This may come as a surprise to you, but no, Christoper Columbus did not discover America. There were already 50 million indigenous peoples living in the area of land Mr. Columbus claimed to “discover.”
I know this is a busy month and lots of activities bid for our attention, but the month of November is Native American Heritage Month — giving Americans time to consider the important contributions of Indigenous Peoples, honor their histories, and advocate for solutions to the struggles they still face today.
Native Americans have been confronted with discrimination and hardship since European settlers first stepped foot on their land, and have suffered injustice in many ways since.
‘Indigenous” means the original inhabitants who first occupied a land or region, so the Indigenous peoples of America has the same meaning as Native Americans.
The indigenous people of North America spoke a huge number of spoken languages prior to colonization — somewhere between 300 and 500. However, many of these languages have disappeared as a result of assimilation policies by the government. In 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant declared, “In the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble… their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language substituted.”
Beginning in the 1800s, Native Americans were displaced from their communities and moved onto reserves, and children were taken to Indian boarding schools and educated in English. It wasn’t until 1972, when Congress passed the Indian Education Act, that Native American tribes were permitted to teach their own languages. In 2013, there were 169 Native languages spoken in the United States and many of them had very small numbers of speakers. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Language Act, which provides support for Native American language preservation and revitalization. It’s estimated that all but two Native American languages are in danger of disappearing altogether by 2050.
Prior to colonization, Native American languages were orally transmitted. After the arrival of Europeans, several tribes began to adopt writing systems. Sequoyah, a member of the Cherokee Nation, spent 12 years developing a writing system so that his people could learn to read and write in their language — he completed his 86-character “a;phablet” in 1821.
On February 21, 1828, the first edition of the Cherokee Phoenix was published in the Cherokee capital of New Echota, Georgia. It was the first bilingual newspaper in the United States — printed in both English and Cherokee.
It wasn’t until 1924 that all Native Americans were granted citizenship, when Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act. At that time most Native American were able to vote, but many laws at the state-level prevented voting rights for all — it took over 40 years for all 50 states to allow Native Americans to vote.
The very first American Indian Day in a state was held in New York and took place on the second Saturday in May in 1916. The first year of dedicating November as National American Indian Heritage Month was in 1990 ± proclaimed by President H.W. Bush. The name was changed under President Obama, in 2009, to National Native American Heritage Month.
The United States of America was founded on the idea that all of us are created equal and deserve equal treatment, opportunity and dignity. Unfortunately, we have fallen short many times. That equality has often been denied to Native Americans who have lived on this land since time immemorial.
Maybe the Native Americans figured us out years ago…. A Sauk Indian from Oklahoma, Black Hawk, said, “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”
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