Orange alludes to Cherokee Author John Rollin Ridge and his book, "The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta," because John Ridge's book feeds into the stereotypes that feeds Americans about Native American Indian Peoples. John Ridge brings his character to life during the California Gold Rush. He was the son of a successful Cherokee lawyer and landowner. John Ridge was also an Urban Indian and advocated "Cherokee assimilation to the dominate culture, politics, and economy of the United States" (Rowe 153).  

​"John Rollin Ridge's 1854 thriller, "The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta" is an extraordinary example of how literary texts condense the contradictory political, social, legal, cultural, and  psychological effects of colonial conquest," says contemporary Author John Carlos Rowe from his novel Highway Robbery: ‘Indian Removal,’ the Mexican-American War, and American Identity in ‘The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta.’ ​ (Rowe 149)

Colonists and early Americans flew Indian-head flags for hundreds of years in this country.

In contrast, during the Determination Era (1960s - Present) the American Indian Movement flew their own flag.

Today, Native Americans fly flags and wear patches (right) as part of their reclaiming and decolonizing as well as to send messages.

​Currently, Indigenous women and children in the United States and Canada are going missing at alarming rates. The red hand on the face, acknowledges the MMIWC movement. 

By Elicia Goodsoldier
Indian Country Today
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On June 7 (2018), the United States House of Representatives passed H. R. 129, a bipartisan piece of legislation, sponsored by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), urging Germany to reaffirm its financial commitment to address the health and welfare needs of Holocaust survivors. This legislation passed unanimously with a vote of 363-0.

According to the bill’s summary, this legislation was needed to ensure “that all Holocaust victims live with dignity, comfort, and security in their remaining years.” It calls on Germany “to reaffirm its commitment to this goal through a financial commitment to comprehensively address the unique health and welfare needs of vulnerable Holocaust victims, including home care and other medically prescribed needs.”

The irony that lies in this situation is the fact that Adolf Hitler studied many of the United States’ policies implemented against American Indian people, as models for how he would deal with Jewish people. He studied the plans of Bosque Redondo, the concentration camp where over 8,000 Navajo men, women and children were sent after the Long Walk in 1864. According to, John Toland, Pulitzer Prize winning author, in his book Adolf Hitler (pg. 202) wrote: “Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”

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​Hitler studied how the Native population rapidly declined due to starvation and disease when placed on reservations. There are so many parallels one can draw from Nazi and American Indian history-- including death marches of Jewish people to concentration camps and the Navajo Long Walk and the many Native American Trails of Tears. The parallel of Nazis destroying Jewish art, music and books and burying people in mass graves and the Wounded Knee Massacre where generations of people and their knowledge, were also buried in a mass grave. My aunt Ethleen Iron Cloud-Two Dogs once said, “We can never measure the loss of language, stories, and culture we experienced when our relatives were buried that day”

David E. Stannard, author of American Holocaust, argues that the genocide against the American Indian population was the largest genocide in history. Though it is hard to pinpoint an exact number of American Indian deaths since Columbus’ arrival, it has been estimated at anywhere from 10 million to a little over 100 million.

 
Intertribal Friendship House (IFH) located in Oakland, CA was established in 1955 as one of the first urban American Indian community centers in the nation. It was founded by the American Friends Service Committee to serve the needs of American Indian people relocated from reservations to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area American Indian community is multi-tribal, made of Native people and their descendants—those who originate here and those who have come to the Bay region from all over the United States and from other parts of this hemisphere.

The Baltimore American Indian Center (BAIC) is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1968 with a mission to “assist and support American Indian and Alaskan Native families moving into an urban environment and adjusting to the culture change they will experience.” Following WWII, the neighborhood surrounding the BAIC became populated predominantly by American Indians and was referred to as “the Reservation.”

To support this Native American community, the BAIC provided services that included education, skills trainings, workforce development, child care, afterschool arts and seniors programs, as well as health and healing services. Over time, much of the American Indian ​community in Baltimore moved out of the city seeking more affordable housing and sustainable job opportunities. This demographic shift prompted BAIC to prioritize cultural heritage

preservation and education programs, with health, housing and employment-related services provided on an ad hoc basis. While the BAIC was founded by Lumbee Tribal Members, the Center is open to Native community members from all tribes and nations; 

We continue to serve as a hub for the American Indian community’s social and cultural activities. With 78% of American Indians and Alaskan Natives in the U.S. living outside of tribal territories, our organization is an essential resource.

