Timelines

Migration is a natural part of living systems, and human history is no exception. Yet it remains one of the most debated public issues of our time.

Both people and borders move. Who is allowed to move, and who is granted rights, lies at the heart of how nations define belonging. In Germany and the United States alike, these debates have been deeply intertwined with evolving ideas of race and ethnicity.

These timelines trace how citizenship and belonging have been constructed, challenged, and redefined through laws, social movements, global events, and cultural works — and how those histories continue to shape the present.

1871

Native Nations No Longer Recognized as Independent

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, federal policy toward Native American Indians reflected white settlers’ desires for territorial and market expansion across the continent and the eradication of Native American national and tribal identities. Viewing Native American land rights as obstacles to their westward expansion, railroad companies and other corporate interest groups successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Indian Appropriation Act in 1871. The act proclaimed that: “no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power, with whom the United States may contract by treaty.”

We Are Still Here

A Documentary on Today's Young Native Americans

United States

Sources

Ronald Takaki. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2008.

Additional Resources

Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains.
Ned Blackhawk. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Richard White. The Roots of Dependency Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press.
We Are Still Here.

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