[Post 5] - Art & Activism: Tribal Sovereignty and Cultural Preservation
- Dani Romero
- Jul 30
- 11 min read
It's hard to fully conceive the depth of an issue like 'stolen land', though we hear the words used to generate buzzy conversations and articles all over the place these days. 'Stolen land' means much more than just the forced migration of a people, but the erasure of their positive impact and relationship with the land, the disappearance of their culture and societal structure. It means pushing an entire group of people into poverty, restricting their access to proper healthcare and education, threatening the environments they're forced to move into, and so much more. It is forcing people to live through a constant existential threat, and their children, and their children's children, their ancestors, as far back and forward as can be remembered.
Like I said, it's incredibly difficult to imagine ever happening, especially in the United States in 2025, supposedly the freest country there is. Looking back at our history, the very foundations of our country, the truth is that we are born out of the decimation of indigenous peoples. The reason why I'm pivoting to this issue is actually born out of a need to find the roots of the issues we're facing today, such as our immigration crisis, or the discrimination of minority groups. Without understanding and fully accepting the reasons these things are happening at all, and what they evolved from, there's little use in trying to tackle our current failings. So when digging in the soil for those roots, I found a very succinctly put summary of our country's frankly put history by Lyle Fass. It may seem lengthy, but to bring together the entire foundation of what created the country that we have today, it is impressively simple but elegant:
"You want to understand why America is like this, why Trump happened, why the rot keeps spreading, why cruelty isn't a bug, but a feature? It's not a mystery. It's the oldest story we've never told honestly. And until we face it, we will keep collapsing into darker versions of ourselves.
This country was not founded on freedom. It was founded on stolen land, cleared by slaughter, and built by stolen people, broken by force. That is the foundational transaction. Everything else is decoration. We did not reckon with the genocide of Native peoples. We mythologized it. We made Westerns about it. We named football teams after the dead. We paved over bones and called it destiny. We did not reckon with slavery. We declared it over, and then immediately wrote new laws to replace chains with prison bars. We never paid for the centuries of free labor, for the children sold, for the torture, for the theft of time and breath and lineage. We made a new America, but left the engine intact.
The Confederacy lost the war but won the memory. We let them rewrite history in marble. The monuments didn't go up in 1865, they went up in the 1950s. Not in remembrance, but as warning. We never cleansed the institutions. The racists became sheriffs. The sheriffs became senators. And the logic of white supremacy adapted, changing shape, changing code, but never losing its grip.
That's why America elects racists. Not in spite of our history, but because of it. When the mask slips and the candidate says the quiet part out loud, it doesn't alienate the country. It clarifies it. Trump didn't invent any of this. He just said it without shame. And for millions, that was the fantasy: a man who would take every buried cruelty and wear it like a crown. This is why they're banning books. Why they're rewriting curricula. Why the very mention of 'racism' or 'history' now sets off alarms. Because they know what we'd find if we looked too closely: a country terrified of its own reflection.
Reparations are not radical. They're overdue. Truth telling isn't divisive. It's the only way out. And if we don't learn from Germany, if we don't enshrine what happened, criminalize its symbols, and build laws that make it unrepeatable, then we are telling the future exactly what we're willing to tolerate again. America doesn't confront its breaking points, it buries them. Calls it pride. Wraps it in an anthem and a flag. But buried things don't disappear, they grow back meaner. We are running out of time to break the cycle."
This important quote is what inspired me to shift focus just a bit. We're going to continue looking at the issues we face TODAY, but we're going to also start looking at the root cause and how it evolved into the problem as it exists presently. Without treating the underlying problem, a diagnosis and baby steps of progress will keep us struggling for decades more. If we examine our country at the very beginning, we thus find 'stolen land'.
