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...A Forum for American Indian Issues...
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biography 
Fri May 17, 2013 at 09:10:30 AM PDT
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In 1830 Red Jacket, the most famous Seneca orator, died in New York at the age of 74. Seneca writer, historian, and archaeologist Arthur Caswell Parker described the deathbed scene this way:
"He murmured that his old comrades were around him, some chiding him for his mistakes and urging him to see that there was a task ahead."
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Thu Dec 20, 2012 at 13:25:15 PM PST
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Henry Cloud was born in 1884 (1882 or 1886 according to some sources) to the Winnebago Bear Clan (or possibly the Bird Clan) on the reservation in northeastern Nebraska. His tribal name was Wo-Na-Xi-Lay-Hunka ("War Chief"). At the age of seven he was conscripted by the Indian police and sent to the Genoa Indian School, a government-run boarding school. Here he learned English, was forbidden to speak his tribal language, and was converted to Christianity. He was then baptized Henry Clarence Cloud.
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Wed Apr 04, 2012 at 16:18:52 PM PDT
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When the Europeans first encountered the Indian nations of North America they assumed that leadership must be inherited through the male line. That is, the "king" was always the son of the previous "king." The idea of matrilineal inheritance-that is, inheritance through the female line rather than the male line-was inconceivable and baffling to the Europeans, even though it was common among Native Americans. For most Indian people, on the other hand, the idea that leadership should be based on genetics or biological inheritance was ludicrous. Leadership, according to most tribal traditions prior to the European conquest, was based on wisdom, skill, experience, and oratorical skill.
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Fri Nov 18, 2011 at 16:38:51 PM PST
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In 1825, Governor George Simpson of the Hudson's Bay Company conceived the idea of selecting some Indian boys from the Columbia River tribes in present-day Washington and Idaho and sending them east to the Anglican mission school at Red River in Manitoba to be educated. His idea was that these boys could help in "civilizing" the tribes upon their return. Two teenage Indian boys - one from the Spokan in Washington and the other from the Kootenai in Idaho - were sent to the Red River School. The boys are renamed Kootenai Pelly and Spokan Garry. The name "Garry" was taken from the name of one of the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company and the name "Pelly" from one of its governors. At the school, the boys were taught to read and write both English and French.
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Sat Oct 29, 2011 at 12:17:14 PM PDT
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In 1762 the Delaware (Lenni Lenape) prophet Neolin, who was living in Ohio, had a vision in which he undertook a journey to meet the Master of Life. He was told:
"The land on which you are, I have made for you, not for others. Wherefore do you suffer the whites to dwell upon your lands?"
"Drive them away; wage war against them; I love them not; they know me not; they are my enemies; they are your brothers' enemies. Send them back to the land I have made for them."
He received a prayer which was carved in symbolic language on a stick.
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Tue Oct 25, 2011 at 19:38:38 PM PDT
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In 1829, Andrew Jackson became President of the United States. Jackson felt that since the Constitution prohibited the establishment of a new state within the boundaries of another without the agreement of the later and since the states had not agreed to the establishment of a Cherokee nation, the establishment of a Cherokee nation was unconstitutional. Thus, Indians had only two choices: to submit to the states or to remove themselves. Jackson pretended that the Indian nations in the Southeast were hunters and gatherers and therefore had made no improvements to the land which would entitle them to claim the land. Partially in response to Jackson and to the false view of Indians that many non-Indians held, a Pequot Christian minister, William Apess, published his Son of the Forest. The autobiography tells of a life of abuse and oppression. Using the Christian-based style of the time, he tells his story as a spiritual confession and in so doing is able to comment on the anti-Indian prejudices held by non-Indians. This book was one of the earliest books written by an American Indian.
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Sat Apr 23, 2011 at 22:10:47 PM PDT
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In 1879, Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute from Nevada and the daughter of Chief Winnemucca, gave a series of lectures in San Francisco and Sacramento on the treatment of Indians by the Indian Service. Five years later her autobiography, Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, was published. Winnemucca then traveled throughout the country giving lectures on the conditions in Indian country, often charging the government with mismanagement of Indian affairs. Sara Winnemucca became the most recognized Indian woman of the late nineteenth century.
