Native American civil rights criticize the idea of "American progress" and to express pride and faith in the identities of their own cultures. Charles Eastman, a Mdewakanton and Wahpeton Sioux and physician, published books and articles in English for American people to show that it is not savage that Native people celebrate what Mourning Dove called the "ancient way". In 1902, Gertrude Bonnin told the "Atlantic Monthly" that the traditions of her tribe, the Yankton Dakota Sioux, were not only equal to European Americans, but that their values were superior. In 1903, Charles Eastman, a Santee Dakotan and Native representative, was requested by Theodore
Native American slave ownership many Native American women bought African men but, unknown to the European sellers, the women freed and married the men into their tribe. When African men married or had children by a Native American woman, their children were born free, because the mother was free (according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrum, which the colonists incorporated into law.) In the 1790s, Benjamin Hawkins was assigned as the US agent to the southeastern tribes. He encouraged the major Southeast tribes to adopt chattel slavery in order to have labor for plantations and large-scale agricultural production, as part of their assimilation