Pictured: Joy Harjo, Muscogee (Creek), former Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022.
November is Native American Heritage Month. It was declared on August 3, 1990 by former President George H. W. Bush under the name “National American Indian Heritage Month,” but is commonly known by its other name.
“This landmark bill honouring America’s tribal people represented a major step in the establishment of this celebration which began in 1976 when a Cherokee/Osage Indian named Jerry C. Elliott-High Eagle authored Native American Awareness Week legislation, the first historical week of recognition in the nation for native peoples.”
Learn about Native American Heritage
Websites
Here are some great places on the web to start learning about Native American heritage and native tribes today.
Native American Heritage Month
The official website with educational resources from The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
National Congress for American Indians (NCAI)
Information on native policies, initiatives, news, and tribes.
Library Resources
General Information
Native Americans: An Overview (via Credo Reference)
This topic page explains the history of American colonization and notes that the “original peoples of North America collectively have been called Native Americans, American Indians, or Amerindians. These terms are European American inventions that obscure the diversity of peoples indigenous to the Americas. Members of many tribes, or First Nations, often embrace these terms but prefer their tribal names, such as Nee-Me-Poo (Nez Perce), Anishinabeg (Chippewa), or Tohono O’odham (Papago).”
Films on Demand Documentaries
Some documentaries selected from the library’s Films on Demand database. All Films on Demand films are closed captioned and can be embedded in Canvas.
The Native American Renaissance (film, 2024, 52 min.)
“There are currently almost 10 million Native Americans in the United States. Once confined to reservations and condemned to poverty, they are now proudly reclaiming their culture. Providing a view into their America, this documentary showcases the vibrant, shimmering powwows that bring together thousands of natives in New Mexico, the new oil Eldorado of the Dakotas.”
Native America (season 1, 2018, and season 2, 2023, 4-episode seasons, approx. 50 min. each)
“Native America challenges everything we thought we knew about the Americas before and since contact with Europe. … The series reveals some of the most advanced cultures in human history and the Native American people who created it and whose legacy continues, unbroken, to this day.”
Trail of Tears (film, 2015, 23 min.)
“This emotional documentary dramatically re-tells the story of the Trail of Tears, the brutal relocation of Native Americans from their homelands in the East to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Men, women, and children were forced to march more than 1,000 grueling miles to territories west of the Mississippi.”
Books and DVDs
Some recommendations from the library’s physical collection.
Native peoples of North America (DVD series, 2016)
“Join the Smithsonian Institution to discover the rich history of native Americans.”
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee: an Indian history of the American West (print book, 2001) by Dee Brown
“Dee Brown’s classic, panoramic account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian over the second half of the nineteenth century. Using council records, autobiograhpies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allowed great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties–of the losses that they suffered as the American West was ‘won.’”
Conversations with remarkable Native Americans (print book or eBook, 2012) by Joëlle Rostkowski
A “collection of interviews with some of today’s most important Native Americans. In these interviews, contextualized in a national and international sociopolitical perspective, the editor, a noted ethnohistorian brings to light major developments in the Native American experience over the last thirty years. Overcoming hardships they have experienced as a forgotten minority, often torn between two cultures, these native writers, artists, journalists, activists, lawyers, and museum administrators have each made contributions toward the transformation of old stereotypes, the fight against discrimination, and the sharing of their heritage with mainstream society.”
Native tongues: colonialism and race from encounter to the reservation (print book or eBook, 2015) by Sean P. Harvey
“Explores the morally entangled territory of language and race as it relates the intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites’ beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its ‘manifest destiny’ of westward expansion.”