Thanksgiving Day, annual national holiday in the United States and Canada celebrating the harvest and other blessings of the past year. Americans generally believe that their Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people.

Virginia

Plymouth Plantation

Beginning in the 1800s with the discovery of a pamphlet describing the 1621 Thanksgiving celebration, Plymouth has been widely considered the site of the “first Thanksgiving,” a feast enjoyed by the Pilgrims to mark their first harvest after they arrived in the New World.

The so-called first Thanksgiving has been celebrated and taught to schoolchildren as the origin story of what would later become the United States. But many Native Americans say Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the slaughter of millions of Indigenous people and the theft of their lands by outsiders.

As was the custom in England, the Pilgrims celebrated their harvest with a festival. The 50 remaining colonists and roughly 90 Wampanoag tribesmen attended the “First Thanksgiving.”

Shakopee Mdewakanton – Annual Revenue of $1 Billion The Shakopee Mdewakanton are the wealthiest Native American tribe, going by the individual personal wealth. They are 480 members, and each member gets around $84,000 per month, as disclosed by a tribe member going through a divorce.

Must all American Indians and Alaska Natives live on reservations? No. American Indians and Alaska Natives live and work anywhere in the United States (and the world) just as other citizens do. American Indian and Alaska Native population now live away from their tribal lands.

Each person listed on the Dawes Rolls of Cherokees by Blood was assigned a blood quantum fraction to express their amount of Cherokee ancestry. Blood quantums begin at 4/4 and divide in half with each successive generation. Your blood quantum will be computed and placed on your CDIB.

www.bia.gov/bia/ois/tgs/genealogy Publishes a downloadable Guide to Tracing Your Indian Ancestry. Has a vast online library, Tracing Native American Family Roots. www.ncai.org/tribal-directory Provides the online tribal directory where contact information for specific tribes can be found.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs uses a blood quantum definition—generally one-fourth Native American blood—and/or tribal membership to recognize an individual as Native American. However, each tribe has its own set of requirements—generally including a blood quantum—for membership (enrollment) of individuals.

There are hundreds of millions, as everyone born in the Americas is a full blooded Native America. As far as how many people are full blooded descendants of the original peoples that lived in the pre-Columbian era of the Western Hemisphere, there are probably none.

Yaqui, Indian people centred in southern Sonora state, on the west coast of Mexico. They speak the Yaqui dialect of the language called Cahita, which belongs to the Uto-Aztecan language family. (The only other surviving speakers of the Cahita language group are the related Mayo people.)

Northern Ute

Pine Ridge Reservation

In 1830, US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing many indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi from their lands. The violent relocation of an estimated 100,000 Eastern Woodlands indigenous people from the East to the West is known today as the Trail of Tears.

The poverty of First Nations has been the result of being stripped of their lands, their traditional livelihoods, and cultures, and having been placed on less valuable lands as reserves, as well as serious lack of educational opportunities (Neu & Therrien, 2003).

To explain the poverty of the reservations, people usually point to alcoholism, corruption or school-dropout rates, not to mention the long distances to jobs and the dusty undeveloped land that doesn’t seem good for growing much. The vast majority of land on reservations is held communally.