American Indian Heritage Month

One of the early proponents of an American Indian Day was Dr. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca Indian who was the Director of the Museum of Arts and Science in Rochester, New York. He persuaded the Boy Scouts of America to set aside a day for the "First Americans," and for three years the Scouts adopted such a day. In 1915, at the annual Congress of the American Indian Association meeting in Lawrence, Kansas, a plan celebrating American Indian Day was formally approved. The Association directed its president, Rev. Sherman Coolidge, an Arapahoe, to call upon the country to set aside a day of recognition. Rev. Coolidge issued a proclamation on September 28, 1915, which declared the second Saturday of May as American Indian Day and contained the first formal appeal for recognition of American Indians as citizens.

The year before this proclamation was issued, Red Fox James, a Blackfeet Indian, rode horseback from state to state, seeking approval for a day to honor American Indians. On December 14, 1915, Red Fox James presented the endorsements of 24 state governments to the White House. There is no record, however, of such a national day being proclaimed.

The first American Indian Day to be celebrated in a state was declared on the second Saturday in May 1916 by the governor of New York. Several states celebrate the fourth Friday in September. In Illinois, for example, legislators enacted such a day in 1919. Presently, several states have designated Columbus Day as Native American Day, but it continues to be a day we observe without any legal recognition as a national holiday.

In 1990 President George Bush approved a joint resolution designating November 1990 as "National American Indian Heritage Month." Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994.

National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month is celebrated to recognize the intertribal cultures and to educate the public about the heritage, history, art, and traditions of the American Indian and Alaska Native people.

Famous American Indians:

Charles Curtis, 1860–1936, Vice President of the United States (1929–33). Of part Native American background, Curtis lived for three years on a Kaw reservation. He served in the U.S. Congress (1892–1906), where he championed Native American rights to self-government with the Curtis Act (1898). He served in the U.S. Senate from 1907 to 1913 and from 1915 to 1929. After an unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination, he became Herbert Hoover's running mate in 1928.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, The only American Indian in Congress, Republican senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell is also a Northern Cheyenne chief. Campbell was a leader in policy dealing with natural resources and public lands and initiated legislation to found the National Museum of the American Indian within the Smithsonian Institution. A three-time U.S. judo champion, Campbell was captain of the U.S. Olympic judo team in 1964.

Betty Mae Jumper, Born to a full-blooded Seminole mother and a white father, Betty Mae Tiger grew up in a traditional Seminole community in Florida. Jumper attended an Indian boarding school a thousand miles away in Cherokee, North Carolina. In 1945, she and her cousin, became the first Florida Seminoles to graduate from high school. She then enrolled in a nursing program at the Kiowa Indian Hospital in Oklahoma. In addition to her public health career, she launched a tribal newsletter called the Seminole News (which later became The Seminole Tribune) in 1950. The Seminole tribe of Florida received federal recognition in 1957, and in 1967 she was elected head of the Tribal Council, the first woman to serve as leader of the Seminoles.

Jim Thorpe, Probably the greatest all-round male athlete the United States has ever produced. His mother, a Sac, named him Bright Path, and in 1907 he entered the Carlisle Indian School at Carlisle, Pa. He joined the Carlisle football team and led Carlisle in startling upsets over such highly rated teams as Harvard, Army, and the Univ. of Pennsylvania. In 1912, Thorpe took part in the Olympic games held at Stockholm, Sweden, and performed magnificently. He won the broad jump and the 200-meter and 1,500-meter runs of the pentathlon; won the shot put, the 1,500-meter run, and the hurdle race of the decathlon; and was the runner-up in the other events of the pentathlon and decathlon. In 1913, however, Thorpe surrendered his awards, at the request of the Amateur Athletic Union and the insistence of Glenn Warner, to the Olympic headquarters in Switzerland; it had been discovered that Thorpe had played (1909–10) semiprofessional baseball with the Rocky Mount, N.C., team of the North Carolina Eastern League. The medals were restored posthumously in 1982. In 1919, Thorpe played briefly with the New York Giants baseball team. He afterward played professional football with the Canton (Ohio) Bulldogs and other teams and later became supervisor of recreation for the Chicago parks. Jim Thorpe, Pa., where he was buried in 1954, is named in his honor. With T. F. Collison, he wrote Jim Thorpe's History of the Olympics (1932).

Buffy Sainte-Marie caught the attention of a changing nation with her debut album It's My Way (1964), which included the classic antiwar song Universal Soldier, and won an Oscar for writing Up Where You Belong, the theme to An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). The daughter of a Cree mother, Sainte-Marie has long been active in American Indian causes, especially American Indian education. With this in mind she appeared as herself on Sesame Street from 1976 to 1981. Sainte-Marie, who earned a PhD in fine arts, is also an art teacher and internationally exhibited artist.

Places to Visit:
National Museum of the American Indian   
Mesa Verde National Park   
The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail 
Effigy Mounds National Monument  
Hopewell Culture National Historical Park