Today's Foundation

            What makes a protest mean something?  What makes it worthwhile pursuing and supporting?  What makes it stand out in the public eye?  I feel that the answer to these questions can be found within any historical protest, whether it was done two thousand years ago or is still going on.  Although one could feel some sense of connection between many, many different protests and revolutions there is one that has been created and has been in the process of reaching its goals for over five centuries.  This long lasting protest is the American Indian protest for Native American Rights.

            The natives were once a proud force who spread across all of America and lived their lives of peaceful work and worship towards their ancestors and deities that surrounded them in the natural world they lived in.  These men and women were content with the land their lived on and were happy with the lives they lived, until the day that the rest of the world found them.  Christopher Columbus, an Italian, was the first person to "discover" America, in 1492, and find the peaceful natives that flourished there.  He saw them as a kind people that created a "wonderful nation" that the Europeans should not fight battle with.  Columbus then went on and got the Indians to work for him and adopt his culture's ways because what he saw ultimately led him to believe that their ways were those of "heathens" (Dee Brown 14).  The white men continued to travel across the seas and have the natives work from them and soon take their land as well.  After the first generation of Native Americans, who met the white men, died off the rebellious tribes then immediately fought to drive the Spaniards back to their own lands.  This, however, proved disastrous for the natives because they had underestimated the settlers and, after a short time, they were massacred by the thousands (Dee Brown 15).  The white men had better weapons and new recruits coming across the seas by the boat load.  One example of the white man's brutality was after the Mohican tribe killed four soldiers in repentance for the killing of four of their own.  The white men then attacked once more and massacred two entire villages worth of Indians (Wounded Knee 16).  The white men also, for generations, would sign treaties and make promises towards the Native Americans, speaking of equality and justice, but they would figuratively tear them up and take from the Indians what they had earlier promised.  The European descendents justified this by creating Manifest Destiny, which tried to explain their supposed dominance over the Indian "race" and "responsibility" over/for the natives as well as their land (Dee Brown 20).  These acts of brutality and dishonor have been occurring ever since foreigners first came to America and have not stopped since.

            Until the late twentieth century American Indians had fought against the foreigners separately but then in 1968 a group of people were able to find the strength and following to create a society of natives, the American Indian Movement.  The group started out as an association to keep an eye on the police brutality that was brought against Indians and to attempt Indians from being abused in the first place.  After the group became more well known throughout the Native American communities it began to increase in participants and soon found itself working in the political world to put notice on the issues that their people still had to live with.  The activists took part in public protesting around the nation; such as, the Occupation of Alcatraz and the Occupation of Wounded Knee (Donald Fixico).  The Occupation of Wounded Knee was a protest against the fact that Dick Wilson, a tribal leader, had given off part of his tribes land.  The people then got him to get impeached but he was slow to get out of office.  So AIM then decided to hold a press conference at Wounded Knee, which was the sight were 350 Lakotas had been massacred by the U.S. Army in 1890.  The situation then became challenging when Wilson had the roads blocked and the reporters were unable to reach the sight.  With that act of coward-ness and defiance the AIM were stuck on Wounded Knee and the occupation began.  After many months the siege finally came to an end when federal officials promised to look into Wilson's management.  This act of protest was just what the AIM wanted as it brought focus to the natives and gave them the opportunity to go into politics, the International Indian Treaty Council (ITC).  Although it had taken the tribes many generations to get together as one people they were finally able to do so and start to fight back for their rights (Anonymous).

            Now days the American Indian Protesting is still continuing but their past accomplishments still mean much to the people of today.  Much of American History is not spoken of in society and when it is it is always shocking and taken in with joy when the listeners and readers aren't actually taken back by the entire thing.  Once, a student in an Indian Study course took notice in the subject and stated, “Probably many have never seen it in this aspect, I know I did not. I was an Indian but I did not know what was expected of me” (Paul MCKENZIE-JONES).  The past is always important to the future as it is the base of what is known today and what today's people thrive upon.  To not know one's past is to not know what will work in life and what will not, what has been done and what must never be done again.

            The American Indian fight for Civil Rights has been an enormous part of American History and will continue to be until all are truly treated equally and the statement "all are created equal" is actually meant in this nation.  Once the Native Americans were a proud people, strong and powerful, but they are now weakened and divided.  To this day, the county with the deepest poverty in the United States is still a tribal reservation (Dee Brown 8).

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In 1850, although none of the Modocs, Mohaves, Paiutes, Shastas, Yumas, or a hundred other lesser-known tribes along the Pacific Coast were consulted on the matter, California became the thirty-first state of the Union.

-Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

"The white colonists chopped down the tropical forests to enlarge their fields; the cotton plants exhausted the soil; winds unbroken by a forest shield covered the fields with sand. When Columbus first saw the island he described it as “very big and very level and the trees very green … the whole of it so green that it is a pleasure to gaze upon.” The Europeans who followed him there destroyed its vegetation and its inhabitants—human, animal, bird, and fish—and after turning it into a wasteland, they abandoned it.

On the mainland of America the Wampanoags of Massasoit vanished along with the Chesapeakes, the Chickahominys, and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan confederacy.  Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes. Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans.  Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature—the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself."

-Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

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Native American Rights

The natives listened to the foreigners' beliefs without complaint and did not mind their supposed ways but they did change their view of the white men when they began to scour their land for precious materials, such as gold.  The white men attacked the natives for their land so that they may take what it held.  They killed many and enslaved the rest to be shipped off to Europe as slaves.  Resistance brought on the use of guns and sabers, and whole tribes were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people in less than a decade after Columbus set foot on the beach of San Salvador, October 12, 1492.

-Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

“So tractable, so peaceable, are these people,” Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain, “that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.”

-Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

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     The natives first presented the foreigners with gifts and then Columbus sent back word to the king of Spain of their peaceful nature and generosity.  One can only guess whether he wrote this knowing that the king would take this news as a sign of weakness and heathenism, or not.  What he wrote was the one of the first causes of the travel of several million Europeans and their descendants that undertook a life to enforce their ways upon the people of the New World.

"Small though the comparative number of American Indians is, almost all other Americans seem to have an earnest fascination for their history, their arts and literature, their attitude toward the natural world, and their philosophy of human existence.

And this wide interest exists beyond the borders of America into the lands of other people and other cultures. Name a small nation, one whose people have a history of past injustices and oppression, and this book will likely be in print there."

-Dee Brown