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[MUSIC PLAYING]

The first Americans were active and organized on the American continent long before European conquerors dared to sail west on the Atlantic Ocean without fear of falling off the edge of the Earth.

They survived under a highly developed form of representative democracy, a form of government that was noted by our founding fathers who authored or Constitution.

Our founders lived as neighbors with the Native Americans in the Northeast where the Iroquois lived in peace for 500 years.

Though there is more to history than conquest, the encounter with Western Europeans threatened to wipe out American Indians and their culture.

Indians felt the pain of persecution and death.

We're not inferior people.

We're not people that needed to be killed.

But a common resilience, a highly developed spirituality, kept that culture alive for future generations.

It's just something that won't go away.

You were born and raised, brought up, you were taught things, tried to live the way you're supposed to live.

Whenever I play my songs and things like that, it seems like I can just feel those people that had all those songs, and their thoughts and their prayers, and the things that they long to see.

It seems to me like their presence is palpable.

I can feel that.

We are Indians that practice our culture, but we are also Americans.

Native Americans are enjoying a new celebration of their history and culture in a nation finally ready to discover the relevance ancient Indian spirituality holds for modern times.

The experience has inspired and energized many among the Indian nations.

In this program, the first Americans tell their own story, a story sustaining the spirits of their ancestors.

This is "Today's Life Choices: Challenges for Our Times." From the beginning of their encounter with Anglos, American Indians have battled the image problem, a problem they didn't create, but a problem that has hounded them from the frontier to the factory.

In Oklahoma, Community Chief for the Flintrock Ceremonial Ground, James Mankiller, says his Cherokee heritage followed him to work one day.

I just started a job in Oklahoma City about a month ago.

A bunch of people I didn't know-- I walked in there.

Oh, oh, oh, OK.

All right.

That's good.

So we heard you were coming and we heard your name.

Man, we thought you were probably a big, mean, ugly guy coming to beat us up or something.

You don't look that rough.

I think you'll be all right.

What's in their head.

Next thing, they asked me how much I drink.

Oh, yeah.

I know you Indians.

You guys booze it up pretty good.

You know-- this and that.

Their mind-- they already got it.

They know me.

Those images, unopposed, have preyed on the minds of many young Native Americans.

For a youth services manager with the Cherokee Nation, Elizabeth Bird, Anglo American images of her culture nearly cost her life.

I went through a time in my life when I was young that I didn't believe it was worth being Indian.

And I struggled with that.

In fact, I almost committed suicide as a result of that- that I didn't fit in-- that being Native American wasn't all it was supposed to be.

Some images are less destructive, but just as ill-informed.

Most Anglos grew up with these misunderstandings, but few ever realized how incomplete they were.

For Sean Williams, education led him to a greater understanding of Native American culture.

Sean is the Student Senate President at the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in northern Minnesota.

I grew up in elementary school learning that, basically, all the Indians were the same, and that they all lived in teepees, and lived out in the prairie, and all that.

And I've come to find that there are hundreds of different bands with different names with different languages, and they're all unique and special-- have their own traditions.

For many years, Hollywood and hack writers prolonged the image of the hawk-faced warrior, rifle at the ready, itching to hit the warpath and do damage to white settlers.

Indians knew then and they know now that that picture isn't accurate or fair.

The Native American history, many would argue, is one of suppression.

Some historians believe, as a country, we did not emulate the Native American as much as we organized our social culture to treat them as enemies.

We're basically friendly, friendly people. And the way we conducted ourselves and the way our history's written, how we conducted war I think shows you that we were friendly people. I don't think we basically liked war or fighting.

And we're friendly people.

A lot of people that don't understand Cherokee is that if you get several Cherokees together, the first thing that you're going to find is that they'll be laughing, and cutting up, and having fun.

And that's what Cherokee is all about.

Most of the time people see maybe a quiet or a stone-faced, but, basically, that's not the way we are amongst each other.

Anglo children still come to school with the old images, but teachers like Marsha Bowman in Michigan, a Great Lakes state with a strong Native American heritage, are helping to change those images.

She spends 75% of her Michigan history classes studying Native Americans.

Every kid-- their children-- they all live together.

There aren't an uncle, mom, dad, the children.

And if their mom and dad died, then their uncle and aunt would take care of them.

When we study Michigan history, we go all the way back to the first settlements and our heritage and the culture.

And they try to discover why we have the things we have today.

