Native Americans of North America

G

1

Influx of White Settlers

As the United States acquired millions of acres of fertile farmland along the Pacific Coast and in the Great Plains and the Southwest, Native Americans became increasingly displaced and dispossessed. Mining, forestry, and other extractive industries depleted resources on which Native Americans depended. In California, white settlers dispossessed Native Americans from both valley and mountain territories. The Gold Rush of 1849 devastated the Miwok, Maidu, Pomo, and other Native Americans in northern California, who witnessed the invasion of hundreds of thousands of non-Indians. In order to survive, many Native Americans participated in mining enterprises as domestics, laborers, and miners. White violence against Native Americans in California quickly created bitter relations. White men routinely raped Indian women, and when Native Americans retaliated, whites escalated the violence. California went from being one of the most populous regions of Native America to being one of the least populous, as violence, disease, and impoverishment reduced California’s Indian population from nearly 250,000 in 1700 to less than 5,000 by 1900.

White migrants who rushed to California and the Oregon Territory also came into conflict with Native Americans as they traveled across the country. Westward pioneer routes such as the Oregon and Overland trails followed Native American trails and bisected many Native American hunting, grazing, and gathering territories. Whites often killed food supplies such as buffalo and elk and moved thousands of cattle, sheep, and horses along grasslands and waterways on which Native Americans depended. The Pawnee in Nebraska, for example, began taxing white migrants for passage through Pawnee lands and for consuming Pawnee resources. Pawnee taxes became a form of compensation for lost property.

Confident that their occupation of Native American lands was divinely ordained—a 19th-century ideology known as Manifest Destiny—white settlers increasingly fought the Pawnee and other Native Americans for their land and resources. The fighting compelled the federal government to use the U.S. Army to ensure white security. In the mid-19th century the army became one of the primary instruments of federal Indian policy.

Since Native Americans were unwilling to leave their homelands, the government developed new policies for resolving conflicts between white settlers and Native Americans. Whereas early 19th-century treaties aimed primarily at removing Native Americans from their lands in the East, in the West Army officials negotiated so-called peace treaties that attempted to ensure peaceful relations between Native Americans and whites by creating bounded Native American territories called reservations from which white settlers were prohibited. As in the first part of the century, however, the government repeatedly dishonored and violated these agreements. From Minnesota to Arizona, Native Americans committed to treaties they believed would ensure their survival and protection. When whites violated these agreements, Native Americans retaliated.

---

---

G

2

Indian Wars

The western conflicts in the United States between Native Americans and whites from 1850 to 1880 are known as the Indian Wars, and, like all wars, originated from a series of betrayals, attacks, and broken promises. The most extensive conflicts generally included the most powerful and populous Native American nations: the Comanche and Kiowa, among others, in the Southern Plains; the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshone, and Blackfeet, among others, in the Northern Plains; the Apache and Navajo, among others, in the Southwest; the Ute, Shoshone, Bannock, and Paiute in the Great Basin; and the Nez Perce, Spokane, and Yakama in the Northwest. These and other Native American nations resisted white expansion and fought brutal campaigns for their survival. Mescalero and Chiricahua Apache, for example, waged guerrilla wars throughout New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico for more than a generation. Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho leaders united to drive non-Indians out of their grazing and hunting lands. Many Native American leaders, such as Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph, migrated or tried to migrate to Canada to escape U.S. settlers and soldiers.

In all these conflicts, Native American men and women defended not only lands and resources but also their ways of life. Most Native Americans remained deeply and spiritually attached to their homelands, and seeing them converted to white ranches or farms threatened their deepest convictions. Warfare was also culturally sanctioned and respected among most Native Americans. Men honored their families and communities by defending them, and women helped men prepare for battle. The military defeat of so many Native American nations and their subsequent confinement to reservations became, then, more than military, political, or economic defeats; they represented fundamental threats to the fabric of Native American life. And, as they had for countless generations, Native Americans struggled to adapt to their changing and often hostile new environments.

Initially, the U.S. government meant reservations to be protected enclaves, territories where Native Americans could live away from the destructive influences of white settlers. At the treaties of Medicine Lodge (1867) and Fort Laramie (1868), for example, the U.S. government negotiated enormous land cessions with Northern and Southern Plains peoples, respectively. In an attempt to clear a large central corridor through the continent, the government recognized extensive Comanche and Sioux land claims and created large reservations for these powerful Plains peoples. Like early Navajo and Ute treaty lands, these reservations were vast and included millions of acres, and Native American leaders such as Red Cloud believed that their fights with the U.S. Army were now over.

