U.S. continental expansion and Native American dispossession

I. Introduction and overview

British map of the 1763 Proclamation Line, with the western side of the Appalachian Mountain Range labeled “LAND RESERVED for the INDIANS.”  Compelled by Indian resistance, the British Crown issued a proclamation in October 1763 that prevented settlers from gaining land titles in the Trans-Appalachian region. This restriction ended with U.S. independence in 1783. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

The first territorial objective of the United States was the Trans-Appalachian region, a vast area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River populated almost wholly by Native Americans.  This objective was achieved on paper at least in the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the War for Independence.  With no Indigenous leaders present or consulted, Great Britain transferred sovereignty over dozens of Native American homelands to the United States.  What “sovereignty” meant, according to European legal tradition, was the sole right to negotiate with Indigenous tribes for land cessions.  This legality, however, hardly deterred Anglo settlers from rushing into the region after the war.^[5]

U.S. Dept. of Interior poster, 1911. The man pictured is a Yankton Sioux named Padani Kikipi S’ni (Not Afraid Of Pawnee). (Library of Congress)

The dispossession of Indigenous lands continued after all U.S.-Indian wars ended.  In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Severalty Act, after Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts) which redistributed collectively held reservation lands to Native individuals, freeing up 45 million acres – about one-third of the lands – for non-Native settlement.  On April 22, 1889, some 50,000 non-Native settlers lined up for the first Oklahoma Land Rush to claim 160-acre plots, the first of five land rushes between 1889 and 1895.^[10]  The allotment system continued until 1934, further reducing reservation lands by another 45 million acres.^[11]  In all, the United States appropriated over 1.5 billion acres once stewarded by Indigenous peoples.^[12]

Display at the First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded in 1879 by Captain Richard H. Pratt, was not the first off-reservation boarding school, but it became a model for others.  Pratt’s goal, in his own words, was to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”^[16]  Indian children were separated from their families for long periods, punished for speaking their native tongues, prohibited from wearing traditional clothing and long hair, and prevented from engaging in spiritual practices other than Christian rites.  They were shamed for any expression of being Indian, which made it difficult for the children to reintegrate with their families.

Children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1902 (photo by F. Johnston, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)

In the view of historian Margaret D. Jacobs, the Friends of the Indian and other white reformers fundamentally misunderstood Native American cultures because they failed to examine their own ideological beliefs and prejudices:

With their embrace of white supremacy . . . [the Friends of the Indian] and many other settler reformers could talk themselves out of supporting Indigenous rights to land and sovereignty.  If Indian people were lower on the scale of human evolution and were not properly using their land, and if the “white race” led the march of human progress, wasn’t it only right that white settlers would eventually take over Indian land?

True reform, continues Jacobs, “would have required a thoroughgoing internal evaluation of the very legitimacy of the American nation, a critique of its founding and ongoing crimes; a reckoning that few Friends of the Indians were ready for in the nineteenth century.”

Such a reconciliation movement would have required that settlers, not Indigenous people, change.  It would have required them to question and abandon their view of Indians as childlike and dependent, that Christianity was the only true religion, that an industrial economy was inevitable, that private property was the only viable land tenure system.  It would have required them to accommodate groups of people living within the United States with alternate land tenure systems, different religions, and their own autonomous governments.  Most of all, it would have required settlers to abandon the quest for the possession of all the land on the continent and the need to remove Indians from this land, by hook or by crook, by gun or by law, or by assimilation.  It would have necessitated, too, a recognition and renunciation of white supremacy.  This was a long and rocky road.^[18]

This Cherokee delegation of seven traveled to London in 1730, stayed for four months, and signed a treaty of alliance. Engraving by Issac Basire. (Wikipedia and Geni)

Glimpses of multicultural cooperation can be seen in the formative Colonial period (circa 1600 to 1775).  “Many of America’s cities,” writes the historian Colin G. Calloway, “began life as multiethnic communities, trading centers where Indians and Europeans mixed, mingled, and married, and where Indian people were often a common sight and constant presence.”^[19]  The English, French, Dutch, and Spanish all developed trade partnerships and alliances with various Native tribes.  Trade required diplomacy, which in Native traditions meant ceremonies and gift giving as indications of friendship and good will.  Interracial marriages were not uncommon, especially among European traders, and mixed ethnicity children were readily integrated into Indigenous families, clans, and tribes.  The French speaking Métis nation in the Manitoba-Red River region formed as a result of these unions.^[20]

Whether for formal or informal reasons, Indian people sometimes visited early American cities in large numbers and stayed for weeks.  During that time, they talked, ate, drank, smoked, traded, sometimes shared ceremonies and festivities, and generally rubbed shoulders with the residents, colonial dignitaries, and curious onlookers who came to watch the public spectacle and political theater.  On those occasions colonial towns became hubs of the kind of cross-cultural encounters that occurred across America.^[21]

The historian Kathleen DuVal argues that “British colonists could have lived side by side with Native nations, continuing to ally and trade in mutually beneficial ways” had these colonists not been consumed by the “search for profits.”^[22]  British colonists, in fact, lived in a multicultural world – comprised of people from different parts of Europe, Africans and African Americans, and Native Americans – but class divisions, enslavement, racial stereotypes, and religious dogma undermined the spirit of community, even the recognition of it.

Detail of a certificate distributed by Sir William Johnson. circa 1770, showing a treaty negotiation. A symbolic “Chain of Friendship” hangs under the tree. (Heinz History Center)

While there were many wars during the 17th and 18th centuries, almost all were between alliances of European and Native nations against other such alliances, necessitating cooperation between whites and Indians.  The white population, however, tended to view such alliances as temporary expedients after which the quest for Indian lands would resume.  Moreover, many whites failed to distinguish between “friendly” and “unfriendly” tribes, becoming antagonistic toward all.  “Animosities toward Indians during the Revolution were so charged that Governor Patrick Henry of Virginia had to order militia companies to protect Cherokee delegates on their way to Williamsburg,” writes Calloway, “and several groups of backcountry settlers planned to murder a Delaware delegation on its way to Philadelphia in 1779.  And in the midst of war with the western tribes in 1792, the United States government assigned officers to help get Iroquois delegates safely through the Susquehanna valley settlements.”^[23]

Cherokee leader John Ross (original print 1836, Library of Congress)

Native American leaders also appealed to American idealism, arguing that the principles of freedom, equality, and justice applied to them no less than to white Americans.  While visiting Washington, D.C., as part of a delegation in 1824, Cherokee leader John Ross wrote:  “We appeal to the magnanimity of the American Congress for justice and the protection of the rights, liberties, and lives of the Cherokee people.  We claim it . . . by treaties; and we expect it . . . under that memorable declaration ‘that all men are created equal.’”^[30]  Ross, the son of a Scottish father and mixed ethnicity (Scottish-Cherokee) mother who had been reared among the Cherokees, insisted that expulsion was a choice, a matter of policy, and not, as Saunt writes, “a chapter in the inevitable conquest of the world by white Americans.”^[31]

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the United States, movements for civil rights, equal rights, and Indigenous rights gained momentum after World War II, opening the way for new laws against discrimination and new visions of a more just, multicultural, and egalitarian society.  Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in advancing the cause of racial justice, considered the plight of Native Americans in his influential book Why We Can’t Wait (1963):

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.  From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy.  We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade.  Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.  Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.^[36]

Since then, an increasing number of people have come to recognize the ill-treatment of Indigenous peoples, and not just in the United States.  In 1975, New Zealand created a tribunal to respond to the grievances of its Indigenous people, the Maori.  Canada, Australia, and South Africa followed suit, forming truth and reconciliation commissions that heard testimony, assessed the harm done by past policies, and considered measures for reparations and reconciliation.^[37]

First meeting of the National Congress of American Indians, Denver, 1944 (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)

Between 1953 and 1964, over the objection of the National Congress of American Indians (founded in 1944), the federal government terminated recognition of 109 Native nations, cutting off federal aid for health, education, and welfare, and removed 2.5 million acres of Indian Trust Land from protective status.^[45]  The government also provided funds for professional training and relocation assistance in order to encourage Native people to move from reservations to cities.  The response of Native people was ambiguous, as some individuals welcomed the opportunity to leave impoverished reservations while others viewed the policy as a way to undermine their communities.  Whatever the case, many individuals did leave.

Native Americans in newly established urban enclaves joined together to establish community centers to provide both social outlets and access to social services for Indians living in the city.  These community centers served an especially valuable service of providing a comfortable place in new surroundings for new arrivals to the city to gather and establish community and provide support for each other.  Places such as the All Tribes American Indian Center in Chicago, established in 1953, the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland, California, established in 1953, and the Lost Angeles Indian Center, established in 1935, celebrated the tribal diversity of Indian ethnicity in new surroundings.^[46]

Due in large part to Native American protests and lobbying, the federal government shifted course again in the late 1960s and 1970s.  On March 6, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a Special Message to Congress in which he proposed “a new goal” of “self-determination; a goal that erases old attitudes of paternalism and promotes partnership and self-help.”^[47]  Key legislation enacted during this era includes the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.^[48]  To raise public awareness and support for reform, activist groups such as the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in 1968, undertook dramatic actions, including the occupation of Alcatraz island from November 1969 to June 1971.  This was followed by a “Trail of Broken Treaties” march on Washington in the fall of 1972, and the occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in February 1973.^[49]

Protest march in Washington, D.C., against the Dakota Access Pipeline, March 10, 2017 (Indianz.Com)

Indian leaders, then and now, have demanded a greater voice in all policies affecting Native Americans, including land, water, and resource use, health, education, and social welfare programs, education, and politics.  In 1982, Congress passed the Indian Mineral Development Act which substantially strengthened tribal control of resource development on reservations.  The act allowed tribes to enter into agreements for the extraction of minerals, coal, oil, and gas, and to negotiate employment preferences and environmental controls.  In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act permitted and regulated gaming on Tribal lands, providing a source of income for some tribes.  In 1996, a class action suit was filed charging that the federal government had mismanaged Tribal trust funds.  The suit resulted in a $3.4 billion settlement legislated by Congress – the Claims Resolution Act of 2010 – and signed into law by President Barack Obama.  The settlement allowed for the buy-back and restoration of nearly three million acres to Tribal trust ownership in fifteen states along with $1.69 billion paid to 123,000 individuals.^[50]

The First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City opened in Sept. 2021

The quest to bring Native American perspectives and experiences into mainstream U.S. history is supported and promoted today by a host of Native scholars, organizations, journals, and websites; by Native American and Indigenous Studies programs and courses at colleges and universities; and by museums such as the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC and New York City, and numerous tribal museums across the United States.  Among the college-level Native American Studies programs are three dozen charted by Tribal governments.^[56]  According to Ned Blackhawk:

From the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bah, Washington, to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Mashantucket, Connecticut, for example, nearly two hundred tribal museums and cultural centers now articulate the histories of these respective native communities.  New source materials – oral traditions, ethnographies, Indigenous languages, and the archival records from multiple empires – have also helped create new historical and literary studies.^[57]

The 30th annual Standing Bear Powwow, held in Ponca City, OK, on Sept. 29-30, 2023, with the Kaw Nation acting as one of the six co-host tribes (Southwind Bulletin)

Indeed, Oklahoma is home to thirty-nine Native nations which hold some eighty gatherings each year to celebrate their cultures, reinforce tribal traditions, and honor their ancestors.  These Powwows, most of which are open to the public, variously include traditional music, songs, dances, dress, and foods, displays of paintings, pottery, jewelry, clothing, and crafts, and games such as stickball.^[59]

Sec. of the Interior Deb Haaland poses with Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis during her visit on Feb. 22, 2022. (Gila River Indian News)

Speaking at the same gathering, Secretary Haaland praised the courage and perseverance of Indigenous peoples who resisted the U.S. government’s misguided attempts “to annihilate our languages, our traditions, our life ways.”  Three generations of Haaland’s family, including her mother, had been taken from their village in New Mexico and sent away to boarding schools.  “I felt that my life had been definitely affected by the generational trauma,” she said.^[61]  In December 2024, Haaland issued a press release touting new agreements with the U.S. Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to collect and preserve oral histories of those attending Indian boarding schools.  “For decades, this terrible chapter was hidden from our history books, but now, our administration’s work will ensure no one will ever forget.”^[62]  Under Haaland, the Interior Department promoted a very different mission, being dedicated to the preservation of Tribal cultures, traditions, languages, and community values.^[63]

International Peace Bureau, Global Summit April 2026 (click to enlarge)

A common theme among Native American nations and tribes is spiritual kinship with nature, the “earth mother” of us all.^[65]  This essential understanding and identity has endured through many centuries of struggles and remains today a source of healing power for repairing relationships with the natural and human worlds.  In April 2024, fifty Indigenous leaders from thirty countries and territories met in Washington, D.C., for the first Global Summit on Indigenous Peacebuilding.  The delegates established a Global Network of Indigenous Peacebuilders, Mediators, and Negotiators to mitigate and resolve violent conflict across borders, and developed recommendations for including Indigenous Peoples in peace processes.  A Second Global Summit took place in New York City in April 2026.^[66]

Diné (Navajo) filmmaker Deidra Peaches at a Grand Canyon overlook (Grand Canyon Trust)

Projects underway include the following:

• The Havasupai Tribe in Arizona is working with the Grand Canyon National Park to operate lodges, campgrounds, and tours of the famous natural site.  Eleven Tribes have historic connections to the lands and waters within Grand Canyon National Park.
• The Penobscot Nation in Maine is a leader in moose conservation and is working with the Maine Department of Marine Resources to develop hatchery-raised salmon.
• The Bears Ears National Monument in Utah is co-managed by five Native American tribes – the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and Pueblo of Zuni.
• The Navajo Nation, with the largest Indian reservation in the United States and its own Department of Fish and Wildlife, has initiated a native plants program with the goals of restoring locally sourced seeds and plants, conserving water, and improving habitat for native species.
• The Nez Perce, Klamath, Yurok, and Karuk tribes in the Pacific Northwest are aiding in the recovery of Chinook salmon and steelhead trout, having successfully lobbied to demolish dams on the Klamath River.^[70]
• The Kashia Band of Pomo Indians in Sonoma County, California, has been working with state agencies to rehabilitate kelp forests offshore, reintroducing abalones, and clearing out invasive sea urchins.^[71]
• The Yurok Tribe in California, after receiving a 125-acre section of the Redwood Forest in March 2024, has been working to increase the population of endangered condors.^[72]
• In 2022, the federal government transferred management of an 18,800-acre bison range to the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes.^[73]  In 2023, the Blackfeet Nation released a free-roaming bison herd on lands adjacent to Glacier National Park.^[74]

II. Imperial mindsets

1. The Doctrine of Discovery and land claims
2. “Wilderness” and “savages” (land use)
3. “Savagery versus civilization” (culture)
4. Savagery in war (violence)
5. The “Vanishing Indian” and “Manifest Destiny” (progress)

Imperialism is essentially about domination, or power over others.  It can take different forms, from merely collecting tribute from subject peoples to controlling and remaking other cultures, to wiping out whole populations.  Imperial mindsets prepare the way and reinforce domination by devaluing and dehumanizing the subject group.^[76]  These mindsets also can take different forms.  Religious-based rationales were common before the 19th century.  The Christian religion became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 380 and remained an imperial religion thereafter under different states, monarchs, and crusaders, notwithstanding secluded monasteries.  Western Europeans employed this imperial version of Christianity to justify war, slavery, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere, fundamentally contradicting the founder’s message of compassion, nonviolence, and humility.^[77]  Other ideological justifications for domination gradually superseded religious rationales, including “master race” theories (white superiority), national superiority myths (Manifest Destiny), and pseudo-scientific theories of evolution (Social Darwinism).

