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When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’
By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained of the estimated 5 million-plus living in North America before European contact. -
Battle of Tippecanoe
In the early 1800s, the rise of the charismatic Shawnee war leader, Tecumseh, and his brother, known as the Prophet, convinced Indians of various tribes that it was in their interest to stop tribal in-fighting and band together to protect their mutual interests. -
The reservation system
The Indian reservation system was created to keep Native Americans off of lands that European Americans wished to settle. -
Forced removal
One of the most bitterly debated issues on the floor of Congress was the Indian Removal Bill of 1830, pushed hard by then-President Andrew Jackson. Despite being assailed by many legislators as immoral, the bill finally passed in the Senate by nine votes, 29 to 17, and by an even smaller margin in the House. In Jackson’s thinking, more than three dozen eastern tribes stood in the way of what he saw as the settlers’ divinely ordained rights. -
The gold rush
The 1848 discovery of gold in California set off a frenzied Gold Rush to the state the next year as hopeful prospectors, called “forty-niners,” poured into the state. -
Mankato Executions
Annuities and provisions promised to Indians through government treaties were slow in being delivered, leaving Dakota Sioux people, who were restricted to reservation lands on the Minnesota frontier, starving and desperate. After a raid of nearby white farms for food turned into a deadly encounter, Dakotas continued raiding, leading to the Little Crow War of 1862, in which 490 settlers, mostly women and children, were killed. -
The Sand Creek Massacre
Indians fighting back to defend their people and protect their homelands provided ample justification for American forces to kill any Indians on the frontier, even peaceful ones. On November 29, 1864, a former Methodist minister, John Chivington, led a surprise attack on peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos on their reservation at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. His force consisted of 700 men, mainly volunteers in the First and Third Colorado Regiments. -
Sioux Treaty of 1868
The history of Native Americans in North America dates back thousands of years. Exploration and settlement of the western United States by Americans and Europeans wreaked havoc on the Indian peoples living there. In the 19th century the American drive for expansion clashed violently with the Native American resolve to preserve their lands, sovereignty, and ways of life. -
Wounded Knee
Anti-Indian anger rose in the late 1880s as the Ghost Dance spiritual movement emerged, spreading to two dozen tribes across 16 states, and threatening efforts to culturally assimilate tribal peoples. Ghost Dance, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs, called for a rejection of the white man’s ways. -
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
During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, Wovoka, a shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe, had a vision. 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. -
How Boarding Schools Tried to ‘Kill the Indian’ Through Assimilation
Native American tribes are still seeking the return of their children.