They may also include any Americans whose origins lie in any of the indigenous peoples of North or South America. Native Hawaiians , which it tabulates separately.
The European colonization of the Americas from resulted in a precipitous decline in the size of the Native American population because of newly introduced diseases , including weaponized diseases and biological warfare by colonizers, [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] wars , ethnic cleansing , and enslavement.
Numerous scholars have classified elements of the colonization process as comprising genocide against Native Americans. As part of a policy of settler colonialism , European settlers continued to wage war and perpetrated massacres against Native American peoples, removed them from their ancestral lands , and subjected them to one-sided government treaties and discriminatory government policies.
Into the 20th century, these policies focused on forced assimilation. When the United States was established in , Native American tribes were considered semi-independent nations, because they generally lived in communities which were separate from communities of white settlers. The federal government signed treaties at a government-to-government level until the Indian Appropriations Act of ended recognition of independent Native nations, and started treating them as "domestic dependent nations" subject to applicable federal laws.
This law did preserve rights and privileges, including a large degree of tribal sovereignty. For this reason, many Native American reservations are still independent of state law and the actions of tribal citizens on these reservations are subject only to tribal courts and federal law. This emptied the "Indians not taxed" category established by the United States Constitution , allowed Natives to vote in elections, and extended the Fourteenth Amendment protections granted to people "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