1. The Doctrine of Discovery and land claims

Portrait of Pope Alexander VI, circa 1495 (Wikipedia)

Thirty-eight years later, following Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull in May 1493 that assigned all newly discovered lands in the Americas to either Spain or Portugal, coupled with an obligation to spread “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion.”  The edict authorized the Portuguese and Spanish to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed . . . to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery . . . and to convert them to his and their use and profit.”^[79]   It was understood that converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity meant subjecting them to Spanish or Portuguese rule.  The Doctrine of Discovery thus mixed sovereignty claims over “discovered” lands with domination over non-Christian, Indigenous peoples.

Engraving of Columbus landing on Hispaniola, being greeted by Arawak Indians. Produced in 1594 (a century later) by Theodor de Bry as part of his Collection of Voyages to the East and West Indies. Other engravings in the collection depict horrific atrocities committed by the Spanish against Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean.

When Columbus returned to Spain after his first voyage to the West Indies, he wrote a letter to his Spanish royal sponsors describing his encounters.  He remarked on the beauty of the land and the willingness of the Natives to share their goods:  “In all these islands . . . I could not well understand whether they have private property or not, for I saw that what every one had was shared with the others, especially means, provisions and such things.  I found among them no monsters, as very many expected; but men of great deference and kind.”^[80]  To Columbus, this lack of guile indicated weakness and an opportunity to subjugate and exploit the population.  Hence, on his second voyage, he sailed with 17 ships and over 1,000 men along with horses, weapons, and trained dogs of war.  Upon arrival in Hispaniola in November 1493, the Spanish conquest began.

Location of the Wampanoags and other original inhabitants of the New England region (Native American Project)

The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in December 1620 settled in a clearing that the Wampanoag tribe had abandoned three years earlier due to an epidemic that decimated three-quarters of the tribe.  The plague may have been contracted from English fishermen or from English slave traders led by Thomas Hunt who raided Wampanoag villages and captured 28 people in 1615.  One of those captives, Squanto, was sold in Spain but managed to escape to England where he lived for five years before returning to North America.  He served as interpreter and guide for the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims during their first winter.  John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, deemed the epidemic that had wasted the Wampanoag a divine intervention; thus he wrote, “the Lord hath cleared out title to what we possess.”  That same year, King James I stated in the Charter of New England that “within these late Yeares there hath by God’s Visitation reigned a wonderful Plague” that has depopulated the territory so as to leave few Natives to challenge English control over the territory.^[83]

Engraved portrait of Chief Justice John Marshall, 1833 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Doctrine of Discovery was incorporated into U.S. law via two Supreme Court cases.  In Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Chief Justice John Marshall announced on behalf of a unanimous court that “discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it,” meaning Europeans, and thus American Indians had no “power to dispose of the soil, at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased.”  In support of this ruling, Marshall argued that “the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.  To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness . . .”  In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the court determined that the Cherokee tribe was a “domestic, dependent nation” that had rights of “occupancy” but not of “sovereignty” over the lands it inhabited.^[85]  Like packs of wolves and bears, Indigenous peoples were said to occupy the land but could not own it.

2. “Wilderness” and “savages” (land use)

Secotan village (NC coast), based on a drawing by John White, 1585, showing places for prayers, dances, and “solemne feasts,” fields of maize, tobacco, and pumpkins, near a fresh water river (Gilder Lehrman Institute)

Appreciation of the flora, fauna, and people of the “New World” by early European explorers can be seen in publications such as “A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia” (1590) and “Narrative of Le Moyne: An Artist Who Accompanied the French Expedition to Florida under Laudonniere, 1564” (1591), both published by Theodor de Bry in London.  The first book contained paintings by artist John White and descriptions by Thomas Hariot of Roanoke Island, revealing well-ordered communities, cultivated gardens, and abundant fish and game in the surroundings.  The Indigenous people appear healthy, curious, and friendly.^[86]  Such reports provided the basis for French lawyer Marc Lescarbot’s description of Native Americans as “noble savages” in his 1609 book History of New France.

All this attention to wilderness and woods is inherited from the first colonists, particularly New Englanders imbued with biblical ideas about God’s chosen people passing through a wilderness to reach the promised land.  These folks outdid themselves in wilding America: a “remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness”; “one of the most hideous, boundless, and unknown Wildernesses in the world”; “a vast and roaring wilderness.”^[87]

This dire picture of the surrounding environment articulated by colonists served to justify their appropriation of Indigenous lands.  Presumably, the land would be used more productively under their care, bringing order out of chaos.  To maintain this narrative, much evidence to the contrary had to be ignored or denied.  As Merrill writes, “well-known customs [of Native Americans] of working the land – clearing fields, burning woods to open space around their towns and improve conditions for gather and hunting – should long ago have scrapped scenarios that had colonists taming wilds.”^[88]  The planting method of Native women typically enriched the soil by combining corn, beans, and squash plants.

Wall display at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. Click to enlarge.

The skewed European view of North America as a “wilderness” inhabited by “savages” continued to be voiced by U.S. expansionists in the 19th century.  It was also reinforced by U.S. historians of the time.  One of the most prolific, Francis Parkman, referred to North America before the arrival of Europeans as “primitive America” and derided those who inhabited these lands as “wretched tribes of the forest.”  Other historians used terms such as “virgin soil,” “unexploited wilderness,” and “unoccupied territory,” effectively erasing Indigenous existence.^[93]

He lived in the new Chillicothe town on the Little Miami River, a lovely and seemingly safe location.  Wigwams interspersed with log cabins blanketed a high ridge along the river’s east bank.  Just northeast of the town center stood the council house, sixty feet square and built of strong notched hickory logs.  Corn, melon, and squash fields stretched far away to the south; vegetables grew abundantly in the rich, dark soil.  The Little Miami teemed with fish.  The wooded hills of southwestern Ohio abounded in game animals. . . . Favorite [dishes] included venison roasted over open coals with herbs dipped in bear oil; beaver tails, duck, or squirrel wrapped in wet corn husks and baked in hot ashes; and dried pumpkin and venison cakes.^[94]

Merrill argues that the choice of words used to describe historical developments “is not mere semantics.  This collection of concepts – hunters, settlers, roam, woods, and the like – had real effects for Native peoples and for the course of American history.  They were and are tools in the imperial project of relieving Indians of their sovereignty and their land.”^[95]   The historian James Axtell similarly warns against using vocabularies “crafted by the victors in the contest for America, one fashioned to explain, even justify, how things turned out.”^[96]

3. “Savagery versus civilization” (culture)

Gerald was honored by the Catholic Church with a statue at St. David’s Cathedral in Wales

The trope of “savagery versus civilization” has a long history.  Four centuries before English settlers set foot in Virginia, it was used by the English Crown to justify the conquest of Ireland.  The invasion took place under King Henry II in 1171 and was aided and abetted by chronicler Gerald of Wales (1146-1223), a royal clerk and chaplain to the king.  In widely distributed tracts, Gerald deprecated the Irish as “a wild and inhospitable people” who “have no claim to their lands since they neglect them,” whose “religion is nothing but paganism, absent any Christian virtues,” and whose “social and cultural expressions are deficient, yet they perversely cling to them rather than embracing [English] progress as they should.”  According to Sarah McKibben, Professor of Irish Studies, Gerald’s relentless indictments of the Irish character provided “the ideological underpinning that justifies invasion, conquest, and the superiority of settlers in ensuring ‘proper’ cultivation of the land, right religion, and civilization.”^[99]

Nineteenth century depiction of the Pequot War, 1636-38 (Library of Congress)

The “civilizers,” moreover, were enslavers.  Following the Pequot War in 1636, New England colonists enslaved hundreds of Native men, women, and children, forcing some to work in New England households and selling others to Caribbean plantations.  The New Englanders did so again after King Philip’s War in 1675-76.  Indeed, between 1670 and 1730, the English carried on a brisk Indian slave trade, recruiting members of some tribes to capture members of others.^[104]  The ports of Boston and Charleston became major centers for trafficking in Indian slaves.  In 1708, Native Americans comprised one-fourth of all enslaved people in South Carolina, numbering 1,400 out of 5,500.^[105]  The enslavement of Indians decreased in subsequent years, while Black enslavement increased.  By 1750, enslaved Blacks (Africans and African Americans) made up roughly 20 percent of the population of the thirteen British colonies, including 61 percent in South Carolina, 44 percent in Virginia, 32 percent in Maryland, and 14 percent in New York.^[106]

Thomas Jefferson offers a reward for the return of one his enslaved people at Monticello in this Virginia Gazette advertisement, Sept. 14, 1769 (The Adverts 250 Project)

The enslavement of Blacks was accompanied by a plethora of dehumanizing racial stereotypes.  The English colony of Barbados, for example, passed a law in 1688, “For the Governing of Negroes,” which described Black people as “of a barbarous, wild, and savage nature.”  Their alleged “savage nature,” in turn, made it “absolutely necessary” for the English to regulate them and to “restrain the disorders, rapines, and inhumanities to which they are naturally prone and inclined.”  That same year, a group of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, presented a formal petition against the institution of slavery, arguing that it violated the Biblical Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have done unto you.”^[107]  Most European Enlightenment philosophers, however, followed Aristotle in accepting slavery as a “natural” condition for certain human beings.^[108]  Most signers of the American Declaration of Independence followed these unenlightened men in believing similarly.

[Indian] Communities maintained order by custom, clan obligations, and the force of public opinion.  Throughout the eastern woodlands, in villages nested in fertile river bottoms, people sustained balanced economies based on extensive cornfields, hunting, and trade.  A communal ethic of sharing and a moral economy of reciprocity provided practical ways of dealing with periods of plenty and scarcity. . . . People kept the world in balance by prayer, ritual, and ceremony, and kinship with the spirit world.  Spiritual forces permeated everyday lives and possessed and exerted power.  Access to spiritual power required observing proper rituals, conducting appropriate ceremonies, and behaving in respectful ways – with other people, with animals, with the natural environment. . . . Political power was diffused; communities were generally autonomous, and they reached decisions by consensus.  Individuals were expected to subordinate their own interests and ambitions to the good of the community.  Unlike Virginians, Indian leaders reckoned wealth in relatives rather than in land, slaves, and money.^[109]

Native American visitors to colonial American towns and cities were no doubt impressed by the physical dimensions of the civilization before them – the public buildings, harbors, craft shops, stores, and houses.  Yet, according to Calloway, they “also no doubt noted stark divisions between rich and poor, . . . free and unfree labor, between genders, and between black and white.”

Unlike most Indian towns, colonial towns and cities revolved around business and commerce rather than kinship and community. . . .So many people crowded together in one place yet unconnected by ties of clan and kinship, reflected, indeed created, disorder and lack of community, not order and civility. Indigenous delegates to Paris and London were repulsed by the accumulation of personal wealth and class distinctions they saw. . . . Indian people had similar reactions in the eighteenth-century American cities, centers of commerce whose primary purpose was the business of making money.^[110]

Some 150 years earlier, in the early 17th century, French missionaries remarked on the solidarity and generosity of the Wendat (Huron) people in Ontario.  According to one missionary, “They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.”

“A Jesuit Preaching to the Indians,” drawing by Charles W. Jefferys, 1934 (C.W. Jefferys website). Click to enlarge.

Scholars David Graeber and David Wengrow describe another missionary, Gabriel Sagard, who “was at first highly critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful, but by the end of his sojourn he had come to the conclusion their social arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France.”  Moreover, although the Wendats had no written language, they appeared to excel in rhetorical skills and logic:

Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall . . . not showing themselves to be particularly bright.  People who tried to grab the stage, denying others the means to present their arguments, were acting in much the same way as those who grabbed the material means of subsistence and refused to share it.^[111]

The Jesuits attempted to convert the Wendats to Christianity (and learned Wendat language for this reason), but most Wendats were inclined to debate ideas rather than imbibe religious doctrine.  They also resented Jesuit condemnation of their spiritual and cultural practices.  This was true across the spectrum of Native American cultures.  While Native peoples had their share of superstitions, magical thinking, and charismatic visionaries, they recognized a higher spiritual power over all beings, and they did not go to war over different conceptions of “God.”  Intolerance in the Christian religion, in contrast, has historically produced such horrors as the burning of “heretics,” the forced conversion of Jews, “holy wars” against Muslims, fratricidal wars between Catholics and Protestants, and the conquest and enslavement of “savages” in the Americas.^[112]

Cahokia, as it may have appeared around 1150 CE. Painting by Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

The historian Kathleen DuVal extends the analysis of Native American social cohesion to historical developments between the tenth and fourteenth centuries.  At the beginning of this period, at least four powerful city-states were on the rise in North America – Cahokia in the Upper Mississippi Valley, Moundville in the Lower Mississippi Valley), and Huhugam and Chaco in the Southwest.  By the end of the period, most people had abandoned these states and created smaller, more egalitarian communities.  According to DuVal:

Powerful rulers led many of these civilizations, combining political and religious power, much as monarchs of Europe in later centuries would claim a divine right to rule.  In the 13th century, though, a global cooling trend began which has been called the Little Ice Age.  In part because of that cooling, large-scale farming became more difficult, and these large civilizations struggled to feed their people.  Elites began hoarding wealth.  The people wanted change.

The residents of North America’s great cities responded to these stresses by reversing the centralization of power and wealth.  Some revolted against their leaders.  Others simply left the cities and spread out into smaller towns and farms.  All across the continent, they built smaller, more democratic and more egalitarian societies.  Huge numbers left Cahokia’s realm entirely.  They found places that still had game to hunt and woods full of trees for firewood and building, both of which had declined near Cahokia due to its rapid growth.  The population of the capital city of Cahokia fell from perhaps 20,000 people to only 3,000 by 1275.  At some point the elite left as well, and by the late 15th century the cities of Cahokia’s realm were completely gone. . . .^[113]

In the aftermath of the fall of cities, communities and nations throughout North America developed their own unique egalitarian structures as they also shared ideas and developed some common values.  One of the most broadly shared values was the philosophy of reciprocity, an ideal of sharing and balance that undergirded economics, politics, and religion across the continent. . . . Whereas previously some powerful rulers who made decisions for others had reaped wealth as a result, now people rejected such concentrations of wealth and power.  Power and prestige lay not in amassing wealth but in assuring that it was shared wisely, and leaders earned support in part by being good providers.  Rather than requiring tribute, they were responsible for public food supplies to be used in diplomacy and for those in need.^[114]

4.  Savagery in war

Finger Lakes region (Iroquoia), circa 1730

The principle of reciprocity that was fostered within Native American communities did not necessarily extend to other communities.  Indeed, reciprocity could be turned into vengeance and reprisals against adversaries, creating a cycle of violence.  To break the cycle, tribal leaders became skilled in the art of diplomacy, negotiating peace pacts amid solemn ceremonies and re-establishing trade relations and alliances.^[116] Such pacts did not achieve peace across the board.  The pact among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois confederacy), for example, served to prevent wars among the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes, but it did not prevent wars against other tribes, particularly the Shawnee.  The Europeans who settled on the Eastern Seaboard took advantage of inter-tribal rivalries to gain advantage over all the tribes.

