Native Americans of North America

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3

Three Pivotal Wars

Three pivotal conflicts in the second half of the 1700s and in the first decades of the 1800s eroded the balance of power in North America. These conflicts were the French and Indian War, the American Revolution (1775-1783), and the War of 1812 (1812-1815). At the end of these conflicts, the survival of Native Americans became squarely linked to the British in the territory of Canada and to the Americans in the United States.

The first critical stage came during the French and Indian War between France and Britain. Unlike any of the previous conflicts between the French and British, this contest consumed far more resources and was fought literally around the world—in Europe, North America, Asia, and on the high seas. (It was known as the Seven Years’ War in Europe.) The conflict began in the Ohio River Valley backcountry with clashes between British settlers and French and Indian forces, and it left few regions of New France and British North America untouched.

From eastern Canada, down the St. Lawrence and Hudson rivers, into the Great Lakes and along the Ohio River, Native Americans and French forces clashed with British forces and their Indian allies. Framing the conflict as a struggle for the future control of North America, Britain and France deployed thousands of men, hundreds of ships, and many other resources. With mastery of the seas and a much larger fighting force on the ground, Britain and its Native American allies outlasted the more experienced French and Native American forces. At the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France ceded its North American empire to Britain, and New France was no more. At the end of the war, France effectively abandoned hundreds of thousands of Native American allies as well as thousands of Métis and French settlers.

After Britain defeated France, Algonquian leaders throughout the former region of New France demanded that British officials recognize and honor the rights and customs that they had forged in more than a century of relations with the French. If the British failed, for example, to supply Native Americans with gifts, particularly ammunition, it was more than insulting; it threatened their survival. Essentially trying to force their new British rulers to adopt the roles of their former French allies and to reassert Native American autonomy, Native American leaders, under such commanders as the Ottawa chief Pontiac, went to war against the British in the early 1760s.

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However, Britain did not want another war, and its leaders knew that they could not continue to fight Native Americans in the forests of former New France. British officials consequently began respecting Native American demands and even began protecting Native American lands from settlers. In the Royal Proclamation of 1763, Britain set aside land west of the Appalachian Mountains for Native Americans and prohibited the expansion of settlements there.

With this move, British rulers angered the 13 British colonies along the Atlantic Ocean, which coveted Native American lands in the interior. Long accustomed to subjugating Native Americans through trade and warfare, the colonists wanted to turn more Native American homelands into farms and slave plantations. Colonists protested British land policies and the taxes that Britain levied to repay its debts from the wars. The colonists soon began imagining a future without British rulers. Such imaginings became the spark for the American Revolution.

When the American Revolution began, many Native Americans initially tried to stay outside of what appeared to them to be an internal dispute between family members. However, many quickly realized the stakes of the struggle and aligned themselves with the British. Having struggled to get the British to recognize their rights, the Algonquians, for example, bitterly resisted the colonists’ efforts to become independent. So, too, did the Iroquois, who similarly understood that the colonists coveted Native American lands for development. Iroquois and Algonquian homelands became critical battlegrounds during the war, as many revolutionary generals invaded Native American territories. George Washington, George Rogers Clark, and John Sullivan all became renowned fighters of Indians. Sullivan and Clark inflicted terrible damage on Native American communities, burning crops, destroying towns, and displacing women, children, and the elderly.

After the colonists defeated the British in 1783, most Native Americans had little energy or resources left to fight the United States alone because much of the fighting had taken place on their homelands. The Iroquois, whose mighty confederacy had controlled so many lands, now became increasingly disunited. They granted enormous land cessions to the new republic, which became their primary form of appeasement.

The Algonquians still fought the Americans in continuous wars throughout the 1790s and into the 1800s, culminating in the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. As tens of thousands of settlers rushed west after the American Revolution, the Shawnee, Fox, and other Algonquian groups united into powerful confederacies. With British support, the vastly outnumbered Native Americans repelled several U.S. invasions. When Britain negotiated peace with the United States in 1815 and Spain later transferred Florida to the United States, Native Americans east of the Mississippi no longer had any European powers to whom to turn. The young American nation now claimed, by right of conquest and cession, much of the former lands of Spain, France, and Britain. How to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans throughout these regions now preoccupied the highest levels of U.S. government.

F

Removal Trends, 1815 to 1870

For Native Americans, the century following the independence of the United States brought even greater changes than the previous century of war. No Native American, European, or U.S. leader could have predicted that in the century following independence, the United States would control its own empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The United States was founded as a land of liberty, where individuals had inherent rights and could participate in a democracy. Such rights, however, did not extend to all of the nation’s peoples, including Native Americans, who were not viewed by the U.S. government as citizens, and often not even as human beings.

Early leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson, generally saw Native Americans in two contrasting ways. Native Americans could either assimilate and choose to live within the United States like “civilized” Americans or the government would remove them to the recently established Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. There was essentially no option for Native Americans to continue to live in their homelands as distinct peoples. As the United States expanded, the opportunities for Native Americans to live autonomous and independent lives declined ever further.

