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 within that were ethnically cleansed by the United States government.
Blood quantum laws or Indian blood laws are laws in the United States that define Native American status by fractions of Native American ancestry. These laws were enacted by the federal government and state governments as a way to establish legally defined racial population groups. By contrast, many tribes do not include blood quantum as part of their own enrollment criteria. Blood quantum were first imposed by white settlers in the 18th century. Blood Quantum (BQ) is a very controversial topic.
Native American studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that examines the history, culture, politics, issues, spirituality, sociology and contemporary experience of Native peoples in North America, or, taking a hemispheric approach, the Americas. Increasingly, debate has focused on the differences rather than the similarities between other ethnic studies disciplines such as African American studies, Asian American studies, and Latino/a studies.
Black Indians are Native American people – defined as Native American due to being affiliated with Native American communities and being culturally Native American – who also have significant African American heritage.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn was a Native American editor, essayist, poet, and novelist. She was considered to be outspoken in her views about Native American politics, particularly in regards to tribal sovereignty.
Devon Abbott Mihesuah is a Choctaw historian and writer. She is a former editor of American Indian Quarterly and an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation. She is the Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. She is the second Native woman to receive a named/distinguished professorship. Her lineage is well-documented in multiple tribal records. Her great, great, great grandfather signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. His son, Charles Wilson, served as sheriff and treasurer of Sugar Loaf County in Moshulatubbee District of the Choctaw Nation. His murder in 1884 is documented in Choctaw Crime and Punishment and Roads of my Relations. Her great-grandfather, Thomas Abbott, created the blueprints for the town of McAlester, Oklahoma and his son, Thomas, served as Chief of Police. They are chronicled in "'Gentleman' Tom Abbott: Middleweight Champion of the Southwest," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 68 : 426–437.
Indigenous decolonization describes ongoing theoretical and political processes whose goal is to contest and reframe narratives about indigenous community histories and the effects of colonial expansion, cultural assimilation, exploitative Western research, and often though not inherent, genocide. Indigenous people engaged in decolonization work adopt a critical stance towards western-centric research practices and discourse and seek to reposition knowledge within Indigenous cultural practices.
Native American identity in the United States is a community identity, determined by the tribal nation the individual or group belongs to. While it is common for non-Natives to consider it a racial or ethnic identity, for Native Americans in the United States it is considered to be a political identity, based on citizenship and immediate family relationships. As culture can vary widely between the 574 extant federally recognized tribes in the United States, the idea of a single unified "Native American" racial identity is a European construct that does not have an equivalent in tribal thought.
John Horse, also known as Juan Caballo, Juan Cavallo, John Cowaya and Gopher John, was a man of mixed African and Seminole ancestry who fought alongside the Seminoles in the Second Seminole War in Florida. He rose to prominence in the third year of what was to become a seven-year war when the first generation of Black Seminole leaders was largely decimated and the primary Seminole war chief, Osceola, fell into the hands of the American military commander, General Thomas Sydney Jesup.
The Choctaw Freedmen are former enslaved Africans, Afro-Indigenous, and African Americans who were emancipated and granted citizenship in the Choctaw Nation after the Civil War, according to the tribe's new peace treaty of 1866 with the United States. The term also applies to their contemporary descendants.
Native American feminism or Native feminism is, at its root, understanding how gender plays an important role in indigenous communities both historically and in modern-day. As well, Native American feminism deconstructs the racial and broader stereotypes of indigenous peoples, gender, sexuality, while also focusing on decolonization and breaking down the patriarchy and pro-capitalist ideology. As a branch of the broader Indigenous feminism, it similarly prioritizes decolonization, indigenous sovereignty, and the empowerment of indigenous women and girls in the context of Native American and First Nations cultural values and priorities, rather than white, mainstream ones. A central and urgent issue for Native feminists is the Missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis.
Indigenous feminism is an intersectional theory and practice of feminism that focuses on decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, and human rights for Indigenous women and their families. The focus is to empower Indigenous women in the context of Indigenous cultural values and priorities, rather than mainstream, white, patriarchal ones. In this cultural perspective, it can be compared to womanism in the African-American communities.
Donald Fixico is a Native American American writer and intellectual. He is a Distinguished Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. Previously, he was the Thomas Bowlus Distinguished Professor of American Indian History, CLAS Scholar and the founding Director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas.
Kim TallBear is a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta, specializing in racial politics in science. Holding the first ever Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment, TallBear has published on DNA testing, race science and Indigenous identities, as well as on polyamory as a decolonization practice.
Steve Russell, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, was a poet, journalist and academic, as well as a former trial court judge and Associate Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice, Indiana University Bloomington.
Joanne Barker became a faculty member within the American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University, in 2003. Much of her work focuses on indigenous feminism and the sovereignty and self determination of indigenous peoples. Her work takes a transnational approach, making connections between and across the borders of countries. Barker makes historical and scholarly connections between the oppression and resistance of marginalized communities. An example of this transnational approach can be seen by the work that Barker has done to show connections in the struggles of Palestinians in Israel and indigenous communities in the United States.
Clifford M. Lytle was a political scientist, scholar of Native American studies, and legal scholar. He was a distinguished university professor in the department of political science at the University of Arizona. He frequently collaborated with fellow University of Arizona political science professor Vine Deloria Jr.
Gregory D. Smithers is a professor of American history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. An ethnohistorian, Smithers specializes in Native American and African American histories.
The historiography of Indigenous genocide is the study of how these type of genocides have been documented and interpreted by historians throughout the colonial age up to today.
Felt theory is an academic theory that builds upon conceptualizations of trauma and the processing of emotions, taking form in various disciplines and sectors of humanity. Frequently and most widely seen in Native/Indigenous cultures, the concept was first discussed by Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million in 2009. Felt theory aims to utilize experiences to properly and most informedly recover from traumatic events, highlighting storytelling and nostalgia as paramount features.