Historical marker, Green County, NC, 1961

During the Colonial period, attacking noncombatants became the preferred English strategy largely because Native towns and crop fields were unprotected while Native fighters were elusive.  To take one example, in 1711, the colony of South Carolina organized a punitive expedition against the Tuscarora tribe.  Led by John Barnwell, his “army methodically swept across the Tuscarora country, laid siege to villages, massacred Indians, burned fields, and then marched on to repeat the process,” writes Grenier.  “Throughout the conflict, Barnwell’s men made it a point to spare neither Tuscarora women nor children.”  The Virginia legislature encouraged the slaughter by issuing a 20-pound bounty for every Indian scalp.^[121]  In 1722, some 1,500 surviving Tuscarora moved north and joined the Haudenosaunee Confederacy located in what is now upstate New York, Quebec, and Ontario.

“Point of View” bronze sculpture by James A. West, dedicated in Pittsburgh in 2006, depicts George Washington and Seneca leader Guyasuta meeting face-to-face in October 1770, while Washington was in the area examining land prospects.

Among the English colonists who had many dealings with Native Americans was George Washington.  Serving as a British colonial officer in the French and Indian War (1754-1763), he actively recruited Indian allies and urged his superiors to do so as well.  He wrote that “their cunning and craft are not to be equaled” except by other Indian fighters.^[124]  Washington learned from his Native partners how to fight a guerrilla war, a strategy he later employed in the War for Independence against the British.

Ohio History Marker at the Gnadenhutten Historical Park and Museum commemorating the execution of more than 90 Lenape men, women, and children on March 8, 1782 (click to enlarge).

Frontier militias were also ruthless in their dealings with Native Americans – and not necessarily against enemy Indians.  In March 1782, Patriot militiamen from western Pennsylvania captured a large group of peaceful Indians, mostly Delawares (Lenapes), and held them at the Moravian mission of Gnadenhutten, ninety miles west of Fort Pitt.   The militia commander, the very same Col. Daniel Brodhead, wrongly accused the Indians of participating in frontier raids.  He then asked his men to vote on what to do with the captives.  According to reports, sixteen to eighteen voted for “mercy” and more than eighty voted for execution.  The following morning, 64 men and women and 34 children were marched, two-by-two, into a room where they were bludgeoned to death with a hatchet and scalped.  The troops then looted and burned the village.  No criminal charges were brought against Col. Brodhead or his men, as the white frontier mentality was largely one of vengeance and prejudice against all Indigenous peoples.^[129]

Americans on the plains continued the strategy of waging war against Indian food supplies and Indian villages.  Where colonists had destroyed cornfields in previous centuries, Americans slaughtered buffalo herds in the nineteenth century.  In addition, American forces regularly endeavored to catch otherwise elusive Plains Indians when they were gathered in winter encampments.  As in colonial times . . . it was not unusual for Indian people living peaceful in their villages to be attacked by soldiers who made no distinction between hostile and friendly bands.^[131]

In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Francis Lieber, a U.S. Army commissioned lawyer, produced a manual on the conduct of war for the Union Army.  Known as the Lieber Code, or General Orders No. 100, it sought to limit the scope of war fighting, especially in protecting noncombatants and cultural institutions.  Lieber made an exception, however, for wars against “barbarous armies,” insurgents, and “uncivilized peoples.”^[132]  This exception allowed U.S. Army units to act with impunity against Native Americans, even massacring women and children.

Painting by artist Stone Rabbit depicting Chief Black Kettle trying to prevent a U.S. attack at Sand Creek (Wikipedia)

Such was the case on January 29, 1863, when a U.S. army unit slaughtered an estimated 400 Shoshone men, women, and children at Bear River in southeastern Washington Territory; and on November 19, 1864, when a Colorado militia led by Col. John Chivington attacked an unsuspecting village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado, massacring some 230 people, mostly women, children, and elderly.  Cheyenne peace chief Black Kettle had tried to halt the attack by putting up a white flag and waving an American Flag, but to no avail.^[133]

5.  The “Vanishing Indian” and “Manifest Destiny” (progress)

This 1873 painting by George A. Crofutt has been dubbed “The Myth of the Vanishing Indian” by the White House Historical Association (part of the White House art collections). “This highly symbolic image of American expansion in the West shows Native Americans being pushed out by settlers and embodies ‘Manifest Destiny.'” (White House Historical Association)

According to the historian Sarah Fling, “Native Americans were not ‘vanishing.’  They were being displaced by war and coercion and dispossessed of their ancestral lands through illegal seizures and illegitimate treaty negotiations. . . . The Myth of the Vanishing Indian was a national self-fulfilling prophecy pursued by federal government officials and agents throughout the nineteenth century that aligned with a wider belief in ‘Manifest Destiny,’ or the idea that American territorial expansion by white settlers was both inevitable and preordained by God.”^[140]  The historian Nicole Eustace similarly notes, “Whites spread the myth that Indigenous people simply failed to thrive, rather than the reality that whites systematically sought to deprive them of every form of rights.”^[141]

What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement, can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed?  What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect?  America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defense of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement.  Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes.  We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy.^[143]

John O”Sullivan

In reality, the United States engaged in numerous offensive wars and spread desolation far and wide among Indigenous peoples, but it did so under a democratic government rather than a monarchy.  At the very time O’Sullivan was writing in 1839, the U.S. government was depopulating the lands of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Muscogees, Choctaws, and Seminoles, and the U.S. Army was destroying Seminole villages, food stores, and crop fields in order to force the Seminoles out of Florida.  Notwithstanding these blatant contradictions, the idea of “Manifest Destiny” took hold among white Americans, as it affirmed their nation’s righteousness in taking the continent.

There were between 88,000 and 95,000 Indians living within that territory on the eve of the American Revolution.  By the early 1820s, this number had increased to between 112,000 and 121,000 (not including groups of Shawnees, Delawares, and Cherokees, who had migrated west of the Mississippi).  These figures, it bears emphasizing, are only estimates, but there are strong grounds for confidence in the general trends they reveal. . . . There was every reason to think that they could survive – and thrive – within the United States provided they were allowed to retain viable land bases.^[152]

The overall Indian population declined in the last half of the 19th century.  A U.S. Census survey in 1853 recorded 400,764 Tribal Indians; another in 1890 recorded 237,196.^[153]  After reaching a low point around 1900, the population began to increase again.  In 1938, John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, announced the “astounding, heartening fact” that “the Indians are no longer a dying race,” refuting the widespread belief that it was the “inevitable destiny” of Native peoples, tribes, and cultures to recede and disintegrate.^[154]

III. Dispossession and expulsion in the East

Northwest Territory and the major Native tribes inhabiting the area (Wikipedia)

Congress, in fact, encouraged western settlement by passing the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance in July 1787.  The former set up a grid system for surveying and selling land, while the latter provided a blueprint for incorporating new territories into the United States.  The Northwest Ordinance also stated, as a matter of principle:

The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful ways authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.

For the next 84 years, obtaining the consent of Native American tribes for land cessions became an obsession among U.S. leaders.  President George Washington (1789-1797) employed both diplomacy and war to this end.  On the diplomatic side, he entertained Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Creek delegations and smoked the calumet (peace pipe) with his guests in deference to Indian diplomatic custom.^[156]  In a meeting with representatives of the Iroquois League in Philadelphia on March 23, 1792, he assured his guests that he was “desirous, that a firm peace should exist, not only between the United States and the five Nations, but also between the United States and all the natives of this land; and this peace should be founded upon the principles of justice and humanity as upon an immovable rock.”  He also stated, “If the western Indians should entertain the opinion, that we want to wrest their lands from them, they are laboring under an error.”^[157]

Henry Knox, 1784 portrait (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

The federal government set forth its first official policy orientation toward Native Americans in a series of Indian Intercourse acts during the 1790s.  The goal was to maintain peace with Native nations while gradually obtaining their lands for an expanding white American population along with their enslaved Black population.  The main obstacle, as noted by Knox in his “Report on Indian Affairs” of December 1794, was the refusal of American settlers to respect Indian territorial boundaries and rights.  According to Knox, the “desires of too many frontier white people to seize by force or fraud upon the neighboring Indian lands. . . . has been and still continues to be an unceasing cause of Jealousy and hatred on the part of the Indians.”  Knox deemed that peace could only be achieved if the Indians can “rely with confidence upon the protection of their lands by the United States.”  As such, he proposed that military posts be established along the frontier to hold back Anglo settlers.  Congress, however, refused to approve or fund this plan.

Brainerd Mission, from a sketch by Thomas E. Paine, 1821. Brainerd was created in 1816 by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to serve the eastern Cherokees. (Native Voices) Click to enlarge.

Knox’s “civilizing mission” was predicated in large part on facilitating a transition from hunting to raising livestock among Native nations, thereby freeing up Native hunting lands for cession to the United States.  To this end, Knox advocated that missionaries appointed as agents to the tribes “be well supplied with all the implements of husbandry and the necessary stock for a farm.”^[163]  Knox’s recommendations became official policy with passage of the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, which provided funds for Indian education and a “civilization” program administered by religious missionaries, including Methodist, Baptist, Moravian, Quaker, and Catholic.

Thomas Jefferson, portrait by Charles Wilson Peale, 1791 (Independence National Historical Park museum)

Yet Jefferson was even more dedicated than Washington to empire building.  During his eight year tenure, thirty-two treaties were concluded with Native nations in which a total of 200,000 square miles of land was ceded to the United States, an area equal to the size of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana combined.  In two of these treaties, bands of Kickapoos and Shawnees agreed to resettle in western lands.  Jefferson hoped for more.  In 1808, he met twice with Cherokee leaders in Washington in an effort to convince them to “settle on our lands beyond the Mississippi.”  The Cherokee leaders responded that, while they would not stop individuals who wished to emigrate, they would not move their communities.  They furthermore pointed out that the president’s advice contradicted his previous admonitions to take up “farming and industry” so as to establish their communities on a secure economic foundation.  Having done so, they reasoned, there was no need to move.^[167]

Bust of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh by Hamilton MacCarthy, created in 1896, on display at the Royal Ontario Museum

The third attempt was led by Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his younger brother, Tenskwatawa (the Prophet).  Beginning in 1808, the two traveled across the region to organize a pan-Indian alliance.  They gained the support of some Shawnee, Chickamauga, Tutelo, Ojibwe, Mascouten, and Potawatomi factions, enough to threaten U.S. expansionist plans in the view of the James Madison administration.  Hence, on November 7, 1811, Governor William Henry Harrison of Indiana Territory led an army of 1,000 soldiers to attack the headquarters of Tecumseh’s confederacy at Prophetstown (Indiana).  Seven months later, the United States declared war against Great Britain and Tecumseh joined forces with the British Army, Canadian militia, and the First Nations of Canada.  The alliance was successful in repulsing repeated U.S. invasions of Canada, but Tecumseh was killed in battle in October 1813, and in the peace negotiations of late 1814, the British abandoned their proposal for an “Indian barrier state” in the Old Northwest Territory.^[171]

Hayne Judjihini was part of the Otoe-Missourias delegation to the White House. Painting by Charles Bird King (White House Historical Association)

Chief Sumonyeacathee, Otoe-Missourias delegate to the White House with his wife, Hayne Judjihini, in 1822. Painting by Charles Bird King.

The Monroe administration still hoped to convince eastern tribes to leave voluntarily.  To prepare the way, the administration invited leaders of tribes located west of the Mississippi River – designated “Indian Country” – to come to Washington in order to discuss land cessions.  Between November 1821 and February 1822, seventeen representatives from the Kansa, Pawnee, and Otoe-Missouria nations visited the White House.  At the end of the meetings, the president gave each male delegate a peace medal with an inscription of President Monroe’s profile; the only woman delegate, Hayne Hudjihini (Eagle of Delight) of the Otoe-Missouria, did not receive one.  Three years later, the United States concluded treaties of cession with all three tribes.^[175]

Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan Territory, 1813-31 (State Dept. Office of the Historian)

Back in the East, continuing Native American resistance to removal prompted U.S. agents to ratchet up their threats.  In 1826, for example, Michigan Territory governor Lewis Cass bluntly informed the Miamis and Potawatomis in Ohio, “You must remove or perish.”  A Miami leader responded that his ancestors told him “that we should stay on the land which the Great Spirit gave us, from generation to generation, and not leave it.”  He added, “It is yourselves destroying us, for you make the spirituous liquor.  You speak to us with deceitful lips, and not from your hearts.”^[183]  The two tribes nevertheless agreed to cede a portion of their territory to the United States.

• bribing tribal leaders;
• negotiating with unauthorized representatives of tribes;^[184]
• declaring one thing in negotiations and writing another in the final written treaties;
• changing written treaty terms without knowledge or approval by Native leaders;
• saturating the negotiation meetings with alcohol;
• disallowing Native councils to ratify treaties in contrast to the requisite two-thirds vote of approval in the U.S. Senate (some tribes similarly required the approval of decision-making councils for the treaties to be valid);
• threatening to withhold annuities (annual payments of food, equipment, supplies, and funds the U.S. government owed a tribe by previous treaties) if new treaties were not signed; and
• promising to protect Native communities from white invaders, attacks, and plunder but instituting no measures and taking no actions to carry out this promise.

By the 1820s, it was no secret that the United States hoped to remove the eastern tribes beyond the Mississippi River.  To hasten the process, state and federal officials did little to keep settlers from trespassing on Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Muscogee, Chickasaw, Delaware, Potawatomi, Wyandot, and Ojibwe lands.  Presidents could have committed the United States Army to protect Indian lands and sovereignty, but they typically turned a blind eye and failed to honor treaties . . . By failing to honor past treaties and prevent settlers from taking Indian lands, presidents enabled settlers to violate treaties, steal lands, ignite conflicts, and effectuate the forced removal of thousands of Native Americans.^[185]

Thomas McKenney, appointed Superintendent of the Office of Indian Affairs in 1824, had long been an ally of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles) in opposing removal; but in 1826, he became despondent over the lack of progress in “civilizing” Native peoples.  He wrote despairingly to Cyrus Kingsbury of the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, “I once, like you, hoped to complete success before I was compelled to let go of the hope to which I had, like you, been so long clinging, as wholly delusive.  It is as much impossible to redeem the Natives situated as they are, and elevate their condition, and place them on a level with ourselves, as it would be for you, or I, to raise the dead.”^[186]  McKenney thereafter became a proponent of Indian removal, reasoning that there was a better chance of “civilizing” Native people if they were removed from their ancestral homelands.

