What is NOT Indian Country
To be fair and accurate this journal must start by explaining what is NOT Indian Country.
Not India
Indian Country has nothing to do with India. Indigenous North Americans have been called Indians for 500 years, since Christopher Columbus landed on a Caribbean island thinking he had sailed to India.
Scholars at the time had a good estimate of the size of the earth but Columbus believed it was smaller. The name Indian is nonsense but it's here to stay. No more nonsensical than America which is named after a mapmaker who never set foot in the New World.
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Not What It Was
Children in the U.S. are taught that Christopher Columbus "discovered" America in 1492, ignoring that the continent was inhabited for 10,000 years before the first European explorers arrived.
Below is a political map of "pre-Columbian" North America. The entire continent was inhabited. All of North America was Indian Country.
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We all know what happened after Europeans "discovered" the New World. Tribal homelands shrunk dramatically over the next 4 centuries. First, most of the indigenous population died from imported diseases. Then the survivors were gradually displaced by European settlers, African slaves, and their descendants.
Not Indian Territory
Indian Country should not be confused with Indian Territory, a region that was autonomous from 1834 to 1907 but is now the eastern part of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. It's the home of 5 large tribes who were forcibly relocated from the eastern U.S. in a migration known as the Trail of Tears. The Indian Territory tribes have some degree of sovereignty but no longer own most of the land.
Oklahoma has a large Indian population and brands itself as "Native America", but it's not Indian Country.
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