The Future for Native Americans
Participants at a Colorado Springs Native American Inter-Tribal Powwow, 2015. Detroit Publishing Company
In the fifteenth century, when European settlers began to arrive in North America, the continent was richly populated with Native American communities. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in a wide range of environments from shore to shore, each community or nation with its own distinct culture. The centuries that followed the arrival of Europeans were years of tremendous upheaval, as the expansion of settler territory and the founding and growth of the United States resulted in Native American communities being moved, renamed, combined, dispersed, and, in some cases, destroyed.
These dislocations and changes took place across many centuries, and each individual episode was marked by its own set of unique circumstances, from public negotiations and careful planning to subterfuge and deceit; from declarations of friendship to calls for genocide; from disease, starvation, and bloodshed to perseverance, resistance, and hope in the face of persecution. But all were driven by the relentless expansion of European settlement and U.S. territory, and by U.S. government policies that relegated the independence and well-being of Native Americans to secondary status, if that.
Native American communities today span the continent and continue to grow and change. But the mass relocations and other changes, most notably those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shaped many aspects of U.S. society in ways that persist today.
Today, Native American communities are diverse, complex, and can be found across the U.S., in cities and rural areas, on tribal land or far away. Tribal governments' relationships with federal, state, and local governments remain complex, and issues about land sovereignty and use are debated in legislatures and contested in the courts.
Many of the rights secured by Native Americans were won through the efforts of activist groups in the 20th century, such as the American Indian Movement. Today, new generations of activists and tribal leaders continue to fight to improve the life and culture of Native American communities.