Indian land cessions in Georgia. The area circled in blue was the last, signed away by an unauthorized faction of Cherokee on Dec. 29, 1835, in the Treaty of New Echota. Click to enlarge.

Pressure for removal soared in the fall 1828 following the discovery of gold in north Georgia and the election of Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee slaveholder, as president.  In December 1828 and early 1829, the Georgia legislature passed a series of laws extending state authority over the Cherokees and outlawing meetings of the Cherokee legislature, to take effect on June 1, 1830.  Alabama and Mississippi followed suit with similar oppressive laws.  The Cherokees, in turn, submitted petitions to Congress protesting Georgia’s assertion of legal jurisdiction over them, citing treaties with the U.S. government that recognized Cherokee national sovereignty.^[187]  The stage was set for a showdown.

The present crisis in the affairs of the Indian Nations in the United States demands the immediate and interested attention of all who make any claims to benevolence or humanity.  The calamities now hanging over them threaten not only these relics of an interesting race, but if there is a Being who avenges the wrongs of the oppressed, are causes of alarm to our whole country. . . . In repeated treaties with the Indians, the United States, by the hands of the most distinguished statesmen, after purchasing the greater part of their best lands, have promised them “to continue the guaranty of the remainder of their country FOREVER.”^[190]

Theodore-Frelinghuysen, circa 1850 (Rutgers Univ.)

During the Congressional debate over the bill, New Jersey Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, an active member of the American Board, spoke for six hours over the course of three days in support of the Cherokee position and offered an amendment that guaranteed federal protection of Cherokees as long as they chose to stay.^[191]  On the other side of the debate, Lewis Cass wrote an essay published in the North American Review (January 1830) that depicted Native Americans as being mired in “savage” customs notwithstanding the fact that they had created “an independent government” modeled on that of the United States.  Such a government, argued Cass “cannot be permitted” as it “would lead to their inevitable ruin.”^[192]  This fate, of course, was not inevitable if the federal government protected the Cherokees and other tribes from aggressive white Southerners, as required by existing treaties.

Andrew Jackson, 1824 portrait (US Senate Collection)

President Andrew Jackson felt compelled to rebut his critics and justify the Removal bill in his Message to Congress in December 1830.  He used the words “savage” or “savages” four times to describe Native peoples.  “And is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian?” he asked rhetorically.  Appealing to humanity, Jackson postulated that removing Native tribes to western reservations would not only protect them (from white settlers and southern state governments), but also “perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.”^[196]

The immediate source of immiseration for the Cherokees took the form of an invasion of Georgia settlers.  Even before 1830, hundreds of Georgians, spurred by the discovery of gold on Cherokee territory in 1829, had illegally squatted on Cherokee lands.  On the heels of the Removal Act, Georgia began surveying Cherokee lands in preparation for a lottery that would allocate these lands to Georgia’s eager white citizens.  By summer 1830, as the Cherokees wrote in a statement of grievances addressed to the U.S. Congress, Georgians had “flocked in thousand to our gold mines” and “by violence” had “forced the natives out of their houses, and taken possession.” . . . The Cherokees cited several examples.  In one, squatters attacked “peaceable” Cherokees.  “One was cruelly murdered, another wounded, and a third . . . thrown into jail.”  In another example, a part of ten armed men “forced an Indian from his horse . . . and cruelly abused the persons of two aged Cherokees, one a female, causing a flow of blood because they did not quietly suffer themselves to be robbed of their property. . . .

By late 1832, Georgia had completed its survey of Cherokee lands and held lotteries for them.  Thousands of lottery winners were taking possession of Cherokee farms and pastures. . . . Some felt entitled not only to Cherokee lands but to Cherokee women.  In one instance, a Georgia sheriff stopped at the home of two married Cherokee women and “called for a drink of water.”  Finding the women alone, he tried to rape one of them, but the other “laid hold of him.”  The sheriff left, but not before lashing the two with his horsewhip.  The two women went to a local magistrate for justice, only to be told that “no Indian testimony could be received.”  Under Georgia law, they were without rights.^[198]  Such abuses made the federal government’s efforts to obtain Native consent to removal treaties much easier.  U.S. agents highlighted the “inevitable” destruction of tribes, which tribal leaders understood to mean the immediate threat of murderous white settlers and aggressive state governments in their midst, and promised sufficient provisions for their journey west and establishment of new homes in “Indian Country.”

The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit was the final blow to Choctaw efforts to remain in their ancestral homeland. Ceded lands, 1765-1830. (Choctaw Cultural Center, OK) Click to enlarge.

The Choctaws were the first to leave, following the signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in September 1830.  The treaty ceded 11 million acres in Mississippi and Alabama for 15 million acres in Indian Territory.  Approximately 15,000 Choctaw were forced to make the 500-mile journey over a three-year period.  One-quarter to one-third perished from disease, starvation, and exposure, as they were forced to travel in inclement weather and the U.S. failed to provide adequate food, tents, horse carts, and supplies.  A Choctaw chief, interviewed by the Arkansas Gazette, described the ordeal as a “trail of tears and death.”^[199]  An option in the treaty allowed for Choctaws to remain in Mississippi if they gave up their communal land-holdings in return for small, individually owned allotments.  Some 5,000-6,000 took this option, but they were continually harassed and plundered by whites; hence, many exited the state in subsequent years.

Chickasaw treaty cessions, 1805-1832 (Chickasaw Cultural Center, OK) Click to enlarge.

For the Chickasaws, with a population of about 6,000, it was Mississippi residents who forced them to sign the Treaty of Doaksville in 1837.  They purchased a portion of the Choctaws’ western lands and made the journey in several groups during 1838.  An estimated 500-600 died, many from a smallpox epidemic.

Osceola, Seminole war leader, portrait by George Catlin, 1838 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

In 1837, Osceola visited General T. S. Jessup under a flag of truce.  Instead of honoring this internationally recognized symbol, Jessup imprisoned Osceola and sent him to Fort Moultrie, South Carolina.  The artist George Catlin visited Osceola there and painted his portrait.  “This gallant fellow,” wrote Catlin, “is grieving with a broken spirit, and ready to die, cursing the white man, no doubt to the end of his breath.”  A contingent of Seminoles continued to fight until 1842, while 3,000 to 4,000 were transported to Indian Territory.  Between 200 and 300 escaped into the Everglades where they established new communities.  A Third Seminole War in the 1850s failed to remove them.^[203]

Native leaders engaged in negotiations with the United States, all the while understanding (often because of numerous verbal threats of slaughter by the U.S. military if they did not sign the treaty) that the Americans were in reality all but dictating every “treaty.”  Their repeated objections and protests were disregarded and often summarily dismissed by the U.S. government.  In addition, the United States frequently obtained the X mark of any Native person – whether or not they were authorized representatives of the legitimate government of the Native nation – and would pretend that that person was authorized, rushing the “treaty” through ratification and proclaiming it to be law.

In one instance, in 1836, Vice President Martin Van Buren instructed an Indian agent to go around the legitimate and authorized negotiators for the Potawatomie Nation to obtain a treaty for land cessions to which the legitimate government of this Native nation would not accede by bribing the lower-level chiefs of bands to sign.  This treaty was procured and rushed back to Washington for ratification and proclamation into law.  When the legitimate authorities of the nation found out what had been done, they hurried to Washington in 1836, hoping that once the president understood the fact that the legitimate government did not sign this treaty, he would immediately destroy the offending document.  Meeting with Van Buren and Secretary of State Lewis Cass, the chiefs eloquently described the bad faith and corrupt practices of the U.S. negotiators in which unauthorized persons were deliberately sought out to “sign” this treaty.  Van Buren coldly responded, “I do not wish to speak of it,” and Cass stated, “Your names are on the treaty, your lands are lost.”^[208]

Potawatomi Emigration, sketch by George Winter, 1838 (Tippecanoe County History Assn.)

On August 30, 1838, a company of one hundred U.S. soldiers arrived in the Potawatomi village near Twin Lakes, Indiana, and order the tribal members to permanently move.  According to the Citizen Potawatomi Nation:

On the morning of September 4, 1838, a band of 859 Potawatomi, with their leaders shackled and restrained in the back of a wagon, set out on a forced march from their homeland in northern Indiana for a small reserve in present-day Kansas.  To minimize the temptation for the Potawatomi to try to escape and return home, militia members burned both fields and houses as the dejected members of the wagon train departed.  The journey was a 660-mile trek for which the Potawatomi were not prepared and through terrain to which they were not accustomed.  The heat was oppressive and water was often scarce. They had only a few hundred horses to carry people and supplies, and promised additional wagons did not arrive before their departure; so, even the weak and elderly were forced to walk.  The pace and conditions of the march debilitated the health of travelers.  A day rarely passed that a member of the party did not die, usually a child, forcing their bereft and exhausted families to leave the bodies behind in hastily dug graves.  In the end, more than forty people died during what the Potawatomi came to call the Trail of Death.^[209]

The U.S. government coerced many other tribes to move west, including Shawnees, Ohio Senecas, Delawares, Kickapoos, Ottawas, Wyanots, Sauk and Meskwakis (or Foxes), Ho-Chunks, Miamis, Myaamias, and others.  The Shawnees, located in the Ohio region, had long been divided over how to respond to removal pressures.  Some had migrated to Missouri during the wars of the 1790s.  Others followed the accommodating leader, Black Hoof (who signed the 1795 Treaty of Greenville), and established a new town called Wapakoneta in western Ohio.  Still others followed Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa in their effort to create a pan-Indian alliance against white encroachment.^[210]  In 1831, the remaining Shawnees in the East were forced to sign a treaty ceding all their lands in Ohio, including Wapakoneta, for 100,000 acres west of the Mississippi River.

Sac Chief Black Hawk, painting by George Catlin, 1832 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

In the first military encounter on May 14, 1832, Sauk fighters led by Chief Black Hawk routed a company of Illinois rangers.  Secretary of War Lewis Cass called for reinforcements.  The Galenian newspaper, meanwhile, called on the governor of Illinois to “carry on a war of extermination until there shall be no Indian (with his scalp on) left in the northern part of Illinois.”^[213]  In early August 1832, some 1,300 federal troops along with state militia and Native allies caught up with Black Hawk and his band of 400 men, women, and children at Bad Axe, Michigan, on the banks of the Mississippi River.  Black Hawk tried to surrender, but U.S. soldiers, thinking this was a trick, opened fire with cannons and rifles, killing combatants and noncombatants indiscriminately.^[214]   After the battle, Black Hawk was imprisoned while the remainder of the tribe was relocated to Iowa.  According to Claudio Saunt, the Native allies who fought with the U.S. forces, including Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Dakota, and Potawatomi fighters, did so for reasons of “settling old scores” with the Sauks as well as “currying favor with the United States.”^[215]

Of an estimated population of 48,000 Indians north of the Ohio River in 1830, only about 24,000 were moved. . . . In areas of high demand [for land] – northwestern Ohio, southern Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and southern Wisconsin – Native nations faced as much pressure to relocate west of the Mississippi as any of the southern nations.  Most were eventually removed.  In the upper Great Lakes and upper Mississippi Valley, however, where settlement was relatively light into the 1840s, there was less demand for Indian lands and resources and correspondingly less pressure to force Indians out.^[216]

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 resulted in multiple “trails of tears.”

Some tribes were forced to move multiple times over the years.  Members of the Delaware (Lenape) tribe were compelled to move in successive stages from the Delaware-New Jersey region to Ohio country, to Kansas, and to Oklahoma, with some moving to Ontario, Canada.  Stockbridge Indians moved from New York’s Upper Hudson Valley and western Massachusetts to central New York, where they lived with Oneidas, before moving with some Oneidas to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they negotiated with resident Winnebago and Menominee Indians to establish a settlement.  Some Kickapoo bands made their way to Mexico where they were granted land at Hacienda del Nacimiento near the town of Múzquiz in 1850.^[217]

The “Trail of Tears National Historical Trail,” maintained by the National Park Service, follows 17 migration routes of Cherokees to Oklahoma in 1838-39, spanning nine states. See the Interactive Map here.

There were also intangible losses related to Native knowledge of the natural environment – where to locate and how to use flora, fauna, and healing herbs – developed over thousands of years.  This was an area of expertise among Indigenous women who served as healers, midwifes, and herbalists.

As the death toll mounted in the mid-1830s, federal officials remained silent about their policy’s destructive consequences, while repeating well-rehearsed claims about their devotion to the welfare of American Indians.  Even as they pursued the most publicized of all removals, that of the Cherokees in 1838-1839, those responsible took no account of the destructiveness of previous removals and the likelihood of destruction’s recurrence. . . .

Because the lies associated with removal are so glaring – not only the refusal to admit the policy’s destructiveness but the fictions that Indians were vanishing, that removals would be entirely voluntary, and that Indians would be guaranteed permanent homes in the West – professions of benevolence can seem nothing more than a fig-leaf to cover naked greed.  That perspective, however, underestimates the capacity of ideologues to convince themselves of the truth of what they want to believe and to hold inconvenient facts and troubling doubts at bay.  Officials’ constant repetition of their arguments about the benevolence of removal seems to have been intended as much to reassure themselves as to convince skeptics.^[225]

Failure to recognize and ameliorate the harm done to Native Americans by U.S. policies in the East allowed for their continuation in the next phase of U.S. expansion in the West.

IV. “Winning” the West

The borders of the United States in 1840

Between 1845 and 1848, the United States acquired formal title to 1.2 million square miles of land (768,000,000 acres) in western North America.  The acquisition was effected by the annexation of the Republic of Texas in March 1845, a treaty with Great Britain that divided Oregon Territory in June 1846, and a war against Mexico that resulted in the transfer of Mexico’s northern territories (Alta California and Nuevo México) to the United States in July 1848.  Most American citizens knew little about the estimated 275,000 Indigenous people who inhabited these lands, but they fully expected the Indians to be corralled into reservations in due time, in keeping with the pattern established for eastern tribes.  Indeed, this became the policy of the U.S. government, pursued over the course of the next forty years.^[226]

California on the eve of contact with Europeans was an exuberant clamor of Native American economies, languages, tribes, and individuals. . . . A number of Southern California Indian peoples, such as the Quechans, farmed – mainly corn, beans, and squash – along the Colorado River.  Yet most California Indians depended on carefully managing, harvesting, and processing nature’s bounty.  Almost everywhere, they modified and maintained their environments in order to maximize hunting and gathering yields.^[228]

Indigenous trade networks before 1500 (ResearchGate). Click to enlarge.

