By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Photo credit: C Watts

A silver lining in the cloud of racial injustice and pandemics. The NFL announced that the Washington Redsk*ns will change their offensive name and logo. This is years after owner Dan Snyder crossed his arms and said it would never happen. We never thought this day would come as soon as it did. It was about time. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker reveal in this adapted selection from “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, the history of Indigenous anti-mascot initiatives goes further back than you think.

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Sociologist James O. Young writes that cultural appropriation happens when people from outside a particular culture take elements of another culture in a way that is objectionable to that group. According to Young’s definition, it is the objection that constitutes appropriation, as distinguished from cultural borrowing or exchange where there is no “moral baggage” attached. Native American cultural appropriation can be thought of as a broad range of behaviors, carried out by non-Natives, that mimic Indian cultures. Typically, they are based on deeply held stereotypes, with no basis at all in knowledge of real Native cultures. This acting out of stereotypes is commonly referred to as “playing Indian,” and, as Philip Deloria’s research so eloquently revealed, it has a long history, going at least as far back as the Boston Tea Party. Some forms of appropriation have been outlawed, as is the case with the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (IACA). Responding to the proliferation of faux Indian art (which undermines economic opportunities for actual Native American artists), the IACA is a truth-in-advertising law that regulates what can legitimately be sold as Indian art. No such possibility exists, however, for the vast majority of appropriations American Indians endure daily.

Non-Native people play Indian whenever they don any garb that attempts to replicate Native culture (however serious or trivial their intent) or otherwise mimic what they imagine to be Indian behavior, such as the tomahawk chop, a fake Indian dance, or bogus war whoop. Native American appropriation is so ubiquitous in US society that it is completely normalized, not only rendering it invisible when it occurs, but also adding insult to injury. Native people are also shamed for being “hypersensitive” when they protest. Halloween costumes, popular fashion, and children’s clubs and activities (such as the YMCA’s Indian Guides and Princesses programs and other summer camps) are some of the more obvious ways cultural appropriation occurs through Indian play in mainstream society, but perhaps its most visible form is in school and sports team mascots. Campaigns to put an end to the turning of American Indians into mascots began in the early 1960s when the National Indian Youth Council began organizing on college campuses to remove Indian sports stereotypes. Then, in 1968, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the largest pan-Native representational and advocacy organization in the United States, established its own anti-mascot initiative. Once obscure, the movement to eradicate Indian mascots has snowballed into mainstream awareness.

In 2013, the NCAI issued a report outlining their position on Indian mascots. It mentions numerous resolutions that have been passed by the organization over the years, including one in 1993 imploring the Washington professional football team referred to as the “Redsk*ns” to drop its name, and another in 2005 supporting the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ban on native mascots, nicknames, and imagery.

The report summarizes the negative impacts that Indian mascots have been shown to have on Native youths, citing, for example, a study by cultural and social psychology scholar Stephanie Fryberg. Her 2004 study revealed that when exposed to stereotypical “Indian” images, the self-esteem of Native youths is harmed, eroding their self-confidence and damaging their sense of identity. This is crucial given that the suicide rate among young American Indians is epidemic at 18 percent, more than twice the rate of non-Hispanic white youth, and contextualized by the fact that Native Americans experience the highest rates of violent crimes at the hands of people from another race. Since the early 1970s, thousands of public and postsecondary schools have dropped their Indian mascots, and hundreds more professional and governmental institutions have adopted resolutions and policies opposing the use of Native imagery and names, including the American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the US Commission on Civil Rights. In 2015 California became the first state to ban “Redsk*ns” as a mascot name in public schools.

As the NCAI report indicates, the “Redsk*ns” name is particularly offensive to Native peoples. According to the report,

The term originates from a time when Native people were actively hunted and killed for bounties, and their skins were used as proof of Indian kill. Bounties were issued by European companies, colonies, and some states, most notably California. By the turn of the 20th century it had evolved to become a term meant to disparage and denote inferiority and savagery in American culture. By 1932, the word had been a term of commodification and the commentary on the color of a body part. It was not then and is not now an honorific. . . . The term has since evolved to take on further derogatory meanings. Specifically, in the 20th century [it] became a widely used derogatory term to negatively characterize Native characters in the media and popular culture, such as films and on television.