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1

United States

In the Northeast, after military resistance was no longer feasible, many Native Americans found alternative ways of surviving. Many incorporated Christian teachings into their own cultures and began adapting to the new economic realities of American life by becoming farmers, hunters, or traders. Among the Seneca of the Iroquois Confederacy, religious leaders such as Handsome Lake fused Iroquois and Christian spiritual values and called upon their followers to adopt aspects of American economic practices and gender roles. Handsome Lake, for example, instructed Seneca men to farm, which was traditionally a women’s activity, and to allow missionaries among them. Such adaptation enabled the Seneca and other Iroquois groups to survive in New York and eastern Canada, although they continued, often clandestinely, many traditional political, religious, and social practices.

Although some Native Americans made efforts to assimilate to various degrees, other Native Americans resisted those attempts, and American settlers increasingly pressured the U.S. government to drive Native Americans from their lands. Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, when the United States purchased a vast region west of the Mississippi from France, President Thomas Jefferson suddenly had a huge area of land on which to push Native Americans. Moving Native Americans west became the primary goal of the U.S. government for the next two generations. In 1824 the Bureau of Indian Affairs was established within the Department of War to oversee relations with Native Americans, and federal Indian agents were appointed to deal with tribes. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the removal of eastern tribes to lands west of the Mississippi.

Indian removal became a death knell for both native and nonnative peoples committed to peaceful coexistence. In regions such as the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes where Native Americans and Europeans had lived together for generations, U.S. policies now called for Indian families to leave their homelands. When nations such as the Sac (Sauk) under Black Hawk resisted in the 1830s, the U.S. Army fought them to defeat.

When the state of Georgia tried to take Cherokee lands, the Cherokee insisted that the state had no jurisdiction over its lands because the Cherokee, like the United States, was a nation and thus not subject to state authority. In the 1830s the Supreme Court of the United States clarified the legal status of Native Americans in a series of cases. In one ruling, Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Native Americans were members of distinct, sovereign nations within the United States who did not fall under state authority but solely under the jurisdiction of the federal government. The Constitution of the United States, Marshall reasoned, always considered Native Americans as nations, and the Congress of the United States had related with them accordingly through treaties—the “supreme law of the land.” Such landmark rulings institutionalized relations between Native Americans and the U.S. government and created the “government-to-government” framework that remains the backbone of federal Indian law. (Under that framework, the U.S. government recognizes Native American tribes as sovereign nations and negotiates with them as one government to another.) Unfortunately for the Cherokee and other Native Americans supposedly protected by treaties, the federal government did not enforce the treaties and increasingly deprived them of their legal and constitutional rights.

President Jackson even went so far as to ignore Marshall’s rulings, in direct violation of the Constitution, which states that the Supreme Court can override presidential and congressional power. He refused to use federal power to prevent states from removing Native Americans from their lands. The federal government then used the army to remove thousands of Cherokee, who were marched at gunpoint about 1,285 km (about 800 mi) from Georgia to the Indian Territory during 1838 and 1839 along what became known as the Trail of Tears. Thousands died along the way due to malnutrition, disease, and violence.

The lands west of the Mississippi were not, however, the empty lands that U.S. policymakers believed them to be. Powerful Native American nations, such as the Comanche, Pawnee, Kiowa, and Lakota Sioux, controlled much of the Northern and Southern Plains. Recently removed Native Americans from the East often had little in common with these Plains peoples, and conflicts sometimes ensued. Some eastern groups, such as the Delaware (Lenni Lenape), became intermediaries in the West, serving as guides, traders, and translators for white trappers and explorers. By the mid-19th century, after the United States had won the Mexican War (1846-1848) and acquired the northern half of Mexico, few Native Americans in North America outside of British Canada could remain independent of U.S. control. The United States now claimed much of the continent and was no longer content with driving Native Americans west to Indian Territory.

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2

British Canada

In British Canada, indigenous peoples faced different challenges. After the War of 1812, Britain still claimed Canada, and Indians continued to interact with British officials, settlers, and traders, as well as the French who remained. During the 1800s Indians such as the Cree continued to exchange furs with British traders and trading companies, including the Hudson’s Bay Company in western and northern regions. In eastern Canada, Indians such as the Mi’kmaq (Micmac) and Iroquois faced increasing pressures for their land from British settlers. This pressure came especially from Loyalists, colonists who had supported Britain in the American Revolution and then flocked by the tens of thousands north to British Canada.

However, British land policies mandated that Indians could only cede their lands to the British government. So settlers pressured British officials to remove Indians from the fertile farmlands in southern Ontario and Québec and to create land reserves for Indians away from European settlements. Pressures for removal in Canada paled in comparison to those in the United States, but important treaties, including an 1850 agreement with the Ojibwa, instituted important land cessions and provisions. These treaties generally stated that the government would provide annual payments to Indians in return for Indian land. The government then moved the Indians onto land reserves. These treaties formalized legal relations between Indians and the British government. After Canada achieved self-government in 1867, however, relations between the new government and Indians would become, as in the United States, severely tested.

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Wars and Treaties, 1850s to 1900s

The process of removal effectively emptied much of eastern North America of Native Americans, especially in the Deep South and Midwest. The American Civil War (1861-1865) fundamentally transformed U.S. society and accelerated its expansion into Native American homelands. American industry and technologies, for example, dramatically increased after the war, and much of the continent became linked through commerce and railroads. As in the first half of the century, Native Americans bitterly resisted such expansion, often fighting against overwhelming odds. By the end of the century, however, no region of the West remained outside of the U.S. government and economy, and Native Americans were confined to newly created reservations.

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