Native American civil rights are the civil rights of Native Americans in the United States.
Although indigenous to the Americas, American Indians became one of many minorities and the movement for American Indian civil rights began almost as soon as Europeans started to arrive in the Western Hemisphere. Following the establishment of the United States of America, Native Americans were denied basic civil rights for many years. While American Indians did not have a particular period of fighting for their civil rights like the African American Civil Rights Movement, measures have been taken to achieve equal rights for American Indians throughout history.
Because American Indians are citizens of their tribal nations as well as the United States, and those tribal nations are characterized under U.S. law as "domestic dependent nations", a special relationship exists which creates a particular tension between rights granted via tribal sovereignty and rights that individual Indians retain as U.S. citizens. This "dual citizen" status creates tension within the U.S. colonial context even today, but was far more extreme before Indians were uniformly granted U.S. citizenship in 1924. As non-whites, and non-citizen indigenous people, the United States built discriminatory language into their own laws and took on special colonial projects that denied basic human rights—particularly in the areas of cultural expression and travel—to their indigenous non-citizen "wards".
Read more about Native American Civil Rights: Education, Indian Civil Rights Act (1968), Sovereignty, Fishing and Hunting Rights, Traveling Rights, Voting, Land Rights, See Also
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“The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman’s soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better.”
—native American belief, quoted by D. Jenness in “The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River,” Bulletin no. 133, Bureau of American Ethnology (1943)
“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.... I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The Civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, be infringed.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.”
—Malcolm X (1925–1965)