The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement of approximately 60,000 people of the "Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850, and the additional thousands of Native Americans and their enslaved African Americans within that were ethnically cleansed by the United States government.
The term Five Civilized Tribes was applied by the United States government in the early federal period of the history of the United States to the five major Native American nations in the Southeast: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminoles. White Americans classified them as "civilized" because they had adopted attributes of the Anglo-American culture.
The Seminole are a Native American people who developed in Florida in the 18th century. Today, they live in Oklahoma and Florida, and comprise three federally recognized tribes: the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, as well as independent groups. The Seminole people emerged in a process of ethnogenesis from various Native American groups who settled in Spanish Florida beginning in the early 1700s, most significantly northern Muscogee Creeks from what are now Georgia and Alabama.
Wilma Pearl Mankiller was a Native American activist, social worker, community developer and the first woman elected to serve as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, she lived on her family's allotment in Adair County, Oklahoma, until the age of 11, when her family relocated to San Francisco as part of a federal government program to urbanize Indigenous Americans. After high school, she married a well-to-do Ecuadorian and raised two daughters. Inspired by the social and political movements of the 1960s, Mankiller became involved in the Occupation of Alcatraz and later participated in the land and compensation struggles with the Pit River Tribe. For five years in the early 1970s, she was employed as a social worker, focusing mainly on children's issues.
The State of Sequoyah was a proposed state to be established from the Indian Territory in eastern present-day Oklahoma. In 1905, with the end of tribal governments looming, Native Americans in Indian Territory proposed to create a state as a means to retain control of their lands. Their intention was to have a state under Native American constitution and governance. Their efforts failed to gain support in Congress, and the territory was annexed to the United States in 1907.
The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is a Native American reservation occupying portions of southeastern Oklahoma in the United States. At roughly 6,952,960 acres, it is the second-largest reservation in area after the Navajo, exceeding that of eight U.S. states. The seat of government is located in Durant, Oklahoma.
The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians is a federally recognized Native American tribe in the U.S. state of Florida. Together with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, it is one of three federally recognized Seminole entities.
John Collier, a sociologist and writer, was an American social reformer and Native American advocate. He served as Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, from 1933 to 1945. He was chiefly responsible for the "Indian New Deal", especially the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, through which he intended to reverse a long-standing policy of cultural assimilation of Native Americans.
Indian termination describes United States policies relating to Native Americans from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It was shaped by a series of laws and practices with the intent of assimilating Native Americans into mainstream American society. Cultural assimilation of Native Americans was not new; the belief that indigenous people should abandon their traditional lives and become what the government considers "civilized" had been the basis of policy for centuries. What was new, however, was the sense of urgency that, with or without consent, tribes must be terminated and begin to live "as Americans." To that end, Congress set about ending the special relationship between tribes and the federal government.
Alexander Lawrence Posey was an American poet, humorist, journalist, and politician in the Creek Nation. He founded the Eufaula Indian Journal in 1901, the first Native American daily newspaper. For several years he published editorial letters known as the Fus Fixico Letters, written by a fictional figure who commented pointedly about Muscogee Nation, Indian Territory, and United States politics during the period of the dissolution of tribal governments and communal lands. He served as secretary to the Sequoyah Constitutional Convention and drafted much of the constitution for its proposed Native American state, but Congress rejected the proposal. Posey died young, drowned while trying to cross the flooding North Canadian River in Oklahoma.
The Seminole Tribe of Florida is a federally recognized Seminole tribe based in the U.S. state of Florida. Together with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, it is one of three federally recognized Seminole entities. It received that status in 1957. Today, it has six Indian reservations in Florida.
