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Native American / Native Peoples Program

AFSC Articles and reports on Native Americans

Links to Our Programs Around the Country

More detail on these programs appears in the paragraphs below.

AFSC's Native American/ Native Peoples (NAAP) Program addresses a range of issues that challenge the continuing survival of native communities in the United States and beyond. The program supports the renewal and strengthening of native traditions, institutions, communities, and identities; defends Indian treaty rights, lands, sovereignty, religious freedom, and citizenship; builds youth leadership; seeks to build alliances in support of native rights; and affirms the international rights and standing of indigenous peoples.

Current projects build upon AFSC work that dates back to the late 1940s. In recent years, the program has increased its international focus and works with national coalitions, Friends (Quaker) groups, and nongovernmental organizations to support initiatives like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and a similar document from the Organization of American States.

The program also tries to ensure that Indian perspectives are reflected in AFSC's work, as well as in the work of other groups struggling for change. There are Native American/Native Peoples Programs in the New England, Mid-Atlantic, Central, Pacific Southwest, Pacific Mountain, and Pacific Northwest regions. The staff in the National Community Relations Unit helps facilitate and coordinate their work, which includes:

• Youth leadership development in Maine's Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Micmac, and Maliseet communities. In the early 1990s, it became evident to Indian leaders and the NAAP Program that substance abuse, suicide, violence, and other forms of self-destruction among young people were tied to their struggles for and confusions about identity. Through the decade that followed, the program focused on working with Indian youth to try to stop the cycle of negative behavior by restoring their sense of Indian-ness and affirming their distinctiveness. NAAP has organized an international Wabanaki youth group with young people from both Canada (where Wabanaki traditions and customs are more intact) and the United States. The program coordinator, a winner of the Ford Foundation Leadership for a Changing World Award, is a skilled counselor and leads workshops with the groups. (This work coordinated by the Maine-based Wakabani Program). http://www.afsc.org/newengland/wabanakis.htm

• Environmental defense and education in Akwesasne. By the late 1980s, industrial pollution from factories owned by General Motors, Alcoa, and Reynolds Aluminum, among others, had turned Akwesasne into an environmental disaster area. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had mandated clean-ups, but clean-ups take a long time (they are still happening) and in the meantime residents needed to know whether they could safely eat what they farmed or fished. Since 1987, the NAAP has supported projects developed by the Akwesasne Task Force on Environment, a group of indigenous environmental experts who work with the communities of Akwesasne to use alternative methods to defend and restore the area's natural resources. The projects include breeding healthy fish (aquaculture); growing black ash trees, which are used to make traditional baskets and had been completely depleted; supporting a medicinal herb garden and a community garden (maintaining crops and seeds); and educating the public on the environment. (This effort is coordinated by the Akwesasne Environmental Justice Project.) http://www.afsc.org/midatlantic/syracuse/
  AkwesasneEnvironmentalJustice.htm

• Nation-building and restoring culture and tradition in South Dakota. Recent Native American/Native Peoples Program projects in South Dakota include working to restore tiospaye, the traditional Native American family structure and unit of governance, and trying to prevent the disappearance of the Lakota language through language immersion and training. The program has also developed a broad coalition of Lakota and worked on developing a common-man council, a base from which AFSC has been able to raise concerns about indigenous rights internationally. (This effort is coordinated by the Oglala Community Education Resource Center.) http://www.afsc.org/central/pineridge.htm

• Youth leadership development in New Mexico. A new project with native young people has just begun. Recent projects include doing restoration work after fires. (This work is coordinated by AFSC's New Mexico Area Program.) http://www.afsc.org/pacificsw/albuquerque.htm

• Collaboration with youth councils in small towns and on the Peyote and Shoshone reservations in California and Nevada. The work in this region is done by interns, one of whom also works with the urban youth community in Oakland. (This effort is coordinated by the Oakland Program.) http://www.afsc.org/pacificmtn/oakland.htm

• Tribal/community relations in Washington. In recent years NAAP has worked to combat the racism that emerged in Washington in recent years, when after close to an eighty-year hiatus, the Makah asserted their treaty-protected right to subsistence whaling. They faced huge opposition, some of which was genuinely environmental but much of which was overtly racist. NAAP is involved in encouraging community dialogues among natives and non-natives to promote understanding of native subsistence and traditions. (This effort is coordinated by the Seattle Indian Program.) http://www.afsc.org/pacificnw/indian/Default.htm

• Sovereignty in Hawaii. The Hawaii sovereignty movement has many conflicting strategies and goals; NAAP partners with a number of groups and tries to bridge the gaps in the movement. (This effort is coordinated by the Hawai'i Area Program.) http://www.afsc.org/pacificsw/honolulu.htm

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