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The Native
American population in the United States has increased steadily in the 20th
century; by 1990 the number of Native Americans, including Aleuts and Inuits,
was almost two million, or 0.8 per cent of the total US population; according
to the United States Census Bureau, the Native American population rose more
than 20 per cent between 1980 and 1990. Slightly more than one-third of these
people live on reservations; about half live in urban areas, often near the
reservations. The US government holds about 23 million hectares (56 million
acres) in trust for 314 federally recognized tribes and groups in the form of
278 reservations in 35 states, plus pueblos, rancherias, and trust lands. On
what remains of their former lands, Native American groups continue to function
as separate federal governments.
One of the problems confronting the young United States was what to do with Native American peoples. The Treaty of Paris (1783) ending the American War of Independence had made no mention of the country's indigenous peoples, reflecting Great Britain's ambiguous jurisdiction over them. The United States duly drafted Article I, Section 8, of its Constitution: “The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”.
In the closing years of the 18th century, many “new” Americans were migrating in search of land across the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge into the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee—areas where various Native American nations were still intact and strong. Once there, many of these migrants squatted on Native American land, with the predictable result: war. A series of battles culminated in 1794 in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in north-western Ohio, and in 1795 in the forced Treaty of Greenville, establishing a definite boundary between what was designated “Indian Territory” and white settlement.
The Congress of
the United States, interested in pursuing a just and humane policy towards
indigenous peoples, passed the Trade and Intercourse Acts, a series of
programmes at the end of the 18th century aimed at regulating dealings with
Native Americans. In practice, Congress sought to extinguish Native American
titles to lands through peaceful negotiation before white settlement.
However,
Washington policymakers and eastern humanitarians could not control the
frontier dwellers, who proposed and practised dispossession or even
extermination. Eastern philanthropists and humanitarians, including President
Thomas Jefferson, sought to incorporate the indigenous peoples into the
mainstream of US society by means of an ambitious, largely church-operated educational
programme. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was created in 1824 by the War
Department to assimilate Native Americans. By the later 1820s, however, even
the staunchest defenders of this programme were admitting defeat.
The Indian Removal
Act, passed in May 1830, empowered the United States to move eastern Native
Americans west of the Mississippi, to what was then “Indian Territory” (now
essentially Oklahoma): this “voluntary” removal was in practice mandatory,
resulting in brutal forced marches. By the 1850s, as the United States
expanded, removal was refined by the restriction of Native Americans in “Indian
Territory” to reservations, with resistance countered by the US Army. The
resulting Indian Wars, which raged during the last half of the 19th century,
ended in the slaughter of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South
Dakota, shortly after December 25, 1890.
By 1890 it had
become clear that a new policy had to be adopted towards Native Americans,
whose dwindling numbers seemed to threaten extinction. In 1871 Congress decided
to abandon the treaty process and legislate on the behalf of Native Americans,
now wards of the US government. Tribalism was attacked by parcelling out
reservation land on a severalty (individual) basis from 1887. Hundreds of
thousands of acres remaining were then sold to whites. This allotment policy,
designed to absorb the Native Americans into US society, actually stripped
them, in many cases, of even their allotted lands. Native Americans reached
their lowest population numbers at the turn of the 20th century. In June 1924
the US Congress finally granted these original Americans United States
citizenship.
Attempts at
coerced integration ceased with the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which
encouraged tribes to organize their own governments, subject to the approval of
the US Department of the Interior. After World War II this was replaced by a
policy of terminating federal trust responsibility to the tribes. Native
American resistance in the early 1970s forced a policy reversal, with
responsibility for self-determination being returned to the tribal
administrations. Many Native American groups also initiated land claims and
other actions to regain lost rights and territories: the Alaska Native Land
Claims Settlement Act of 1971 settled $962 million cash and 16 million hectares
(40 million acres) of land on Alaska's Inuit and Aleut population.
