Treatment of Native Americans

  • Native American Treatment

    Native American Treatment
    Europeans arrived on American shores and it became a shared space of vast differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people.
  • Native American treatment

    Native American treatment
    By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained.
  • Indian Territory decisions

    Indian Territory decisions
    The decision by Indiana Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison to attack and burn Prophetstown, the Indian capital on the Tippecanoe River, while Tecumseh was away campaigning the Choctaws for more warriors, incited the Shawnee leader to attack again. This time he persuaded the British to fight alongside his warriors against the Americans.
  • Sioux Treaty

    Sioux Treaty
    Settlement of the Americans and Europeans near the west wreaked havoc on the Indian people living there. In 1868, a conference was held at Fort Laramie that resulted in a treaty with the Sioux Indians.
  • Assimilation Policies

    Assimilation Policies
    the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century
  • Reservation System

    Reservation System
    The Indian reservation system was created to keep Native Americans off of lands that European Americans wished to settle.
    The reservation system allowed indigenous people to govern themselves and to maintain some of their cultural and social traditions.
  • The Dawes Act

    The Dawes Act
    Authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual contacts were allowed to become US citizens.
  • Wounded Knee and Ghost Dances

    Wounded Knee and Ghost Dances
    A shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe, had a vision. Claiming that God had appeared to him disguised as a Native American and revealed to him a land full 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.
  • National Museum of American Indians

    National Museum of American Indians
    As a result of wars with the United States, many tribes were forced off their lands, relocated, or confined to reservations where they endured poverty, racism, and attempts to erase their traditional cultures.
  • Native American Boarding Program

    Native American Boarding Program
    Beginning in the late 1800s, Indian children were forbidden to speak their own languages and punished in government- and church-supported boarding schools if they did.