There is no definitive record that can show us when Native Americans first settled in the land of America, but by following the most common anthropological theories, it could have been as early as 30,000 years ago. Consider that number for a moment, how many generations of Paleo-Indians, Puebloans, and other groups existed in this country, the entirety of it their home, with the only existing borders being territories between tribes, and the vast majority of those tribes viewed the land as sacred and communal. Put yourself in the mindset of how they might have lived to see an invasion that destroyed their homes, killed their families, friends, and neighbors, and tried to make them believe that all the language, religion, song, stories and art they learned growing up never even existed.
Imagine all of those things being violently forced upon you, living outside of a cage, but still imprisoned in a society you never asked for. As children, we all experience the concept of theft; you play with other children, they take a toy from you that you were playing with. You cry out, the parents settle the matter by either returning your toy or telling you to share. But what do we learn from this? How do we apply this to something as enormous as stealing 3.8 million square miles of land from tens of millions of people?
What must happen in modern times to even begin addressing the wound is that we take responsibility for our ancestor's actions. Very few people are willing to do this, and that's true across the entire world. We must forgive one another's mistakes, but we must also put forth sincere efforts to apologize. This means not only saying we are sorry, but immediately changing our behavior and directly addressing the problems that indigenous Americans face because of our history of mistreatment. The cost of taking these actions now may seem steep, but as history has proven time and time again, the cost of waiting to correct our mistakes far outweighs any burden we take on in the present. There is sincerely no single example I have found of humans trying to put off fixing a large issue, whether material or systemic, that has ended with a positive outcome for having waited. Now is the time to examine our very first mistakes, the colonization of the land in which we live and the people who were here first.
Respect
The respect that Native communities ask of their neighbors can seem like a minimal request, but the first thing we must all recognize is that similar to a meaning behind an apology, there must be sincerity behind the respect we give to tribes. Indigenous sovereignty, or the inherent right of indigenous people to govern themselves, control their land and resource, and share their culture and political systems, is a self-determination that the majority of Americans experience by default their entire lives. Access to water, food, energy and culture are all things that tribes still fight for every day in the United States. Transferring the ownership of treaty-claimed land from one authority into several local offices helps to increase decisive efficiency and to empower tribes to cultivate the earth and preserve their culture at the same time.
Beyond the literal ownership of the land they should live on, there is also the matter of indigenous communities collecting and owning their own data, such as census, health, social services and environmental data. There have been fantastic efforts and progress in this area, as the CICD's 2024 Data Summit have celebrated, significant advances have been made in indigenous communities to research, safekeep, and share important information to young American Indians, helping to preserve their culture with future generations. Through gathering-of-nations councils, virtual workshops, and open presentations, ancestral lessons have also been provided to the public. This is a great counter-action to the typical means of learning about indigenous cultures, which traditionally takes place in museums filled with stolen artifacts. More and more museums are also working to return historical relics to tribes in an effort to correct the past mistakes of anthropologists and explorers. While perhaps some of the pieces in museums are preserved under good intentions, it's important to ensure that our public institutions of learning are based on voluntary donations as much as possible.
These are small and large ways that individuals and groups can work together to create a respectful dialogue with Native tribes and encourage future generations to keep those lines of communications open and consistently sharing important lessons.
Learning
This is perhaps one of the easiest requests which we can all take upon ourselves to do, considering the stockpile of resources that have been carefully archived by our Native communities, as well as the more recent digitizing of those resources. There are centers for education who hold monthly, sometimes weekly public events to learn specific languages, diverse histories, traditions, as well as contemporary issues that tribes face. As mentioned previously, there are gatherings, sometimes called 'Pow Wows' by certain tribes, welcoming all to experience culture in action through dance, ritual, artisans and vendors, food, and family fun. Doing a search online for these kinds of events near your area often provides both websites for tickets or free access to the gatherings, or Facebook pages for museums or tribal communities that you can follow for future opportunities. The best part about public council gatherings as an example is not only do you get to see their ceremonies, regalia, dances, and language being used, but there are also artisans who share their crafts and artwork, there are food vendors who make traditional meals. You get to experience their culture alongside hearing about the obstacles they face. Many of these events also double as fundraisers to assist their efforts for land reclamation and to establish sovereignty over their tribes. It's a win-win!