Over the last twenty-five years, at least twenty-eight high schools have abandoned the name, but the Washington football team’s owner, Dan Snyder, has stalwartly insisted that he will never change the name, despite mounting legal challenges to its trademark and public outspokenness by President Barack Obama and other political leaders about its offensiveness. A growing number of media outlets and prominent sports reporters have vowed to stop using the name, and even NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has acknowledged its insensitivity.

Although arguments to justify the usage of Native images in the world of professional sports are weak at best, there are some instances where the use of Native mascots has been deemed acceptable at the college level, according to the NCAI report. The NCAA ban, for instance, includes a “namesake exception” that allows universities to keep their Native American nicknames and logos when they are based on a specific tribe and they have been granted the permission by that tribe. Such permission was granted for Florida State University (“Seminoles”), Central Michigan University (“Chippewas”), and the University of Utah (“Utes”). The University of North Dakota, on the other hand, due to opposition of the name “Fighting Sioux” from local tribes, was not granted an exemption. At the high school level, at least one high school in New York State has successfully fought to retain its Native mascot despite a request from the state’s education commissioner to boards of education and school superintendents to end their use of American Indian mascots and team names. Salamanca Central High School (SCHS) is located within the boundaries of the Seneca Nation, 26 percent of its student body is American Indian, and the team name “Warriors” is represented by an accurate depiction of a Seneca sachem rather than the cartoonish Plains-style Indian so typical of Native mascots. A name change was opposed by the Seneca Nation of Indians Tribal Council, the SCHS administration and student body, the Salamanca school board, and the Salamanca city council in a show of cross-cultural solidarity.

Be that as it may, there is a subtle claim to ownership in the realm of mascot names and images that scholars of cultural appropriation have keenly unmasked. With university and college examples like the Florida State Seminoles, the University of Illinois Fighting Illini, and many others, non-Native mascot defenders claim such representations honor particular tribal nations and peoples. But what they really do is assert an imagined indigeneity whereby white dominant society assumes control of the meaning of Nativeness. Professor of professional sport management at Drexel University Ellen Staurowsky characterizes these kinds of fraudulent claims to Indianness as a system of sustainable racism within a “sociopolitical power structure that renders Indianness tolerable to Whites as long as it is represented on terms acceptable to them.” She also points out the inconsistency of tolerating objectionable university Indian mascots with the central mission of higher education.

The myth that Indian mascots honor Native Americans, then, appears to be little more than a carefully constructed rationale to justify the maintenance of a system of domination and control—whether intentionally or unintentionally—where white supremacy is safeguarded, what Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. famously called the “White Man’s Indian.” And particularly at the level of professional sports, the branding of Native American team names and images also serves more as a rationale to maintain financial empires (explaining the stubborn adherence to racist portrayals of Native peoples in organizations like the Washington Redsk*ns), than dubious claims to be honoring them. But the justifications for American Indian cultural appropriation don’t end with sports team mascot battles and fashion debacles. Appropriating Native cultures by playing Indian permeates US society so broadly it strikes at the very heart of Native American cultures, their spiritually based systems of belonging and identity, which we turn to next.

About the Authors 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro. 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and a consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. Her research interests focus on Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, environmental justice, and education. She also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of indigeneity and the sport of surfing. She is co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of Beacon Press’s “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, and author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. Follow her on Twitter at @DinaGWhit and visit her website.

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Jennie A. Brownscombe’s “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914). Ugh! See how the artist centered the colonists to push the settler-centric mythos of Thanksgiving? This has settler-colonial Hallmark nonsense written all over it.

