American Indian Heritage Month Facts & Figures
The first American Indian Day was celebrated in May 1916 in New York. Red Fox James, a Blackfeet Indian, rode on horseback from state to state, getting endorsements from 24 state governments, to have a day to honor American Indians. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush declared November National American Indian Heritage Month. Today, American Indians comprise 1.3 percent of the U.S. population. Their buying power, which this year is 156 percent greater than in 2000, is expected to grow to $148 billion by 2017.
Click the images below, or the following links, to expand the view or download a PDF: American Indian Heritage Month Timeline and American Indian Heritage Month Facts & Figures.
American Indian Heritage Month
1600s – 1700s
1614 Pocahontas marries English Jamestown colonist John Rolfe in Virginia, bringing temporary peace between English settlers and Algonquians
1758 First North American Indian reservation is established in New Jersey
1800s
1824 Bureau of Indian Affairs is established
1830 Indian Removal Act gives president the power to negotiate removal treaties for American Indians to move west of the Mississippi. About 4,000 Cherokee die as a result.
1834 Congress bans alcohol sales on American Indian lands
1851 Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 gathers American Indian tribes and places them on reservations
1871 Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 dissolves the status of Indian tribes as sovereign nations
1887 Congress passes Dawes Act, dividing reservation lands into privately owned parcels
1890 Roughly 300 Sioux are killed at Wounded Knee in last battle with federal forces
1900s
1912 Jim Thorpe, an athlete of the Sac and Fox tribe, wins two Olympic gold medals
1924 Indian Citizenship Act classifies American Indians as “citizens”
1929 Charles Curtis becomes the 31st vice president of the United States, the first person with significant acknowledged American Indian heritage to reach this level of the executive branch
1930 Apache Scout William Major becomes an officer of the 25th United States Infantry
1934 Congress passes Indian Reorganization Act to protect American Indians from loss of lands and provide funds for economic development. Also helps re-establish tribal governments
1963 Lyndon B. Johnson bestows the Presidential Medal of Freedom on its first American Indian recipient, Annie Dodge Wauneka of the Navajo Nation.
1968 Indian Civil Rights Act grants American Indians most protections under the Bill of Rights and 14th Amendment
1972 The American Indian Movement seizes the Bureau of Indian Affairs national headquarters and presents a 20-point list of demands
1973 American Indians occupy Wounded Knee in South Dakota
1978 American Indian Freedom of Religion Act allows “American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut and Native Hawaiian [people] … inherent right” to free exercise of their traditional religions
1980 Supreme Court orders U.S. government to pay $122 million to Sioux Indians for land illegally taken in South Dakota in 1877
1982 Supreme Court supports tax levied by the Jicarilla Apaches in New Mexico, allowing tribes to tax production of oil, natural gas and other minerals on reservations
1988 Congress passes Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, protecting American Indians’ gaming rights
1989 National Museum of the American Indian opens in Washington, D.C.
1990 First National American Indian Heritage month is celebrated (November)
1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act provides process for museums to return American Indian remains and artifacts to tribes upon request and protect their grave sites
1990 Native American Languages Act protects “the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice and develop Native American languages”
1992 Foxwoods Casino opens on Pequot Reservation in Connecticut
1997 U.S. military allows American Indian soldiers to use peyote in their religious services
2000s
2000 The U.S. Mint issues a dollar coin with the image of Sacagawea, the Shosone woman famed for guiding the Lewis & Clark expedition through the western United States
2002 U.S. Navy Commander John Bennett Herrington, a Chickasaw citizen, visits the International Space Station, becoming the first American Indian astronaut in space
2005 National Collegiate Athletic Association bans use of “hostile and abusive” American Indian mascots in postseason tournaments
2009 Federal government settles dispute with American Indians, claiming they were swindled out of billions of dollars in oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the U.S. Department of the Interior since 1887
2009 Congress passes and President Obama signs Native American Apology Resolution
2011 Judge clears New York state to tax cigarettes sold on American Indian reservations
2012 Senate approves the HEARTH Act that allows tribal governments to lease
tribal lands
Kevin Washburn of the Chickasaw nation is nominated by President Obama as the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs
1:57 pm
Why does the timeline start after the arrival of Europeans? Didn’t Native Americans have a history prior to that?
10:39 am
DiversrityInc. Your font is too tiny so one cannot really get the facts of your articles and certainly cannot be reprinted for any good use. Help your readers out increase the font size PLEASE.
1:04 pm
How ignorant. You must be white. Of course they had a history prior to arrival of Europeans. In fact it was long and rich. Native Americans didn’t have to ride state to get Governors support for day to celebrate and call their own because they didn’t have to before whites came and took everything for themselves, annihilated the natives and took away all their rights to their way of living. Laws and days of recognition didn’t exist before the Europeans because it wasn’t necessary. Look at the nature of these dates in history. It’s related to rights and privileges which whites took away and hence needed to be restored or rectified. Only white privilege allows you to ask this type of stupid question.
7:22 pm
I appreciate the list of Natives you have but I would like it if you’d talk about/research the many LIVING Native people. Too often are we relegated to the long ago times. I’m including a list of more contemporary Natives for people to learn about:
Sherman Alexie
Paula Gunn-Allen
Dennis Banks
Adam Beach
Ben NIghthorse Campbell
Vine Deloria Jr.