The Native
Americans of Canada suffered from European encroachment, but not to the same
degree as their fellows in the United States. Competition for land was reduced
by the sparse settlement of Canadian territory; only an estimated 200,000
Native Americans were resident in the area of modern Canada when the first
European settlers arrived. Populations declined during the 19th century, but
Canadian Native Americans did not endure anything like the Indian Wars of the
United States. The Indian Act of 1876 gave the status of Canadian Native Americans
a statutory footing. Native Americans today constitute some 2 per cent of the
Canadian population, and belong predominantly to the Algonquian linguistic
group; other representative linguistic stocks are the Iroquoian, Salishan,
Athabascan, and Inuit (Eskimoan). They are divided into nearly 600 groups, or
bands. People of mixed Native American and European ancestry, especially the
French-speaking Métis, also form a significant group, particularly in the north
and west. Schools and other services are provided for Native Americans by the
Canadian federal government. Native American populations have grown greatly in
recent years due to better health care. The Inuit have probably endured the
most interference with their traditional ways of live in recent years, with
mining, hydroelectric projects, and oil extraction intruding into their
territories. A plan instituted in 1991 provides for the creation from about 2
million sq km (772,000 sq mi) of the North-west Territories of Nunavut
(Inuktitut for “our land”), a separate Canadian territory for the Inuit, which
will become self-governing in 1999.
The Native
American population of Latin America is estimated at 26.3 million, of whom 24 million
live in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. Generally classified as
campesinos (peasants) by the governments of the countries in which they live,
the vast majority live in extreme poverty in remote rural areas where they eke
out a living from the land. Native American campesinos make up 60 per cent of
the total population of Bolivia and Guatemala. In all of Latin America, only
Uruguay has no remaining indigenous population. In addition, the majority of
Latin Americans are mestizos of mixed Native American and European descent:
Native Americans and mestizos together make up an estimated 85 per cent of the
populations of Mexico, Bolivia, Panama, and Peru, 90 per cent of that of
Ecuador, and an even greater percentage in Chile, Honduras, El Salvador, and
Paraguay. Only Argentina is notably European in racial constitution. Modern
Latin America is therefore considerably indebted to its Native American
heritage, and the history of most Latin American states is essentially the
recent history of Latin Native Americans.
Only 1.5 per cent
of the total Native American population of Latin America is designated as
tribal, unsurprisingly as most important pre-Columbian Latin American cultures
were constituted as states or other units larger than tribes. These exist
mainly in Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Paraguay, and Venezuela. Many of the tribal
groups live in the remote jungle environment of the Amazon Basin, where they
subsist by hunting, fishing, and gathering manioc and other roots. Current
Brazilian expansion into the Amazon, however, threatens the physical and
cultural survival of the Amazon tribes, as diseases brought by outsiders
decimate the indigenous populations, and mineral exploration and highway
construction destroy tribal territories.
The largest
unacculturated Brazilian tribe today is the Yanomamo, numbering over 16,000
people, for whom the government plans to create a park for their protection.
Anthropologists estimate, however, that the Yanomamo would need at least 6.4
million hectares (16 million acres) in order to continue their traditional
lifestyle.
The total
indigenous population of Latin America includes slightly more than 400
different Native American groups, with their own languages or dialects. Like
the Native Americans of North America, they live in vast extremes of climate
and conditions, ranging from the Amazon jungle to the heights of the Andes,
where one group, on Lake Titicaca, subsists on artificial islands of floating
reeds.
Native American and
mestizo populations, frequently poor and often barred from the highest echelons
of Latin American government and society, have sometimes fostered political
radicalism. “Liberation theology”, which grew up in Latin America, attempted
a compromise between the Roman Catholicism prevalent in these communities
and the revolutionary Communism which offered the chief promise of bettering
their social and economic situation. Peru's notorious terrorist movement,
the Shining Path, was able to propagate itself partly by combining its interpretation
of Maoism with the traditional beliefs of the mestizo and Native American
peasantry. Governments have consequently persecuted these populations where
they are seen as centres of subversion.
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