Early European colonizers (1500-1750) did not reach deeply into western North America, but their presence profoundly affected Native American societies through the introduction of horses, guns, and contagious diseases.  All were spread through Indigenous trade networks.  As Peter Cozzens explains:

In the sixteenth century, the Spaniards had introduced the horse to the New World.  As the Spanish frontier pushed into the present-day southwestern United States, horses fell into the hands of Indians.  Afterward, through theft and barter, the horse culture spread rapidly from tribe to tribe.  In 1630, no tribe was mounted; by 1750, all of the Plains tribes and most of the Rocky Mountain Indians rode horses.  The horse did not create the buffalo culture, but it made hunting infinitely easier.  Horses also increased the frequency and fury of intertribal clashes. . . . The gun, introduced to the Indians by French trappers and traders, made the hostile encounters far more deadly.  White man’s diseases were deadlier yet, decimating western tribes just as they had ravaged those east of the Mississippi.^[229]

During the 1780s, a devastating smallpox epidemic originating in Mexico spread through the Great Plains, drastically reducing Native populations and forcing the abandonment of many villages.  The Mandan people who lived on the Missouri River (North Dakota), at the center of a trade network, were repeatedly hit by smallpox epidemics – in 1781, 1801, 1831, and 1837 – which reduced their population to a few hundred people.^[230]  The diminished tribe merged with the nearby Hidatsa and Sahnish to become the Three Affiliated Tribes, a recognized Native American nation today.  Sioux tribes in the Minnesota area took advantage of the diminished population on the Great Plains to expand westward, displacing Omahas, Otoes, Iowas, Missouris, and Poncas.^[231]  Some Sioux tribes gave up farming for a nomadic existence following bison herds, relying on trade to meet other needs.  By 1850, the western Sioux, or Lakotas, with a population of 15,000, resided in a vast region between the Platte and Yellowstone rivers.

This 7-foot marble sculpture of Po’pay, created by Cliff Fragua, stands in the US Capitol Visitor Center, donated by the state of New Mexico in 2005 (Architect of the Capitol)

The Spanish colonization of New Mexico began in 1598.  In short order, Spanish demands on the Pueblos and Hopis led to fighting, resulting in the deaths of a few Spanish soldiers.  In January 1599, Juan de Oñate led a small army on a revenge mission that slaughtered between 600 and 800 Indians and enslaved the survivors.^[233]  The Spanish subsequently settled into the area, demanding labor, tribute, and subservience from the Indigenous people and suppressing their religious practices.  In 1675, a medicine man named Po’pay (also spelled Popé) and 46 other Pueblo leaders were convicted of sorcery.  Po’pay was among those flogged, while others were executed.  In 1680, Po’pay led a massive revolt by the Pueblos and Hopis in which 400 Spaniards were killed and 2,000 more driven out.  Twelve years later, however, the Spanish returned with superior forces to reestablish control.

Despite romantic portraits of California missions, they were essentially coercive religious, labor camps organized primarily to benefit the colonizers.  The overall plan was to first militarily intimidate the local Indians with armed Spanish soldiers who always accompanied the Franciscans in their missionary efforts.  At the same time, the newcomers introduced domestic stock animals that gobbled up native foods and undermined . . . efforts to remain economically independent.  A well-established pattern of bribes, intimidation and the expected onslaught of European diseases insured experienced missionaries that eventually desperate parents of sick and dying children and many elders would prompt frightened Indian families to seek assistance from the newcomers who seemed to be immune to the horrible diseases that overwhelmed Indians.  The missions were authorized by the crown to “convert” the Indians in a ten-year period.  Thereafter they were supposed to surrender their control over the mission’s livestock, fields, orchards and building to the Indians.  But the padres never achieved this goal and the lands and wealth was stolen from the Indians.^[234]

Between 1769 and 1833, Franciscan padres recorded the baptism of 81,586 California Indians and the burial of 62,600 baptized Indians, mostly from contagious diseases.  Spanish soldiers also raped Native women at the missions.  Junípero Serra, who founded seven missions in California, wrote, “The soldiers, clever as they are at lassoing cows and mules, would catch an Indian woman with their lassos to become prey for their unbridled lust.  At times some Indian men would try to defend their wives, only to be shot down with bullets.”  Such abuses incited a rebellion in 1775, when 600 Ipais (Tipais) burned down the San Diego mission and killed the padre, and another in 1781, when Mojaves and Quechans destroyed two colonial outposts near present-day Yuma, Arizona, killing four missionaries and numerous colonists.^[235]

Comanche warriors were skilled horsemen, able to hang off the side of their mount as they shot their arrows, as depicted in this painting by George Catlin, 1834-35 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

For more than two centuries, powerful tribes such as the Comanches, Navajos, Apaches, and Southern Utes held their own against European invaders and colonizers, but the American invasion that began in the late 1840s was like no other.  “The whites were coming now, in numbers incomprehensible to the Indians,” writes Cozzens:

They assaulted Indian lands from every direction.  Settlers rolled in from the east, while miners poked at the periphery of the Indian country from the west, north, and south and simply overran it when new mineral strikes were made.  In westerners’ parlance, Indians who resisted the onslaught were to be ‘rounded up’ and rendered harmless on reservation land too miserable to interest the whites.  It would be a grand encirclement and a slow strangulation that would require three decades to choke the life out of recalcitrant Indians.^[239]

The encirclement and strangulation was “slow” because the United States did not initially have the power to force Native tribes onto reservations.  The West was vast; U.S. Army units were relatively small; forts had to be built along every trailway; many Indian tribes were fiercely independent with strong military traditions; and Indian fighters were resilient, courageous, and elusive.  The elusiveness of Indian warriors led U.S. Quartermaster General Thomas Jesup to recommend in 1851 that the Army strategically place its troops “in a position where they could menace Native villages,” according to the historian Stefan Aune.  “Jesup’s solution to the superior mobility exercised by Native warriors, who ignored the national boundaries of US-Mexico borderlands, was to focus on noncombatants.  This recommendation seems to have been accepted without controversy by the secretary of war.”^[240]

Overview of major western tribes and battles, 1860-1890, excluding most of California (Wikipedia)

In the asymmetrical warfare that ensued between the United States and various western tribes over the course of forty years (1846-1886), the United States held many advantages.  With its population of 23.2 million in 1850 (including 2.3 million enslaved persons), the United States could afford to field professional army units, build forts across the West, and provide steady supplies of food, goods, guns, and ammunition.  Native American fighters, in contrast, lived with their families and had to protect them at all times, needed to hunt as well as fight in order to survive, and depended on other tribes or white traders for guns and ammunition.  The U.S. government furthermore employed an effective divide-and-conquer strategy that took advantage of inter-tribal rivalries.  In wars against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, for example, the Army recruited Pawnee and Crow warriors as scouts and allies; and some 200 Pawnees were hired to protect railroad building operations across the Great Plains.

Sitting Bull, photo by D.F. Barry, circa 1883, Dakota Territory

Recognizing these many advantages, the American public was shocked when U.S. military units were occasionally defeated on the battlefield.  The fierce resistance of “hostiles” such as Crazy Horse (Oglala Lakota Sioux), Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux), and Geronimo (Chiricahua Apache) won them a measure of respect among U.S. citizens, but such regard for their fighting prowess never altered the imperial mindset that Indians must give up their lands and make way for American “progress.”

President Ulysses S. Grant (Library of Congress)

In the aftermath of the Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) set out to curb this pervasive corruption in what became known as his Peace Policy.  The management of Indian reservations was transferred to Christian denominations, including Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers, who would presumably deal fairly with Native tribes.  The effort was monitored by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ely S. Parker, the first Native American (Tonawanda Seneca from upstate New York) to serve in that position.  Yet the policy garnered few allies in Congress and Parker was forced to resign in 1871 after a House of Representatives committee reported “irregularities, neglect and incompetency” in the Office of Indian Affairs.^[242]

There has been an insufficiency of food, and as the game is gone, hunger has made the Indians in some cases desperate, and almost any race of man will fight rather than starve.  The question of justice and right to the Indian is past and cannot be recalled.  We have occupied his country, taken away his lordly domain, destroyed his herds of game, penned him up on reservations, and reduced him to poverty.  For humanity’s sake, let’s give him enough to eat and integrity in the agent over him.^[243]

For those Native American tribes and bands who remained independent, President Grant’s “Peace Policy” amounted to a declaration of war, threatening them with annihilation if they did not move to reservations.  In 1872, the president wrote to General John Schofield, “Indians who will not put themselves under the restraints required will have to be forced, even to the extent of making war upon them, to submit to measures that will ensure security to the white settlers of the Territories.”  In his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1873, Grant presented his policies as part of a civilizing mission, declaring his intention “to bring the aborigines of the country under the benign influences of education and civilization.  It is either this or war of extermination.^[244]

In 1850s Oregon, many Native nations, some already partially annihilated through genocidal war, were expelled from the Rogue River and Willamette Valley.  During the Civil War, the Army marched the Diné (Navajos) from their homes in northern Arizona to a desolate reservation in New Mexico, a traumatic event known among the Diné as the Long Walk.  After the Civil War, although federal treaties had guaranteed them “permanent homes,” the United States shoved most of the nations living in Kansas into Oklahoma. . . . And, as part of the so-called Indian wars of the 1870s, federal officials punished communities that had resisted dispossession – Modocs in northern California, Cheyennes in Montana, and Nez Perces in the interior Northwest – by exiling them to Oklahoma.^[245]

The Pawnee and Ponca nations, located in the Kansas-Nebraska region, suffered similar fates.  Although Pawnee men served as scouts for the U.S. Army and protected the First Transcontinental Railroad, the United States did not protect the Pawnees from Lakota raids nor prevent white encroachment on their reservation obtained in an 1857 treaty.  According to the Pawnee Nation, “After years of trespass, theft, rape, and murder by white settlers, the Pawnee Nation sold their reservation to the U.S. Government in 1874 and purchased new lands from the Cherokee and Muscogee nations in what is now Oklahoma.”^[246]  Their journey to the Oklahoma reservation was described by Herb Adson, Pawnee Cultural Resource Division director, as similar to the forced expulsion of the Cherokee Indians.  “This was our Trail of Tears that we came from there,” said Adson. “It was very cold and only few had horses or things like that, so most people walked.”  Many perished on the journey due to adverse weather and disease.^[247]

Ponca “trail of tears” historical marker in Nebraska (click to enlarge)

The Poncas were a small tribe at peace with the federal government and surrounding white neighbors.  In January 1877, Government Inspector E. C. Kemble arrived at the Ponca Agency in Nebraska to inform the tribe that they must move to “Indian Territory” (Oklahoma).  Chief White Eagle protested:  “I have never broken any of my treaties with the government.  What does the President want to take my land away for? . . . My people have lived and died on this land as far back as we can remember. . . . We have always been peaceful.  This land is our own.”  Kemble dismissed the protest and continued making preparations for the Poncas to leave.

In March, Chief White Eagle spoke with Kemble again, reminding Kemble that he had first come to the Ponca homeland as a missionary.  “You professed to be a great Christian,” said White Eagle.  “You preached to us and told us about God. . . . You said that you wanted to save my soul when I should die, but now I find that you wish to send my soul to hell while I am yet living.”^[248]  Chief Standing Bear also spoke with Kemble, telling him through interpreters, “This is my land.  The Great Father [U.S. president] did not give it to me.  My people were here and owned this land before there was any Great Father.  We sold him some land, but we never sold this.  This is mine.  God gave it to me.”  Many nearby local settlers were also appalled by the federal government’s decision, having lived with the Poncas on friendly terms for decades.  Two local newspapers, the Sioux City Journal and the Niobrar Pioneer, published editorials opposing removal; and the Knox County commissioners passed a resolution against it.

Chief Standing Bear is honored at the US Capitol with this 9-foot statue portraying him at court defending his humanity. Created by artist Benjamin Victor and dedicated in Sept. 2019. (Architect of the Capitol)

Ponca appeals fell on deaf ears in Washington.  General Willian T. Sherman ordered two companies to the Ponca Agency to force their removal.^[249]  According to Margaret D. Jacobs, the soldiers “terrorized the Ponca villagers,” breaking into homes, removing all household items, and piling the items into wagons.  The soldiers also “confiscated all of their farm equipment and locked it in a warehouse.  When they finished, the military men pointed their bayonets at the defenseless Ponca people.”  Some 530 Ponca men, women, and children were marched 600 miles over the course of fifty-five days, arriving at the Quapaw Reservation in Indian Territory on July 9, 1877.  Nine people died along the way, including Chief Standing Bear’s adult daughter and infant granddaughter.  Provisions at their new reservation were woefully inadequate and lethal contagions were rampant.  Within two years, one-third of the tribe had died, including Standing Bear’s son, his second daughter, and his wife’s mother and grandmother.^[250]

In January 1879, Standing Bear and thirty followers left the reservation and returned to Nebraska, only to be apprehended and imprisoned by federal authorities.  The case was taken up by the U.S. District Court in Omaha.  In Standing Bear v. Crook, the government argued that Standing Bear did not have habeas corpus rights – meaning that an Indian was not a “person” under the law – and thus he could be arrested and imprisoned for leaving his reservation.  On May 12, 1879, Judge Elmer S. Dundy ruled that Standing Bear and his band were indeed “persons” under the law and were free to enjoy the rights of any other person in the land.  The government appealed Dundy’s decision, but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, leaving Standing Bear and his followers free.^[251]  For the next four years, Standing Bear traveled across the eastern United States giving lectures on Indian rights (with the aid of interpreters).  In 1996, an eight-acre park and museum & education center in Ponca City was dedicated to Standing Bear, including a 22-foot bronze statue honoring the Ponca leader.

Indigenous California (National Museum of the American Indian)

In March 1846, two months before the United States formally declared war on Mexico, the U.S. invasion of California began.  Army captain John C. Frémont had no direct orders to invade, but, having previously met with President James K. Polk, he knew of the president’s desire to take Mexico’s northern territories and thus he led his sixty-man force into the Sacramento Valley and waited for orders to attack.

John C. Fremont, 1856 photo (CA State Library)

Frémont suffered no stain on his reputation from the massacre.  He went on to become the first Military Governor of California in January 1847, then California’s first U.S. senator in 1850.  Building on his military reputation, he was the first Republican nominee for president of the United States in 1856 and founder of the California Republican Party.

John A. Sutter, Sr., circa 1850 (California Online Archive)

Swiss immigrant John Sutter, having received a land grant of 50,000 acres from the Mexican government, supervised hundreds of Indians who managed his cattle, raised and harvested his crops, and protected his property.  According to one visitor, James Clyman, Sutter ruthlessly exploited his Miwok and Nisenan labor force, keeping “600 to 800 Indians in a complete state of Slavery.”  Sutter also kept a “harem” of Indian women and molested Indian girls, according to his Swiss employee, Heinrich Lienhard.^[255]

Hydraulic jet mining in California, 1883 (Wikipedia)

Gold mining evolved from simple panning in rivers to hydraulic mining that washed away hillsides, and mercury mining that poisoned rivers.

On January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall discovered gold on the banks of the American River, located on Sutter’s estate.  News of the discovery traveled fast.  Over the next five years, some 250,000 Americans poured into California, overwhelming Californios and posing a dire threat to the survival of Native Americans, especially in the mining areas of central and northern California.  American immigrants commandeered Native lands, depleted traditional food sources, attacked Indians without provocation, and kidnapped women and children to work as virtual slaves.  When Indians defended themselves or counterattacked, white vigilantes and militias often took revenge against Indians anywhere and everywhere.

