority to the states, and the 1956 Indian Relocation Act encouraged Indigenous people to move to low-income urban areas.

Chapter 10 Summary: “Indigenous Action, Indigenous Rights”

Collective action rose with the formation of the Inter-American Indian Institute and National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in the 1940s. In 1961, frustrated young activists created the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), and the American Indian Movement (AIM) formed in 1968 out of efforts to confront over-policing in urban areas. One of the NIYC’s first tests was a 1964 mass demonstration against fishing restrictions in Washington State. The Survival of American Indians Association staged fish-ins in traditional waters with violent responses by law enforcement and sportsmen. A 1973 US District Court Case found in favor of the Pacific Northwest nations that the terms of the 1850s treaties still stood.

Belva Cottier, a member of the Sioux Club at San Francisco’s Indian Friendship Center, saw that the abandonment of Alcatraz Island’s prison in 1963 meant the land should return to Indigenous hands under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. A group of Sioux Club members “symbolically claimed” the land, and in 1969 Indians of All Tribes staged an 18-month occupation of the island that drew thousands of activists (182). Although the Richard Nixon administration forced an end to the occupation, negotiations led to the establishment of Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University and the first doctorate for Native American studies.

The NIYC, AIM, and NCAI organized the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties, which brought a caravan of 800 people across multiple nations to Washington, D.C. After a scuffle at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the caravan occupied the building for eight days. The incident ended with Nixon promising not to charge the occupiers, though he didn’t seriously consider the Twenty Points they came to propose. The Twenty Points later influenced the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and investigations that affirmed treaty rights. The same year, AIM went to the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota to protest Tribal Chairman Richard Wilson, his henchmen, and tribal police. The caravan traveled to Wounded Knee, which led to a two-month siege with the FBI that included gunfire exchanges and the deaths of two Indigenous men.

The 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act affirmed that Indigenous nations could determine how to spend federal funding, and the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) ensured that those in child protection programs would stay with Indigenous families if possible. Meanwhile, the National Indian Gaming Association promoted the creation of casinos and gaming facilities as a revenue source, which drew $2.5 billion in 2015. Some profits went to tribal citizens and larger projects like the National Museum of the American Indian. The US Supreme Court found in 1987 that states could not prevent tribes from operating these facilities, but 1988 Indian Gambling Regulatory Act did put limits on them.

Indigenous nations sought reparations from the government for illegally taken lands. Some regained their lands, such as the Taos Pueblo’s Blue Lake. Others received financial compensation. The Sioux, however, refused financial reparations for the Black Hills, now worth $106 million today. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 allowed communities to regain stolen remains and burial items from museums, and the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act let tribal authorities prosecute non-Indigenous people for domestic violence.

Conclusion Summary: “‘Water is Life’: Indigenous Resistance in the Twenty-First Century”

Indigenous lands hold roughly ten percent of the United States’ energy resources. As populations near mining and drilling projects often suffer adverse health effects, Indigenous nations use their rights under the 1975 Indian Self-Determination Act and environmental partnerships to keep government and business interests from circumventing their authority. This led to successes like the Barack Obama administration’s blocking of permits for the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline. This advocacy continued with the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation’s resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).

In 2014, Energy Trading Partners announced the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as a means of delivering fracked crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. Over time, it shifted its proposed route away from North Dakota’s capital of Bismarck to under Lake Oahe, a critical water source for the Standing Rock reservation. The tribal council opposed the proposal due to environmental concerns and the presence of artifacts from an 1863 massacre. However, the DAPL and the Army Corps of Engineers pushed forward, citing pre-planning that rarely involved Indigenous peoples, and the reservation filed an injunction.

In April 2016, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard created the Sacred Stone Camp to gather opposition to drilling. The camp included education facilities for children and drew in “Water Protectors” from 100 Indigenous nations across the Western Hemisphere. While the protectors focused on nonviolent resistance, North Dakota’s governor sent a militarized response using law enforcement and National Guard troops from multiple states. This included checkpoints, air surveillance, and a blockade that affected emergency vehicle travel. When the protectors positioned a camp on the pipeline’s path that October, officers arrested 100 people using rubber bullets, tear gas, batons, and a sound cannon. The officials also blamed protectors for a vehicle blockade that ended in a fire, although they contest that security company employees were responsible. This led to a November confrontation in which police used tear gas, concussive grenades, and high-pressure water hoses on protestors.

