Celebrating Native American Heritage

Founded in 1968, the American Indian Movement (AIM) is a source of a complicated nostalgia for Indigenous activists today. AIM orchestrated many direct actions that remain instructive touchstones, including the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee. Still, the organization has also been characterized by a masculinism often found in its famous iconography. During the 2016 mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL), common invocations of AIM by mainstream media revealed the contrast between these moments of struggle. Analyzing this contrast through the visual record of each mobilization, the author argues that nostalgia for AIM presents an opportunity to work through the colonial imposition of heteropatriarchal norms. Current Indigenous media makers have begun the work to demonstrate emancipatory gender politics that provide an elaboration of Indigenous representations of relationality, thereby attesting to the connections among feminist, queer, and ecological consciousness. Foregrounding the importance of tribal specificity, the author focuses on media produced on and of Lakota tribal homelands.

This work builds upon Elizabeth Archuleta's (Yaqui) term “ethos of responsibility” by contextualizing it within the #NoDAPL movement and applies a cultural rhetorics methodology to constellate an understanding of an ethos of responsibility utilized by Indigenous women water protectors in the #NoDAPL movement, as seen in video-recorded interviews selected from the #NoDAPL digital archive. This study attempts to understand the rhetoric of Indigenous women water protectors through the lens of Indigenous feminism(s), Indigenous rhetoric(s), and Dakota/Lakota/Nakota history and worldviews. When speaking from an ethos of responsibility, the water protectors featured in this study locate agency in traditional teachings and in the experience of Indigenous women, including responsive care in/to the interconnectedness of life, the special role of women in the care of water, and the collective survival of Indigenous women in colonial and patriarchal violence.

While many of the health disparities, brought on by the cruelties of settler colonization, that affect Native American and Alaskan Native communities and individuals at high rates have been documented, the health risks impacting non-federally recognized tribes are less explored. In this manuscript, we explore the challenges non-recognized tribes face and how without Tribal sovereignty, autonomy, and resources, it is more difficult for non-recognized tribes to provide care and resources for the members of their communities. This study took place in the Gulf South regions of the United States, where there are environmental factors pertaining to industry, global warming, environmental racism, and rurality that further impact the quality of life and rates of cancer, respiratory illness, and reproductive health issues in the Native American communities that live there. In addition, tribes without federal recognition have increased challenges in addressing the lack of access to health equity and may not have the health resources or programming available to them that exist for federally recognized tribes. To explore these topics, a qualitative description methodology was used to conduct 31 semi-structured interviews with women from a state-recognized Native American tribe in the Gulf South to understand their healthcare experiences and concerns. Participants in this study described: high rates of cancer, vehicle accidents or collisions common, barriers to exercising, physical injuries common, chronic illnesses common in the community, loss of family members, and physical violence. These findings indicate that state-recognized tribal members may need increased, improved, and culturally contextualized healthcare programs within their communities, in addition to full recognition of their tribal sovereignty rights. This study begins to address important gaps in the research exploring the full scope of the health risks and challenges affecting non-federally recognized tribal members, while also highlighting their resilience in the face of settler colonialism.

Land acknowledgements have become a powerful introduction to convocations, graduations, and conferences in higher education. As defined
by The Guide to Indigenous Land and Territorial Acknowledgements for Cultural Institutions “an Indigenous Land or Territorial Acknowledgement
is a statement that recognizes the Indigenous peoples who have been dispossessed from the homelands and territories upon which an institution
was built and currently occupies and operates in.”1 The key word in the definition of a land acknowledgement is dispossession. Settler colonialism is an ongoing process and system of power that perpetuates the loss of land by Indigenous people.2 The settler colonial educational institution built on Indigenous lands revolves around the denial of Indigenous rights and the erasure of Native people. The truth is – if it were not for the loss of land by Indigenous peoples, American colleges and universities would not exist. Institutions must challenge themselves to move away from encouraging acts that are performative, into commitments of transformative change.

LANDBACK is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands. Currently, there are LANDBACK battles being fought all across Turtle Island, to the north and the South.

Native Land Digital strives to create and foster conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations, through educational resources such as our map and Territory Acknowledgement Guide. We strive to go beyond old ways of talking about Indigenous people and to develop a platform where Indigenous communities can represent themselves and their histories on their own terms. In doing so, Native Land Digital creates spaces where non-Indigenous people can be invited and challenged to learn more about the lands they inhabit, the history of those lands, and how to actively be part of a better future going forward together.