Indigenous Americans

The first modern Native American activist I heard about was Leonard Peltier. Working for Indigenous rights as a leader in the American Indian Movement, Peltier was at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation when two FBI agents arrived there in 1975. A shootout ensued. No one knows who fired the first shot. The FBI agents and one Lakota died in the exchange. Peltier was convicted of murdering the agents and spent nearly the next half century in prison.

His conviction was and remains controversial. The prosecutor admitted the government didn’t know who shot the agents. The FBI was said to have coerced false evidence and suppressed documents that might support Peltier’s innocence. National and international organizations call him a political prisoner.

Is Peltier a civil rights hero and martyr? That’s for American Indians to say, not me. There must be others I never heard of. Nor did I learn until now that Indians became citizens only in 1924, and whether they could vote was up to each state. It’s as though Indians’ place in our national story ended in the 1800s on the Great Plains.

That’s one of my problems with linking Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Native American Heritage Day with Columbus Day and Thanksgiving respectively. Far from displacing the older autumn holidays, this reinforces the image of Indians as people of long ago, with a history as victims but no modern agency. It’s as if instead of Martin Luther King Day, we had a holiday about slavery and ignored the Civil Right Movement.

My other problem is that the supposed Indian ties to those holidays aren’t real. Columbus Day was created by Italian and other Catholic immigrants in the early 1900s, not to celebrate European conquest, but to show pride at a time of extreme discrimination against them. Thanksgiving was a traditional day of gratitude long before it acquired the Pilgrims-and-Indians myth in the 1800s. Can’t we admit Columbus Day has outlived its purpose, restore Thanksgiving as a day to count our blessings, and honor Native Americans on a new holiday free of that baggage?

Of course, whether this should happen is for American Indians to say, not me.

Image: Badlands in the northern part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. National Park Service photo by D. Luchsinger.