November is associated with Thanksgiving preparations across the country. Classrooms and public areas are decorated with warm-, earthy-toned cutouts of turkeys, English settlers – the Pilgrims, as they are known – who made a new home in a country new to them, and “Indians” with colourful feather headdresses and vests made of construction paper.
Families gather for a feast from across the nation. And some arguments.
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Even those who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving or fully understand it have been helped by America’s dominance of pop culture thanks to songs and movies.
But to millions of Indigenous Americans, the story of Thanksgiving is also closely intertwined with their history of invasion, occupation, displacement, death and devastation that their communities faced as waves of settlers arrived and took over what is today the US.
Here’s a look at what the historical journey of the US has meant to its Native American communities through maps showing where they once lived, how they had to move and the reservations they are now largely ghettoised in.
Thanksgiving became a national holiday when?
In 1863, a proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln turned the last Thursday of every November into a national holiday for giving thanks.
This occurred in the middle of the American Civil War between the Confederacy and the Union, the nation’s northern region, who wanted to preserve a system of slavery. The Civil War spanned from 1861 to 1865, and nearly 700, 000 soldiers were killed.
Following a campaign that began in 1846 under the direction of Sarah Hale, a poet, editor, and activist, the national holiday was established. She’s most commonly known as the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb.
The custom that was formalized as Thanksgiving was common in the original settler communities of New England long before Lincoln’s proclamation or even Hale’s campaign.
When and where was the first Thanksgiving?
The East Coast of what is now the US was divided by England’s King James I in 1616 between the Plymouth Company and the London Company, which later became the Virginia Company of London. Both were joint-stock trading companies, much like the British East India Company, which was set up in India in 1608.
This was still more than a century and a half before the US was born.
The goals of these British trading companies were to find gold, search for trade routes and compete with other European powers.
The Jamestown colony, which was established along the banks of the James River in modern-day Virginia, was the first English colony to settle in the New World in 1607. This was the ancestral home of the Powhatan Indigenous people.
The first African slaves ever to work in lucrative tobacco fields arrived in the colony in 1619.
Jamestown as a colony was ravaged by famine, disease and resistance from Indigenous communities.
A group of 102 English families, the Pilgrims, made their way to modern-day Provincetown Harbor, Massachusetts on November 11 and anchored their ship, the Mayflower, in modern-day Plymouth Harbour on December 16. The colonists named it New Plymouth, which was the home of the Wampanoag people.
However, the first winter, when New Plymouth was rife with disease, saw the death of nearly half of the Mayflower’s passengers.
At the same time, the colonists learned survival skills, including farming on land that was foreign to them, from some of the Indigenous communities.
The surviving Pilgrims and the indigenous people who surrounded their colony laid the seeds of Thanksgiving in October or November 1621.
But in 1622, a vessel called the Sparrow brought the beginnings of another settlement, and two other ships followed soon after. The tensions between colonists and indigenous people increased. Ultimately, the Native people fled, and the trade ecosystem that the Plymouth Colony had set up with the Indigenous communities broke down.
The king proclamated it in 1763.
Under the Royal Proclamation of 1763, Great Britain set aside resources for the Native people. British colonies, Crown lands designated for indigenous communities, and Spanish- and French-held areas are depicted on the map. This is recorded as showing the movement of Indigenous people from the coast to inland areas.
US independence in 1776
In an act of defiance against the Crown, the original 13 settler colonies declared independence in 1776 during the 1775-1783 Revolutionary War.
1806 – Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Mandan Nation
The first US expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis of Virginia and William Clark of Kentucky (1804-1806), charted a path leading to the Pacific and laid the groundwork for US expansion.
Along the way, they met with the Mandan Nation along the Missouri River.
Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, understood the value of having them as trade and intelligence partners.
Jefferson’s 1806 message to the Mandan Nation encapsulates the early US policy of Native assimilation. Jefferson introduced Mandan leaders to Washington, DC, and laid out a paternalistic strategy for how indigenous peoples would “mix with us by marriage” before eventually integrating into the growing US.
Historians see this as a blueprint for the federal “civilisation” programme that became the effort to replace Indigenous sovereignty with American identity through trade dependency, intermarriage and cultural transformation.
Indian Removal Act of 1830
Half a century after the birth of the US, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by President Andrew Jackson, authorised the federal government to negotiate treaties with Indigenous communities.
Communities that had been displaced from other locations were given land west of the Mississippi River. This resulted in the forced migration of Indigenous people from the East Coast inland and in some cases all the way to the present-day Midwest.
Due to the high death toll level, the forced displacement of five indigenous peoples from southeast of the United States to what is now Oklahoma is known as the “Trail of Tears.” Nearly 60, 000 people were forced to move overland without much say about their own destiny. Along the way, between 10,000 and 15,000 people died.
The Lumbee Nation, a Native American organization, was one of the people who were forced to flee during these forced removals.
Her tribe has been recognised by the state since 1885 but is not federally recognised. Native American tribes that are recognized have a number of self-governing rights, are dependent in the US, and are eligible for federal funding for healthcare, education, housing, and infrastructure.
Locklere, 60, is a former US Air Force lieutenant colonel who lives in Virginia and maintains a home in her ancestral lands in North Carolina. She spent nearly 20 years in the armed forces, and after she retired, she set out to find the federal government to recognize her tribe.
“I took my combat boots off and put my moccasins back on to try to help our people as much as I can”, Locklear says.
Her tribe, which has almost 60, 000 members, has recently visited Capitol Hill with North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis to lobby for its recognition. The Lumbee Fairness Act, which would grant the Lumbee full federal recognition, passed the House of Representatives in December but is awaiting Senate and presidential approval.
