NOVEMBER IS NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH

(Ed.'s Note: In 1990 President George H. W. Bush approved a joint resolution designating November 1990 “National American Indian Heritage Month.” Similar proclamations, under variants on the name (including “Native American Heritage Month” and “National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month”) have been issued each year since 1994.)

By Juan Montoya

Five hundred and thirty years ago, natives of a Caribbean island woke up to find three boatloads of hungry (and lost) Europeans announcing to them that they had been discovered. What’s more, they said the land now belonged to them and their distant king.

The next five centuries would be devastating for the natives, who shared their food and resources with the new arrivals. And from the very start, no matter how generous the natives (whom the Europeans called Indians in the mistaken belief they had reached India) were, the white visitors always seemed to want more.

Over time, the leader, one Christopher Columbus, not only took their food and shelter, but he also implemented a system of tribute. The natives were perplexed at why the Europeans were so greedy for the yellow shiny metal they used as decorations.

As the Europeans become more avaricious in the quest for gold, they started demanding that the natives dedicate their entire days working in mines and river beds to search for the shiny metal.

As time went on, the natives begin dying off from over work, new diseases against which they had no immunity, and at the hands of their cruel new masters.

Needing more labor as the gentle tribes were decimated at the hands of the avaricious conquistadores, they persuaded Queen Isabella to issue a writ ordering that any so-called carabs, or cannibals, could be used as slave labor in their mines. Any native who resisted, it turned out, could be classified as a carab. And so slavery was introduced to the Americas.

Columbus died convinced he had discovered India and that China was not too far over the next mountain range. Subsequent conquistadores spread across the face of a land they called America and laid waste to entire tribes looking for treasure and plunder. The annals of the conquista are full of narratives where natives were torn apart by war dogs or burned alive when Spaniards thought they were holding out on gold deposits.

In one relato, a burial area that was on a platform was torn apart and the remains relieved of their gold burial ornaments.

Mexico City was leveled, as was the Inca nation. Unspeakable cruelty was perpetrated in the name of God, King, and civilization. The tribes that weren't decimated by steel of forced labor were destroyed by diseases against which the natives had no immunity. Entire nations disappeared from the face of the earth to make room for "civilization." 

The so-called “Columbian Exchange” was a lopsided affair. The Old World got the riches of these nations, and “America” got disease and slaughter in return. The Old World got unimaginable wealth in the form of foodstuffs that saved entire European nations from famine (potatoes), and gave humanity a crop that would in time become the most important addition to the world’s granary – corn.

Today, corn, a wild grass domesticated by the natives some 15,000 years ago, is now the biggest cash crop in the United States, if not the world. Some of the earliest pollen of domesticated corn has been found in cave hearths and middens as far north as Tampico in the Sierra Madre Oriental in northeast Mexico.

Further north, in the United States, the newcomers adopted a policy of genocide against its natives. Those it could not kill outright were dispossessed of their ancestral lands and forcibly moved across the country to unimaginably uninhabitable terrain.

The Trail of Tears remains very real to them.

(At right, Melissa Grace Issac-Montoya, a Saginaw Chippewa Tribe member from Central Michigan poses in the White House alongside portraits of ancestral chiefs who once visited the nation's capitol to sign treaties between their sovereign nations and the U.S. government. Issac-Montoya was a special guest of First Lady Dr. Jill Biden during the State of the Union Address and has been invited once again by the Bidens to  celebrate Native American Heritage Month.)  

The Cherokees and Seminoles were moved from the semitropical Southeast to the arid plains of Oklahoma. The eastern tribes were moved into the Black Hills and plains of South Dakota. The rest were packed into squalid reservations. 

To this day, some Native activists will not accept a $20 bill because it bears the face of Andrew Jackson, the president who defied the U.S. Supreme Court and removed the people from their lands in Florida and Georgia under the infamous Indian Removal Act at a huge cost in human life. 

Somehow, the native people have been able to survive and their Great Spirit looked over them.

The Cherokees in Oklahoma found out that their reservations lay atop underground oceans of oil. And in the barren Black Hills, where the Lakotas were relegated, uranium and gold were discovered. And, as they are sovereign nations in treaty with the United States, they can have gaming on their squalid reservations. And they built casinos, and the people came. And they are still coming.

Next time you’re in Indian country and have a chance to visit one of their pow-wows, do yourself a favor and go. The beat of the drum and the chanting of the dancers resonate as one with the very rhythm of their Mother Earth just as it has since long before Columbus stumbled upon this continent and made his “discovery."