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Ulysses Grant’s Forgotten Fight for Native American Rights

The President and his Seneca friend Ely Parker wanted Indians to gain citizenship, but their efforts are mostly lost to history.
by Mary Stockwell via Zócalo Public Square on January 7, 2019
Spread from Vine Deloria, Jr.'s essay "The Bureau of Indian Affairs: My Brother’s Keeper."

The Bureau of Indian Affairs: My Brother’s Keeper

An excerpt of “My Brother’s Keeper,” the essay that chronicles the Bureau’s various crimes over two centuries.
by Vine Deloria Jr. via Art In America on July 1, 1972
John Montgomery’s Notice to George W. Gray, November 26, 1855.

“Acts of Lawless Violence”: The Office of Indian Affairs, and the Coming of the Civil War in Kansas

The question should not be if settler colonialism factored into the history of the Civil War but how and to what extent.
by Paul Barba via Muster on July 17, 2024
Deb Haaland.

Deb Haaland Confronts the History of the Federal Agency She Leads

As the first Native American Cabinet member, the Secretary of the Interior has made it part of her job to address the travesties of the past.
by Casey N. Cep via The New Yorker on April 29, 2024
Shot of Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio hugging in Killers of the Flower Moon

Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon Describes the Struggles of the Osage People

Here’s why they are still fighting.
by Greg Palast via The Guardian on October 20, 2023
Still from the film "Killers of the Flower Moon."

The Real History Behind 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

Martin Scorsese's new film revisits the murders of wealthy Osages in Oklahoma in the 1920s
by Meilan Solly via Smithsonian on October 18, 2023
Family photo.
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In the Long Fight to Protect Native American Families, a Law Stands Guard

For generations, Native American children were removed from their homes and placed with white families.
via Retro Report on July 13, 2023
Denise Lajimodiere stands in an empty room of a former American Indian boarding school.
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Forced into Federal Boarding Schools as Children, Native Americans Confront the Past

Native Americans demand accountability for a federal policy that aimed to erase Indigenous culture.
via Retro Report on May 11, 2023
American Indians hold rifles during the standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973.

A Return to the Wounded Knee Occupation, 50 Years Later

The new era of social consciousness and racial activism in the 1970s would play a pivotal role in the events leading up to the 71-day occupation.
by Dennis Zotigh via Smithsonian on February 27, 2023
Visualization of documented visitation networks among reservations placed onto a map made in 1890.

Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance

A digital companion to "We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us," telling the story of Native American resistance to forced resettlement on reservations.
by Justin Gage via nativeamericannetworks.com on October 8, 2020

The Real Story of the 49ers

The reality of the early gold-rush prospectors was not nearly as benevolent as the mascot’s wide smile may suggest.
by Bruce Barcott via The Atlantic on February 2, 2020
A woman walking toward an isolated house on the Navajo reservation.

The Native American Women Who Fought Mass Sterilization

Over a six-year period in the 1970s, physicians sterilized perhaps 25% of Native American women of childbearing age.
by Brianna Theobald via TIME on November 27, 2019

Can Colonial Nations Truly Recognise the Sovereignty of Indigenous People?

The Lakota, like other groups, see themselves as a sovereign people. Can Indigenous sovereignty survive colonisation?
by Pekka Hämäläinen via Aeon on October 2, 2019
How a group of Red Power activists seized the abandoned prison island and their own destinies.

This Land is Our Land: The Native American Occupation of Alcatraz

From November 1969 to June 1971, 89 Red Power activists seized the abandoned prison island of Alcatraz, and their own destinies.
by Mariah-Rose Marie M, Eleri Harris via The Nib on June 11, 2018

From the ‘Pocahontas Exception’ to a ‘Historical Wrong'

The hidden cost of formal recognition for American Indian tribes.
by Arica L. Coleman via TIME on February 9, 2018
Mountainous Alaska landscape.

Trump’s Push to Control Greenland Echoes US Purchase of Alaska From Russia in 1867

The tale of how and why Russia ceded its control over Alaska to the U.S. 150 years ago is actually two tales and two intertwining histories.
by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley via The Conversation on January 8, 2025
Protestors gathered at Wounded Knee in 2022, waving the flag of the American Indian Movement and an upside down United States of America flag. (Photograph by Eunice Straight Head)

The Siege of Wounded Knee Was Not an End but a Beginning

Fifty years ago, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization invited the American Indian Movement to Pine Ridge and reignited a resistance that has not left.
by Nick Estes, Benjamin Hedin via The New Yorker on May 6, 2023
Painting depicting the Trail of Tears.

Native Removal Prior to the Indian Removal Act of 1830

To understand westward expansion, the Trail of Tears, the history of Manifest Destiny, and the impacts to Native Americans, one must understand its buildup.
by Stephanie Edwards via Readex on March 28, 2023
Men standing around an archaeological site.

America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains

The remains of more than 100,000 Native Americans are held by prestigious U.S. institutions, despite a 1990 law meant to return them to tribal nations.
by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz, Ash Ngu, Graham Lee Brewer via ProPublica on January 11, 2023
Mount Harkness Fire Lookout in California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Historic Fire Lookout Towers Are Burning Down in Today’s Megafires

One of the country’s oldest fire lookouts was destroyed last year in the largest wildfire in California’s history. What else is being lost?
by Hannah Kingsley-Ma via The New Republic on September 7, 2022
Wilma Mankiller on a quarter

Reconsidering Wilma Mankiller

As the Cherokee Nation’s first female chief’s image is minted onto a coin, her full humanity should be examined.
by Alaina E. Roberts via High Country News on June 6, 2022
Clyde Bellecourt speaking outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA, 1974.

Damn Hard Work

Clyde Bellecourt taught Native people that colonizing society is weak because of its sense of superiority.
by Nick Estes via The Baffler on January 21, 2022
Comedian Charlie Hill on stage with a microphone.

‘Part of Why We Survived’

Is there something in particular about coming from a Native background that makes a person want to write and perform comedy?
by Ian Frazier via New York Review of Books on December 23, 2021
A woman in a horse-drawn wagon in the American west.

For Me, but Not for Thee

How white feminism failed Native Americans in the late-19th century.
by Kyla Schuller via Slate on October 25, 2021
An illustration of broken and bloody pieces representing awareness of Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls.

Traumatic Monologues

On the therapeutic turn in Indigenous politics.
by Melanie K. Yazzie via The Baffler on September 6, 2021
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland meets with young people from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe on July 14
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Reckoning With American Indian Boarding Schools Requires Accountability, Not Pity

It’s a story of U.S. misdeeds, but also Native resilience.
by K. Tsianina Lomawaima via Made By History on August 18, 2021
Chemical plant worker

Where Would We Be Without the New Deal?

A new history charts the forgotten ways the social politics of the Roosevelt years transformed the United States.
by Michael Kazin via The Nation on July 26, 2021
Charles Milton Bell, Apsáalooke Delegation, 1880.

Apsáalooke Bacheeítuuk in Washington, DC

A case study in re-reading nineteenth-century delegation photography.
by Wendy Red Star, Shannon Vittoria via Panorama on October 1, 2020
Formal photograph of Ulysses S. Grant.

Public Monuments and Ulysses S. Grant’s Contested Legacy

It is fair to ask whether Grant’s prewar experiences define the entirety of his character, and who sets the bar for which public figures deserve commemoration.
by Nick Sacco via Muster on July 7, 2020

The Empire of All Maladies

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.
by Nick Estes via The Baffler on July 6, 2020
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