What we got from the Native American culture, and it just plays such a big part in Michigan's history.

They never ruined the forest.

They lived by only using nature and still survived, and they never hunted for sport.

This is a game called [INAUDIBLE]

I think it's pronounced.

It's also called the moccasin game.

I made a wigwam, and I made it out of deer hides.

In fact, many facets of culture we assume to be patently American may have originated with native tribes.

For example, Principal Chief for the Cherokee Nation Chad Corntassel Smith says civility among tribes living in what became the American South provided the foundation for the gently-mannered life known today as Southern hospitality.

It was the five tribes.

I would suggest strongly that Southern hospitality was learned from the tribes.

Because who you had in Georgia at the time was the debtors and the prisoners of debtors of England.

So they were not known for hospitality.

And that sounds like a simple thing, but you can look to every tribe and actually see where this country is socially, and culturally, and politically established on the precepts and the concepts we had.

Understanding how Native Americans have persevered through centuries of trials and tribulation requires a journey to the center of the Indian soul.

Though they differ as nations and tribes, all Indians maintain a depth of spirituality not common in the Anglo world.

They express it in different ways, but common to each experience is a sense of long suffering, a sense of continuity of human life, that allows them to face the pain and indignities inflicted on them by Anglos.

According to exhibit designer for the Trail of Tears Exhibit, Lyn Henley, Native Americans have moved forward amazingly well with little or no anger.

From different tribes that I've worked with-- and there have been four or five at this point-- I think there's a very strong sense of inner calm, way deeper than our Anglo society has.

And there's a sense I get that they're really unshakable on a lot of levels.

They can face a lot of adversity and still be grounded in who they are and in their beliefs.

I don't hold any animosity, but I believe there is a militant side that does come out, though, when I really get engrossed in readings or studyings of things that happened to the Native American people at large-- yes.

For the award-winning flute player and songwriter, Kevin Locke, a Lakota from the Dakotas, harboring animosity and anger over past treatment will do little good.

He prefers sharing his Native American heritage through the arts.

You get out there and you start dancing, and all that negativity just dissipates where you can just feel peace, feel at one with everything.

All the people, all the generations, all the tribes-- everybody's there.

You can't really spend your life thinking bad thoughts.

It's not good for you, especially when there's not much you can do about the whole picture.

You have to come to terms with it because it is.

It's history.

Historical documentation for Native American artifacts is well under way in Washington, DC.

The Smithsonian Institution will soon open its latest addition, the National Museum of the American Indian.

Director of the project is Richard West.

We feel that we have been here a long time, and we will continue to be here for an even longer time, so we have been willing to take much in the short term-- not willing-- we have had to take much in the short term.

But we have always believed that there was a cultural beyond to what has happened to us, and I think that that is what empowers lots of contemporary Native Americans today.

Native Americans embraced the long view centuries before white men stumbled onto their shores.

They would need it.

The settlers who moved onto their lands had little interest in who they were, where they came from, or what they believed.

Actually, in the beginning, this country never wanted to touch its native roots because native people were really seen as a savage, uncivilized pagan.

They were looked at through the very narrow and, in my own view, culturally myopic lens of Western civilization.

And so what they had and who they were were simply not valued for a very long time.

The worst of those campaigns came to be known as the Trail of Tears and The Relocation, the forced removal of native people from their land beginning in 1838 in the East.

Executive director of the Southwest Museum in California, Duane King, says the relocation was all about land.

It was the result of the federal policy to eradicate tribal land in the Southeastern United States, and to move the populations to the Indian territory.

And the Cherokees at that time controlled parts of Northwest Georgia, Southeast Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and Northeast Alabama.

But it was prime farmland, and there it was land that was desired by the governments of those states.

The notion was that Indians from all over the United States would be removed to Oklahoma to try to get them out of everybody else's way, wherever else they might be located.

And as a result of that, the five civilized tribes-- or at risk that's how they were referred to-- came from what is now the southeastern part of the United States.

Other tribes, like the Cheyenne, came from the plains.

Ultimately, there were some 63 different Indian tribes nonindigenous to Oklahoma or what is now Oklahoma that were removed to what is now the state of Oklahoma.

The Relocation affected all parts of the country.

Language and culture instructor, Donald Perrot.

There was a removal that went on, a general removal of Potawatomi people from the Michigan area.

It was called Michiana, which included also Ojibwas and Odawas.

A lot of people didn't realize that they just grabbed Indians and started removing them.

