2019 saw a wide range of news from Indian Country. From environmental activism, to civil rights and the arts, Native communities were in the vanguard of several social movements that set out this year to promote accountability, inclusion, equity and freedom of expression.
The Environment
As part of their efforts to assert the sovereignty of the more than 500 indigenous nations currently residing in the US, Native youth have increasingly joined the ranks of climate activists, contributing new viewpoints and energy in the effort to educate the public about the human costs of climate change.
Read more:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.1/indigenous-affairs-young-indigenous-activists-lead-climate-justice-action-in-alaska?fbclid=IwAR3f5dNdc3JVLg5jkKEQC7Q6LdxMJ3yex8Nf6fivuowVqqsc7if0-LUzULw
https://indianz.com/Environment/
Civil Rights
Native communities in North Dakota have found themselves swept up in the sudden rush to purge voter roles and to enact overly burdensome restrictions on voter ID requirements. A recent change in North Dakota voter ID laws has, according to the Associated Press,
“has been criticized for potentially suppressing Native American votes.North Dakota law requires voters to provide an ID listing an address, but not all residents on tribal land have one. Before 2013, voters who did not have one could sign an affidavit attesting to their eligibility . . . The rule change faces legal challenges because many living on reservations use post office boxes, not street addresses . . . Last October, weeks before the midterm elections, the U.S. Supreme Court responded to an emergency appeal from the tribes by upholding the state’s voter ID rules. ‘The Supreme Court made the ruling and everybody was scrambling,’ said Dan Nelson, the executive director of the Lakota Law Project, which helped the Standing Rock Reservation identify addresses for tribal members and print new IDs that met state requirements.
The Associated Press reported last year that at least dozens of Native Americans were unable to cast ballots because of the new rules but turnout was up in two counties with Native American reservations.
The upcoming US Census has also come under criticism for its limited view of Native identity and citizenship. In the following article, Jen Deerinwater explains how this is just the most recent example of the efforts of the federal government to erase indigenous peoples from the historical and political record.
https://rewire.news/article/2019/12/09/paper-genocide-the-erasure-of-native-people-in-census-counts/?fbclid=IwAR3s1r-PZq9Tu7T9bs7Rg9PKofUK-D9yAwO9yfEHme931GzpmqMbSmu07po
Read More: https://apnews.com/afs:Content:6949540043
North Dakota Agrees to Court-Ordered Relief Easing Voter ID Laws for Native Americans on Reservations
The Arts
In film and gallery exhibitions, Native artists saw increased visibility in 2019. Two significant gallery shows highlighted the year in Native art. The first, an exhibition of the work of Cree artists Kent Monkman, made headlines for its challenge to its viewers to decolonize their vision of North American history.
The second, “Hearts of Our People,” a retrospective assembled by The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, was the country’s first ever exhibition devoted solely to the works of Native American women. The show, which is currently at Nashville’s Frist Art Museum and will visit Tulsa and Washington, D.C. in 2020, focuses on the unheralded work of indigenous women in their communities over the centuries. As Jeffrey Brown of PBS reports, the exhibition features “some 117 works of art from more than 50 Native American communities across the U.S. and Canada. There are traditional pieces, like this Anishinaabe jingle dress created in 1900 and worn for dancing at powwows, and a Hohokam bowl dating back to 1,000 A.D. There are also works in photography
In addition to these groundbreaking gallery shows, indigenous filmmakers enjoyed enhanced visibility in 2019, when Canada opened a huge catalog of First Nations films free to the general public. The National Film Board of Canada’s Indigenous cinema is an extensive online library of over 200 films by Indigenous directors — part of a three-year Indigenous Action Plan to “redefine” the NFB’s relationship with Indigenous peoples.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-groundbreaking-exhibition-finally-tells-the-stories-of-native-women-artists?fbclid=IwAR0-i84Pmny0QIm7LhdH9rwzkWyJDptySIXCuKuifz0UVydl3dtxZpd4H7U
https://www.cbc.ca/arts/there-s-a-massive-free-catalogue-of-indigenous-films-online-and-we-have-6-picks-to-get-you-started-1.4623884?fbclid=IwAR1WqdeqN5YOvrkOewzSGBA54E1mtE0xRGI-erhGRAm2GkQv-j5pIcXkulE
Violence Against Native Women
Native women suffered sexual assaults and murder at rates far surpassing the rest of the population in 2019. A recent article in the New York Times labeled this situation as a “crisis,” and as far back as 2016, the Washington Post ran an article documenting some 1000 Native women who had gone missing or were murdered in that year. Now, three years later, MS Magazine reports that the recent elections of Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo woman from New Mexico, and Sharice Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation from Kansas to the House of Representatives, has energized Congress to take action on the issue.
Read More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/04/the-mystery-of-1000-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-in-canada/
Making Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Visible
Land and Sovereignty
Even though Indian Country has suffered continued suppression of voting rights and a complete disregard for the plight of Native women, there were a few bright spots in Indian Country in 2019. Some tribes, like the Esselen of California, have seen tribal homelands returned in landmark legislation.
At Long Last, Smallest Native Californian Tribe Has Land To Call Their Own
Recommended American Indian and Indigenous Material
John Low discusses canoe travel in the Great Lakes.
