American Autumn

Who Are the True Native Americans?This series has never defined its central terms by ancestry, and this volume will not start now. Earlier volumes named the True Europeans, the True Africans, the True Asians, people of that inheritance whose actions were directed by the human blueprint rather than by the ancient memory of hard times working against it, ancestry alone earning nothing without the behavior to match it.Bartolomé de Las Casas earned the name. So did Helen Hunt Jackson.This volume needs the same designation for its own thread, and widens it further, because this volume's own designation deserves the same standard the rest of this series already holds itself to. The True Native Americans are not a people, in the sense of a single tribe, era, or nation.They are not defined by paperwork, not by what the government once measured out in fractions, deciding how much "e;Indian blood"e; a person supposedly carried; not by whether a name sat on some official tribal roll or federal list; not even by how straight a line a person could draw back to the first people who crossed into this land, so long ago that ice still blocked half the way.They are indigenous people of the Americas, across every nation and every century this book covers, whose lives were shaped by the human codes rather than the extraction working against them, the same standard this series has already held the True Europeans, the True Africans, and the True Asians to in earlier volumes.Take the sachem, the word many northeastern nations used for a chief. A sachem never ruled by his own say-so. He was chosen by the Clan Mothers, and if he reached for more power than a leader had any right to, it was a Clan Mother who took his title back. That is a True Native American.So is the hunter who, ten thousand years before either word (sachem, Clan Mother) was ever spoken, brought down an animal and handed the meat to his people instead of keeping it for himself.This was never a closed circle. Any nation. Any tribe. Any era. If your life followed that old code instead of the greed fighting against it, you belong on this list. The door was never shut.It has been open, within it, since the first person chose reciprocity over extraction, and it stays open to whoever within that inheritance chooses it next.And the same honesty this series has always insisted on cuts the other way. Ancestry alone earns nothing. A Cherokee slaveholder who enslaved another human being is not a True Native American by virtue of being Cherokee, any more than a European colonizer is a True European by virtue of being European. The designation was never about where a person came from.It has only ever been about what they did with what the moment handed them.