Peter Burnett, first California governor, circa 1860

Beginning in the summer of 1850, California officials took charge of local militias.  The state provided arms and paid recruits more than many could earn elsewhere, thus enticing more men to participate in the killing expeditions.  The first operation was the Gila Expedition in southern California.  The Quechan (Yuma) Indians had been running a profitable ferry business on the Colorado River, transporting people, livestock, and supplies entering California.  When a company of whites began competing with them for this lucrative river traffic, violent incidents ensued and eleven company men were killed.  The killings prompted Governor Peter Burnett to organize a militia led by Major J. C. Morehead in order to “punish the Indians, bring them to terms, and protect the emigrants.”  Morehead’s force of 142 men engaged in skirmishes with Quechan fighters but was unable to inflict the expected chastisement.  Federal officials stepped in to establish Camp Yuma in November 1850 as a temporary outpost overlooking the Colorado River crossing.^[264]

This drawing called “Protecting the Settlers” accompanied an 1861 Harper’s New Monthly magazine article that described the mass murder of Yuki people at Round Valley, California (New York Public Library)

Most members of Congress at the time preferred treaties of cession to outright expropriation.  As such, they commissioned three federal agents to make treaties with California tribes.  Arriving in San Francisco in January 1851, the commissioners arranged meetings with tribal leaders across the state.  With the assistance of a host of translators, the trio negotiated eighteen treaties with 119 tribes over the course of one year.  The treaties established nineteen reservations totaling 11,700 square miles, or 7.5 percent of California’s land mass, with all other lands ceded to the United States.  The treaties also promised livestock, clothing, blankets, tools, food, education, and physical protection.^[269]

Vigilante assaults on Indian communities continued.  In March 1853, a party of settlers attacked a Tolowa spiritual gathering at Lake Earl, killing 450.  From 1856 to 1859, a series of massacres took place against Yuki Indians in Mendocino County, resulting in over 1,000 deaths.  In February 1860, an assault on a Wiyot community in Humboldt County left between 80 and 250 dead, mostly women, children, and elderly.  In September 1864, vigilantes massacred 300 members of the Yana tribe who had gathered in Oak Run for a spiritual ceremony.  Dozens of murders on a smaller scale took place.^[272]

Western trails (click to enlarge)

The American discovery of gold in California in early 1848 was followed by strikes of gold and silver in Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, and Montana, all prompting a surge of fortune seekers trampling across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.  In 1849, some 25,000 Americans crossed the Plains, ten times that of 1845.  The 2,000 mile trip from Independence, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, on the California Trail took four to six months by wagon train.^[275]

Jean Pierre de Smet’s map of the 1851 Fort Laramie Indian territories (Cheyenne.org) The tribes secured generous boundaries but the treaty did not last (click to enlarge).

After each tribe held its own council, the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed by representatives of the Oglala and Brulé Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations.  The treaty, also known as the Horse Creek Treaty, stated that the tribes would accept territorial boundaries, refrain from warring among themselves, permit the U.S. government to build roads and forts in their territories, and allow white travelers to pass through unmolested.  The U.S. government, in turn, promised to pay the tribes annuities for fifty years (later reduced to ten years by Congress) and to protect Indians and their lands from white despoilers.^[281]  Two years later, a similar treaty was signed with Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes at Fort Atkinson (Kansas), except that this treaty allowed the president to replace annuities with farm assistance at his discretion.^[282]

Seven years later, a second Sioux War erupted in western Minnesota.  Its origins lay in the failure of the federal government to deliver timely annuity payments to the Santee (Dakota) Sioux.  Having lost most of their land in a treaty signed in July 1851, and with bison herds largely absent from the area, the Dakotas were heavily dependent on annuities for purchasing food.  During the Civil War, however, the U.S. government fell behind in its payments and, with the onset of a drought and crop failures in the summer of 1862, the Dakotas were on the verge of starvation.  Tribal leaders demanded that their Indian agent distribute food stored in a government warehouse, but this request was denied.

U.S. troops under Gen. Alfred Sully attack a Sioux village at White Stone Hill, Dakota Territory, on Sept. 3, 1863, depicted in Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 31, 1863 (Wikimedia)

The U.S. military furthermore undertook punitive campaigns against “hostile” Sioux tribes in the Dakota Territory (encompassing North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of other current states further west).  On September 3, 1863, Brigadier General Alfred Sully led a surprise attack on a village of Yanktonai, Santee, and Teton Sioux at White Stone Hill, killing between 100 and 300 men, women, and children, taking 156 prisoners, and destroying tons of bison meat exhaustively accumulated for the winter.  One of Sully’s interpreters, Samuel J. Brown, a mixed-blood Sioux, described the scene as “a perfect massacre.”  Sully, on the other hand, reported to his superiors, “I can safely say that I gave them one of the most severe punishments that the Indians have ever received.”^[287]  The punishment was apparently not enough, as General John Pope ordered another expedition against the Sioux tribes in the summer of 1864.  Despite the ongoing Civil War, the Union government mustered the largest army ever against Native Americans.  Some 2,200 soldiers attacked a Sioux encampment at Killdeer Mountain on July 28, forcing the Sioux to flee and burning their tipis and winter supplies.

Col. John M. Chivington (Colorado History Museum)

On November 19, 1864, Col. Chivington and a force of 675 men, with four mountain howitzers, attacked a peaceful camp of 500 Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek, Colorado, massacring 230 people, two-thirds of whom were women, children, and elderly.  As Chivington prepared for the attack, Chief Black Kettle raised an American flag and a white flag over his tipi to indicate his friendship with the United States.  It made no difference.  Chivington wanted no prisoners taken, and none were.  His troops, as an army interpreter later testified, “used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, and mutilated their bodies in every sense of the world.”  Indian men fought back in desperation, killing twenty-four and wounding fifty-two of Chivington’s men.  Black Kettle and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, who survived nine wounds, both escaped.  The two were killed four years later by the U.S. 7th Cavalry, led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, on November 27, 1868.^[290]

Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders met with U.S. officials at Camp Weld, Colorado Territory, Sept. 28, 1864. Led by Chief Black Kettle (bottom row, second from left), the chiefs believed they had secured safety by agreeing to relocate their people to Fort Lyon. The agreement was ignored by Col. Chivington whose militia massacred Black Kettle’s band at Sand Creek three weeks later. (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian)

Upon returning to Denver, Col. Chivington and his Third Colorado Cavalry unit were given a hero’s welcome.  In Washington, however, the “battle” at Sand Creek was scrutinized by a Congressional committee which gathered 800 pages of testimony from participants, observers, and others.  The final report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War strongly condemned Col. Chivington, charging that “he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty.  Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their inapprehension and defenceless condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.”^[291]  Despite his culpability, Chivington was never charged with a crime.  Nor did the U.S. Army change its strategy of conducting surprise attacks on Indian villages, which invariably resulted in noncombatant deaths.

When the [Apache] Chichenne chief Mangas Coloradas attempted to broker a peaceful accommodation, prospectors horsewhipped him, whereupon he declared war on the Americans.  Even more egregious was the mistreatment accorded Cochise, chief of the Chokonens (Central Chiricahuas), who was on friendly terms with settlers in his desert homeland in present-day southeastern Arizona.  George H. Bascom, another blundering lieutenant cut from the same West Point mold as Grattan, squandered the goodwill in February 1861 when he arrested Cochise and several of his warriors under the mistaken impression that the chief had kidnapped a boy from a distant ranch.  Cochise escaped and took hostages of his own.  After several days of fruitless parleying, Cochise killed his hostages, and Bascom hanged the Chiricahuas, including Cochise’s brother.  With that Arizona exploded in an orgy of violence.^[293]

Kit Carson, Pioneer monument, Denver, erected in 1911 (Equestrian Statues). Col. Kit Carson became famous in his own time for trailblazing and Indian fighting. Monuments honoring him were erected in Denver, Santa Fe, and Carson City. Belated recognition of his role in the forced removal and killing of Native peoples led to the removal of this statue in Denver in 2020, and another in Santa Fe in 2026.

The orgy of violence entailed battles, ambushes, Apache raids on farms and U.S. outposts, and U.S. attacks on Apache villages.  Brigadier General James Carleton, as commander of the Department of New Mexico, issued instructions to Col. Christopher (Kit) Carson that “All Indian men . . . are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them.”^[294]  In January 1863, Chief Coloradas surrendered to U.S. military leaders at Fort McLane in southwestern New Mexico.  He was subsequently murdered by U.S. soldiers under the pretext that he was attempting to escape.

Navajo Long Walk routes to the Bosque Redondo Reservation, 1863-1866 (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian)

In January 1863, General Carleton arbitrarily ordered the Navajos to relocate to the Bosque Redondo Reservation in eastern New Mexico.  When the chiefs refused, Carlton ordered Col. Carson to use any means necessary to make the Navajos submit.  Throughout the summer and fall of 1863, Carson’s troops conducted a scorched earth campaign, destroying Navajo crops, homes, and villages, and capturing livestock.  Reduced to near starvation, some 8,000 Navajos surrendered.  In March 1864, they were forced to march over 250 miles to the reservation – known as the “Long Walk.”  Another 4,000 Navajos led by Chief Manuelito continued to wage guerrilla warfare from mountain strongholds.  Manuelito surrendered in the fall of 1866, after which his followers were also marched to the reservation.

A Navajo dance at Fort Defiance on the Navajo reservation, 1873 (Library of Congress)

The Bosque Redondo Reservation was essentially a prison camp where the land was ill-suited for farming or raising sheep and living conditions were intolerable.  Tribal members faced deprivation, starvation, disease, and death.  News of the camp’s debilitating conditions shocked visiting news correspondents and U.S. officials such as General William T. Sherman and Peace Commissioner Samuel F. Tappan.  In the spring of 1868, Chief Manuelito and other Navajo leaders were permitted to travel to Washington, D.C., to petition the government for a new reservation.  This was granted in the Navajo Treaty of 1868, enabling the Navajo people to return to part of their original homeland.^[297]

President Abraham Lincoln, 1863 (Wikipedia)

During the Civil War (1861-1865), the main body of Cherokees, Muscogees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) took the side of the Confederacy, mainly due to promises of political recognition and protection, while most Osages sided with the Union.  President Abraham Lincoln, worried that other tribes might choose to ally with the Confederacy, decided to invite leaders of the Apache, Arapaho, Caddo, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes to Washington.  After a long journey, sixteen Indian delegates, fourteen men and two women, entered the East Room of the White House on the morning of March 26, 1863.  Surrounded by cabinet secretaries, diplomats, reporters, and curious guests, President Lincoln shook hands with each male Indian leader.  He belatedly noticed the two female delegates and shook their hands as well although he did not speak to them.

White House photo, March 26, 1863. Bottom row, left to right: Standing in Water, War Bonnet, Lean Bear (Cheyenne), and Yellow Wolf (Kiowa). (White House Historical Assn.)

Cheyenne Chief Lean Bear, speaking through an interpreter, used terms such as “the Great Father” in referring to the president, but this was meant to signify social connection and friendship rather than deference to hierarchical authority.  The chief expressed the view that his people wished to live in peace with white people, but that this could only be accomplished if white people ceased to invade his country and threaten his people.  “The Great Father,” said Lean Bear, “must counsel his white children to abstain from acts of violence so that both Indians and whites might travel safely across the plains.”  The chief also expressed hope that the “white man’s war” then raging in the East (Civil War) would soon come to an end.  The president listened patiently, then responded:

I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race excepting living as they do, by the cultivation of the earth.  It is the object of this government to be on terms of peace with you and all our red brethren.  We constantly endeavor to be so.  We make treaties with you, and will try to observe them. . . . and if our children should sometimes behave badly and violate treaties, it is against our wish.  You know, it is not always possible for any father to have his children do precisely as he wishes them to do.

Lincoln also voiced a common prejudice, telling his Indian guests, “Although we are now engaged in a great war between one another, we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.”  At the end of the meeting, each chief was given a bronze peace medal and papers signed by Lincoln attesting to their mutual friendship.  Kiowa Chief Yellow Wolf was at the time wearing a silver peace medal given to a Kiowa leader by President Thomas Jefferson and handed down through the generations.  The Indian delegates had their photographs taken by Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.  They toured the city of Washington for ten days, then visited New York City before boarding a train for Denver on April 30.  Yellow Wolf unfortunately succumbed to pneumonia while in Washington and was buried with his Jefferson Peace Medal in Congressional Cemetery.^[298]

Completed railroad lines as of 1870. More were on the way (click to enlarge).

As the United States became more powerful, populous, and ambitious to complete its “Manifest Destiny,” an increasing number of white Americans came to view treaties as roadblocks to progress.  According to the historian Mark Hirsch, following the Civil War, “the idea of independent tribal nations came under increasing attack from land hungry settlers, ranchers, mining and railroad companies and politicians who found tribal sovereignty an obstacle to economic development and an affront to American society.”^[299]

Gathering of Sioux tribes at Fort Laramie in November 1868 in anticipation of signing of a new treaty (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian)

An additional factor arose with the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.  Unlike most other treaties, the United States appeared to lose more than it gained in this one.  Officially titled “Treaty with the Sioux-Brule, Oglala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arcs, and Santee and Arapaho, 1868,” the treaty was signed by Oglala Chief Red Cloud and 125 other Lakota chiefs on November 4.  The pact ended a three-year war with Sioux tribes over the building of forts and white encroachment along the Bozeman Trail (which ran northwest from Fort Laramie in southeastern Wyoming to the goldfields of Montana).  To the advantage of the Indians, the treaty:

1868 Fort Laramie Treaty boundaries. The Black Hills are located in the southeastern part of South Dakota (State Historical Society of N. Dakota). Click to enlarge.

• granted the Sioux tribes a large expanse of land in western South Dakota;
• stated that no persons, except authorized agents of the U.S. government “as may be authorized to enter shall ever be permitted to enter upon Indian reservations in discharge of duties enjoined by law, shall ever be permitted to settle upon, or reside in the territory”;
• reserved an “unceded” area (north of the North Platte River and east of the summits of the Big Horn Mountains) for Indian hunting “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase”;
• declared that “the military posts now established in the [unceded] territory . . . shall be abandoned, and that the road leading to them and by them to the settlements in the Territory of Montana shall be closed”;
• stated that “no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion” of the unceded territory, nor “pass through the same”; and
• protected the tribe from future U.S. land grabs by requiring “at least three-fourths of all the adult male Indians” to approve any land cession.^[300]

Red Cloud, 1880 (Library of Congress)

Red Cloud was not entirely pleased with the treaty as there were other outstanding issues.  Hence, he and fifteen Oglala subchiefs traveled to Washington in the spring of 1870 to make their case.  Meeting face to face with President Grant and his advisers on June 9, Red Cloud requested the removal of Fort Fetterman in eastern Wyoming, the barring of white travelers and prospectors from the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains, trading privileges for the Oglalas at Fort Laramie, and a Sioux reservation near the Black Hills.  President Grant objected to the dismantling of Fort Fetterman and was vague on other issues.  The meeting was nonetheless cordial, which led some prominent newspapers such as the New-York Tribune to hail the president’s “Peace Policy” and predict an imminent “end of our Indian wars . . . from Oregon to Texas.”^[301]

That hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.  Provided, further, that nothing herein contained shall be construed to invalidate or impair the obligation of any treaty heretofore lawfully made and ratified with any such Indian nation or tribe.^[302]

The idea that past treaty obligations would be upheld was not taken seriously, as the United States had repeatedly failed to carry out many of its obligations, then demanded that new treaties be signed.  The end of treaty-making, as such, did not mean the end of U.S. treaty-breaking.

