Margaret Verble's novel, Stealing, centers around Kit, a young girl who is part Cherokee. Set in the 1950s, she is removed from her home and sent to a Christian boarding school where a significant portion of the students are Native American. Not only are the indigenous children systematically stripped of their heritage but Kit observes that they are treated as generic "Indians," with no awareness that they come from different nations with differing cultures—an ignorance shared by many people, even today.

Thinking of the pre-Columbian population of North America as a single group is akin to lumping all Europeans into one bucket despite Europe's many and varied histories, languages and geographical regions—an excessively broad term that ignores each group's unique culture. According to The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the diversity was truly astonishing. There were monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, theocracies, democracies and socialist ...