November is Native American Heritage Month, and November 26th is the Day of Native American Heritage. This month Indigenous people in the United States spend time celebrating our heritage while remembering and honoring our ancestors. However, Indigenous people practice our culture everyday and we remember who we are and where we come from daily. November is also a month for non-Indigenous people to learn about true American history, and to recognize the depths of colonialism that are embedded in American culture today. November is a month for non-Indigenous people to re-educate themselves and pay reparations to all that we as Indigenous people have lost.
It should not be a radical statement to say that we are still here along with our people and our cultures, but it is. Many people do not believe that Native people survived colonization, but we did. While settler colonialism ravaged our people, traditions, and pathways of life, but we survived and we are still here. Even when practicing our culture was illegal, we survived and with what was left of our languages and cultures we persisted to survive and worked toward putting our communities back together on our new homelands after forced removal. While colonization perpetrates violence, genocide, forced removal, racism, sexism, capitalism, and more, we continue to survive, practice our cultures, and thrive in community. There is no such thing as the Indian problem, Native people were never the problem, we were a white inconvenience.
I come from Mvskoke Nation. I have a CDIB (certificate of degree of Indian blood, or a blood quantum card), an enhanced tribal card, a Mvskoke citizenship ID card, and a driver’s license. All of which tell me, my tribe’s government, and the federal government that I am Indigenous and by how much, by blood. We are the only racial group tracked by the federal government by blood, which is a violent form of colonialism used to limit our access to our tribe(s). The federal government uses this as a way to breed Indigenous people out of their tribes, which further intended to rid the federal government of their responsibility to uphold treaties they made with Indigenous people.
We are from what is now referred to as (parts of) the deep American South, and our tribes spread across Louisiana to Florida. Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 allowing the forced removal of Native people from the South to west of the Mississippi. 1834 was the year the Mvskoke (Creek) tribe were forced to walk the Trail of Tears, along with the Cherokee (1838), Chickasaw (1837), Choctaw (1831), and Seminole (1832) Nations. We were forced to march in the winter from our lands to what is now Oklahoma. Colonizers called us the “five civilized tribes” as we tried to adapt and survive colonization, keep our land, and our people alive.
My tribe’s lands are now restricted to the border lines within the single state of Oklahoma, along with many other tribes who were forcibly removed.
The removal of a people from their home will always be an act violence, and the Indian Removal Act was intended to be a legally mandated act of mass genocide. Colonial forms of removal and violence still exist: eviction, gentrification, lack of affordable housing, deportation, arrests, land purchasing, land entitlement, rejecting Native heritage in our schools, etc. and it is happening on our stolen land. While this is a brief history of my tribe’s history, our people are incredible, resilient, kind, funny, so smart and resourceful. We are so much more than the small pieces of colonial history, we lived for hundreds of years before colonization peacefully and we persist in thriving today. You can support Urban Indigenous Collective, as we prepare to open the first community center focused on health and wellness services for Indigenous people in Lenapehoking (New York City).
We are still here, and we are alive.
- Tati Cosper, QDEP Volunteer
