Native Americans in the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  Native Americans are the Indigenous peoples of the United States, the descendants of the first human beings to settle these lands, tens of thousands of years before European ships arrived. Their story begins with migrations across Beringia, a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, with archaeological evidence suggesting those journeys started around 25,000 years ago. Some may have arrived even earlier, navigating the coastline along what researchers call the "Kelp Highway".

  By 1250 CE, one Native city alone, Cahokia, held a population exceeding 20,000 people. Trade networks stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Earthworks at Watson Brake and Poverty Point were built thousands of years before European contact. What happened to these civilizations, and to the people who built them, is one of the most consequential stories in American history.

  Today, more than five million Native Americans live in the United States. About 80 percent of them live outside reservations. The questions that follow are not only about the past. They are about land, law, language, health, and what sovereignty means when a nation exists inside another nation.

• 2. Colonization and Collapse

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  Pre-Columbian population estimates for the area of the modern United States range from 2 million to over 18 million people. By the end of the 18th century, those numbers had collapsed to around 600,000, driven by disease, warfare, and genocide. Smallpox was especially devastating. In some regions, populations fell by 90 percent or more in the first century after European contact.

  The Declaration of Independence described Native Americans as "merciless Indian savages". Two sculptures commissioned by the U.S. government and displayed outside the Capitol for over a century reflected that framing. The sculptor Horatio Greenough wrote that his 1837 work, The Rescue, was designed "to convey the idea of the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes". The second sculpture, The Discovery of America, from 1844, depicted Columbus triumphant alongside what Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan called a "female savage".

  The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized mass relocations west of the Mississippi River. This produced what became known as the Trail of Tears, a forced march that killed thousands. The Dakota War of 1862, the Great Sioux War of 1876, and dozens of other conflicts followed. The Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, where up to 300 Lakota were killed during a Ghost Dance gathering, stands as one of the last major events of that era of open military violence.

  Adolf Hitler referenced this history approvingly in 1928, stating that the United States had "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage". Numerous scholars have classified elements of this colonization process as comprising genocide against Native Americans.

• 3. Law, Sovereignty, and the Trust Relationship

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  The Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 ended federal recognition of independent Native nations and began treating them as "domestic dependent nations" subject to federal law. That single legislative decision reshaped the legal standing of every tribal government in the country. It did preserve certain rights, including a significant degree of tribal sovereignty, but it permanently altered the government-to-government relationship that had existed since the founding of the United States.

  There are 574 federally recognized tribal governments and 326 Indian reservations in the United States. These governments hold the right to form their own laws, enforce civil and criminal codes within their boundaries, levy taxes, regulate membership, and exclude outsiders from tribal territory. At the same time, they cannot make war, conduct foreign relations, or mint currency, limitations that also apply to states.

  The Bureau of Indian Affairs administers and manages 55,700,000 acres of land held in trust by the United States for Native peoples. Many Native Americans and their advocates argue that framing those lands as held "in trust" by an outside authority is condescending, and that full respect for Native sovereignty would require handling tribal relations through the Secretary of State rather than an interior agency.

  Federal recognition itself is difficult to obtain. Tribes must prove continuous existence since 1900, and the process requires extensive genealogical documentation. Some tribes have been unable to meet those standards. The Muwekma Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area are currently pursuing federal recognition through litigation. In Virginia, a registrar named Walter Ashby Plecker, who served from 1912 to 1946, applied a one-drop rule to reclassify all Native Americans in state records as "colored", effectively destroying the documentary evidence those communities would later need to establish tribal continuity.

• 4. Citizenship, Voting, and Civil Rights

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  The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted United States citizenship to all Native Americans born in the country who had not yet received it. The law emptied the "Indians not taxed" category written into the Constitution, extended Fourteenth Amendment protections, and allowed Natives to vote in elections. Yet some states continued denying Native Americans voting rights for decades after the act passed.

  Native Americans were subjected to Jim Crow Laws and segregation in the Deep South after the 1924 citizenship act. Native identity was especially targeted by a legal system that recognized only two categories: white and colored. Martin Luther King Jr. began assisting Native Americans in the South in the late 1950s after they reached out to him. Creek communities in Alabama were attempting to fully desegregate schools; light-complexioned Native children were permitted to ride school buses to previously all-white schools, while dark-skinned children from the same band were barred from the same buses. Through King's intervention, the problem was resolved.

  In his book Why We Can't Wait, King wrote: "Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race." The National Indian Youth Council, formed in 1961, became one of the most active Native organizations in the civil rights era. During the 1963 March on Washington, there was a sizable Native American contingent, including many from South Dakota and the Navajo nation.

  The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 recognized tribal autonomy and led to Native-run schools and economic programs. Titles II through VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 comprise the Indian Civil Rights Act, which applies many but not all of the guarantees of the U.S. Bill of Rights within tribal governments. The Native American Rights Fund, created in part through the inspiration of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund, has pursued legal remedies for tribal rights since then.