Cellphone cameras and social media allowed the Standing Rock group to document the situation and disprove the narrative pushed by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), one of the operators of the pipeline. Standing Rock earned positive coverage from the media, celebrity support, and on-the-ground assistance from 2,000 military veterans. Obama did not grant the easement necessary for the pipeline to continue. However, his successor Donald Trump, who previously held interest in the company, allowed the pipeline to go ahead shortly after his inauguration. DAPL went into service on June 2016, though the court ordered ETP to be transparent with pipeline incidents. This situation demonstrates how the United States continues to harm Indigenous nations for material gain, as well as the need for activism to address these threats.

Chapter 9-Conclusion Analysis

As An Indigenous Peoples’ History nears the modern era, the fight for rights shifts from battlefields to classrooms and courtrooms. While some Indigenous families hope that US boarding schools will help children learn enough to fight against suppression—or at least alleviate their poverty—these institutions mostly just prepare them for low-income service roles. The suffering that students endure there leads to mental health problems and abuse of their own children, which Dunbar-Ortiz calls “intergenerational suffering” (164). She also analyzes Sun Elk, a boarding school student who describes how the classes taught him to mock his ancestors’ culture. She mentions how an interpreter may have altered the intent of these statements and that Sun Elk may be a stage name.

The United States’ takeover of Alaska and Hawai’i were part of a larger imperialist competition with Europe and Japan that impacted Indigenous sovereignty across the world. The country’s support of insurrections by White settlers mirrors its involvement in Texas succession from Mexico. While the US returned sovereignty to some lands like the Philippines, some scholars argue that its post-World War II policy of maintaining spheres of influence in strategically important regions is a continuation of Manifest Destiny (Deudney, Daniel H. “Sphere of Influence.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Updated 25 October 2019.)

Indigenous activists made powerful steps towards regaining land and earning recognition for tribal rights. As sovereign nations with pre-existing treaties, tribes can regain wrongfully taken land or obtain financial reparations. National and global Indigenous alliances strengthen their negotiating power in ways that their predecessors couldn’t achieve. Their efforts to establish educational programs and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples expanded awareness of their plight, leading to alliances with environmentalist and civil rights groups. Dunbar-Ortiz notes the importance of word choice in describing activists: She calls the DAPL activists “water protectors” rather than “protesters” because it better describes their goals.

But the fight for civil rights is an ongoing battle. The native Hawaiians could not stop the annexation plot even though they established themselves as a modern independent nation. While land-rights commissions are a step forward in regaining territory, their results are mixed. The occupations of Alcatraz and the Bureau of Indian Affairs were dramatic but didn’t achieve all their goals. Even though there were no full-scale massacres, the standoff at Wounded Creek led to two deaths and echoed the 1890 tragedy, and the weapons that North Dakota law enforcement used against the Standing Rock Sioux supporters can still leave permanent damage.

Success also depended on which president was in charge. Even the transition from Franklin D. Roosevelt to his vice president harmed Indigenous efforts. Eisenhower stripped many tribes of their sovereign rights, and Nixon largely ignored activist concerns. The book does not name Barack Obama’s successor and the man who allowed the DAPL to go ahead, Donald Trump, by name likely because the original book was published before his 2016 inauguration. While Trump’s administration launched a few pro-Indigenous committees, it also revoked and sold off Indigenous land for energy projects, including Alaska’s National Arctic Wildlife Refuge, home to sacred land for the Gwich’in Nation, and the US-Mexico border, where border wall crews blasted Tohono O’odham Nation burial grounds. Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy separated Indigenous children from their families in a way that recalled the 1800s boarding schools. He regularly referred to a political rival with disputed Cherokee ancestry as “Pocahontas.” (“Presidents Day 2020: 11 Ways Trump Dishonors Native Americans & How Natives Fight Back.” Cultural Survival. 17 February 2020.) Trump also labeled critical examinations of American history similar to this book, like the 1619 Project that examines slavery, as unpatriotic. (Woodruff, Judy & Yamiche Alcindor. “What Trump Is Saying About 1619 Project, Teaching US History.” PBS Newshour. 17 September 2020.)

Meanwhile, legal battles over the Dakota Access Pipeline continue as of 2021. A 2020 lower-court decision ruled that the operation should be shut down so that the Army Corps of Engineers could complete an environmental impact study. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District Columbia overturned the decision a month later. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe remains committed to fighting the pipeline, while the American Petroleum Institute frames the conflict as an energy and economics issue. (Fazin, Rachel. “Court cancels shutdown of Dakota Access Pipeline.” The Hill. 5 August 2020.)