The BAIC is the only resource in the greater Baltimore area where Natives can learn what it means to be American Indian and that educates non-Native people about the myriad cultures and legacies of American Indian and Alaskan Native peoples.

Our organization provides a welcoming, safe space for the Native community to gather; a place where people are treated with dignity, respect and understanding, and where cultural practices are kept alive.

Indigenous Populations in the Bay Area 

It is critical to recognize the Bay Area’s Indigenous populations, past and present. Despite the atrocities of colonization and genocide, Native communities persist today and are active in efforts to preserve and revive the culture. According to the U.S. Census, the Indigenous population in the Bay Area is 18,500 strong and is projected to grow over the next few decades.

The Ohlone are the predominant Indigenous group of the Bay Area, including the Chochenyo and the Karkin in East Bay, the Ramaytush in San Francisco, the Yokuts in South Bay and Central Valley, and the Muwekma tribe throughout the region. Other Indigenous groups include the Graton Rancheria community (Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo), Kashaya, Patwin, and Mishewal Wappo in the North Bay, and the Bay Miwok in the East Bay. The arrival of Spanish explorers and missionaries in the late 1700s was the first major threat to Ohlone existence and culture as a result of forced cultural and religious assimilation, exposure to European diseases, and harsh and unsanitary living conditions. When California became part of the Union in 1850, after the Mexican-American War, the state government sanctioned the mass genocide of Indigenous populations by local militia in the wake of the Gold Rush. By 1852, there were less than 1,000 Ohlone remaining, a 90 percent loss in their pre-colonial era population. By the 1880s, the Bay Area Ohlone population was dramatically reduced.
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The latter half of the 20th century saw many different tribes from across the country coming to the Bay Area as one of the several relocation sites where the U.S. government promised, and failed to delivery on, training, housing, and jobs as part of the Indian Relocation Act. The Bay Area has since become one of the largest populations of Intertribal Indians in the country with people coming from communities in the Southwest, Great Plains, and Eastern Woodlands areas. Now, California is home to close to 200 tribes with only 109 of them recognized by the U.S. federal government. The displacement of Native Americans from their reservations into the region led to the creation of the oldest urban Indian community center, Intertribal Friendship House which provided a community for Indigenous people to seek each other out and access social services. Intertribal Friendship continues to exist today in Oakland.
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By Rene' Locklear White and Angie Ford

In Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir Deborah A. Miranda organized her book in a way to kill the Mission-story lie (xx). Her book is more than ink on paper it is her weapon. She is aiming to kill the Mission-story lie (xx) by telling the real Mission story from the Indian’s perspective. She describes the mission story as a “Fantasy Fairy Tale” and “kind of witchery” that has “to end” (xix). She said the lie is like a bad spirit. Not only has the Mission Project story helped kill the Indian, it teaches the Indian and others how to kill the Indian. Her book gives space for her people’s courageous voices as witnesses coming out of their silenced past (xx). 

​Part of her larger story helps readers get present to this and their own untold stories. Like her family history (the Mission story), other cultures have the kind of history that no one historically wants to talk about (genocide and slavery), so it is “never spoken” and “never mentioned by anyone” who lived it or caused it, as if by not talking about it, makes the ugly past (seem to) go away (152).

One way to get rid of the lies (or bad spirits) is to tell the truth. In “Post-Colonial Thought Experiment” Miranda describes fourth grade lesson plans for in the “Carmel Mission”, “Birmingham Plantation,” and “Dachau Concentration Camp” projects. Seeing these three lesson plans side-by-side makes it easy to see California’s one-sided mission-story. These examples break the silence and scream out the truth. 

We believe that colonization contributed to an unnatural center at Miranda's dad’s core; infected with bad bacteria. This bad bacterium (i.e., results of colonization) is like a bad spirit that needs a host. In this case, the bad bacteria is colonization and all of its byproducts and the hosts are American Indians. ​

The colonizers fed this bad bacteria (bad spirit) into Miranda’s family through colonization; forced upon American Indians to consume or die. The bad spirit ate away at her father from the inside of his Spirit out, manifesting in her dad’s life and Miranda’s as pain, suffering and death. 
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By digging and searching deeply, Miranda recognized that her dad was “born into a hard world” (173). She realizes that what happened to her dad is an unnatural part of his life. She also begins to ask herself and the reader, is there is “a way to reconcile this” brokenness (172)? Another words how can we kill the bacteria (the bad spirit)? 