American Indian boarding schools, also known more recently as American Indian residential schools, were established in the United States from the mid-17th to the early 20th centuries with a primary objective of "civilizing" or assimilating Native American children and youth into Anglo-American culture. In the process, these schools denigrated Native American culture and made children give up their languages and religion. At the same time the schools provided a basic Western education. These boarding schools were first established by Christian missionaries of various denominations. The missionaries were often approved by the federal government to start both missions and schools on reservations, especially in the lightly populated areas of the West. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries especially, the government paid Church denominations to provide basic education to Native American children on reservations, and later established its own schools on reservations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) also founded additional off-reservation boarding schools. Similarly to schools that taught speakers of immigrant languages, the curriculum was rooted in linguistic imperialism, the English only movement, and forced assimilation enforced by corporal punishment. These sometimes drew children from a variety of tribes. In addition, religious orders established off-reservation schools.
Clyde Merton Warrior (1939–1968) was a Native American activist and leader, orator and one of the founders of the National Indian Youth Council. He participated in the March on Washington and the War on Poverty in the 1960s and was a charismatic speaker on Indian self-determination.
Urban Indians are American Indians and Canadian First Nations peoples who live in urban areas. Urban Indians represent a growing proportion of the Native population in the United States. The National Urban Indian Family Coalition (NUIFC) considers the term to apply to "individuals of American Indian and Alaska Native ancestry who may or may not have direct and/or active ties with a particular tribe, but who identify with and are at least somewhat active in the Native community in their urban area."
The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was a United States law intended to create a "a program of vocational training" for Native Americans in the United States. Critics characterize the law as an attempt to encourage Native Americans to leave Indian reservations and their traditional lands, to assimilate into the general population in urban areas, and to weaken community and tribal ties. Critics also characterize the law as part of the Indian termination policy between 1940 and 1960, which terminated the tribal status of numerous groups and cut off previous assistance to tribal citizens. The Indian Relocation Act encouraged and forced Native Americans to move to cities for job opportunities. It also played a significant role in increasing the population of urban Native Americans in succeeding decades.
The Choctaw Youth Movement (CYM) was a Choctaw nationalist grassroots movement born in the late 1960s in response to efforts by the federal government to terminate the Choctaw Nation. It was formed, in part, as a tribal-centric movement to counter the Pan-Indianism of other Native rights groups, such as the American Indian Movement. As opposed to AIM, the Choctaw Youth Movement practiced non-confrontational, peaceful activism, and advocated cultural revitalization and the re-adoption of tribal language, and taking pride in the distinctness of being Choctaw. The defense of the tribal culture and history took precedence over maintaining inter-tribal alliances.
From 1969 to 1974, the Richard Nixon administration made important changes to United States policy towards Native Americans through legislation and executive action. President Richard Nixon advocated a reversal of the long-standing policy of "termination" that had characterized relations between the U.S. federal government and American Indians in favor of "self-determination." The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act restructured indigenous governance in Alaska, creating a unique structure of Native Corporations. Some of the most notable instances of American Indian activism occurred under the Nixon Administration, including the Occupation of Alcatraz and the Occupation of Wounded Knee.
David E. Wilkins, a citizen of the Lumbee Nation, is a political scientist specializing in federal Indian policy and law. He is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor in Leadership Studies in the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies and professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota. He studies Indigenous politics, governance, and legal systems, with a particular focus on Native American sovereignty, self-determination, and diplomacy. Wilkins was a student and friend of Vine Deloria Jr., coauthoring two books with Deloria and producing three books about his intellectual impact.
Native American newspapers are news publications in the United States published by Native American people often for Native American audiences. The first such publication was the Cherokee Phoenix, started in 1828 by the Cherokee Nation. Although Native American people have always written for state and local newspapers, including the official publications of Native American boarding schools, periodicals produced by Native people themselves were relatively few and far between until the 20th century.
Raymond Darrel Austin is Diné (Navajo) scholar and former Associate Justice for the Supreme Court of the Navajo Nation, where he presided over the case of Navajo Nation v. Russell Means. Since 2016, he is a professor in the Department of Applied Indigenous Studies at Northern Arizona University. Austin has practiced law in both the U.S. and tribal courts systems, and has published extensively on Federal Indian Law and Policy.
