From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is The Story on Sunday.
I'm Manveen Rana.
This weekend on the podcast and across the Times, we’re marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence.
Yesterday, we heard how modern America was forged through revolution and war.
But for the Native Americans, that history reads differently.
Dovard Madeira Sr. is 80 years old and he lives on the Spokane reservation.
He told me that because of the shame that he was given and that he grew up with,
when he was a kid he'd go to the cinema
and he'd watch cowboys and Indians films and he'd cheer for the cavalry.
For centuries, their cultures have been pushed to the margins.
Children taken from their families, languages banned, and traditions forced underground.
As I was reporting the story and I was speaking to non-Native Americans,
people would say things like, "Oh, are they still here?"
The Sunday Times Senior US Correspondent Louise Callaghan has been to visit a family who are striving to change that.
I spent some time with the Madeira family
who are raising their children in their culture, with their ceremonies, with their language.
All of that was pretty much illegal until 1978.
But that revival has exposed a deeply contested question.
After centuries of displacement, assimilation, and intermarriage,
who actually gets to call themselves Native American and how should that be determined?