Some Native Americans consider the Trail of Tears the most devastating result of the Indian encounter with the white man.

But as disruptive as the Trail of Tears proved to be, it wasn't the last straw.

As late as the 1950s, the government still had plans for Native Americans.

Let's take the Indian family, give them money, and get them settled in a city because that's where a new life and a better life could be for these Indian people.

And many families took that opportunity.

But what happened was they ended up in what became a ghetto, anyway.

So were they better off in the new place than in the old place?

The systematic dislocation left many Indians landless and poor.

That paved the way to what some call the Second Trail of Tears.

Between 1930 and 1940, half the Cherokee population of Oklahoma left.

And why?

We'd lost our land.

We were dependent upon the cash economy.

The Depression hit.

So US 66 all the way to Bakersfield, California, became a second Trail of Tears, an economic Trail of Tears.

And that was the whole design, to break open the tribal held title, allot it, and diffuse us to the winds.

So of course we would have been much better off if Congress had been good to their word in the numerous treaties.

Native Americans count as many as 23 treaties with the federal government.

Few, if any of them, benefited Indians as much as they did the United States.

And native people contend the Revolutionary colonists gained in more than material ways from their talks with the Indians.

Native Americans say they are the true inspiration for the democracy white men established in the New World.

I knew before I went to school.

Before I went to kindergarten, I knew that the reason that the United States has a Constitution and a tripartite government is because Ben Franklin observed the Iroquoian people in the Confederacy.

So then when the founding fathers saw this, they thought, wow, that's great.

If you look at Ben Franklin's writings, he says how strange it would be if these savage tribes could organize and govern their affairs in a democratic egalitarian system, and we civilized Europeans couldn't do better.

Indians would gladly have shared the spiritual foundation that undergirds their concept of government and all of life, but the new Americans weren't prepared to hear it.

They're listening now.

It was not a mere component of the way we live, separate from many of the other aspects of how we live-- religious versus secular, for example.

"Spiritual," I think, describes the totality of a concept that pervaded every aspect of how Indians lived, how they valued themselves, how they valued other living things, how they valued the natural world around them.

They attached sacred significance to all of those things because they were all aspects of the creative force of the universe.

When the people came over on the Mayflower, and they looked at the Indian people, and they said, oh, these people are worshipping that eagle, or they're worshipping that fire, or they're worshipping that mountain.

But that's not it.

It's just that everything in this physical world is a counterpart to something.

So in other words, it's not like you worship the eagle, but you look at the eagle, and you realize that this is what we can understand.

We see that, and this is like the embodiment of nobility, see?

Eagle soars and represents nobility.

Or we look at these mountains.

We're not going to worship those mountains, but we can see this mountain represents majesty, see?

The beginning of serious interest in Native American culture doesn't mean the end of prejudice and insensitivity.

Native Americans still see it, face-to-face and emblazoned across American society.

I saw a survey in the "Tulsa World" the other day, and the question was asked, do you think mascots that are offensive to Indians should be removed?

53% said no.

57% percent said "Indians" is OK.

58% said "Savages" and "Redskins" was fine.

Well, apparently the American public has a problem with the Indians because if you can't afford the same dignity to tribes-- the Indians-- as you would blacks, Chicanos, Asians, and others, I think the American public does have a problem.

The Native American drive to refresh, celebrate, and recover their traditions is not fueled by the goodwill of the Anglo community.

Part of their motivation is simply learning how to live successfully in at least two worlds.

For the Gaussoin family of Santa Fe, New Mexico, their heritage is kept alive in traditional jewelry making.

This is their bridge connecting their Native American world with the Anglo world.

We live in our pueblo world.

We live in our Navajo world.

And we're also living in the world that surrounds us from all the communities in this universe.

I'm not able to actually be up there in the pueblo, to live like my ancestors did.

But to acknowledge what they went through and then where I am now, living here in this nice house.

Sometimes it's a call so loud from the spirit of the ancestors that it must be answered.

I struggle in the ways of learning of how add on to my past.

Growing up in the dominant society, that stays with me.

And I don't knock what I learned from before, but now I'm adding on to that, and I'm trying to learn how to put those two together to build a strong foundation.

I feel there's spirits around this place when they put it here.

Dixie was telling you about the architecture of this building.

If you really go out into them woods and sit by that rock, you can feel.

There's days when you can feel things up in them trees that push you.

