Native American Heritage Month: Where It Came From and How to Honor It

Every November the same question comes up in classrooms and offices: what is this month actually for? The short version is that it is time set aside to pay attention to the first peoples of this land, not as figures in a history lesson but as nations, families and languages that are very much here. The longer version starts more than a century ago, with people who traveled, wrote and lobbied for a single day of recognition.

This guide walks through how the month came to be, who Native nations are today in numbers drawn from federal sources, why languages sit at the center of so much current work, and how to take part in ways that respect the people being honored.

The idea is older than most people expect. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Native advocates began pressing for a day that would recognize what Native peoples had given to the United States. One of them was Dr. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca scholar who directed the Museum of Arts and Science in Rochester, New York. He persuaded the Boy Scouts of America to set aside a day for the “First Americans,” which the Scouts observed for three years.

In 1914, Red Fox James, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, set out on horseback from state to state, asking for support for a day honoring Native people. On December 14, 1915, he presented endorsements from 24 state governments at the White House. That same year, the American Indian Association met in Lawrence, Kansas, and approved a plan for an American Indian Day. Its president, the Rev. Sherman Coolidge, an Arapaho minister, issued a proclamation on September 28, 1915, naming the second Saturday of May as the day. It was the first formal appeal for Native people to be recognized as citizens.

No national day came out of those campaigns, but states acted. New York’s governor declared the first state American Indian Day in May 1916, and Illinois enacted a day in 1919. The federal step came much later. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush approved a joint resolution of Congress designating November 1990 as National American Indian Heritage Month. Similar proclamations, under slightly different names, have been issued every year since 1994, and the observance is now called National Native American Heritage Month.

As of January 2026, the Bureau of Indian Affairs lists 575 tribal entities that are federally recognized and eligible for its funding and services: 347 in the contiguous 48 states and 228 in Alaska. The list grew from 574 with the addition of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Each of these is a distinct nation with its own government, history, homelands and ways of life, which is why it helps to say “Native nations” rather than treat Native people as one group.

Population numbers come from the US Census Bureau, which counts people by how they identify themselves. The 2020 Census counted 3.7 million people who identified as American Indian and Alaska Native alone, 1.1 percent of the country, and 9.7 million who identified as American Indian and Alaska Native alone or in combination with another race, 2.9 percent. In 2010 those figures were 2.9 million and 5.2 million.

Those comparisons need care. The Census Bureau says changes to how it designed, processed and coded its race and ethnicity questions largely explain the rise in people reporting more than one race, so the bigger 2020 number is not simply growth. What the figures do show clearly is that millions of people in the United States claim Native ancestry and identity, and they live everywhere, not only on reservations. The Census Bureau also counted 123,404 American Indian and Alaska Native veterans of the US armed forces in 2024.

Many. When the Census Bureau looked closely at its American Community Survey for 2006 to 2010, 169 of the 381 non-English languages it codes were Native North American languages, and 372,095 people age 5 and older spoke one of them at home. Navajo was by far the largest, with 169,471 speakers. Yupik, Dakota, Apache, Keres and Cherokee followed, each with more than 11,000 speakers. A later release, based on survey data from 2009 to 2013, listed 150 Native North American languages spoken by more than 350,000 people.

The chart makes one thing plain: beyond Navajo, numbers fall fast. The ninth-largest language, Ojibwa, had 8,371 home speakers, and every language below it on the list had fewer. That is why so much energy now goes into passing them to children. Federal law supports some of that work. The Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, approved on December 14, 2006, amended the Native American Programs Act of 1974 to fund immersion programs. These include language nests, which offer instruction and child care in a Native language to at least 10 children under age 7 for an average of at least 500 hours a year, with classes for parents too, and language survival schools for school-age students.

Behind every number on that chart are families deciding which language their children will hear first, and teachers building lessons, books and recordings so the next generation can answer back.

The early campaigners asked for one day, and a single day still exists. The Native American Heritage Day Act of 2009, approved on June 26 that year, names the Friday after Thanksgiving as Native American Heritage Day. It encourages people and governments across the country to hold programs and to celebrate Native cultures, traditions and languages. It does not create a federal holiday.

A day works like a single beat: it marks a moment. A month gives room for something closer to rhythm, enough time to read, visit, listen, buy from an artist, or learn a few words of a language that belongs to the place you live. Heritage, though, is not something that switches on in November. The nations, languages and art in this article are part of ordinary life all year, and the month is simply a regular reminder to pay attention.

Proclamations like this one are the federal government’s yearly marker. The more lasting part happens in communities, and in how the rest of us choose to show up.

Respect here mostly means letting Native people speak for themselves and putting your attention, time and money where they can see it. A few practical ways to start:

• Learn whose land you are on. Native Land Digital, an Indigenous-led not-for-profit based in Canada, maps Indigenous territories and languages. It is clear that its maps are not official sources and calls them “a starting point for deeper conversations and engagement with Indigenous communities.” Use it to find a name, then go to that nation’s own website.

• Visit a Native museum or cultural center. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian was established by Congress in 1989 and opened on the National Mall on September 21, 2004. It also runs the George Gustav Heye Center in lower Manhattan, admission is free, and its collections hold more than 800,000 objects and photographs. The museum says it works “in partnership with Native and Indigenous communities in everything we do,” and it partners with tribal museums and cultural centers, so look for one near you too.

• Buy from Native artists, and know the law. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 is a truth-in-advertising law. It is illegal to sell art or crafts in a way that falsely suggests they are made by American Indians, or to use a tribe’s name on work no member or certified artisan of that tribe made. For a first violation, an individual can face up to a $250,000 fine, five years in prison, or both, and a business can be fined up to $1,000,000.

• Ask before you buy. The Indian Arts and Crafts Board suggests checking a seller’s policy or an event’s vendor rules, and, if there is none, getting written confirmation that the work was made by a tribal member or certified Indian artisan.

• Use the names nations use. Many nations have their own names for themselves, and their official websites are the best guide to how they want to be called.

Pick one small, concrete practice and do it this week. Here is a simple version that takes about an hour, spread over a few days:

1. Find the nation. Look up where you live on Native Land Digital as a starting point, and write down the name of one nation whose homelands include your town.

2. Read in their words. Find that nation’s official website and spend twenty minutes on its history, government or culture pages. Note one thing you did not know.

3. Learn one word. If the nation shares language resources publicly, learn one greeting or the original name of a nearby place, and say it out loud.

4. Spend with care. Buy one piece of work directly from a Native artist, or visit a Native-run museum or cultural center, and ask the questions above.

5. Book the next beat. Put a reminder in your calendar for a date in the spring to go back to that nation’s site and see what they are doing then.

The month lasts thirty days. The heritage it honors is far older, and it is still playing.

Ritual OS

A small practice,named at its source

Ritual OS matches you with short practices from the world's traditions, each one named with its tradition and where it comes from, and adapts them week by week. Do them alone or with the people close to you.

Practices are always credited to the tradition they come from.

Week by week

Kithmark

Keep the peopleyou learn from close

Kithmark gives each person in your life their own page, with a private record of how things stand in plain words, never scores, encrypted on your phone. The People map shows where everyone is, with their local time.

Free in the iPhone beta. Android coming soon.

Free iPhone beta

How our apps help

Ritual OS can help you turn a month of attention into a steady habit, with short practices that always name the tradition and place they come from. Kithmark helps you keep track of the people who widen your world, the friend who invited you to a community event or the artist whose work you bought, so you remember to follow up in plain words, privately, on your own phone.