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In the 2020 United States census, some 3.7 million people – about 1 percent of the population- identified as American Indian or Alaska Native alone. Including those who also reported another race, the figure reaches 9.7 million, or nearly 3 percent.

Dr Crystal Cavalier-Keck, a member of the Occaneechi Band tribe of the Saponi Nation in North Carolina, traces her ancestry to one of the first Indigenous communities to encounter English colonisers arriving to settle the land as their own.

A map of North and South Carolina and Georgia, as engraved by the English cartographer Thomas Kitchin, 1718-1784 [Library of Congress]

She says the landscape around her still speaks Indigenous languages. The Haw River is named after the Sissipahaw people, and Hyco Creek means “turkey” in her tribe’s language. Yet while those names endure on maps, Cavalier-Keck says her people are still fighting for federal recognition, despite centuries of documented history and acknowledgement by the state of North Carolina.

“The Trail of Tears that happened on the East Coast that sent tribes west … we [her tribe] escaped that by moving to swamps and living in different areas where most of the colonists didn’t live,” Cavalier-Keck told Al Jazeera.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced tens of thousands of Native people from their homelands to territory west of the Mississippi, in present-day Oklahoma, where many were confined to reservations.

Her tribe currently has about 2,000 enrolled members, and according to Cavalier-Keck, many more have left the area.

Courtesy: The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation

“We have so many more people in the community who migrated away, who just left North Carolina because it was so racial and so hostile. It’s just the fact that assimilation and acculturation was a lot easier than claiming your Indigenous heritage. They chose to go that route,” she says.

Through forced assimilation, the breaking up of communities, forced conversions and the imposition of English, the impact on Indigenous languages has spanned generations.

“It’s only in the last 10 years that I’ve truly understood what losing our language means,” she says. “I’m always trying to learn about our people, but so little has been passed down.”

She says elders from other tribes encouraged her to reclaim what remains of her ancestral language.

“The land remembers. The trees and the rocks are witnesses to the violence that happened here,” she says. “But we’ve lost the language that helped us reconnect with the land, the trees and the water.”

The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation share a struggle faced by many Indigenous communities across the US. Over the past 250 years, languages have steadily eroded, with some disappearing altogether. An estimated 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken across 50 to 60 language families. Today, according to the US Census Bureau’s 2017-2021 American Community Survey, only five are spoken by more than a few thousand people. These include: