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The Gnadenhutten Massacre
A group of militiamen from Pennsylvania killed 96 Christianized Delaware Indians. 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. When they went, the militiamen would beat them to death with wooden mallets and hatchets. -
Assimilation
The U.S. had no more Western territory to push the Native Americans toward, so the U.S. started removing the Native Americans by assimilating them. Now, boarding schools forbid Native American children from using their own languages and names and practicing their culture and religion. They were given new Angio-American names, clothes, and haircuts. -
Reservation System
This system was to keep Native Americans off of lands that European Americans wanted to settle on. So, many indigenous people resisted their confinement to the reservations, resulting in the Indian Wars. The U.S. army subdued Native Americans and forced them onto reservations, where they were able to govern themselves and maintain some of their culture and religion. -
Indian Peace Commision
A congressional committee began a study of the wars in the West and Indian uprisings in 1865. This came as a result of a Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes that came to be released in 1867. Now, this study and report led to an act to establish an Indian Peace Commission to end the wars and prevent future Indian conflicts. This led to a series of Indian treaties that would force them to give up their land and move further west onto reservations. -
Sioux Treaty of 1868
A conference was held at Fort Laramie that ended with a treaty with the Sioux. This treaty was to bring back the Sioux who agreed to settle within the Black Hills reservation in the Dakota Territory and the whites. In 1874 General George A. Custer led an expedition in the Black Hills with miners to find gold, and when they did, they started moving into the Sioux hunting grounds and wanted protection from the U.S. Army. -
Dawes Act of 1887
This act was made in 1887 and allowed the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only the Native Americans who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become U.S. citizens. The objective of this act was to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream U.S. society by annihilating their cultural and social traditions. -
Wounded Knee Massacre
The US 7th Cavalry Regiment surrounded an encampment of Sioux Indians that were near Wounded Knee Creek. A shot was fired while trying to disarm the Sioux, so the US Army soldiers opened fire on the Sioux. This resulted in the massacring of men, women, and kids of the tribe. The native population had been reduced to about 237,000 individuals. -
Indian Removal Act of 1930
This act institutionalized the practice of Native Americans off their ancestral lands to make way for European settlement. The U.S. forcibly relocated Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. The government would move these Five Civilized Tribes to territories that became the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, in a death march that became known as the Trail of Tears. -
Code Talkers
Some American Indians became code talkers and they were communication specialists. The job they had was to send coded messages about troop movements, enemy positions, and other critical information on the battlefield. Some Code Talkers, though, would translate messages into their Native languages and relay them to another tribal member. -
The Ghost Dance
Wovoka, a shaman of the Northern Paiute Tribe, had a vision saying that God appeared to him in the guise of a Native American. Wovoka found a spiritual movement called Ghost Dance. He predicted the reuniting of the remaining Indian tribes of the West and Southwest and banishing all evil from the world.