Sioux delegation to Washington in the early 1870s, White House photo. L-R: Red Dog, Little Wound, John Bridgeman (interpreter), Red Cloud, American Horse, and Red Shirt (Denver Public Library)

Red Cloud counseled patience among the Lakota and, in May 1875, led a delegation to Washington to meet with President Grant.  The president made no attempt to honor the treaty by halting the white invaders and instead offered the Lakota $25,000 if they would give up their rights to the Black Hills.  Red Cloud and two other chiefs, Spotted Tail and Little Wound, refused on behalf of their people.  The president remained resolute.  He appointed a commission chaired by Senator William B. Allison of Iowa to meet with Lakota leaders and persuade them to give up the Black Hills.  The commissioners arrived at the Red Cloud Agency on the Sioux reservation on September 4, 1875.  Five thousand Lakotas attended as observers.  Peter Cozzens tells the story:

Chairman Allison botched the negotiations from the beginning.  Pleading the impossibility of keeping whites out of the Black Hills, Allison said the government only wanted the Lakotas to permit mining until gold and precious metal stocks were exhausted, after which the country would revert to the Indians.  (The senator neglected to explain how the government would evict the whites.)  Apparently forgetting the blood that the Lakotas had shed to close down the Bozeman Trail forts, Allison, in a supremely stupid move, also asked the Lakotas to sell the Bighorn Mountain country.

The chiefs responded with rare unanimity.  The Bighorn country, they said, was not for sale or lease.  As for the Black Hills, they would sell on the condition that the government pay enough to sustain their people for seven generations to come; Spotted Tail thought sixty million dollars a fair price (the commission had been authorized to offer less than a tenth that amount).  The talks sputtered and died, and the commissioners departed, incensed that an offer they considered “ample and liberal” had met with “derisive laughter from the Indians as inadequate.”  Only one option remained. . . . Congress should fix a price for the Black Hills and insist the Indians accept it.  If they refused, the senator concluded then the Indians should be starved into submission.

President Grant had a still more radical solution in mind – war.  There was no reasonable excuse for it.  For all their threats and bluster in council the Indians had displayed remarkable restraint toward the Black Hills’ miners.  The army reported no hostile encounters on the northern plains during 1875. . . . On November 1, Grant held a secret meeting in the White House with a select few like-minded generals and civilian offiicals to map out a war plan. . . .

The conferees agreed on a two-phase plan.  The president’s edict reaffirming Lakota ownership of the Black Hills would stand, but the army would no longer enforce it.  If the Lakotas retaliated against white trespassers, so much the better.  Hostilities would help legitimize the secret second phase of the operation.  To wit, the non-treaty Lakotas were to be given an impossibly short deadline to report to their agencies; the Indian Bureau was to fabricate complaints against them; and General Sheridan would begin preparations for his favorite form of warfare: a winter campaign against unsuspecting Indian villages. . . .

To prime the public for war, the government leaked an inflammatory report of a routine tour of the Dakota and Montana Indian agencies by an Indian Bureau inspector dated nine days after the secret White House conference.  The report was a put-up job to suit the administration’s secret purpose.  The “wild and hostile bands of Sioux Indians” roared the inspector, “richly merit punishment for their incessant warfare, and their numerous murders of settlers and their families, or white men wherever found unarmed.” . . . On December 3, [Interior] Secretary [Zachariah] Chandler set the first phase of the scheme in motion.  He directed the Indian Bureau to inform Sitting Bull and the other “hostile” chiefs that they had until January 31, 1876, to report to the agencies; otherwise, the army would march against them. . . . All appeared neatly in order to commence a war of naked aggression.^[304]

Congress played its part in this tragic play by incorporating into the Indian Appropriations bill of 1876 an amendment that threatened to cut off food, supplies, and treaty-guaranteed annuities unless the Lakotas agreed to sell the Black Hills.  Even with this threat, only ten percent of the adult male Lakota population approved a U.S.-proposed agreement for sale, far short of the 75 percent required under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.  Congress nevertheless ratified the “sale” in February 1877 and the Black Hills were forcibly removed from the Great Sioux Reservation.^[305]

Comanche war chief Quanah Parker, circa 1885, was the son of Kwahadi Comanche chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, an Anglo-American who had been abducted as a nine-year-old child.

The origins of the Red River War lay in the encroachment of commercial buffalo hunters on Indian hunting lands.  The white hunters annihilated scores of animals each day, taking the valuable hides and leaving the carcasses to rot.  This wasteful practice constituted an existential threat to the survival of Southern Plains Indians (Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa Apache, Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho tribes).  On June 27, 1874, some 300 Indians led by Comanche chief Quanah Parker attacked a buffalo hunter post.  The hunters, with their long-range rifles, held them off.

Lt. Col. George A. Custer, circa 1865 (Wikimedia)

On the Northern Plains, the Grant administration’s plot to take the Black Hills continued to unfold.  After issuing its edict in December 1875 requiring all Sioux tribes to report to the Great Sioux Reservation by January 31, 1876, some 7,000 Indians, including 2,000 fighting men, moved in the opposite direction, toward Montana, though Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were not among them.

Pictograph of the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Red Horse (subchief of the Miniconjou Sioux who fought in the battle), 1881. (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution) Click to enlarge.

The U.S. Army went after them, launching the first strike on March 17, 1876.  U.S. Cavalry units under the command of Col. Joseph J. Reynolds attacked a Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux village on the Powder River in Montana Territory, burning 65 lodges and food and supplies, and capturing horses.  In June, a larger U.S. military expedition entered the area and unwisely divided.  Lt. Col. George Custer and his 268-man Seventh Cavalry found themselves facing 2,000 Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors.  They were killed to a man in the Battle of Little Big Horn on June 25-26.  Prior to the battle, Sitting Bull, a revered holy man, performed a ceremonial Sun Dance and received a vision of soldiers falling like “grasshoppers,” which he interpreted as a sign of victory.  Crazy Horse led warriors in the fight itself.  “Custer’s Last Stand” shocked the nation on its one-hundredth anniversary, but the outcome of the U.S.-Indian wars was never in doubt.

Great Sioux Reservation – diminishing boundaries. Click to enlarge.

On November 25, Col. Mackenzie and his Fourth Cavalry, having been called up from the south, discovered and destroyed a Northern Cheyenne village in Wyoming Territory, leading to the surrender of the Northern Cheyenne.  Crazy Horse and his Oglala band surrendered on May 6, 1877.  Not long after, Crazy Horse was fatally bayoneted by a soldier at Camp Robinson.  Sitting Bull took his band across the Canadian border and remained there until July 1881, finally surrendering at Fort Buford in the Dakota Territory.  He was killed in December 1890 by an Indian agency policeman in a botched attempt to arrest him.

Towering pile of bison skulls to be ground into fertilizer, Michigan Carbon Works, circa 1870 (Wikipedia). Click to enlarge.

The plight of Plains Indians included watching the annihilation of the buffalo, ruling out the possibility of any return to their former way of life.  “In 1876,” writes Peter Cozzens, “more than two million buffalo had blanketed the river valleys of Wyoming and Montana.  Six years later, a rancher traveling across the northern plains said he was ‘never out of sight of a dead buffalo and never in sight of a live one.’  By the mid-1880s at the peak of the beef bonanza, there were more open-range cattle in the Lakota country than there had ever been buffalo.”^[308]

Nez Perce land reduced by treaties (National Park Service)

Joseph the Elder and his followers continued to reside in their cherished Wallowa Valley in the northeastern corner of Oregon for the next twelve years.  When the elder chief died in 1871, his son, also named Joseph, assumed leadership.^[310]  In June 1873, President Grant signed an executive order giving Chief Joseph’s band exclusive rights to half the Wallowa Valley.  Two years later, however, under pressure from territorial representatives, Grant revoked the order.  According to Cozzens:  “The Wallowa valley became public domain, and whites overran the land, killing Nez Perce men without cause and raping their women. . . . The Wallowa band forswore vengeance until June 1876, when two farmers killed a warrior wrongly accused of horse stealing.  When the Nez Perce agent’s promise to bring the guilty whites to justice did not materialize, infuriated warriors laid siege to Wallowa ranches.  Civilian volunteers assembled to repel them.”^[311]

Nez Perce Chief Joseph (Mut Too Lat Lat), circa 1880 (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian)

At the surrender, Chief Joseph was told that the Nez Perces would be treated honorably as prisoners of war; that none would be punished for the Idaho killings; and that they would be escorted in the spring to the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho.  Instead, they were taken to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they spent the winter of 1877, then to the Quapaw Reservation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in July 1878, where forty-seven people died during the first two months.^[313]  In January 1879, Chief Joseph was allowed to travel to Washington to plead his case before President Hayes for returning to their homeland in Oregon.  The president denied his request.  Joseph also took his case to the American people, speaking for an hour in Lincoln Hall to a large audience on January 17.  According to the historian Elliott West:

As his words were translated, they were interrupted several times with shouts of “Shame!” and at the end the audience gave a thunderous ovation.  Not long afterward, Joseph have his version of events to an editor of the North American Review, one of the nation’s more widely circulated periodicals; it appeared in April 1879.  He laid out the case against Washington, moving through what he considered the misunderstandings, abuses, and betrayals behind the war, always speaking of the broken promise at its end.^[314]

Six years later, in May 1885, Chief Joseph and 268 Nez Perce were allowed to leave Indian Territory for the Lapwai reservation in Idaho.  Yet the chief still longed to return to Wallowa Valley and thus, continued to petition the government.  He was allowed only brief visits in 1899 and 1900.  Chief Joseph died on September 21, 1904, ninety-nine years and a day after the Nez Perces met Lewis and Clark.^[315]

Geronimo, the last to surrender in 1886 (1898 photo, Wikipedia)

The last U.S.-Indian war – actually a round-up – ended with the surrender of Geronimo and his small band of Chiracahua Apaches near Fort Bowie along the Arizona-New Mexico border in September 1886.  Geronimo spent the rest of his life as a prisoner of war in three different prisons (he died in 1909), but he nonetheless appeared in Wild West shows and the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904, and rode a horse in President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 inauguration parade.  Joined by five other western Indian leaders in full plumed headdresses – Quanah Parker (Comanche), American Horse (Oglala Lakota), Buckskin Charley (Southern Ute), Hollow Horn Bear (Brulé Lakota), and Little Plume (Blackfeet) – they proceeded through the streets of Washington before some 35,000 people.  “I wanted to give the people a good show,” said Roosevelt.  Indeed, it was all for show, as the president met with Geronimo afterward and refused his request to let his people return to Arizona. “When you lived in Arizona, you had a bad heart and killed many of my people,” said Roosevelt through an interpreter.  “We will have to wait and see how you act.”^[316]

With the opening of the 1880s, a host of high-minded reformist groups sprang up dedicated to lift the Indians ‘from the night of barbarism into the fair dawn of Christian civilization.’  As such, the reformers doubled as cultural exterminators.  Few of them saw anything in the traditional Indian way of life worth preserving.  In its place, they would impose individual ownership of the land and a white man’s education. . . . The reformers also held one critical interest in common with westerners:  they wanted reservations cut to the bare minimum and surplus Indian land thrown open to homesteaders.^[318]

Ironically, as the last “wild” Indians were being “tamed,” a new movement emerged in the United States dedicated to preserving the “untamed wilderness,” with Yellowstone National Park established in 1872 as the first national park.

V. Legacies and lessons

The course of empire still holds its accustomed way.  With the United States as the dominant power of the western world lies the obligation of contributing her share to the further extension of civilization, to the spreading of the gospel, and conveying to less favored nations the most enlightened views of civil government.^[319]

Alfred T. Mahan, a career naval officer, urged U.S. leaders to put military muscle behind imperial ambitions by creating a two-ocean navy, building a canal across Panama, acquiring overseas bases, and projecting U.S. power abroad.  General Thomas Jordan set his sights on annexing Cuba in an article titled “Why We Need Cuba,” published in The Forum in July 1891.^[320]  The Republican Party formally adopted overseas expansionism in its 1892 party platform, euphemistically described as “the achievement of the Manifest Destiny of the Republic in its broadest sense.”^[321]  Five years later, President William McKinley declared that “we need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California.  It is Manifest Destiny.”^[322]

Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, apostle of imperialism (Wikipedia)

So began the new era of overseas expansionism in U.S. foreign policy, or what became known in Latin America as “Yankee imperialism.”  Between 1898 and 1904, the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, Eastern Samoa, and the Philippines; joined other imperial powers in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China; made Cuba a “protectorate” of the United States; fomented a revolt in the Colombian province of Panama in order to obtain a ten-mile-wide canal zone; and asserted the right to “police” the Western Hemisphere.  In the Congressional debate over whether to annex the Philippines, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana praised the principle of “self-government” but explained that this was not possible for Filipinos as they “are a barbarous race. . . . They are Orientals, Malays . . . How shall they, in the twinkling of an eye, be exalted to the heights of self-governing peoples which required a thousand years for us to reach, Anglo-Saxon though we are?”^[323]  By this time, racial justifications for imperialism had largely replaced religious ones.

Our men have been relentless; have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap.  Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to “make them talk,” have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those [who] found their bullet riddled corpses.