[SINGING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE]

The push is over for the Public Relations Coordinator at the Hannahville Indian School in upper Michigan.

Jennifer McCloud says she considers her journey back home now complete.

[SINGING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE]

I was my father's son.

I was the first born.

I went hunting and fishing with my dad before I started school.

And that was just our way of life.

And the city areas-- it was getting harder and harder to find a place where you could be free.

I couldn't have a ground fire in a subdivision.

I couldn't have ceremonies in a neighborhood.

And I wanted a different life.

So once my children were grown-- my husband at that time wouldn't allow us to move out into a country setting like I wanted to-- once my children were off and into college, then it was time for me to go back to exactly who I was, how I was born, how I was raised.

There's something about the pull of who we are.

And I don't know how to describe it other than that-- that there's something that draws us back to home, that draws us back to our people to find where our roots are.

There's something about knowing where you come from that's very important to us.

If we say we are Potawatomi, and then can't speak our language-- someone asks, what is a Potawatomi?

Well, you can't just say he's an Indian.

He's an Indian, but he's a specific kind of Indian.

He speaks a language which identifies him as the sort of person that he is.

[SPEAKING POTAWATOMI]

You have to be able to say those kinds of things.

I am Potawatomi.

And as they look to the past to recover culture, Native Americans carry on their centuries-old philosophy of looking to the future for the sake of the children.

I come from a background-- understand-- is Cherokee people.

And my father had explained to me that my people would look generations ahead.

And what he told me was that they look seven generations ahead when they made a decision because they knew that it would affect their great-great-great-great-great grandchildren.

Very important to us that we look forward, forward in what we do.

We have a 100-year plan.

And folks sometimes giggle, saying, well, why 100 years from now?

We won't even be here.

Well, that's precisely the reason.

We won't be here, but who will be?-- our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren.

So we have this great legacy.

And that legacy has been passed down from our ancestors, paid for thousands of lives on the Trail of Tears, 81 million acres in the old country, 15 million acres here in Oklahoma.

So it's a very valuable legacy, and it's helped sustain us over a couple hundred years of very hostile circumstances.

So there's no question in our mind, we're going to survive.

And we're designing the path that 100 years from now, we won't need the [INAUDIBLE].

Renewed interest in Indian culture has not smoothed the path to the future.

Tribal lawyers are battling the federal government for billions of dollars earned from Indian land and never handed over.

For more than 1,000 original communities, the federal government now recognizes only 554 tribes, and some still face an uphill struggle for governmental legitimacy and the funding that goes with it.

But these Native Americans will not be deterred.

They intend to reach the future with their culture intact, no matter what the government or anyone else throws on the trail.

Some Indians believe this is the best moment for recovering their traditions since the first Americans met their new neighbors centuries ago.

They can still retain the language, they can still retain the customs.

And being stripped of that identity is something that is done on paper, but not in the heart of the people.

Our cultural wisdom has allowed us to survive for several years under horrific circumstances, and it will ultimately drive us to survival, prosperity, excellence in the future.

We're prospering, as far as I'm concerned, from a cultural standpoint.

And, happily, at the very same time that is occurring, which is a very significant event in our own cultural history, it is also true that nonnatives in this country are far more receptive to who we are, what our history was, what we can give to civilization, and values that we can impart to others.

Americans, in general, recognize that we live in a pluralistic society.

There are many cultures.

And one of the strengths of the United States is the fabric of this interplay between the cultures.

And I think American Indians, in general, who are the original inhabitants of this land, are in a unique position because American Indian heritage, whether you're Native American or not, is America's Heritage, so it's everyone's heritage.

And that heritage continues to thrive across the American landscape, from a school in upper Michigan that is teaching the next generation their native language to the Anglo schools that make Native American history a living part of our culture.

We continue to learn from each shelf and box in our museums.

To the plains of Oklahoma and to the mountains of northern New Mexico, casino gambling on Native American lands, though controversial, is footing the bill for an identity in the Anglo culture.

Native Americans are not the vanishing American.

Their culture is continuing to grow in art and thought among our non-Indian population.

Many lands have been lost, lives given in battle, but the very fabric of the Native American spirit has endured.

I think in the future, it's going to be easier because people, in general, recognize the value of this heritage and why it's part of the American fabric. For a video copy or transcript of this program, please call 1-800-257-5126, or write Films for the Humanities and Sciences, Post Office Box 2053, Princeton, New Jersey, 08543-2053.

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