After 250 Years: Everything Back – Everything Forward

Editor’s Note: This article is part of Native News Online’s America 250: A Republic Built on Native Land initiative.

The Association on American Indian Affairs has issued the following statement reflecting on the resilience of Native Peoples and Tribal Nations over the past 250 years despite policies designed to separate them from their lands, families, languages, governance systems, and ways of life. The statement examines what Native Nations have endured throughout this history and highlights how Native values can help guide the path forward for future generations.

After 250 Years: Everything Back – Everything Forward

As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, Native Nations mark something different: how Native Peoples and their governments have survived the last 250 years. For generations, the United States pursued policies designed to separate Native Peoples from the very relationships that sustained them: their lands, families, languages, cultures, governments, and responsibilities to the natural world. Today, many of the crises facing America stem from the same systems of separation. We call for everything back—and everything forward—as a roadmap to our shared future.

For 250 years, federal policy attempted to weaken Native Nations by disrupting the relationships that made them strong:

Separate people from their lands.

Separate children from their families.

Separate communities from their languages.

Separate governments from their authority.

Separate cultures from their ceremonies and beliefs.

Separate human beings from the natural world that sustained them.

The devastating consequences of these policies remain. Yet after centuries of attempted erasure, Native Nations remain. More importantly, we remain hopeful.

Hope is not naïve optimism. It is the decision to continue investing in future generations despite hardship. That hope is remarkable because the challenges facing Native Peoples are profound.

Due to the direct impacts of historic and ongoing U.S. law and policy, Native Peoples continue to experience some of the country’s most severe disparities in health and well-being, including suicide rates nearly double the national average and devastating impacts from violence, trauma, and adverse childhood experiences. 

These realities are not historical accidents. They are the predictable results of policies that disrupted relationships essential to human flourishing. Yet Native Nations have resisted and persisted. The path to healing does not come through further assimilation; it comes through restoration. When Native Nations reclaim languages, protect sacred places, restore traditional foods, exercise sovereignty, and strengthen cultural lifeways, Native Peoples become healthier, stronger, and more resilient.

This is the meaning of Everything Back. It is not a return to the past. It is the restoration of relationships, responsibilities, and systems of knowledge that allowed Native Nations to thrive for millennia.

And that restoration points toward something larger: Everything Forward.

Everything Forward begins with a question: What kind of future are we building?

Across the country, people are confronting challenges Native Nations have long witnessed and warned about: environmental destruction, lack of trust in institutions, growing isolation, threats to human rights, and uncertainty about the future. These challenges share a common root—a system that prioritizes extraction over relationship, short-term gain over responsibility, and individual accumulation over collective well-being.

Native Peoples have long understood that human beings exist within a web of relationships.

Healthy communities depend upon healthy lands. Healthy economies depend upon healthy ecosystems. Future generations depend upon the choices made today. That is why Native Nations continue to protect clean water, forests, ecosystems, sacred places, and self-determination. These are not only Native issues. They are human responsibilities.

Indigenous teachings have long reminded humanity that financial wealth cannot replace the necessities of life. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted, money cannot make our hunger go away. Today, that teaching feels less like a warning and more like an observation.

Everything Forward means carrying these responsibilities into the future—for Native Nations and for everyone who depends on clean air, clean water, equality, participation in democratic systems, and a livable planet. Supporting Native Nations is not charity; it is an investment in a healthier future for all.

More than seventy years ago, legal scholar Felix Cohen wrote:

“Like the miner’;s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians… reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”

His words remain true. When treaty obligations are ignored, the rule of law is weakened. When Native Peoples are excluded from decisions affecting their lands and waters, democracy is weakened. When sacred places and ecosystems are sacrificed for short-term gain, our collective future is weakened. The treatment of Native Nations is a measure of the health of American democracy itself.

For generations, Native Nations have carried a vision of governance grounded in reciprocity, kinship, stewardship, collective responsibility, and obligations to those yet to come. While modern systems often emphasize individual gain and immediate outcomes, Indigenous governance asks a different question: How will today’s decisions affect the next seven generations?

Native rights are not separate from human rights or from natural law. They are among the clearest measures of whether a society is committed to justice, accountability, and the collective good.

As the United States marks 250 years, America faces a choice. The next 250 years can continue the patterns that produced environmental degradation, inequality, broken relationships, and distrust. Or they can embrace principles Native Nations have carried since time immemorial: responsibility, reciprocity, stewardship, and respect for future generations.

Native Nations are still here. We are still speaking our languages. Still protecting our homelands. Still exercising our sovereignty. Still carrying forward our responsibilities.

After 250 years, the question is no longer whether Native Nations will survive. The question is whether America is ready to learn from the Peoples it once tried to erase.

Everything Back.

Everything Forward.

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