DEI Indigenous American Resources
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Resources: Indigenous Peoples
UUSG LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The UUSG church is built on the former land of the Pottawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa people. Prior to the dominant culture of the Pottawattamie, additional Algonquin tribes lived here including the Sauk, Fox, Illiniwek, Kickapoos, Miami, Menominee, and Winnebago. Before that, the ancient Mound Builder people lived here. UUSG honors the heritage of the first people on this land and stands as an ally with the struggle for a better future for all indigenous people. This land was ceded to the USA by a treaty with the Pottawatomi in September 1833 and the remaining Pottawatomi people were forcibly removed in 1836. The people were moved along their “trail of death” first to Missouri and then to Iowa and finally to Jackson County, Kansas where the Prairie Band Pottawatomi Nation exists today. We honor their heritage and stand with the struggle for a better future for all indigenous people by learning about their history and researching actions we can take as allies.
Official Website of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation
To learn more about the first people on this land read:
St. Charles History Museum - Black Hawk War
St. Charles History Museum - Native and Settler Relations 1730-1837
St. Charles History Museum - Historic Native Americans in the Fox River Valley
Pottawatomi Indian Tribe - A Branch of the Algonquin Indians
Fox 2 Now News - The Illinois Museum Built on Native American Burial Mounds
Current regional issues in the news:
Rep. Underwood’s Efforts to Secure Justice for the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation
Books
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 239 pages.
In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 272 pages.
“Going beyond the story of America as a country "discovered" by a few brave men in the "New World," Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity. The original academic text is fully adapted…for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.”
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative by Thomas King. 184 pages.
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative is a 2003 nonfiction book written by American Canadian novelist Thomas King. King describes the roles storytelling plays in the Native American tradition, his own life, and the world in general. He argues that the stories we all tell really are all that we are as people, and that Native American storytelling has too often been seen as primitive because of the power dynamic between whites and indigenous people.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. 509 pages.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented, and unforgettable account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century…Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, And A Woman's Search For Justice In Indian Country by Sierra Crane Murdoch. 400 pages.
The gripping true story of a murder on an Indian reservation, and the unforgettable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with solving it—an urgent work of literary journalism…Drawing on eight years of immersive investigation, Sierra Crane Murdoch has produced a profound examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of extraordinary healing.
All the Real Indians Died Off: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker. 224 pages.
Scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths. Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance, [challenging] readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history. You will definitely be enlightened.
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes. 304 pages.
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue…[The book] is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. 464 pages.
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sundance by Leonard Peltier. 272 pages.
In 1977, Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents. He has affirmed his innocence ever since, and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted*. Prison Writings is a wise and unsettling book, both memoir and manifesto, chronicling his life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Invoking the Sun Dance, in which pain leads one to a transcendent reality, Peltier explores his suffering and the insights it has borne him. *His case was made famous in Peter Matthiessen's bestselling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez. 448 pages.
The story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early 20th century…Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Available in the UUSG library on the DEI bookshelf. 408 pages.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a 2013 nonfiction book by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies. Kimmerer received the 2014 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award for Braiding Sweetgrass. The book has also received best-seller awards amongst the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times Bestseller lists. It was named a “Best Essay Collection of the Decade” by Literary Hub.
Articles
Native American History Timeline by History.com Editors. 12 pages.
As explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various stages, from cooperation to indignation to revolt. This interactive timeline provides an historical accounting of key events from 1492 to 2021.
Podcasts
All My Relations.
In each episode hosts Matika Wilbur (Tulalip and Swinomish) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), delve into a different topic facing Native peoples today, bringing in guests from all over Indian Country “to explore our relationships to land, to our creatural relatives, and to one another. This space is for everyone—for Native folks to be joyous, think critically about issues facing our communities, hear new perspectives, look into a mirror of self, and for non-Native folks to listen and learn.”
Videos
9 Questions Native Americans Have for White People (Buzzfeed). 2 minutes.
A pointed, humorous look at attitudes white people tend to have toward Native Americans. (BuzzFeed is a digital media company whose target audience is millennials, ages 18-34.)
If Native Americans Said The Stuff White People Say (Buzzfeed). 2 minutes.
A play on lines white people often say to Native Americans to prove we are not racist. An amusing but sobering reminder of what not to say.
TV Shows
First Nations Experience (FNX)
First Nations Experience (FNX) is a non-profit television network in San Bernardino, California, owned by the San Bernardino Community College District. FNX is America's first and only broadcast network aimed at Native Americans and global Indigenous audiences and consumers of Native American culture. Many First Nations Experience programs can be seen on Chicago’s public media channel: WTTW-operated WYCC (channel 372 on my TV).
Reservation Dogs. Available on Hulu. 8 episodes at 1 hour each.
Reservation Dogs: fiction/comedy, focused on the lives of four Indigenous teens and their efforts to leave their home in rural Oklahoma for new adventures in California. The New Yorker (9.27.21) says, “The show may boast the single most exciting cast of the fall television season…The cool humor…is a welcome downshift from the look-at-me joke density of some of its peers. It encourages the young generation to reconsider home as a portal to their culture rather than a dead end.”
Web Resources
Coyote Science. Offers viewers a culturally rich adventure into science topics that bring together indigenous and western science: engaging hands-on science projects; 1-2 minute introductions by kids to Indigenous scientists and knowledge holders (in astronomy, chemistry, earth science, canoe technology, geology, biology, dwellings, light, music, etc.); 1-2 minute animated features about scientific subjects (e.g., spawning salmon, animal rescue, plants). Speakers may describe ways their Native culture influences their work.
Field Museum’s Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories. (An interactive map). The Field Museum’s Native North America Hall, open May 2022, is a collaboration of more than 100 partners and Tribes, including Native American scholars, museum professionals, community leaders, and artists, whose stories tell of the self-determination, resilience, continuity, and change of Indigenous People. Shows pre-genocide tribal territories. Also from the Field Museum—Land Acknowledgement (includes a taped webinar). The Museum respectfully acknowledges the Original Peoples who laid the foundation for the City of Chicago, and the diverse Indigenous nations that reside in Chicago today.
Online Interview: With Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
An opportunity to hear and see the author.