For young learners, school classrooms do generally provide a little history for Native Americans, but because of the sheer number of topics a curriculum must cover in a relatively short period of time, there are important context details that get glossed over. Further education through books, permissible trips to reservations and their museums, and online lectures can be a great head start for kids to start learning about the first people of the United States and how we can help them in the present day and in the future. The more people we get invested in this culture and earlier in their lives, the greater chance each tribe has of helping to preserve its important history.
This is especially important for smaller tribes, such as the Paugussett Indians, the Pitt River Tribe, and Cahuilla Indians. For example, as of 2022, there are 229 tribes in Alaska alone, and only one of those tribes has an actual reservation for their people. How many Alaskans are aware of even a quarter of those tribes? When you imagine the state that you live in, how many different native tribes do you believe belong to that land? I've been trying to search carefully for a reliable source that will show both state-recognized, federally recognized, and unrecognized tribes in all 50 states, and I have yet to find a consistent archive of information.
Support
The nice thing about learning the history and culture of Native communities is that combined with the act of earning respect and showing respect to their tribes, you ultimately create the means to fulfill the third request: support. Actively engaging with and amplifying the voices of these communities is the ultimate show of encouragement aside from directly donating to important causes such as the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) or the American Indian College Fund.
Just as we can do with any minority group targeted by systemic racism, understanding how historical injustices happened and what they have evolved into can provide the resources necessary for larger groups to stand up against discrimination that causes so many of the problems that plague Native communities. We can each individually challenge harmful stereotypes, such as in the everyday language that we use, avoiding tokenism, and being mindful of the impact of your actions on native land when visiting.
Being that we now exist almost constantly in an online space through social media, another crucial step we can take is to follow and support Indigenous initiatives or businesses! Sharing art, buying from independently owned Native shops, and understanding the context of artisan commissions we ask for can all help us to learn the importance of their cultures, but to also help other people learn and see the beauty as well. Gatherings will often have open markets, but again, using the internet is an instant means of access and a free, easy way to ensure more eyes land on their businesses to support their work.
Since 1492, the first transatlantic voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Americas, colonization and exploitation have ravaged the true people of our nation, communities who are repeatedly ignored, pressured into smaller or lesser living conditions, or threatened with cultural extinction. There are countless, dire efforts still ongoing to this day, to not only maintain our many Indigenous communities, but to see them thrive, see their land returned to them, and to see our entire citizenship of the United States be truly and fully integrated for the benefit of all. There is so much that we can learn from our Native communities; taking on even one small task today, to learn about the land you live on and the people it actually belongs to, is the first step towards seeing the communities who are often hidden from you.
From there, learning, respecting, and supporting is EASY and the impact is enormous. Ifwe each take the blessings we are born with, like the access to information, materials, and dialogues, we can use them in simple ways to move forward together!
HOMEWORK: One of the most popular and often appropriated cultural concepts from Indigenous culture is that of the 'spirit animal'. It's a tempting concept, especially to use in classrooms with young students, to encourage them to think of a favorite animal and simply call it their 'spirit animal', when the reality of this Native practice is born out of a deeply understood respect for the animal in question, and its connection to our world, what makes it essential to our planet.
Spirit animals can communicate specific values and spiritual beliefs of Native communities, often specific to different clans or tribes. Taking animals from those groups to use in a purely aesthetic activity is not a valuable lesson. However, let's consider the practice from a Native perspective and see if we can create a respectful, important activity to help children learn about animals, their effect ecologically, and how to care for those animals in a way that conserves them and their habitats. Let's think about these animals in a location-specific context.
Research the tribes of your area and learn about significant animals to their communities. Next, learn about the animal itself, such as dangers they currently face, habits of their lives and the benefits they provide to the land. Then create a piece of art, in whatever medium suits you, that not only showcases the animal itself, but the importance of this animal to the Earth.
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