“It’s not because of charity,” he said. It’s not. Not because we are waiting for a handout or anything similar. It was a part of a larger policy and a requirement of a government-to-government relationship with Indigenous people”, Locklear says.
Gold Rush of 1849
On the West Coast in present-day California, which was still part of Mexico at the time, gold was discovered in January 1848, and the following month, the US government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, making it part of US territory.
The Californian population’s migration in 1848 was known as the “Gold Rush.” Hundreds of thousands of people moved into the area, where Indigenous tribes and nations were already living.
Charlene Njemeh, 53, is the chief of her tribe, the Mukame Ohlane, who trace their origins back to what is now Silicon Valley. During the Gold Rush, her ancestors lived in a large population of newcomers.
Njemah says the original land of her nation is spread over five counties in present-day California. One of the many unrecognised tribes in the US is the one. Her mother was the chief before her.
Because of what federal recognition entails, our tribe has always been engaged in combat and struggle to form a relationship with the government. It’s a government-to-government relationship”.
The Mukame Ohalane people were forced into the mission system, which attempted to convert them to Christianity, like many other tribal nations.
1851 – Indian Appropriations Act
The Indian Appropriations Act of 1851, which established the reservation system, restricted Indigenous nations to fixed parcels of land owned by the federal government, became a significant turning point in US policy.
It ended the recognition of tribes as sovereign nations and paved the way for forced relocations, broken treaties and tighter military oversight. As tribes were forced onto smaller, unfamiliar territories while white settlements quickly spread across the continent, the act laid the groundwork for decades of displacement.
Aaron Carpella, a 45-year-old Cherokee community member who was married to a Choctaw Nation member, reside in eastern Oklahoma’s tribal region where his ancestors were forced to relocate as a result of the Indian Removal Act. He is a former activist and now runs Tribal Nations Maps, which creates maps tracking the journey of Indigenous people through US history.
Nearly 20% of Oklahomans are Native people, according to Carpella, and many of them can trace their ancestral roots to the time of the relocation, much like his family.
When tribal territories were established in exchange for lost Native American land, tribes were supposed to keep their new land forever and pass it down to their descendants. But the government instead carved up the new Native homelands into smaller, fixed allotments under federal oversight.
The number of landholdings decreased as their descendants grew. “So there’s a lot of Natives here that have like a half an acre]2, 023sq metres] left or a quarter of an acre]1, 011sq metres] or they’ve lost all their land”, Carpella explains.
Impact of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1939
The Indian Reorganization Act, a policy meant to end decades of forced assimilation and land loss, was already a hot topic in the US in 1939.
Tribes were drafting new constitutions, restoring forms of self-government and trying to reclaim lands.
Federal agencies changed the management of reservation resources, easing the transition from allotment to stronger, though still constrained, tribal sovereignty.
But the policy has consistently clashed with reality. Carpella’s home town of Oklahoma is a prime example.
A 2020 Supreme Court ruling declared a large portion of eastern Oklahoma as “Indian” country.
However, there are 80% of the people who live here who are not native people who reside in cities, which suggests that municipalities are a top-notch development. And so you have regular police officers and then you have tribal police officers and then you have Bureau of Indian Affairs police officers”, he explained.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a federal agency in the US, oversees land, services, and obligations under the Indian Act. It is housed within the Department of the Interior in Washington, DC, and led by a presidentially appointed director. Native Americans make up the majority of the BIA workforce, especially for programs involving tribal liaison and education and culture.
As a result, Carpella says, there is a constant battle over jurisdiction. Because we have a Native American license plate, he claims, so police won’t want to stop us. If they are stopped, they have to call the tribal police, starting a time-consuming exercise.
According to him, “In our treaties, it says that Native people can hunt whenever they want wherever they want in Oklahoma forever without the government intervening,” but what happens is that the state government will send out its wildlife officers to distribute tickets to individual citizens who are just out hunting deer for their families.
Native Americans today
Carpella has spent the past 15 years putting together a map based on Native peoples ‘ voices and memories passed down from generation to generation about where their people came from and what languages they spoke.
In the US, this open-source map is unique. Carpella uses this map to do workshops in educational institutes to spread awareness. In 2012, he granted his map a copyright.
“I used to be an activist. I felt like I was trying to cross the fence at a city council meeting or school, attempting to change a racist mascot or something similar. And now I have these products that are in the schools changing minds”, Carpella says.
“It’s really encouraging to see that awareness is expanding. I think 20 years ago, half of Americans didn’t even know that Native Americans still existed”, he says, citing polls that indicated at the time that about half of Americans thought Indigenous Americans were “all gone”.
9.6 million Americans identify as having Native American heritage, an 85 percent increase from 2010 census results. The growth is mainly attributed to how data are collected.
The US government’s blood quantum policy, which was instituted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, determined Native identity by determining a person’s percentage of “Indian blood,” which frequently required at least one-quarter of it. Many tribes say it is a colonial system that divides families and threatens the long-term survival of Native nations.
There is no universal definition of the word “Indian” in the United States, according to Locklear.
“If both parents are Native, the child is considered 100 percent]Native]”, he says. The child would be half, three-quarters, one-eighth, or something along those lines if parents were mixed-race.
“Over time, blood quantum was a genocidal policy because it helps limit membership or citizenship over time”, Locklear says. “We have the authority to choose who can become a Lumbee citizen,” says one of our sovereign powers. I think this right is essential to our ability to self-govern”.
Source: Aljazeera
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