To Native Americans’ misfortune, however, white settlers and prospectors continued to demand Indian lands, even in federally protected reservations. After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in the 1870s, miners rushed into the Great Sioux Reservation while the federal government stood idly by. Enraged Sioux leaders such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull decided to leave the reservation altogether and moved onto the Plains. There they defeated U.S. Cavalry forces under George Armstrong Custer in the summer of 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Stunned at their defeat, U.S. Army leaders began a relentless campaign to subjugate the Sioux and to confine them on smaller reservations in South Dakota. Stationing military forces within reservation lands, the army continued to harass Sioux families. In 1890 U.S. Cavalry forces exacted revenge for Custer’s defeat at Wounded Knee, killing more than 300 Sioux men, women, and children, the great majority of whom were unarmed bystanders.

G

3

New Canadian Government

In the last decades of the 19th century, the new Canadian government began establishing its dominance over native peoples. From its creation in 1867, Canada faced regional and ethnic divisions, and indigenous peoples often found themselves in the middle of such divides. One group of indigenous people, the French-speaking Métis, struggled with the Canadian government to protect the land on which they lived, known as the Red River settlement. It was part of Rupert’s Land, a territory that had been chartered to the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1670. When the HBC prepared to sell Rupert’s Land to the Canadian government in 1869, the Métis bitterly resisted for fear of losing their land rights. Under the astute leadership of Louis Riel, Métis groups along the Red River in 1870 forced the Canadian government to recognize their rights to the Red River settlement and to allow for the admission of a new western province, Manitoba, that included it. Other indigenous peoples, however, were less successful in getting their rights and territories recognized, and the new Canadian government devised new, undemocratic methods for dealing with its so-called Indian problem.

In the 1870s the Canadian government began negotiating a series of treaties with Indians, known as the numbered treaties. With these treaties, the Canadian government gained title to many Indian lands west of Ontario. In return the Indians received land reserves, compensation, and federal assistance such as schools, farming tools, livestock, and seed. The Canadian government had witnessed the Indian Wars in the United States and wanted to avoid similar fighting in Canada. The government thus negotiated these treaties before large numbers of settlers moved west. The treaties, however, still allowed the Canadian government to exert control over many aspects of Indian life.

This control was increased in 1876 when the Canadian Parliament passed the Indian Act. As in the United States, the Canadian government declared that Indians were under the jurisdiction of the federal government and that the federal government alone had the authority to determine the rights, conditions, and so-called status of Indians. The act defined who was an Indian, using a person’s lifestyle and heritage as the primary criteria. The government had complete discretion over who was designated an Indian. For example, the act targeted Indian men and women differently. Indian men and their wives (irrespective of their race) were considered Indian, while Indian women who married non-Indian men were no longer considered Indian. The Indian Act gave the Canadian government the legal structures for determining Indian affairs and for regulating Indian individuals and communities. The Indian Act and the numbered treaties established an elaborate structure of federal control over Indians.

H

Coercive Assimilation, 1900s to 1960s

Throughout both their histories, the U.S. and Canadian governments have used their dealings with Native Americans to increase federal power. During removal and the Indian Wars, the U.S. government, especially the federal army, grew not only in manpower but also in bureaucracy. Provisioning federal troops, supplying them, and establishing the governing agencies for Native Americans increased the size and power of the national government. Similarly in Canada, the Indian Act and the numbered treaties created large governing agencies. Such bureaucracies—known eventually in the United States as the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and as the Department of Indian Affairs (later the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, or DIAND) in Canada—exerted powerful influences over the everyday lives of Native Americans, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Beginning mainly in the 1880s in the United States and shortly thereafter in Canada, these government agencies instituted programs that aimed to reconfigure the fabric of Native American life. Known as the assimilation campaigns, these policies attempted to transform Native Americans into “citizens” by stripping them of their lands, cultures, languages, religions, and other markers of their ethnic identity. Assimilation brought continued challenges to Native Americans, many of whom had only recently been confined to reservations and reserves.

For many Native Americans, such cultural attacks were as painful and difficult as the previous generations of war. Native American communities lost their children, who were sent to U.S. boarding schools and Canadian residential schools where families were prohibited from visiting and children were punished for speaking their languages. Some Native American religious rituals, such as the Ghost Dance and Sun Dance, were outlawed. Native American men were forced to abandon previous forms of economic subsistence, such as buffalo hunting, for the distant hope of becoming farmers. Many communities were resettled onto reservation lands in the least desirable and fertile parts of their former territories. Everywhere, government control and surveillance of Native American life increased.

