The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed in 1990.

Land, water and mineral rights are often protected through treaties; but remember treaties, the supreme law of the land, can be broken and all of them have been, by the federal government. The only recourse tribes have is to take the federal government to court, through the federal justice system, up to the Supreme Court. It is a long, costly and arduous process and the Supreme Court has the ability to deny hearing a case.

In addition, individuals could not afford all the necessary resources like tools, animals, seeds and supplies necessary to begin, let alone maintain a farm. Tribes were left unpaid or underpaid for the land allotments which often were too small to farm.

Ethnic cleansing has been defined as the attempt to get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of an ethnic group. Ethnic cleansing is also the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups from a given area, often with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Removal policies were acts of ethnic cleansing, and meant to take land from Native American tribes and place it in the hands of white invaders.

Colonization is the process of using power and assuming control through war, force, genocide, slavery, and intimidation of someone else’s territory, resources, culture and identity; and forcing one’s own culture, systems of law, government, and religion upon the remaining Indigenous group survivors

Sovereignty is a political concept that refers to dominant power or supreme authority

In just 3 short paragraphs Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy describes what it is like to be a California Indian woman today. She bids us to think about land theft, loss and destruction. She makes us think about the significance of intergenerational trauma and how violence doesn’t just hurt the victim. Cutcha calls us to think about missing and murdered indigenous women and places that California Native people deem sacred. Her life is place based. She speaks and writes from an internal place that is spiritually, emotionally, and intrinsically connected to where her ancestors and she were raised, and where their creation happened. Colonization may have pushed many of us from our homelands, but we return. See more on Dr. Risling Baldy's work on the Hupa Coming-of-Age Dance as decolonizing praxis under Chapter 8, section 8.6: Transformational Liberation through Love.

Reasons why we plant, what we plant, how we plant and how we harvest sustainably is passed on through storytelling. Stories tell us about what to gather and hunt as well as when to do so.

Each nation has their own creation story telling of the way things came to be: plants, animals, water, rivers, lakes, rain, the earth, mountains, valleys, wind, fire, stars and people. Not only do these stories tell us about ourselves and our creation, but they reveal how everything is related, connected, and intertwined. Important information is passed down generation after generation in stories.

We have always been here. We learned to respect and appreciate the land, water, plants and animals as living beings, and know them as our equals, as family; because without them there is no us. We were created here, and we shall remain.

American Indian Studies (AIS) or Native American Studies (NAS) is an academic discipline that formally began in the late 1960’s when Native American student activists coordinated with Asian American, Chicana/o/x, Puerto Rican and Black students to demand change within higher education.

This has also led to the field becoming a target for politicization by outside commentators and stakeholders who consciously organize misinformation campaigns using the media and local activist networks

Police officers used militarized tactics on strikers, including directly assaulting students.

These norms enforced colonial gender binaries, conditioning girls to do housework with boys focused on outside labor. Speaking Native languages and practicing religious or familial customs were violently punished in these Boarding Schools (Lomawaima 2018).

Ethnic Studies is the critical and interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity, focusing on the experiences and perspectives of diverse Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.