Editor’s Note: I don’t know about you, but what you’re about to read is not what I was taught about Thanksgiving—and I wish it was. In school, I got the Hallmark card mythos. The following excerpt from “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker busts the myth of this holiday. Spoiler alert: the history is much more complicated.

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Second only to the Columbus discovery story, the Thanksgiving tale is the United States’ quintessential origin narrative. Like the Columbus myth, the story of Thanksgiving has morphed into an easily digestible narrative that, despite its actual underlying truths, is designed to reinforce a sense of collective patriotic pride. The truths are, however, quite well documented. Their concealment within a simplistic story inevitably depicts a convoluted reality about the Indigenous peoples who played crucial roles in both events, and it presents an exaggerated valorization about the settlers’ roles. The result is a collective amnesia that fuels the perpetuation of Native American stereotypes, playing out over and over again in the classrooms and textbooks of American schoolchildren, generation after generation. This only masks the complexities of the relationships between settlers and Indians, and thus the founding of the United States.

The Thanksgiving story as we know it is a story of unconditional welcome by the Indigenous peoples, a feel-good narrative that rationalizes and justifies the uninvited settlement of a foreign people by painting a picture of an organic friendship. A more accurate telling of the story, however, describes the forming of political alliances built on a mutual need for survival and an Indigenous struggle for power in the vacuum left by a destructive century of foreign settlement.

The Backstory

The offenses of the Thanksgiving story stem from lack of historical context. For example, it often gives the impression that the Mayflower pilgrims were the first Europeans to settle on the land today known as the United States. But by the time the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December 1620, Europeans had been traveling to the North American continent, and founding colonies there, for well over a century. Armed with information about the region—made available by the knowledge and mapping of predecessors like Samuel de Champlain—the Eastern Seaboard was dotted with numerous European enclaves and towns. Jamestown, for example, was founded in 1607, while Florida had been populated by the Spanish since the founding of St. Augustine, in 1565. Some colonies, such as the one in Roanoke, Virginia, had failed. The Mayflower immigrants, who came to be known as the Pilgrims, were thus, in December 1620, only the latest newcomers to the land, all of which was known at the time to the English as Virginia. Exposure to European diseases had resulted in pandemics among the Natives up and down the coast from Florida to New England throughout the sixteenth century, exacerbated by the Indian slave trade started by Columbus. Between 1616 and 1619 the region that would soon become Plymouth Colony underwent an unknown epidemic that decimated the Indigenous population by at least one third to as much as 90 percent—a fact the Pilgrims knew and exploited.

The settlement the Pilgrims called New Plymouth was the ancestral land of the Wampanoag (Pokanoket) people, who called the place Patuxet. Contrary to the popular myth that the Pilgrims arrived to an unoccupied “wilderness,” it had for untold generations been a well-managed landscape, cleared and maintained for cornfields and crops like beans and squash, as well as for game. Also contrary to popular mythology, the Wampanoags, like most eastern Indians, were farmers, not nomads. Up until the epidemic, the Wampanoag nation had been large and powerful, organized into sixty-nine villages in what is today southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. Their exact population is unknown, but estimates range from twenty-four thousand to upwards of one hundred thousand. The epidemic decimated their population, however, and destabilized relations with their traditional enemies, the neighboring Narragansett, Mohegan, and Pequot peoples, among others. In 1620 the Wampanoags were in a state of military tension, if not full-scale war with the Narragansetts.

When the Pilgrims arrived at New Plymouth in the depth of winter, food was the first concern. From colonists’ journal entries we know that right after their arrival Native homes and graves were robbed of food and other items. Written accounts describe taking “things” for which they “intended” to pay later. Ever pious and believing in divine predestination, the religious separatists attributed their good fortune to God, “for how else could we have done it without meeting some Indians who might trouble us.” Thus, the Pilgrims’ survival that first winter can be attributed to Indians both alive and dead.

