Native American Identity, Legal Background

Colonial Era

The term Indian was coined by Columbus, who, as he wandered about the Caribbean, thought he had arrived on the shores of Asia, or the “Indies.” The European association of the word tribe with Native American social and political organizations has no particular origin. But the earliest usage of the word tribe in English, going back to the 13th century, is associated with the twelve tribes of Israel, ten of which were conceptualized as “lost” after the Assyrians forced them into exile in the 8th century BC. At the beginning of English imperialism in the Americas, one strain of Protestant theological scholarship believed that American Indians were these lost tribes.

Beginning more or less at the same time, tribe was also associated with the political divisions of ancient Greece and Rome. Existing within and alongside these associations is the idea of tribe as an expansive patriarchal lineage, composed of various clans—hence the earliest notion of “race” as extended family or kinship; and embedded in this idea is that of the “primitive.” In keeping with these associations, early modern Europeans, contradictorily enough, identified “Indians” with both ancient Western and Asian civilizations and with the “savage.”

In fact, outside of Mayan, Aztec, and Incan city-state organizations, which were relatively short-lived because of their vulnerability to Western conquest, the social organizations of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas were by and large formed through extended-family structures, based not in terms of “blood” relationships, but in terms of behavior: a set of cultural “rules” or obligations that one had to one's kin, which included not only the other human beings of one's kinship group but also the land and the inhabitants (the other animals and the plants) of the land on which one lived.

The Navajo (Diné) creation narratives, for example, describe the formation of this extended-kinship network from its beginnings in the “First World” to the present-day elaboration of it in the “clans” of the “Fifth World.” These kinship-based social organizations could be matrilineal or patrilineal (not to be confused with matriarchal or patriarchal) or matrilocal or patrilocal; they could be organized into fixed villages, like the Pueblos, or mobile forms, as was the case with the Navajos. Typically, the governance structure of these groups was decentralized, based in consensual forms of governance, where all the adult members of the kinship community, male and female, were part of the decision-making process.

Until the late 18th century, then, when European colonization was well advanced, the Indigenous Peoples north of Mexico did not typically think of themselves as “Indians” or their social organizations as “tribes” or “nations,” another term applied to and adopted by these communities in the United States once the treaty-making process had begun. Rather, they identified themselves according to the name of the kinship group or clan to which they belonged. Writing in 1829, the Pequot activist William Apess testifies in his autobiography, A Son of the Forest, to the alien origin of the word “Indian,” even as he uses it to identify

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