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Concept
Native Americans in the United States
Summary
Native Americans, sometimes called First Americans or Indigenous Americans, are the Indigenous peoples of the United States or portions thereof, such as American Indians from the contiguous United States and Alaska Natives. The United States Census Bureau defines Native American as "all people indigenous to the United States and its territories—including Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders—whose data are published separately from American Indians and Alaska Natives". The US census tracks data from American Indians and Alaska Native separately from Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders, who include Samoan Americans and Chamorros.
The European colonization of the Americas that began in 1492 resulted in a precipitous decline in Native American population because of newly introduced diseases (including weaponized diseases and biological warfare by European colonizers), wars, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement. After its formation, the United States, as part of its policy of settler colonialism, continued to wage war and perpetrated massacres against many Native American peoples, removed them from their ancestral lands, and subjected them to one-sided treaties and to discriminatory government policies. These later focused on forced assimilation, into the 20th century.
When the United States was created, established Native American tribes were generally considered semi-independent nations, as they generally lived in communities separate from white settlers. The federal government signed treaties at a government-to-government level until the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 ended recognition of independent Native nations, and started treating them as "domestic dependent nations" subject to applicable federal laws. This law did preserve the rights and privileges agreed to under the treaties, including a large degree of tribal sovereignty. For this reason, many Native American reservations are still independent of state law and the actions of tribal citizens on these reservations are subject only to tribal courts and federal law, often differently applicable to tribal lands than to U.
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