Before the epidemic, Patuxet had been a village with around two thousand people. Months after their arrival, the colonists had their first serious encounter with an Indian. In March 1621 they came face to face with Samoset, a Wampanoag sachem (leader) of a confederation of about twenty villages. In rudimentary English learned from English fisherman and trappers, Samoset explained about the plague that had just swept through the area. He also told them about Massasoit, who was considered the head Wampanoag sachem, also known as a sagamore. Within a few days, Massasoit appeared at the Plymouth colony accompanied by Tisquantum (Squanto), eager to form an alliance with the colonists in light of the shifting balance of power in the Indigenous world due to the plague. A formal treaty was immediately negotiated, outlining relationships of peace and mutual protection. Massasoit sent Squanto as a liaison between the Native confederation and the colonists, and Squanto taught them Native planting techniques that ensured the bountiful harvest they would enjoy in the fall. Squanto had been kidnapped as a child, sold into slavery, and sent to England, where he learned how to speak English. Having escaped under extraordinary circumstances, he found passage back to Patuxet in 1619 only to find himself the sole male survivor of his village.

The First Thanksgiving

The facts about the first Thanksgiving come from two primary written sources, Edward Winslow’s Mourt’s Relation and William Bradford’s Of Plimouth Plantation. Neither of the accounts are detailed enough to surmise the familiar tale of Pilgrims hosting a feast to thank the Indians for their help, certainly not enough to imagine Englishmen teaching the Indians about thanksgiving as we are sometimes led to believe. The English had an ancient custom of harvest festivals that had been secular, not religious affairs. Spiritual ceremonials of gratitude had always been central cultural attributes among Indigenous peoples who believed in relationships of reciprocity, so the concept of thanksgiving was not new to either group.

Only Winslow’s account, written several weeks after the event, mentions the Indians’ participation. He wrote:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Not all historians agree as to what actually happened that day. It is clear that the colonists decided to have a harvest celebration (note that nowhere is the word “thanksgiving” used). As can be deduced from the account, one widely espoused interpretation holds that the Indians were not initially invited to share in the celebration. They came when they heard in the distance the discharge of guns, fired in the exuberance of the festivities. Wondering if there was trouble, the Wampanoags entered the English village with around ninety men. It was only after arriving well-intentioned but uninvited that an invitation to stay was extended. Since there wasn’t enough food to go around, the Indians went out and caught some deer, which they ceremonially presented to the English.

Throughout Mourt’s Relation (written over a period of one year from November 1620 to November of 1621) references are made to the affection and camaraderie between the Plymouth colonists and Massasoit and Squanto, but the tenuous peace was to be short-lived. Acting independently, Squanto had developed rogue tendencies in an apparent power struggle with Massasoit. He increasingly undermined the authority of Massasoit and other sachems, eventually driving a fatal wedge between himself and Massasoit and straining the relations between Massasoit and the colony. By the spring of 1622, Massasoit had ended trade between the confederation and the English, and the colony held on desperately to their relationship with Squanto. In October Squanto died under mysterious conditions. Nataniel Philbrick wrote that although it is difficult to document, he may have been poisoned in an assassination plot masterminded by Massasoit.

Within a few months Massasoit had reestablished diplomatic relations with the colony. He appointed Hobamok as his intermediary, and an uneasy alliance was maintained with the colony until Massasoit’s death around 1661. He would be succeeded by his son Wamsutta, and by 1662 his second son, Metacom, known to the English as King Philip, was in charge. Because of the unrelenting pressure of the English demands for land, relations would deteriorate so severely between the English and the Wampanoags that by 1675, war broke out. Called King Philip’s War, it has come to be seen as the bloodiest, most violent conflict ever fought on American soil. Thus, in light of the larger history, the simplistic idea that Thanksgiving proves that the Indians welcomed the Pilgrims can be more accurately seen as a temporary chapter characterized by maximized political self-interest on all sides.

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The sooner we disabuse the next generations of the settler-centric mythos of Thanksgiving, the better. For that, we have the young-adult adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, adapted by Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza. For middle-school teachers, we have a complementary lesson plan about Thanksgiving.