• 5. Land, Poverty, and Economic Barriers

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  By the 1920s, 65 percent of tribally-owned land had been sold to non-Native Americans, in large part because of a federal transfer fee that discouraged Native ownership. The Dawes Act of 1887, originally framed as a policy of assimilation, resulted in a net loss of tribal land. These dispossessions were not ancient history: in 1826, Lewis Cass told the Miami Tribe of Ohio and nearby Potawatomi communities, "You must remove or perish." The Miami tribe was eventually forced off their land in 1846.

  Because reservation land is held in trust by the federal government, individuals living on reservations cannot build equity in their homes. Without collateral, they cannot access conventional bank loans. Land fractionalization compounds the problem: when a landowner dies and their property passes to multiple heirs without subdivision, a single parcel may end up with 50 different owners. Any development requires a majority of those owners to agree, a process the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development describes as time-consuming and sometimes impossible.

  According to a 2007 survey, only 1 percent of Native Americans own and operate a business. About 40 percent of the 562 federally recognized tribes operate casinos, which have provided revenue for some communities under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. As of 2011, 460 gambling operations run by 240 tribes generated a total annual revenue of $27 billion. Tribes have also entered financial services, including the Otoe-Missouria, Tunica-Biloxi, and Rosebud Sioux, though debates over regulatory jurisdiction between tribes, states, and the federal government remain unresolved.

  The Karuk tribe in Klamath, California, practiced controlled burning to manage travel routes and optimize hunting. In 1905, the establishment of the Klamath National Forest prohibited those burns on Karuk land. The Potawatomi, who once occupied 30 million acres across the Great Lakes region, were displaced and scattered across the country. Each removal carried what scholar Kyle Powys Whyte describes as the destruction of Indigenous knowledge systems built over generations.

• 6. Health, Trauma, and Contemporary Life

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  Native Americans are dying of diabetes, alcoholism, tuberculosis, and suicide at rates that have long been described as shocking. Studies point to rising rates of stroke and heart disease in the Native American population. About 25 percent of Indigenous households experienced food insecurity in the decade spanning 2000 to 2010, one of the highest rates among any racial group in the United States.

  The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the Dawes Act of 1887, under which Native Americans lost four-fifths of their land, are among the events scholars point to when discussing historical trauma, which is defined as collective emotional and psychological damage across multiple generations. Boarding schools built to, in the words used at the time, "kill the Indian, save the man" imposed shame and cultural erasure on generations of children.

  Professor Sarah Deer has documented that since 1999, multiple reports and studies have reached the same conclusion: Native women suffer the highest per capita rate of rape in the United States. According to the Department of Justice, 1 in 3 Native women have suffered rape or attempted rape, more than twice the national rate. A 2010 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that about 46 percent of Native American women had been raped, beaten, or stalked by an intimate partner. More than 80 percent of Native victims identify their attacker as non-Native.

  As of 2012-70 percent of Native Americans live in urban areas, up from 45 percent in 1970 and 8 percent in 1940. Urban areas including Minneapolis, Denver, Phoenix, Chicago, and Los Angeles hold significant Native populations. The Little Earth housing complex in Minneapolis is one example of an organization attempting to address the poverty, unemployment, and other pressures facing urban Native communities. Since the late 1960s, independent newspapers, the television channel First Nations Experience, tribal schools, and language revitalization efforts have worked to strengthen cultural identity in both urban and reservation contexts.

• 7. Language, Culture, and Representation

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  The Na-Dene, Algic, and Uto-Aztecan language families are the largest by number of languages in North America. Uto-Aztecan has approximately 2 million speakers when Mexican languages are included; Na-Dene has around 200,000 speakers, and Algic around 180,000. Many of these languages face severe erosion as English has become dominant.

  The Cherokee Nation launched a 10-year language preservation plan aimed at raising new fluent speakers from childhood through school immersion programs. The Cherokee Preservation Foundation invested $3 million in opening schools, training teachers, and developing curricula. The goal, set for 50 years out, is that 80 percent or more of the Cherokee will be fluent in the language. The Kituwah Preservation and Education Program, formed in 2006 on the Qualla Boundary, runs immersion programs from birth through fifth grade. A Cherokee language immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, educates students from preschool through eighth grade, with students going on to Sequoyah High School where classes are taught in both English and Cherokee.

  In film, early portrayals of Native Americans were performed by European Americans in mock traditional attire. Jay Silverheels was among the first Native actors to gain prominence, playing a major role in The Lone Ranger television series from 1949 to 1957. The 1998 film Smoke Signals, set on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation, was the first feature film produced and directed by Native Americans with an exclusively Native American cast. At the Sundance Film Festival, it won the Audience Award; its producer, Chris Eyre, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, won the Filmmaker's Trophy.

  In sports, the NFL's Washington Commanders, formerly known as the Washington Redskins, changed their name in 2020. The NBA's Golden State Warriors discontinued Native American-themed logos in 1971. Major League Baseball's Cleveland franchise, formerly the Cleveland Indians, retired the caricature called Chief Wahoo as a logo starting in 2019 and became the Cleveland Guardians in 2021. The debate over terminology has followed a similar arc: the term "Native American" may have been coined by Mohican Sachem John Wannuaucon Quinney in an 1852 address to Congress, while a 1995 Census Bureau survey found a plurality of Native Americans still preferred the term "American Indian".