In November 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant called a meeting with General William T. Sherman (representing the U.S. Army) and Secretary Columbus Delano (representing the Bureau of Indian Affairs) (Anderson, 1996). At this meeting, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was asked to "step aside" and allow the army to resolve the "problem" with Sioux Indians. An ultimatum was then given to the Sioux in the Black Hills to report to a reservation by January 31, 1876 or be punished. The land in question was pledged to the Sioux Nation in the Fort Laramie Treaty of April 29, 1868, but a few years later illegally seized and the treaty was nullified in the Indian Appropriations Bill of 1876 without the tribe's consent. The land has significant resources and minerals, which was the primary driver for its seizure.
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse refused to comply and led a contingent of Cheyenne, Lakota, Oglala and other Sioux peoples in resisting the order to relocate which resulted in the Battle of Little Big Horn. While the Native American warriors won the battle, the U.S. Army continued their directive against the Indigenous peoples resulting in the death of Crazy Horse in 1877 while Sitting Bull and his people escaped to Canada (Anderson, 1996).
Red Power Movement and Activism
In the 1960's and 1970's, Native American folks became more socially and politically active generally around issues of self-determination and American Indian identification and cultural revival (Coffer, 1979; Nagel, 1996). According to Joanne Nagel,
the transformations of identity and culture that mark late twentieth-century American Indian ethnicity were forged in the crucible of Red Power. Red Power activism was the progenitor of an American Indian ethnic rebirth (Nagel, 1996).
Prior to the development of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Native American activists used non-violent civil disobedience tactics from the Civil Rights Movement to organize fish-ins primarily in the states of Washington and Oregon. Nagel writes, "a fish-in involved, quite simply, illegal fishing in bodies of water (rivers, streams, lakes, coastal waters) from which Indigenous fishermen were legally restricted or banned despite their claims to treaty rights" (Nagel, 1996). Some of these fish-ins generated mass arrests and even violent confrontations, but the courts eventually ruled in favor of American Indians' treaty rights to fish in bodies of water (Healey & O'Brien, 2015).
Another notable Red Power activist event was the Trail of Broken Treaties that took place 1972. Again, AIM helped to organize an automobile caravan of hundreds of American Indians that started in October of 1972 from the west (Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) to arrive in the BIA building in Washington, D. C. (Coffer, 1979; Nagel, 1996). While this event received media coverage given the November 1972 election coverage already in Washington, D. C., the demands made by American Indians were not met. It is important to note that more contemporary Native American resistance and activism stems from panethnicity, which is cooperation and unity among different ethnic groups.
The Native American population was decimated by European colonization. At one point, the Indigenous population was in the millions, but by 1900 that number plummeted to approximately 240,000. In the past, the Native American population dwindled to less than 1% of the U.S. population but by 2012 they made up approximately 2% of Americans. Assuming these demographic trends continue as conveyed in USA Facts, the Native American population will continue to rise, demonstrating American Indian resilience.
Today, their tribal affiliations (as of census 2000) are 16% Cherokee, 12% Navajo, 6% Chippewa, 6% Sioux, 4% Choctaw, 46% all other tribes. Approximately 22% live on reservations and trust lands and 15% live in tribal designated areas. The largest group of American Indians, 62.3%, do not live on traditional tribal lands or reservations. By region, 6.25% of all American Indians live in the Northeast U.S., 17.93% of all American Indians live in the Midwest U.S., 30.21% of all American Indians live in the Southern U.S., and 45.59% of all American Indians live in the Western U.S. (U. S. Census Bureau).
Native Americans speak English, Spanish, French, and over 150 Native Languages and thousands of dialects. Although some Indigenous languages have survived, there are several languages that are at risk of becoming extinct. While it is difficult to estimate how many Indigenous languages have been lost, a recent estimate suggests that in the United States, it has been at least 125 languages (Koyfman, 2017).
Currently, Native Americans are more likely to live in a city rather than a reservation. The trend towards urbanization began to increase after the passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, then dropped a bit leading up to the 1953 Termination Act. Urbanization then sharply increased in the 1950s with multiple government programs created to encourage Native Americans to move to the cities, such as the establishment of American Indian Centers and after 1962, the Employment Assistant Program (Healey & O'Brien, 2015; Schaefer, 2015).
Finally, contemporary examples of Native American resistance and activism by young people are evident in our social media platforms. Consider what is presented in the following mashup of TikTok videos. what social issues are being addressed? What are the authors/creators attempting to communicate? Can social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram be effective in educating and familiarizing non-Indigenous peoples of Indigenous issues?