About the Authors 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro. 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and a consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. Her research interests focus on Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, environmental justice, and education. She also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of indigeneity and the sport of surfing. She is co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of Beacon Press’s “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, and author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. Follow her on Twitter at @DinaGWhit and visit her website.

By Dina Gilio-Whitaker

The DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) being installed between farms, as seen from 50th Avenue in New Salem, North Dakota. Photo credit: Tony Webster

Here we are at that time of the year again when Americans pay special attention to American Indians because, well, the foundational national myths of the US occur in autumn. Namely, we are talking about the holiday formerly known in many places as Columbus Day, and its close successor, Thanksgiving. If you are a Beacon Press fan, you will know that Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and I wrote a book about some of these myths, and tackle these two most pernicious myths fervently, “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans.

The book came out about this time last year, and it was quite well received.  We were fortunate enough to go on a national book tour, visiting bookstores, schools, universities, and giving media interviews from the Southwest to the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and the East Coast. We were on the road as the standoff at Standing Rock intensified, and from a hotel room in Minneapolis we watched our Facebook feeds in horror the night militarized police forces brutally attacked demonstrators with water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures. Day after day, we spoke to standing-room-only crowds who were desperate to make sense of the violence being used against unarmed, nonviolent water protectors.  

Since the days of the #NoDapl encampment, now nine months in the past, dozens of films have been released documenting the event. One of the latest is an offering from award-winning documentarian Brian Malone, titled Beyond Standing Rock. Malone has been touring the film, and I recently had the chance to view it in Los Angeles at the Autry Museum of the American West. What follows is my review of the film.

The film’s title is a reference to the fact that its subject matter covers more than just the Standing Rock #NoDapl movement. It also showcases the Bear’s Ears National Monument controversy, and digs into energy development of the Southern Ute in Colorado. Sensing that this is a lot of ground to cover in just one film, your first question might be, “What is the common thread that ties these diverse topics together in one film?” And that is the correct question, but one that isn’t necessarily obvious from viewing the film, without outside commentary.

The commentary was provided at the screening I attended, when Malone was on hand for a post-viewing conversation with a museum staff member.  He explained that the larger point of the film was to show how tribal sovereignty is at the heart of each of the film’s subjects. For Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline is a violation of the Standing Rock Sioux’s sovereignty, especially in light of the history of blatant treaty abrogation that shapes today’s reservation boundaries.

Bear’s Ears raises big questions about the lack of sovereignty tribes like the Navajo, Ute, and pueblo peoples have over sites they occupied for millennia and still consider sacred, having been dispossessed from those lands through processes of colonial domination.

The Southern Ute, on the other hand, with the fantastic wealth generated from decades of fossil fuel development on their lands, are a model for how the exercise of sovereignty can raise a people made destitute by colonialism into a comfortable modern life.

The film attempts to accomplish its goal of highlighting tribal sovereignty (or the lack thereof) by digging deep into legal theory, with interviews by well-known experts in federal Indian law like Troy Eid and former head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn. He also does his due diligence as a journalist with in-depth coverage of opposing viewpoints in each case. It wasn’t easy to watch some of the interviews with opponents like Rep. Ron Bishop (R-Utah), who is a famous foe of Indian country, or the few conservative Navajos like San Juan County Commissioner Rebecca Benally who oppose the Bear’s Ears monument designation. But it was responsible journalism on Malone’s part, and it is perhaps the film’s greatest strength.

There are a number of reasons, however, why the film falls short, and they are too many to list here, so I will limit my critique to my biggest issues with it. Malone, a non-Native guy with no apparent expertise in Native history or scholarship outside his filmmaking experience, seems to grasp the complexity and contradictions of federal Indian law. His focus on the finer points of federal Indian law rightly shows how the legal structure fundamentally works to limit tribal sovereignty, but it does so without framing why the legal system is structured this way, as a process of colonialism. His analysis could’ve—should’ve—been so much more deeply informed with perspectives from other kinds of experts, like historians and other Native studies scholars. Instead, it seems to fetishize colonial law without ever questioning it.