The bitter irony of so many of these coercive policies was that those who developed them believed they were acting in the best interests of Native Americans. Many of America’s leading religious leaders and progressive reformers helped lead this assault to “kill the Indian, but save the man.” Senator Henry Dawes, for example, sincerely believed that he was helping Native Americans when he sponsored the Dawes Severalty Act, or the General Allotment Act of 1887. That act divided Native American reservations, which were owned communally, into separate plots of land owned by individual tribal members. Supporters thought the act would “civilize” Native Americans by making them ranchers and farmers and instill individualism.

But the results were disastrous. Allotting land to individuals who could sell it, the Dawes Act effectively continued the process of taking away Native American land by making remaining reservation lands available to white settlement and corporate development. Tens of millions of acres of reservation lands passed into the hands of non-Native Americans. Large reservations, such as the Ute and Blackfeet reservations that in 1880 were sizable portions of Colorado and Montana, became by 1900 shadows of their former selves.

Surviving the cultural, economic, and religious assaults of assimilation taxed many Native American communities. Many groups successfully navigated these challenges by reshaping government policies to meet tribal needs. The Northern Arapaho in Wyoming, for example, molded their existing age-based political structures to include new reservation leadership positions. The Crow in Montana similarly fought to have Crow leaders in charge of key reservation political positions; Robert Yellowtail, for example, became in 1934 the first Crow superintendent, the leading political officer on the reservation.

Such instances of successful political adaptation, however, by no means typified these early decades of reservation life. Reservations in the United States and reserves in Canada became notoriously corrupt. Government officials sometimes sold food intended for starving Native American families to outsiders or withheld it to punish recalcitrant individuals. Reservation superintendents often rewarded their friends and punished their enemies. Such routine abuses of power permeated all levels of federal Indian policy in both countries, and Native Americans developed a deep distrust and resentment towards these authoritarian regimes and policies.

By the 1920s most U.S. reservations remained impoverished and ruled by non-Native Americans. While many Native American students had learned English and some had become lawyers, doctors, and teachers, the campaign of assimilation had failed to erode the fabric of Native American life. On the contrary, Native American communities continued to live according to traditional values and practiced the customs they deemed most important. They resisted assimilation by keeping their languages and cultures alive and used the educational systems intended to destroy their culture to better their circumstances. They instilled in their children the seeds of self-determination and sovereignty. They also created pan-Indian political networks and religions, such as the Native American Church.

Recognizing its failure, the U.S. government slowly abandoned its assimilation policies and granted universal citizenship to Native Americans in 1924. It also instituted dramatic political reforms in the 1930s under BIA Commissioner John Collier. Known as the Indian New Deal, these reforms included several landmark policies, particularly the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. This act attempted to reverse the destructive effects of assimilation by providing greater control to Native Americans over the political, economic, and social policies that affected their lives. Not all Native Americans accepted Collier’s reforms, particularly the Navajo nation, but many benefited from the federal government’s attempts to undo generations of neglect and discrimination.

Canadian Indian affairs followed similar assimilation designs. Indian dances and ceremonies, such as the potlatch of the Northwest Coast peoples, were outlawed. Indian movements were heavily policed through a notorious pass system in which individuals had to have a pass to leave their reserves. As in the United States, Canadian officials used the idea that Indians needed to be helped and protected to justify their discrimination, as land and economic and political control remained firmly in the hands of nonnative peoples. Canada did not extend voting rights to northern Inuit peoples until the 1950s and to Status Indians (Indians who are officially registered by the federal government) until 1960. However, native peoples in Canada resisted assimilation in similar ways to Indians in the United States. They created national political leagues and new forms of cultural expression in art, literature, and education.

I

Self-Determination, 1960s to Present

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Native Americans resisted assimilation in many ways. Many groups molded their economies and cultures to their changing environments, while others adopted new ways for new situations. As Native Americans both resisted and adapted to the changes in their lives, they began to forge modern nations within the borders of the United States and Canada. They established unique forms of self-government unlike any other North American peoples.

After World War II (1939-1945), subsequent government administrations halted Collier’s reforms and returned to assimilation goals. From 1950 to the 1970s, during what is known as the Termination Period, federal Indian policy attempted to terminate the federal recognition of Indian tribes in order to end federal responsibility for them. The government also encouraged Native Americans to relocate from reservations to cities in order to facilitate their assimilation. Known as the Employment Assistance Program or the Voluntary Relocation Program, it offered one-way bus tickets and temporary low-cost housing for Native Americans who agreed to move to urban areas.

More than 100,000 Native Americans relocated to U.S cities, but they did not disappear. They developed and maintained their Native American identities within cities. Large urban Indian communities developed in many U.S. cities, particularly in Los Angeles and Oakland, California; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; and Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Canada a similar migration took place as indigenous peoples moved to urban areas mostly beginning in the 1970s. Indigenous populations grew in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Edmonton, Alberta; Vancouver, British Columbia; Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; and Toronto, Ontario.

