The Native American peoples of the United States are descendants of the original inhabitants of the American continent. The 1980 Census counted 1,418,195 Indian persons within the American population including Eskimos and Aleuts, and it is thought that more than half of this number lives in towns or cities, though a government estimate of 1987 reported that about 861, 000 Native Americans live on or adjacent to Indian reservations. This suggests that the rural reservation remains an important focus for Indian identity.

Non-Indians, particularly Europeans and White Americans, have consistently failed to appreciate the culture and specific identities of Native Americans, which has led to a whole history of confusion, myths, stereotypes, and misunderstanding which has been particularly destructive on the Native American side since the power of definition has historically been overwhelmingly white on red. An example of this confusion among whites is the inability of specialists and the general public to set aside their own understanding of what constitutes a political and governmental unit or structure and realize that Native American structures are not the product of economic individualism and liberal representative democracy. The most characteristic form of political discussion amongst Native Americans tries to reach a consensus; the idea of crushing rival and opposing viewpoints by simple majority votes is alien.

In order to understand the culture and organizational structures that characterize Native American communities in the contemporary United States, one must be alert to diversity. Today there are more than 170 American Indian political and social formations variously describing themselves as nations, tribes, bands, peoples, and ethnic groups. This diversity ranges from large groupings such as the Navajos of Arizona and New Mexico who number more than 160,000, to communities of less than 100 like the Chumash of California and the Modocs of Oklahoma. The kind of mixture of Indian autonomy and adaptation to mainstream American culture that many groups have negotiated is exemplified by the eight hundred Mohawks who were living in 1970 in the North Gowanus Section of Brooklyn, New York. This community has existed since the 1920's when they came to New York to work as high steel workers on bridges and skyscrapers like Rockefeller Center in New York City. Their sense of community was defined by residence in a distinct neighborhood, served by a Presbyterian church whose minister preached in the Mohawk language. However, these 'jockeys of the clouds' do not regard Brooklyn as their real home. Most remain Catholic, send their children to be educated on their home reservation of Caughnawaga in Quebec and spend a long annual summer vacation there. Most intend to retire to the reservation and would expect to be buried there.

Another rich source of misunderstanding between Indian and White Anglo-Saxon cultural analysis is the different attitude of most Native Americans to such concepts as Nature, the environment, and social values, particularly among Indians of traditional views, but also among the generation of the 1960's who combined political militancy with ancient Indian ideas of living in harmony with the natural and animal world, as they sought to challenge the often ruthless and unbalanced ideology of material progress espoused by mainstream American society. In contrast to European and Anglo-American ideas that the world is to be understood in terms of causal connections and linear chronology, traditional Native American philosophy stresses the idea of continuity and the continuous renewal, by each new generation, of certain values that cannot be made redundant by myths of technological change and material amelioration. The fact that Native Americans have clung to a distinctive philosophy and cultural identity despite continuous attacks from a federal policy that sought for example to turn the nomadic hunters of the Plains culture with its extended family structures into nuclear-family based small farmers or more recent plans to integrate Native Americans through urbanization (that classic, deeply flawed process of modernization and Americanization that has been particularly unsuccessful in the case of Indians whose rate of unemployment in the cities is chronic as is the level of alcoholism) suggests that this distinctive identity is not some set of colorful aboriginal survivals but an organic world view, necessary for survival. It may be that cultural difference is exactly what it means; a trait or concept that cannot be assimilated into the dominant Western cultural system. The usual Western way of coping with some concept or ritual that seems 'other' or strange is to search for an equivalent that will familiarize and anaesthetize the shock that there are other ways to exist and interact. There may not be an equivalent and this is often the case when traditional Native American philosophies and the lifestyles that they generate, are set alongside their Anglo counterparts.

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