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The Gnadenhutten Massacre
In 1782, a group of militiamen from Pennsylvania killed 96 Christianized Delaware Indians, illustrating the growing contempt for native people. Captain David Williamson ordered the converted Delawares, who had been blamed for attacks on white settlements, to go to the cooper shop two at a time, where militiamen beat them to death with wooden mallets and hatchets. -
Office of Indian Affairs
As white settlers pushed ever further westward across the American continent, brutal conflicts over land became more frequent/problematic for the US government. In 1824, the Office of Indian Affairs was created in order to resolve the land issue. The position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs was established by an act of Congress in 1832, and in 1869, Ely Samuel Parker became the first Native American to be appointed to the position. -
Indian Removal Act of 1830
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 institutionalized the practice of forcing Native Americans off of their ancestral lands in order to make way for European settlement. The US government forcibly relocated the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) to territories that would become the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, in a death march that became known as the Trail of Tears. -
The Indian Appropriations Act of 1851
authorized the establishment of reservations in Oklahoma and inspired the creation of reservations in other states as well. The US federal government envisioned the reservations as a useful means of keeping Native Americans off of lands that white Americans wished to settle. -
Sioux Treaty of 1868
The United States government set out to establish a series of Indian treaties that would force the Indians to give up their lands and move further west onto reservations. In the spring of 1868 a conference was held at Fort Laramie, in present day Wyoming, that resulted in a treaty with the Sioux. This treaty was to bring peace between the whites and the Sioux who agreed to settle within the Black Hills reservation in the Dakota Territory. -
The Dawes Act
The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become US citizens. -
The Ghost Dance
Claiming that God had appeared to him in the guise of a Native American and had revealed to him a bountiful land of love and peace, Wovoka founded a spiritual movement called the Ghost Dance. He prophesied the reuniting of the remaining Indian tribes of the West and Southwest and the banishment of all evil from the world. -
The massacre at Wounded Knee
on December 29, 1890, the US 7th Cavalry Regiment surrounded an encampment of Sioux Indians near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. While attempting to disarm the Sioux, a shot was fired and a scuffle ensued. The US army soldiers opened fire on the Sioux, indiscriminately massacring hundreds of men, women, and children. -
Curtis Act of 1898
amended the Dawes Act to apply to the Five Civilized Tribes as well. Their tribal governments were obliterated, their tribal courts were destroyed, and over ninety million acres of their tribal lands were sold off to white Americans -
US Indian Reorganization Act
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged the passage of the US Indian Reorganization Act, which instituted a “New Deal” for Native Americans, authorizing them to reorganize and form their own tribal governments. The act ended the land allotments created by Dawes Act and thereby resurrected the reservation system, which remains in place today