Who is an American Indian or Alaska Native?
As a general principle, an Indian is a person who is of some degree Indian blood and is recognized as an Indian by a Tribe and/or the United States. No single federal or tribal criterion establishes a person's identity as an Indian. Government agencies use differing criteria to determine eligibility for programs and services. Tribes also have varying eligibility criteria for membership.

Are American Indians and Alaska Natives citizens?
American Indians and Alaska Natives are citizens of the United States and of the states in which they reside. They are also citizens of the Tribes according to the criteria established by each Tribe.

Historically, did all American Indians and Alaska Natives speak a common language?
American Indians and Alaska Natives speak many diverse languages. At the end of the 15th Century, more than 300 American Indian and Alaska Native languages were spoken. Some were linked by "linguistic stocks" which meant that widely scattered tribal groups had similar languages. Today, some 250 tribal languages are spoken and many are written.

Do American Indians and Alaska Natives Have the Right to Hold Federal, State, and Local Government Offices?
American Indians and Alaska Natives have the same rights as all citizens to hold public office. In this century, American Indian and Alaska Native men and women have held elected and appointed offices at all levels of state, local, and federal government.

Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw Tribe of Kansas, served as Vice President of the United States under President Herbert Hoover. Indians have also been elected to the United States Congress. Tom Cole, a member of the Chickasaw Nation, has represented Oklahomain in the United States House of Representatives since his election in 2002. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana, represented Colorado as in the United States House of Representatives from 1987 until 1993 and in the Senate from 1993 until 2005. Brad Carson, a member of the Cherokee Nation, represented Oklahoma in the United States House of Represenatives from 2001 until 2005.

How are tribes organized?
Tribes have the inherent right to operate under their own governmental systems. Many have adopted Constitutions, while others operate under Articles of Association or other bodies of law, and some still have traditional systems of government. The chief executive of a Tribe is generally called tribal chairperson, principal chief, governor, or president. A tribal council or legislature often performs the legislative function for a Tribe, although some Tribes require a referendum of the membership to enact laws. Additionally, a significant number of Tribes have created tribal court systems.

What is a reservation?
Reservations are territories reserved as permanent tribal homelands. Some were created through treaties while others were created by statutes, or executive orders.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples from the regions of North America now encompassed by the continental United States, including parts of Alaska. They comprise a large number of distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as intact political communities. There has been a wide range of terms used to describe them and no consensus has been reached among indigenous members as to what they prefer. They have been known as American Indians, Indians, Amerindians, Amerinds, or Indigenous, Aboriginal, Original Americans, or Red men.

Not all Native Americans reside in the contiguous 48 states. Some live in Alaska or insular regions. These other indigenous peoples, including Alaskan Native groups such as the Inupiaq, Yupik Eskimos, and Aleuts, are not always counted as Native Americans. The Census 2000 demographics listed "American Indian and Alaskan Native" collectively. Native Hawaiians and various other Pacific Islander American peoples, such as the Chamorros (Chamoru) of Guam, can also be considered Native American in a broad sense but such a designation is not commonly made.^[3]

Most of the historical record is about Native Americans and their contact with Europeans in the continental 48 United States. The first known major contact with Native Americans in what is now known as the United States occurred in the early 1500s when Conquistadors Ponce de León and Hernando de Soto ventured into the area now referred to as the American Deep South.

The earliest recorded date of Native Americans becoming U.S. citizens was in 1831 when the Mississippi Choctaw became citizens after the ratification of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. They were the first non-European racial minority group to become citizens of the United States. However, it wasn't until The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, that U.S. citizenship was granted entirely to

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Representatives from about 15 of the largest tribes in the nation created the Fellowship of Native American Christians (FONAC) during a meeting June 9 preceding the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis.

Native American leaders initiated FONAC at a 2007 meeting in San Antonio when they decided to create a group to increase networking, fellowship, leadership and ministry opportunities. They adopted a constitution June 9 and elected Emerson Falls of the Oklahoma Creek Nation as president. He is pastor of Glorieta Baptist Church in Oklahoma City.

Other officers include Donnie Coulter, vice president, who works with First Nation's people in Canada; Lumbee Timmy Chavis, treasurer; pastor of Bear Swamp Baptist Church in Lumberton; Bruce Plummer of the Assinboine Nation and a missionary and pastor in Montana, secretary; Gary Hawkins of the Oklahoma Creek Nation, assistant treasurer.

Ledtkey McIntosh, national missionary with the North American Mission Board, encouraged formation of a Native American Fellowship to assist in starting a church planting network among Native Americans.

"We see this fellowship as being broader, including information sharing and fellowship," said Mike Cummings, director of missions in the Burnt Swamp Association, a Lumbee Indian association centered in Lumberton, with churches from Maryland to South Carolina.

"In creating FONAC we see it as that place where we all come to find out what the issues are, what the needs are. This will facilitate our coming together as native people and finding out about life in the native community in America."

More directly, the organizers grew from the church-planting concept to creating a fellowship "to make some noise about our presence in this denomination," Cummings said. Too often, Indians are "an invisible people."

One of the loudest noisemakers possible came just the day after FONAC organized when Johnny Hunt, a Lumbee Indian, was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention. His ethnicity was never an issue.

FONAC will meet in conjunction with the annual Southern Baptist Convention each year.

There are just over 450 Indian churches nationwide, according to Plummer. "We want to be Indians reaching Indians."

To date, Plummer said, Southern Baptist efforts have been "relatively ineffective" since less than one percent of the Indian population has been reached after 75 years of trying. "We can draw strength from one another and reach Indians rather than white missionaries which traditionally have been doing the work," he said.

At one time there were as many as 800 identifiable tribes in America, a number that has dropped to 500. There are 6.5 million Indians in America and collectively Indians are one of fastest growing ethnic minorities. Plummer, from a family of seven, has eight children.

As many as 50 million Americans contain a recognizable degree of Indian blood, he said.

Instead of being a part of the mission field, Indians want to be "full partners with you in the mission force," said Larry Locklear, pastor of Island Grove Baptist Church in Lumberton, N.C.

Plummer said Indians in the west, particularly, see Christianity as "white man's religion."

"There is only one God," Plummer said. "He died for Indians just like anyone else. But they ask me, 'If God really loved us and wanted to save us, why did it take 1,500 years for Him to come and tell us?' Hearing it from an Indian makes a significant difference."

Locklear said Burnt Swamp Association has been doing mission projects across the nation for more than 20 years. "But a lot of our emphasis has been going to the same places doing the same thing over and over," he said. "With a network to better connect resources with needs we could do a better job."

Chavis said North Carolina's Lumbee worked directly with members of the United Houma Nation to help in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

In American, Indian populations are the "poorest of the poor." They have the highest suicide rate, the highest school dropout rates and live in the toughest social conditions, said the new officers.

Cummings pointed out the experience of eastern and western Indians can be vastly different. "On the east coast we don't know reservation life at all," he said. Seven reservations in Montana cover one-seventh of the state and at one time, Indians in the west were confined to the reservations.

Reprinted from the Biblical Recorder- Baptist State Convention of North Carolina