Kwe,

I write here as an Indigenous person myself (Anishinabe/Mi'gmaw) and in a Eastern Canadian perspective.

I must say that Pan-Indigeneity exists in the European view since the contact. Europeans saw all Indigenous peoples of America as the same group. So you have two kinds of PanIndigeneity in Canada: one Indigenous and one European.

Firstly, before the arrival of the Europeans, we had many identities, going from the individual, to the clan, the band, and what we could (debatably) a nation. This nation was based on a common language, even though we could often understand our neighbours, because of the language continuum. You can take the Mi'gmaq as an example for that, having a Grand Council of the Mi'gmaq. But we also had confederations. The Mi'gmaq were eventualy part of the Wabanagi Confederacy, a group of Eastern Algonquian speaking peoples. The group was mainly formed as an opposition to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). That is an exemple between two groups in Eastern North America, but those groups had influence in the plains, along the coast, and in the North as well. So, we cared about other regions, but not as far as Central America. Furthermore, Algonquian peoples recognize there shared ancestry, and our family goes from the Rockies to the Atlantic (with some forgotten groups farther).

There is also another aspect of our precolinial societies that is importnat here: adoption. We used (and still do to a lesser degree) to adopt and integrate individuals our groups from other tribes and nations. You could have an Iroquois integrating an Abenaki band and becoming, themself, Abenaki. We did it with some Europeans too. So, we did not necesseraly had a strong and exclusive line between our identities.

So, after thousands of years of war between the two groups, how can we have the same label today and shared organizations ? And why do we have Pan-American organizations ?

The idea of Pan-Indigeneity began (in Northeastern America) in the 18th Century. It was in resistance against the British. It culminated with Pontiac's War. Some leaders, including spiritual leaders, united nearly 20 nations together with a strong sense of a shared Indigenous identity, even though there were of differnet cultures or even enemies before. The war agaisnt the British was lost, but the idea never disappeared. In the Prairies, the Métis, the Crees and the Blackfoot united against the British/Canadians in the 19th Century. More recently, you have grassroots mouvements like the American Indian Movement and Idle No More. Today, oral tradition from a lot of nations put emphasis on PanIndigeneity, or even on shared humanity. You can see it with the Medicine Wheel, which has four colours, which some intepret as the four races in one circle (so you have a red race). Some talk about the unity of all peoples of Turtle Island (North America) or between the Eagle and the Condor (North and South America).

Concurrently, the PanIndian perspective of the French and British was legislated. In the Treaty of Paris of 1763, the King of the UK inherited the treaties that the King of France made with the Indians and took the role of Father to the Indians. In the Quebec Act (1774), Indians were reserved some territories. Canada is the legal successor of the British in its claimed territory. As such, those treaties and acts are also Canadian. This idea of PanIndianness was enshrined in the Indian Act of 1876 (although with the exception of the Inuit, too far way, and the Métis). This law is still in use today, albeit amended since. It groups nearly all Indigenous peoples under the label Indian. We were the same under the law. Band Chiefs created organizations in the 20th Century. Band Chiefs being chiefs of reserves, European creations, there PanIndigeneity was more European, in my view, than Indigenous. You already had crossreserves organizations in late 19th Century. Today, the Assembly of First Nations is viewed as a puppet of the Canadian government by many Indigenous people. As for an International approach, being based on the Indian Act and the reserves, those Europeanized groups are more exclusive.

In conclusion, I would say that Indigenous cross-tribal organizations that are spiritual, political, cultural and economical, exist since before the Europeans, but included more and more Indigenous peoples with the resistance against colonization. As for Europeanized cross-tribal organizations, they exist since around the Indian Act (as for Canada), and were mainly political.

It didn't happen all at once. Not all indigenous peoples in North America encountered Europeans at the same time and the nature of that contact was not uniform across the continent. While the Powhatans and Wampanoags traded directly across the frontier with European colonists a short distance away, peoples like the Ojibwas or the Theoloël encountered either individual traders far removed from European colonies or received knowledge about the colonists second-hand. Most indigenous peoples were more concerned with interactions with other indigenous peoples until Euro-American colonists arrived within close proximity to them to lay claim to their lands.

The first cross-tribal alliances occurred very quickly, discounting those alliances that predated colonization, like the Haudenoshaunee (Iroquois). The First Anglo-Indian War in 1676, a.k.a. King Philip's War, saw the Algonquian tribes of New England ally together to push back against the colonies at Massachusetts and Maine. The Yamasee War in 1715 saw an alliance of tribes spring up in Carolina in response to paranoia over the English potentially enslaving them to pay off the enormous debts they had acquired.

A pan-Indian identity typically emerged as a direct response to settler colonialism. The first instance of indigenous peoples promoting a language of racial solidarity among indigenous groups was during the Natchez Revolt in 1729. Nancy Shoemaker identifies this as the moment when indigenous peoples in North America began to identify themselves as "red" in contrast to "white" Europeans or enslaved "black" people. The Natchez Revolt occurred as a result of aggressive French incursions onto sacred Theoloël (a.k.a. Natchez) land to use it for tobacco farming. The Theoloël called for allies against the French and used the idea of the "redness" of non-French persons as a rallying cry against settler colonialism.

The Natchez Revolt failed disastrously, however, because not all Native peoples bought into this rhetoric. The Choctaws were closely allied to the French but their lands were not in any perceived danger of being claimed by them. They received guns and supplies from the French and included them within their understandings of alliance and fictive kinship. The French offered a sizable bounty for the Choctaw to attack and destroy the Theoloël, and they proceeded to do exactly this despite Theoloël appealing to their sense of "redness."

The Theoloël were scattered far and wide after the failed revolt, landing in places as far from their home along the southern Mississippi River as the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio. Their concept of redness found a home among the Native peoples of Ohio, especially the Lenni Lenapes (Delawares). The idea germinated for a while until a new wave of settler colonialism initiated after the Seven Years War ended in North America in 1760. Anglo-American colonists had begun pushing into western Pennsylvania and Ohio, initiating a brutal stage of frontier warfare. The violence of this conflict helped to highlight the difference between Natives and Euro-Americans. Colonists were already painting all Natives with the same brush, but Native leaders and prophets in the Trans-Appalachian west began to do the same at this time. A Lenni Lenape prophet named Neolin sparked a major offensive against the British colonists and laid siege to Fort Pitt in 1760, rallying an alliance of nearby tribes with a message about Indian identity.

Going forward, the tribes and peoples in the interior began to quickly categorize themselves as "Indian" or "red," but this always occured when directly threatened by and influx of colonists or the American military. Their sense of indigeneity was innately oppositional to white settler colonialism and to the white settler colony state: the USA.

Sources:

• Gregory Dowd, War Under Heaven

• George E. Milne, Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscape of Race in French Louisiana

• Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin