Description

For generations, the Native American culture has been dismantled through war, forced colonization, and hatred. As a result of ignorance and prejudice, their existence has often been reduced to a subject title in our history books to remind the distant past. We gasp at the horrific ways they were stripped of their culture, tradition, land, and community. Yet, we remain ignorant that the devastating effects of this historical trauma have been passed on from generation to generation and still haunt the daily existence of Native American people today.

According to a recent study, 566 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages in the United States--each with their own culture, language, and history. Every tribe has unique traditions and styles of housing, dress, religious beliefs, values, and ceremonies. Throughout the passing generations, however, Native Americans have battled to maintain their cultural identity.

The racialization of Native Americans has distorted their individual and collective identities. As a mechanism of Western imperialism, "race" has contributed to their dispossession, disintegration, and decentralization. Racialized oppression continues at federal and tribal levels through racial terminology and blood quantum policies, leading to the fragmentation, marginalization, stigmatization, and alienation of Native individuals. As such, race and blood quantum pose a threat to the survival of tribes. Tribes have within their means indigenous alternatives to race and blood quantum and will need to revitalize these indigenous practices and principles if they are to safeguard their survival as autonomous cultural and political entities