Sam Deloria
Grahame Greene
Betty May Jumper
N. Scott Momaday
Billy Mills
Louis Riel
Robby Robertson
Will Rogers
Buffy St. Marie
Leslie Marmon Silko
Wes Studi
Jay Silverheels
Maria Tallchief
Jim Thorpe
John Trudell
James Welch
Chris Eyre
Gary Farmer
Robert Mirabal
R. Carols Nakai
Cmdr John Herrington
Louise Ercrich
Gary Schildt
Quannah Parker
Elouise Cobell
This is not an exhaustive list. Learn more about living Natives and how they contribute to our lives today. The past is improtant but so too is the here and now.
11:43 am
Two historic and precident dates for AI/AN were Executuve Orders signed by President CLinton. In 1996 he siged an Executive Order mandating that all Federal Deparrtments develop plans on how they can assist the 34 Tribal Colleges. The Second EO was a reinforcment about the Governments requirement to Consult with Indian Tribes on Matters That May Affect Them. These two EO’s are landmarks because they forced the FED to live up to the promises made and broken in all the Treaties (See also US Constitution) Article One, Section 8 on tribal soveirgnity that establised the “Government-To-Government relationship between Indian Tribes and the Federal Government. These two documents were continued by Pres. George Bush, and Barack Obama. People rarely are aware that as part of these, every Federal Dept must now summits an annual plan on how they will allocate targeted resources to Indian Tribes. They also have a points-of-contact at every deparment and agencies within departments.
12:28 pm
Will each reservation be allowed to submit a budget request to meet the needs of the veterans who are enrolled on each reservation.
11:55 am
How about the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 which gave tribal government a much greater voice into the removal of children from their homes. Adoptions prior to that into white families was a form of cultural genocide, and occured large-scale in the Mid-West. Also, I agree that this is very biased towards the Europeans history, as there is no mention of the Haudenashaunee contibutions to democracy, their culture (I am not one of them, but live amongst them).
10:08 am
How can you say 300 Lakota Sioux killed in last BATTLE between Federal Forces and American Indians?? Everyone KNOWS that it was not a battle, Those were woman, children and old people, including the old chief and they did not fight, they ran. It is all well and good to have Diversity and information about American Indians and a timeline, but nothing could be so offensive to the Sioux as to call that a battle.
10:21 am
Perhaps you should have included North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota. There are about 22 Indian reservations combined in those states.
1:12 pm
He (singular) is a Blackfoot Indian not “Blackfeet Indian”
2:58 am
What about Minnesota, North and South Dakotas? These states have American Indians living and working. I feel offended that these states were not included in this grouping. Sioux and Chippewa
1:28 pm
Are you only counting the people who happen to be full bloods? How about those who happen to have a strong family history in one tribe or another? If you happen to have African American Blood in your family no matter if you are only a quarter or an eighth you are counted as being black. Why is it not done for our Native Americans? Thank you.
4:03 pm
Red Fox James was a Blackfeet, there is no blackfoot tribe.
12:52 pm
It’s nice to be offered these statistic’s during our month, but it seems a Native writer might have had a less ditant view of us. The third commented touch on a topic close to us, we are stereotyped as some sort of aritfact from three hundred years ago. Tha’s not what the Native people want to see or have frontpaged as what represents us. All of our acoplishments as Dr.’s ., Lawyers, Artit’s and Writers and traditional leaders in the modern world need to be what European people think of when they think of us. Again, just E mail the writer of the third comment here… they had a great handle on the topic….
9:49 am
I am very surprised that there is no mention here of the US-Dakota Conflict of 1862 in which the United States carried out the largest government sponsored mass execution US history. This conflict was in response to the Dakota being forced off their land to a tiny section along the river where they were starving (any Indian who left the area was shot on sight and the United States paid a bounty to their killer). This mass hanging was carried out the day after Christmas in 1862 and the women/children were marched to Fort Snelling internment camp where many starved and froze as they had to live outdoors for the winter. For the next several generations, children as young as 4 and 5 years old were forced into Catholic boarding schools where their native tongue was beaten out of them, many were sexually abused, and grew up to join the miliary and develop even more extensive PTSD. The ban on Native American spiritual practices was not overturned until 1978 and the Dakota exile from Minnesota is still on the books to this day! This year is the 150th Anniversary of the hangings.
The above are just a few more facts and figures that must have been inadvertently overlooked – thanks!!
3:01 pm
“States with more than 100,000 American Indian and Alaska Native residents as of 2010.” Why is 100,000 the magic number of where Native American live? You exclude many states with a smaller overall population that still have Native Americans present. It would have been nice to have different colors represent the varying numbers of either:
1) The total population of Native Americans in each state
OR
2) The percentage of the state’s total population that Native Americans hold.
2:47 pm
I agree that the timeline should go back over 10,000 years and include the great mound-builder civilizations and others. Native peoples were practicing democracy and freedom of choice long before Europeans “discovered” it. In fact, the formation of the U.S. was influenced by the Iroquois Confederation. Cherokees developed their own written language. The Navajo Code Talkers helped win WWII. The list goes on…