Invisible No More: Voices from Native America

For too long, Native American people in the United States have been stereotyped as vestiges of the past, invisible citizens in their own land obliged to remind others, “We are still here!” Yet today, Native leaders are at the center of social change, challenging philanthropic organizations that have historically excluded Native people, and fighting for economic and environmental justice.

Edited by Raymond Foxworth of First Nations Development Institute and Steve Dubb of The Nonprofit Quarterly, Invisible No More is a groundbreaking collection of stories by Native American leaders, many of them women, who are leading the way through cultural grounding and nation-building in the areas of community, environmental justice, and economic justice. Authors in the collection come from over a dozen Native nations, including communities in Alaska and Hawaiʻi. Chapters are grouped by themes of challenging philanthropy, protecting community resources, environmental justice, and economic justice. While telling their stories, authors excavate the history and ongoing effects of genocide and colonialism, reminding readers how philanthropic wealth often stems from the theft of Native land and resources, as well as how major national parks such as Yosemite were “conserved” by forcibly expelling Native residents. At the same time, the authors detail ways that readers might imagine the world differently, presenting stories of Native community building that offer benefits for all. Accepting this invitation to reset assumptions can be at once profound and pragmatic. For instance, wildfires in large measure result from recent Western land mismanagement; Native techniques practiced for thousands of years can help manage fire for everyone’s benefit.

In a world facing a mounting climate crisis and record economic inequality, Invisible No More exposes the deep wounds of a racist past while offering a powerful call to care for one another and the planet. Indigenous communities have much to offer, not the least of which are solutions gleaned from cultural knowledge developed over generations.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642833126

Book preview

Introduction

Steve Dubb

They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own secret soul, and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

—N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), House Made of Dawn¹

AT ITS HEART, THIS VOLUME LIFTS UP a wide range of vital stories from Native American leaders and organizations. There are many reasons that Raymond Foxworth and I decided to organize this collection. One reason appears right there in the title: Invisible No More. It is long past time to end the invisibility of Native Americans and make Native American voices accessible to a broad popular audience.

This book also is a product of a much broader movement among many people from within the 574 federally recognized Indigenous nations (and the many more that remain unrecognized).² In fact, the authors in this collection are among the leaders of a rising social, political, and cultural movement that has swept many Native communities. N. Scott Momaday’s writings, cited above, form part of a broader cultural movement. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in 1968, the same year that Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel was published.³ A year later, AIM activists began a nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island, garnering national attention.⁴

The official federal policy regarding Native Americans in the 1950s and 1960s was known as termination—and it meant exactly what it sounds like it meant: federal government policy sought to terminate tribal nations and end Native sovereignty entirely. One tactic the federal government used was to offer free one-way tickets for Native Americans to move to relocation cities like Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. An estimated 100,000 people were moved in this way. This is one reason why two-thirds of Native Americans today live off the rez in urban areas.⁵

Native American organizing such as AIM forced an end to federal termination policy, which was legislatively reversed in 1975 when Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.⁶ Additional policy gains followed. It is worth reflecting on how recent some of these victories are. It was in 1978 that the Indian Child Welfare Act and the Indian Religious Freedom Act were passed. The former was designed to keep Native American families together and is currently facing a Supreme Court case challenge.⁷ The latter is a potent reminder that until 1978 Native Americans on reservations lacked the legal right to openly perform sacred ceremonies.⁸

Subsequent policy wins include the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and the 1994 Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act. The latter established federal support for what is today a network of thirty-five tribal land-grant colleges with a combined student enrollment of 23,000; a recent study found that each dollar invested in a tribal college returns $5.20 in economic benefits to Native nations.⁹ As for gaming, a study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that gaming generated $28 billion in revenue by 2013, up from $100 million in 1988, but cautions that the accumulated economic and social deficits on reservations far exceed gaming revenues.¹⁰ Indeed, as coeditor Raymond Foxworth has noted, not only is the distribution of gaming revenues among Native nations highly uneven, but the per capita gap in income between Native and non-Native Americans far exceeds—by a factor of ten or more—any conceivably sustainable annual profit-distribution scheme.¹¹

In recent years, Native communities have also increasingly mobilized politically. On an international stage, this was evident at the internationally prominent pipeline protests at Standing Rock beginning in 2016.¹² Mobilization also occurred at the ballot box, with Native voters playing a decisive role in swing states such as Arizona and Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election. Native American voter turnout in 2020 reached record highs and six Native Americans were elected to Congress, a record number and three times the Native congressional delegation that existed just two years earlier.¹³

Again, it is remarkable how recent all of this is. The first two Indigenous women elected to Congress, Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (Ho Chunk), assumed their seats in January 2019. In 2021, Haaland left Congress to become secretary of the interior—the first Native American cabinet official in over two centuries of US