The start of November marks the beginning of National Native American Heritage Month, which has unofficially opened with President Joe Biden’s formal apology for the U.S policy of sending Native American children to federally-backed boarding schools. Biden’s address on Oct. 25, 2024 marks the first time a U.S. president has apologized for the practice, which entailed Native children being forcibly separated from their families and communities, often without parental consent.Â
Those boarding schools, among many other U.S. practices, were meant to erase Native American languages and cultural practices, forcibly assimilating Indigenous people. Recognizing the darkness of this period in U.S. history is just part of the larger story we must remember this November.
Many Native American people seek more than just an apology or a land acknowledgment that merely recognizes past harms without real commitment to action. There are current movements for reparations to pursue long-term healing from the individual, communal, and generational trauma inflicted on Native American nations. One such movement is known as the Landback Movement, which in part defines itself as “a relationship with Mother Earth that is symbiotic and just, where we [Indigenous people] reclaim stewardship.”
Landback, a term coined by Arnell Tailfeathers (a member of the Blood Tribe/KáĂnai Nation in the Blackfoot Confederacy) in 2018, is shorthand for a movement predicated on the reclamation of Indigenous land that was seized unlawfully and in violation of treaties made by the United States. Landback aims to re-establish Indigenous political sovereignty over traditional, unceded Indigenous land that was lost in the ongoing process of U.S. colonialism. Taking that step would also support the continued existence of Native American cultures, traditions, and practices in their homelands.
To its supporters, Landback is the recourse against the actions of a settler colonial state. It works against the past policies of displacement, such as President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 that sent tens of thousands of Native people away from their ancestral homelands and killed thousands (specifically, Cherokee who had resisted the directive to leave their land) on the Trail of Tears. Landback counters the efforts to confine Indigenous communities to federal government-drawn reservations meant to constrain and control Native people.
Locally, even here in Berkeley, these rematriation efforts continue to be made by many communities and organizations, such as the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. After many years of active struggle, the sacred West Berkeley Shellmound is to be returned to the Lisjan Ohlone. Even after taking a large step in repatriation last year, UC Berkeley continues to hold on to thousands of Native remains and cultural artifacts. For decades, Indigenous communities have called on UC Berkeley to return these items, and that fight continues here and across the country at other educational institutions.
Knowing all of this, Native American Heritage Month is a time to increase our awareness of Native American cultural practices and lifeways. Not only in terms of how they’ve been threatened, but in our understanding, respect, and wider incorporation of them in contemporary U.S. life.Â
On an individual level, we can support Native American artists, authors, activists, and their work. We can read books like Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes and Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance by Leonard Peltier. We can listen to podcasts like LANDBACK for the People or The Red Nation. We can make conscious, intentional decisions to outwardly value Native thought, literature, art, and existence.Â
A month celebrating Native American heritage must also contend with resistance: the historical and current implications of settler colonialism, along with the ongoing battles that today’s surviving Native nations are fighting. Societally, we can amplify Native voices, not just as political tokens or to demonstrate performative allyship, but as a real way forward in reckoning with settler colonialism.