This is admittedly a big conversation. I realize that editorial choices need to be made in filmmaking, but I was left with the feeling that the film bit off more than it could chew. It also left me with the feeling that because of his apparent lack of expertise in Native issues, he was the wrong person to make this film. At the very least, he needed far more advisory expertise.

In the end, especially with his post-film discussion, Malone comes off as just another white guy presenting himself as an expert on Native issues. As Native people, we’ve had more than enough whitesplaining of our realities. We need our own people telling our stories, and we have the talent to do so. Films like these can do as much harm as good when not adequately framed, and I fear this is the case with Beyond Standing Rock. 

About the Author 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is an award-winning journalist and columnist at Indian Country Today Media Network. A writer and researcher in Indigenous studies, she is currently a research associate and associate scholar at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. She lives in San Clemente, CA. She is the co-author (with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) of “All the Real Indians Died Off” And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. Follow her on Twitter at @DinaGWhit and visit her website.

By Gail Forsyth-Vail

On November 3, 2016, more than 500 clergy from many faith traditions gathered at Standing Rock in support of the Sioux Nation’s protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. As part of the day of witness, Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) President Rev. Peter Morales was one of seven denominational leaders who read statements repudiating the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery, a papal bull which offered the rationale for the colonization of the Americas and other countries by European Christian powers. By virtue of the Doctrine, Christians were given the legal right to take, colonize, settle, and extract resources from land belonging to those who were not Christian. The statement Morales read, adopted by the UUA General Assembly, called for Unitarian Universalists to learn about the doctrine and its ongoing impacts, not only on indigenous peoples, but on the political, legal, economic, and cultural systems in the United States, in local communities, and in our congregations.

In 2011, I was tasked with curating and creating study materials for congregations so that delegates might better understand why they were being asked to repudiate a 500-year-old document. Delegates were asking, “What possible relevance could the Doctrine of Discovery have to justice work today?” As I prepared materials, I read the work of a number of indigenous legal scholars, historians, and theologians. The more I learned, the more I discovered just how much the Doctrine—and the assumptions that flowed from it—have shaped the dominant story we tell about our nation. Its impacts are far-reaching and ongoing. I looked for resources to help explain this to a general audience, rather than a scholarly one.

In 2015, Beacon Press published An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Here it was: a unified telling of the story of indigenous peoples in the United States that drew a straight line from the first US Congress’ eager claim to the Discovery rights of European monarchs to the struggles for indigenous sovereignty and rights and environmental justice today.  I eagerly devoured the entire book on a long train ride. By centering the experiences of indigenous peoples in the US, it offers exactly the kind of resource that helps Unitarian Universalists and others understand what’s at stake in our nation, and how the witness and struggle of the water protectors at Standing Rock fits into a larger picture. The UUA offers an on-line discussion guide for the book.

Recently, Dunbar-Ortiz teamed with journalist and researcher Dina Gilio-Whitaker to write another book, “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths about Native Americans. This book is about indigenous nations and peoples in the United States today, and is useful for teachers, teens, parents, religious professionals, and justice activists. In short, pithy chapters, it takes on one by one the myths that are part of the current mainstream discourse about Native Americans. It begins with an affirmation of the strength and resiliency of indigenous people. It explains basic questions, such as sovereignty and treaty rights, using just enough history to provide context. It addresses current questions: sports mascots, casinos, and cultural appropriation. It addresses the historical and cultural problem with the common narratives about Columbus and Thanksgiving. Most of all, it challenges readers to examine destructive stereotypes, to rethink what they’ve been taught about Native Americans and history, and to engage more fully in local and national support of the work of naming, addressing, and undoing the ongoing effects of the Doctrine of Discovery. It is critical work that Unitarian Universalists and other people of conscience, secular and religious, are called to do now.

About the Author

Gail Forsyth-Vail is Adult Programs Director in the Faith Development Office at the Unitarian Universalist Association.