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Before Europeans discovered America's shores, Native Americans built societies out of the rugged beauty of this continent. They crafted tribes, federations, customs, families. They cultivated and hunted on the land. They followed their own religion that tied them to the land and to one another. And then the white men came. By the twentieth century, Native Americans -- once stewards of an entire continent -- were left with less than five percent of the nation's land. Since the arrival of white settlers, only 6% of the Native American population remained. Tribes were gathered from north, south, east, and west, and herded to reservations in the American west. Their culture was destroyed and their customs faded from even their own memory. These are the people -- their culture lost, their tribes decimated, their heritage thrown to the wind -- that Jeremiah seems to be describing in the first part of today's reading.