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Mon Jan 03, 2011 at 21:37:31 PM PST
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( - promoted by navajo)
When John Rollin Ridge died in 1867 he was eulogized as one of California's great poets and political commentator. To understand his life and what motivated him, we must start by looking at his parents: John Ridge and Sarah Bird Northrup.
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Mon Dec 06, 2010 at 08:39:52 AM PST
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( - promoted by navajo)
American colonists, unhappy with the English tax laws, attacked a detachment of British troops in Boston in 1770. The soldiers fired into what they viewed as a rioting crowd. One of their primary targets was the leader of the group - a man known as Crispus Attucks. Ultimately, five colonists, including Attucks, were killed.
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Thu Dec 02, 2010 at 15:30:37 PM PST
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( - promoted by navajo)
Ask some non-Cherokees to name some prominent historical Cherokee leaders and there are three names which frequently come up: (1) John Ross, the chief who led the Cherokee during the first half of the nineteenth century, (2) Sequoia, the genius who created Cherokee writing, and (3) Wilma Mankiller, the well-known twentieth century chief. There are, however, many other prominent Cherokee historical figures and there were powerful chiefs before John Ross. One of these was Attakullakulla.
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Mon Nov 08, 2010 at 20:18:48 PM PST
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( - promoted by oke)
There was a time, particularly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when museums were simply "cabinets of curiosities" which displayed artifacts from other cultures and made little attempt to educate or engage the people who looked at them. Items were displayed simply as "curiosities": exotic items from strange people. During the first part of the twentieth century a new approach to museums was developed by Arthur Caswell Parker.
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Fri Oct 15, 2010 at 08:03:24 AM PDT
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( - promoted by navajo)
One of the visitors at an 1891 Comanche Ghost Dance in Oklahoma was Frank White. He sat on the north side of the dance area and ate a lot of peyote. When the Comanche asked him who he was, he said that he was Pawnee. Following the Comanche Ghost Dance, he attended a Ghost Dance among the Wichita. There he once again ate peyote, he watched the dance, and then he joined it.
While dancing, Frank White went into a trance where he saw the stream, the tree, the Messiah, and the village of the people. He saw the people dance, and in his trance he joined them and from them he learned Ghost Dance songs in Pawnee. The English words to the first song he learned are:
The place whence you come,
Now I am longing for.
The place whence you come,
Now I am ever mindful of.
When he woke from the trance he told the people what he had seen. In this way, Frank White became a prophet and the people felt that he had the same power as Sitting Bull, the Arapaho Ghost Dance leader.
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Wed Aug 18, 2010 at 18:50:38 PM PDT
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( - promoted by navajo)
 Indian citizenship and participation in American politics involves more than just voting: it also involves having Indians elected to public office. One of the first Indians to be elected to national office was Charles Curtis.
Curtis was born in 1860 near present-day North Topeka, Kansas. His mother was a descendent of Kansa (also called Kaw) chief White Plume. White Plume was the son of an Osage chief and had been adopted into the Kansa. Later, Curtis's tribal affiliation would be listed as Kansa (or Kaw) or as Kansa-Osage.
He was raised in part by his maternal grandmother and attended an Indian mission school on the Kaw Reservation. After the Cheyenne attacked the Kaw at Council Grove in 1868, Curtis was moved to Topeka where he later attended Topeka High School.
In 1881, Curtis was admitted to the bar and soon entered politics as a Republican. In 1885 he was elected county attorney for Shawnee County and his political career began.
In 1892 was elected to Congress and began the first of eight terms in the House of Representatives. Like many others of this era, Curtis felt that Indians had to be assimilated into American culture. Assimilation meant that traditional cultures and languages had to be destroyed.
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Sat Jul 31, 2010 at 16:23:49 PM PDT
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( - promoted by navajo)
In 1799, a new religious movement was born among the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. The new religious movement, considered to be a traditional Iroquois religion today, began with a series of visions received by Handsome Lake. Among this vision was the prophecy that the world would end in 2010.