In these cities, Native Americans intermixed and formed new political associations. The American Indian Movement (AIM) developed amidst such conditions. Founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1968, AIM became a pan-Indian political action network that resisted and challenged federal Indian policy while calling attention to the conditions and plight of Native Americans both on and off reservations. AIM became part of the larger Red Power movement, which emphasized developing pride in one’s Native American heritage, sustaining traditional Native American cultures and lands, and supporting Native American rights. Native Americans increasingly called attention to instances where the U.S. government violated Indian constitutional and treaty rights. Native Americans began insisting that their communities receive the guarantees outlined in treaties and by the Supreme Court.

Countless Native Americans, including activists, lawyers, and leaders, worked hard and organized themselves to bring attention to their causes. To protest federal Indian policy and the conditions of Native Americans, AIM and other activists staged a series of high-profile demonstrations during the late 1960s and 1970s. These included the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay from 1969 to 1971, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., in 1972, and the takeover of the town of Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1973. The latter resulted in a 71-day standoff with the U.S. government. With these and other demonstrations, activists brought the plight and concerns of Native Americans to the highest levels of national government.

Such attention and concerted effort brought dramatic results. Beginning in the 1970s, the U.S. government rescinded termination and passed a series of reforms, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975). This act embraced the notion of Native American self-government and created mechanisms for returning political autonomy to tribal governments. The government also passed similar reforms allowing more Native American control in Indian education and health services, among other areas.

Since these reforms, tribal communities have gained increased economic power. Tribal governments have insisted that because their status as sovereign nations places them outside of state jurisdiction, they can maintain and develop industries such as gambling and selling tobacco products free of state interference. Winning a series of legal and political battles, many tribal communities have used their treaty rights to form lucrative gaming and tourist businesses. The Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, for example, operates a successful casino, convention center, and hotel facility and is one of the largest employers in Green Bay.

Economic development has brought many tribes the revenue to develop museums, schools, and health programs for their tribal members. These opportunities do not, however, exist for most reservations, several of which remain among the nation’s most impoverished counties. Many Native Americans hope that the forms of sovereignty now secured will enable tribal governments and communities to work together to address the health, educational, and social problems that still plague many communities.

Culturally, Native Americans withstood the assaults of assimilation and rose to meet the challenges of the 20th century. Taking pride in their unique cultures and histories, Native Americans began exploring new forms of cultural expression and awareness. Native American artists revisited sophisticated artistic traditions. Native Americans also became authors and gained larger and larger audiences; thousands became educators, doctors, scholars, and lawyers. Throughout Indian country, a renaissance bloomed, as Native Americans increased their forms of cultural pride.

Canadian indigenous groups also achieved greater political awareness and constitutional rights. The Canadian Parliament amended the Indian Act a number of times beginning in 1951 to reduce government involvement in Indian activities. The federal government also commissioned reports on the state of Canada’s indigenous population in the 1950s and 1960s. With this increased attention, indigenous leaders astutely navigated provincial and national levels of government and brought increased public awareness to indigenous affairs.

As Canadians have attempted to address the cultural and legal rights of French Canadians, for example, indigenous groups have insisted that their land claims and treaty rights receive equal consideration. In 1990 Elijah Harper, an Ojibwa-Cree member of the Manitoba legislature, gained international attention when he stalled the passage of the Meech Lake Accord, a national accord to recognize French Canada as a distinct society. Harper, along with many other indigenous peoples, objected to the accord because it had no mention of indigenous peoples.

That same year, Mohawk activists seized control of the roads and bridges into their two reserves outside of Montréal during the dramatic Oka Crisis. The Mohawk were protesting the construction of a golf course on land that they claimed. Thousands of Canadian soldiers were deployed against the Mohawk for nearly three months. Such actions generated increased national resolve for settling indigenous land claims disputes. Throughout the 1990s indigenous groups won important land settlements, including the establishment of new reserves and even a northern Inuit territory, Nunavut, which was created in 1999.

When the 20th century began, Native American populations of North America were at an all-time low. Only about 250,000 Indians in the United States and 100,000 in Canada had survived the generations of war, disease, violence, and oppression that followed European contact and American and Canadian colonialism. A century later, more than 2 million Native Americans live in the United States and more than 1 million live in Canada. Inheriting legacies of survival and adaptation, modern Native Americans stand poised to ensure that their communities and cultures will flourish in the 21st century.

Ned Blackhawk contributed the History section of this article.