​In 1862, Congress passed a bill for the Transcontinental railroad to stretch from West Omaha, Nebraska to East Sacramento, California. The first phase of the Transcontinental railroad was completed during the year of 1869 in Promontory, Utah which was defined by the connection of the Western Union Pacific Railroad and Eastern Central Pacific Railroad. The second phase caused the creation of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, which built a railroad line connecting Isleta Pueblo in Grant New Mexico, Flagstaff Arizona, Barstow California, and Los Angeles California. Later, transitioning into the third phase, connecting the railroad line to Atchison Topeka and Sante Fe Railroad company. In 1880 through 1992, Congress passed a grant to build a sixty mile railroad across the Pueblo Laguna land, based upon a handshake and oral agreement, known as the “Flower of Friendship,” Agreement. This agreement would come into effect In 1922, as the railroad endured a labor strike along with a loss of Japanese laborers due to Pearl Harbor's effect of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Following the Chinese Exclusion Act and other immigration laws, there was difficulty for railway companies to contract cheap labor.

This led to the increase of Native Americans working on the railroads. The Santa Fe Railroad Company reached out to the Laguna people, and sought to move native people to Richmond California through an oral agreement. The negotiations between the

Laguna and the Santa Fe railroad was referred to as the “Flower of Friendship.” This was an oral agreement between the Laguna people and the railroad company, and specifically targeted the Laguna people because they provided cheap and accessible labor in the time of a shortage. As a result of the “Flower of Friendship,” Acoma and Laguna people began to arrive in Richmond, California in the 1920s to live at the Santa Fe depot. This Richmond point was one of significance because it was the western terminal of the Santa Fe Railroad. As the Laguna and Acoma Pueblo began to arrive in Richmond to work for the Santa Fe Railroad company, they were forced to live in boxcars turned into living quarters. Eventually, the boxcars became so populated that a satellite village of laguna and acoma pueblo people was created in this space, which came to be known as the “Boxcar Village.”

​American Indian Politics and the American Political System (2018) novel by David Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark

freed from all Federal supervision and control and from all disabilities and limitations specially applicable to Indians. Between 1945 and 1960 the government processed 109 cases of termination “affecting a minimum of 1,362,155 acres and 11,466 individuals.”

Along with the termination resolution, Congress, just a few days later, also enacted Public Law 280, which conferred upon five states (California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin) full criminal and some civil jurisdiction over Indian reservations (with certain reservations being exempted) and consented to the assumption of such jurisdiction by any other state. 

The final part of the termination policy trilogy was relocation, a federal policy aimed at the relocation of Indians from rural and reservation areas to designated urban “relocation centers.” In 1956 alone, the federal government spent $1 million to relocate more than 12,500 Indians to cities. The relocation policy was a coercive attempt to destroy Tribal communalism.

Important Military Conflict Years and Policies

1914-1920 During WWI the Indian Assimilation Era was still underway. 
1920's - United States granted citizenship to Native Americans through the Synder Act.
1934 - Indian Reorganization Act took place just before WWII began in 1939-1945.
1950-1960s - Indian Termination Era took place during the Korean War just before the Vietnam War.
1970s - United States granted Voting Rights for many Native Americans.
2022 - U.S. government created the first memorial dedicated to Native American contributions to military service in the defense of the United States (National Native American Veterans Memorial (NNAVM)).

Excerpt by Dr. Jere Franc
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In 1940, cognizant of impending war, Congress once again declared Native Americans to be citizens in the Nationality Act. Because Selective Service registration had been conducted on Indian reservations since 1938, it appears that his act intended to reinforce the "duties" aspect of citizenship, namely military service. While tribal and individual Native American resistance to the act was minimal, the government early sought to define American Indian Indian status within a wartime society. The courts soon found this act useful. 

​When an Iroquois man claimed draft exemption based on the 1794 Treaty with the Six Nations and charged that the United States held no power to draft members of an independent nation who had ​

twice rejected American citizenship, the federal court "reluctantly" ruled against the young ​Onondaga man and declared that the interests of the United States overrode any prior treaty status of American Indians. "Where a domestic law conflicts with an earlier treaty, that the statute must be honored by the domestic courts has been well established," ruled Circuit Judge Jerome Frank.