Handsome Lake was born into the Seneca Wolf clan in 1735. (The Seneca are one of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.) As a young man, Handsome Lake followed the traditional Iroquois role for men and was a warrior. In 1765 he was a part of a group of 100 Seneca warriors, under the leadership of Giengwahtoh (Old Smoke). The war party journeyed to the southeast where they raided the Cherokee and the Choctaw.
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Sun Jul 18, 2010 at 08:45:34 AM PDT
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( - promoted by navajo)
For many people in the academic world, one of the major foundations of Native American literature was laid with the publication of The Surrounded in 1936. This novel, written by D'Arcy McNickle, was not the first novel written by an Indian nor was it particularly successful at the time. The book came out in the midst of the depression and found relatively little readership in spite of good reviews. In the 70 years that have passed since the book's publication, however, it has become one of the most widely read and studied American Indian novels.
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Sat Jul 17, 2010 at 17:02:01 PM PDT
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( - promoted by navajo)
The United States government and American historians have been as reluctant to acknowledge women leaders among Indian nations as they have been acknowledging women warriors. The fact is that many Indian nations have had women leaders. In the many treaty councils which the United States held with the Indian nations, it was unusual for the United States to allow Indian women to speak.
In 1831, when the Sauk returned to their traditional village of Saukenuk in Illinois, the Americans called up a force of 700 militia volunteers to protect the citizens of the state from the Sauk invasion. The Sauk were determined to remain peaceful and met in council with the Americans. The Americans wanted the Sauk to move to new lands west of the Mississippi River. Black Hawk informed General Gaines that the women own the fields, not the men. The Sauk then selected a woman to speak for them. She told the Americans that the women owned the fields, not the tribe, and that the women had never sold any of the land nor consented to the transfer of it to the United States. Gaines simply dismissed her comments saying that the President did not send him to make treaties with women nor to hold council with them.
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Fri Jul 16, 2010 at 08:39:55 AM PDT
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( - promoted by navajo)
When the Europeans first began arriving on this continent they were amazed that Indian women were very much unlike European women. Indian women were not subservient to men, they often engaged in work - such as farming and warfare - which the Europeans viewed as men's work, they had a voice in the political life of their communities, and they had control of their own bodies and sexuality. Unlike the patriarchal European societies, Indians were often matrilineal, a system in which people belonged to their mother's clans or extended families. When Indian people spoke of a neighboring tribe as "women" or as "grandmothers", the Europeans often misinterpreted this compliment as a derogatory statement.
During the nineteenth century Indian women, and particularly Indian women leaders, were invisible to the American government. Some Indians have gone so far as to say that the Americans were so afraid of Indian women that they would not allow them to sit or speak in treaty councils with the United States government. Even today, Indian women are conspicuous by their absence in American history.
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Tue Jun 15, 2010 at 09:55:39 AM PDT
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( - promoted by navajo)
Tiwi-teqis, later known to the Americans as Old Chief Joseph, was born between 1785 and 1790 in Oregon. He became the principal leader of the Wallowa Nez Perce sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century. This was prior to the creation of reservations for the Indians of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
During his life he saw the impact of the fur trade, the coming of Christian missionaries, and the arrival of American settlers. To give these settlers free land, the United States government sought to move the Nez Perce onto a reservation in Idaho. Joseph, as a traditional Nez Perce leader, resisted the government's attempts to move him from his homeland and to convert him to Christianity.
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Mon Mar 29, 2010 at 14:44:10 PM PDT
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Susan LaFlesche was the first American Indian woman to become a doctor and to practice Western-style medicine among her own people. She became a doctor at a time when there were only a handful of other Indian doctors trained in western medicine-Charles Eastman and Carlos Montezuma. In addition, it was highly unusual at this time for a woman to become a doctor.
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| In Memoriam |
In honor of my mother, THE FLORA SOMBRERO LIND NAVAJO ENDOWMENT FUND has been set up to accept your donations.
This scholarship endowment has been established at the American Indian College Fund to honor Flora Sombrero Lind, as an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation who was born at Inscription House, Arizona of the Many Goats clan circa 1925. This scholarship endowment is funded by Flora's family and friends who want to see Navajo students pursue higher education and carry on their great Navajo heritage.
Please leave a comment here if you donate.
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