As if to rationalize this brutality, the correspondent reminded readers that American troops were “not dealing with a civilized people.  The only thing they [Filipinos] know is force, violence, and brutality, and we give it to them.”^[324]

Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy, Jan. 20, 1961. “Let every nation know . . . that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” (U. S. Army Signal Corps photo, JFK Library, Boston)

As with the “civilizing mission,” official rhetoric obfuscated actual practices.  During the Cold War (1946-1991), contrary to U.S. proclamations, the United States supported a host of repressive governments and sometimes overthrew democratic ones.  According to the historian Lindsey O’Rourke, the United States engaged in 70 “regime change” operations during this time, of which 64 were conducted covertly through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  “The United States supported authoritarian forces in forty-four out of sixty-four covert regime changes, including at least six operations that sought to replace liberal democratic governments with illiberal authoritarian regimes.”  In these six cases – Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973) – the U.S. not only undermined democracy but also aided and abetted repression, torture, and execution of political opponents.^[327]

Frederick Jackson Turner, 1918 photo (public domain)

In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner called attention to the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau of 1890 had declared that the “frontier line” separating settled and unsettled territory no longer existed; the West, as such, had been settled.  In a speech delivered at the American Historical Association annual meeting in Chicago, titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” he remarked:

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.  The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. . . . This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.^[331]

In reality, the land was not “free” at all, but inhabited by Indigenous peoples who were removed by violence and coercion to small reservations at a great cost to the U.S. government.  Turner’s historical thesis does not take into account the harm done to Native American people, nor the repeated failures of the federal government to carry out its treaty obligations, nor the continuing assaults on Native American cultures, rights, and dignity in his own day.  In short, Turner’s thesis refrains from any semblance of accountability for the nation’s past misdeeds.  What Turner was mainly interested in was how the nation would fare without its mission to “overspread the continent” and what might replace this mission.  In 1896, he wrote another article in which he called for “the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries,” thus joining other advocates of overseas imperialism such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge.^[332]

William D’Arcy McNickle (1904-1977) (The Newberry Library)

In 1946, the United States established an Indian Claims Commission and asked anthropologists and historians to serve as expert witnesses in court cases adjudicating Tribal territorial claims.  The commission investigated 852 cases, each requiring the services of expert witnesses to determine the legitimacy of claims.  The process helped inaugurate a new interdisciplinary field, Indian ethnohistory, focused on understanding Native American societies and their historical experiences.  In 1954, the American Indian Ethnohistoric Conference was founded along with its journal, Ethnohistory.^[337]  Native American historians such as D’Arcy McNickle (Métis-Cree) joined with Anglo American historians such as Wilcomb Washburn to balance white historical accounts with Indian sources and perspectives.  Washburn, in an article titled “A Moral History of Indian-White Relations: Needs and Opportunities for Study” (1957), laid out the case for rewriting the history of U.S.-Indian relations, decrying the “one-sided moral assumptions” used to justify the “the expansion of one people into the territory of another.”^[338]

The D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies in Chicago, founded in 1972, brings together scholars, teachers, students, tribal historians, and Native community members to promote research and improve the representation of Native peoples and histories in education and writing. (The Newberry Library)

In 1972, the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian was established in Chicago in order to improve and promote teaching about Native Americans through conferences, grants, and teacher workshops.  Over the course of the next twenty years, textbooks and curricula were revised, new university courses and programs in Indian history were added, and more scholarly works on Indian culture and Indian-white relations were published, including articles in prominent historical journals.  Some of the new scholarship focused on the roles of Native American women in Tribal societies and how European and American contact generally led to a decline in their status.^[341]

The last quarter of a century has seen a succession of groundbreaking studies that have changed American history almost beyond recognition. . . . Gone is the trivialization of Native Americans as myopic, prepolitical actors, mere speed bumps in Anglo-America’s westward expansion, and gone is the reduction of hundreds of indigenous communities to a hazy backdrop of frontier hostility.  Rather than a monolithic, preordained sequence, the creation of America is now seen as a multilateral process that created new worlds for all.^[344]

Contributions by scholars of Native American heritage have made a world of difference.  Ned Blackhawk, an enrolled member of the Te-Moak tribe of the Western Shoshone and an historian at Yale University, won the National Book Award in 2023 for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History, a grand narrative that weaves together five centuries of Native and non-Native histories.

Our tribal government is based on a long-standing Choctaw value: servant leadership.  A servant leader works to meet the needs of the community. . . . Today, servant leadership guides the Choctaw nation as it works to improve the lives of tribal members (by providing healthcare, schools, and housing), as well as everyone else living in our region (the Choctaw Nation builds public infrastructure that benefits all of Southeastern Oklahoma).^[346]

The past cannot be changed, but how we view the past can and does change.  The lessons we draw from the past guide the choices we make today.  Acknowledging past wrongs serves to realign our choices with principles of justice and humanity, creating better outcomes for all.  On October 8, 2021, President Joe Biden became the first president to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  “For generations,” he wrote in the official proclamation, “Federal policies systematically sought to assimilate and displace Native people and eradicate Native cultures.  Today, we recognize Indigenous peoples’ resilience and strength as well as the immeasurable positive impact that they have made on every aspect of American society.”^[347]

Endnotes

[2] Thomas Paine, Common Sense, first published in Philadelphia anonymously on January 10, 1776, National Constitution Center (document excerpt), https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/thomas-paine-common-sense-1776; and Thomas Paine, Common Sense, edited by Edward Larkin (Broadview Press, 2004), page 64.

[3] Samuel Adams, “On American Independence,” excerpt from a speech delivered at the State House in Philadelphia on August 1, 1776, https://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/american-independence-speech-by-samuel-adams-august-1-1776.html.  In 1776, African Americans constituted about one-fifth of the population in the thirteen rebellious British colonies.

[4] “From George Washington to Lafayette, 15 August 1786,” National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0200.

[5] Note on terminology:  The terms “Indian,” “Native,” “Native American,” and “Indigenous” are used interchangeably in this essay; also, Indian “tribes,” “nations,” and “First Nations” (used in Canada); and “Euro-Americans,” “Anglo Americans,” and “white” Americans.

[6] On “settler colonialism,” see Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Anne E. Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester University Press, Vol. 61, 2006); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8, No. 4 (December 2006): 387-409; Iona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington, eds., Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); and Settler Colonial Studies, a peer reviewed academic journal published four times a year.  See also, Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell, eds., Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2018).

[7] “Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations,” Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, https://americanindian.si.edu/nationtonation.  The term “domestic dependent nation” derives from the 1831 Supreme Court case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in which Chief Justice Marshall defined the Cherokee as a nation within the territorial boundaries of the United States and subject to federal authority.

[8] Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, 77.

[9] Mark Hirsch, “1871: The End of Indian Treaty-Making, American Indian (Magazine of Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian), Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer/Fall 2014), https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/1871-end-indian-treaty-making.  The Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 stated that “henceforth, no Indian nation or tribe . . . shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty,” yet also stated “that nothing herein contained shall be construed to invalidate or impair the obligation of any treaty heretofore lawfully made and ratified with any such Indian nation or tribe.”  In 1903, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock that Congress had the power to unilaterally abrogate treaties with Indian tribes.  Subsequent rulings, however, notably United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), determined that Congressional “plenary power” was not absolute and that tribes retained certain collective rights.

[10] “Rushes to Statehood: The Oklahoma Land Runs,” National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, https://nationalcowboymuseum.org/explore/rushes-statehood-oklahoma-land-runs.  In addition to land rushes in Oklahoma, there was a land lottery in 1901 and a land auction in 1906.

[11] “Federal Law and Indian Policy Overview: History of Indian Law and Policy,” U.S. Department of the Interior: Indian Affairs, https://www.bia.gov/bia/history/IndianLawPolicy.

[12] See “Mapped history of how Native American land was taken” (animated map), Flowing Data, January 13, 2015; and “A Brief History of Native American Land Loss in the United States,” Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which utilizes the animated map to succinctly narrate the story of Native American land loss (2:52 minutes).

[13] Merrill E. Gates, From the Seventeenth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners (1885),” reprinted in Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, 4th edition (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), 452-53.

[14] John Oberly, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1888 Annual Report, cited in David E. Wilkins, “The U.S. Supreme Court’s Explication of “Federal Plenary Power”: An Analysis of Case Law Affecting Tribal Sovereignty, 1886-1914,” Jepson School of Leadership Studies, 1994, https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1310&context=jepson-faculty-publications, page 7.

[15] A catalyst for the Friends of the Indian reform movement was Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, A Century of Dishonor: The classic account of our government’s mistreatment of Native Americans, published in 1881 (republished by Indian Head Books in 1993).  Jackson chastised the federal government for “repeated disregard of its treaties with the Indians” (24) and numerous massacres of Indians.  She called on the U.S. government to stop “cheating, robbing, [and] breaking promises” and to protect “Indian’s rights of property’ (342).  Yet, in the Introduction to the book, Julius H. Seelye, a former missionary and member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the president of Amherst College, wrote:  “When the Indian, through wise and Christian treatment, becomes invested with all the rights and duties of citizenship, his special tribal relations will become extinct.”  Thus, “all our policy should be shaped toward the gradual loosening of the tribal bond, and the gradual absorption of the Indian families among the masses of people” (3).  Essentially, Seelye endorsed cultural genocide in the name of reform.

[16] “’Kill the Indian in him, and save the Man’: R. H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/kill-indian-him-and-save-man-r-h-pratt-education-native-americans.

[17] US Indian Boarding School History,” The National Native American Boarding School Healing coalition, https://boardingschoolhealing.org/us-indian-boarding-school-history; Zach Levitt, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Simon Romero and Tim Wallace, “’War Against the Children’,” New York Times, August 30, 2023; and Kami Horton, “150 years ago, one of Oregon’s first Indian boarding schools opened,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, February 27, 2024, https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/27/native-american-indigenous-klamath-boarding-schools-forced-assimilation-indian-school.  Five years after the Carlisle School was founded, the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School was founded in northern Oklahoma.  A 40 minute documentary film on the school can be found at “Chilocco History Project,” Oklahoma State University Library, https://chilocco.library.okstate.edu/documentary.

[18] Margaret D. Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 161-62.  Jacobs also explores truth and reconciliation commissions set up in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, nations where “settler colonialism” predominated (pp. 204-205).

[19] Colin G. Calloway, “The Chiefs Now in This City”: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 71.

[20] On the Métis nation, see Scott Berthelette, Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire: French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

[21] Calloway, “The Chiefs Now in This City”, 6-7, 3-5.

[22] Kathleen DuVal quoted in Nicole Eustace, “The Expanding Vision of America,” The New York Review of Books, March 27, 2025.

[23] Calloway, “The Chiefs Now in This City”, 46.

[24] Calloway, “The Chiefs Now in This City”, 63-64; and Stephanie Gamble, “Treaty Negotiations with Native Americans,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/treaty-negotiations-with-native-americans.

[25] Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (New York: Random House, 2024), 296.

[26] Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 12.

[27] “Ratified Indian Treaty 8: Delaware – Fort Pitt, September 17, 1778” (with transcription), National Archives Catalog, https://digitreaties.org/treaties/treaty/176316991.  According to the National Museum of American Diplomacy, “Colonel George Morgan (1743-1810), a U.S. representative in Indian affairs during the Revolution (1776-1779), had gained the trust of the Lenape, who called him ‘Tamanend’ in honor of one of their lost warriors. . . . In 1779, Morgan accompanied the Lenape delegation before the U.S. Congress in Philadelphia as they demanded the United States respect their sovereignty and right to neutrality.  To Morgan’s disappointment, Congress responded that the United States was not bound to any agreements as long as any Lenape warriors aided the British.  Morgan promptly resigned from his position.”  “1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt: U.S. Treaty-Making with the Lenape Nation,” July 29, 2022, https://diplomacy.state.gov/stories/treaty-of-fort-pitt.

[28] Jessica Choppin Roney, “An Expansion of the Same Society: Republican Government and Empire in the Early Republic,” The Journal of American History, June 2024, 17.

[29] Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 320, 116.

[30] “The Cherokee and the Trail of Tears,” NCpedia. State Library of North Carolina (2009), https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/cherokee-and-trail-tears.

[31] Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 320.

[32] Saunt, Unworthy Republic,  320-22.

[33] The Curtis Act of 1898 undermined tribal governments by abolishing tribal courts and subjecting all persons in the territory to federal law.  “The Curtis Act (1898),” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=CU006.  The Osage Allotment Act of 1906 broke up communally owned lands of the Osage nation, which, after distributing individual plots, opened remaining lands to non-Native settlement.

[34] “Indian Commissioner Leupp on Indian Policy: Extract from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 30, 1905, in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of the United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 202.

[35] “Sequoyah Convention,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=SE021.  See also, Donald L. Fixico, The State of Sequoyah: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Quest for an Indian State (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2024).  More recently, in 2019, the Cherokee Nation petitioned Congress for representation, based on the 1835 Treaty of New Echota which stated that the “Cherokee Nation . . . shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives.”  The House failed to act on this obligation at the time.  Cherokee leaders of late have called on the House to reconsider its obligation under the treaty and nominated Kim Teehee as their delegate.  If approved, the Cherokee delegate would join six other non-voting delegates – from Washington DC, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands – in the House of Representatives.  “Seat the Cherokee Nation’s Delegate in the U.S. House,” Cherokee Nation, https://www.cherokee.org/our-government/delegate-to-congress.

[36] Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 119-20.

[37] Christine Chaumeau, “New Zealand Leads the Way on Reparations for Indigenous People,” Justiceinfo.net, June 28, 2021, https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/79224-new-zealand-leads-way-reparations-indigenous-people.html; and Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters, 14-15, 162-64.

[38] “UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, September 13, 2007, https://www.ohchr.org/en/indigenous-peoples/un-declaration-rights-indigenous-peoples.  The declaration also validates “all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law.”

[39] See also, “A History of Military Service: Native Americans in the U.S. Military Yesterday and Today,” November 8, 2021, United Service Organizations, https://www.uso.org/stories/2914-a-history-of-military-service-native-americans-in-the-u-s-military-yesterday-and-today.

[40] “Dawes Act (1887),” Section 6, Milestone Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dawes-act.

[41] Clifford E. Trafzer, “Introduction,” in Clifford E. Trafzer, ed., American Indians, American Presidents: A History (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2009), 20.

[42] Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 401.  See “Act of June 18, 1934-(Indian Reorganization Act),” https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-5299/pdf/COMPS-5299.pdf.

[43] Alexandre Guilherme da Cruz Alves Junior, “The Alcatraz Occupation and the American Indian Movement, 1969-1971,” The Journal of American History, March 2025, 737.

[44] “Concurrent Resolutions – Aug. 1, 1953,” Bureau of Indian Affairs Records: Termination, National Archives,  https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/bia/termination.

[45] “Termination Policy 1953-1968,” Partnership with Native Americans, http://secure.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=PWNA_Native_History_terminationpolicySW.

[46] David R. M. Beck and Rosalyn R. Lapier, “American Indians Moving to Cities,” in Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens, eds., Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 217, 223, 219.

[47] Duane Champagne, “From Full Citizenship to Self-Determination, 1930-75,” in Trafzer, ed., American Indians, American Presidents, 174-75.

[48] The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 was controversial.  It provided for the Constitutional rights of Native Americans but also limited the power of Tribal governments by authorizing federal courts to enforce these rights.

[49] “Native American civil rights and citizenship,” EBSCO Research, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/native-american-civil-rights-and-citizenship.  On Indigenous resistance movements, see Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019).

[50] Maura Grogan, “Native American Lands and Natural Resource Development,” Natural Resource Governance Institute,  2011, https://resourcegovernance.org/sites/default/files/RWI_Native_American_Lands_2011.pdf, pages 15, 25; and “Three Million Acres of Land Returned to Tribes Through Interior Department’s Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations,” U.S. Department of the Interior, December 4, 2023, https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/three-million-acres-land-returned-tribes-through-interior-departments-land-buy-back.  See also, David R. M. Beck, Bribed with Our Own Money: Federal Abuse of American Indian Funds in the Termination Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2024).

[51] “Race and Ethnicity in the United States,” United States Census Bureau, August 12, 2021; and “American Indian/Alaska Native Health,” U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office of Minority Health, https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/american-indian-and-alaska-native-health.  Since 2000, the Census Bureau has allowed U.S. citizens to check off multiple race categories, allowing people to self-identify as Native Americans.

[52] “Native American Ownership and Governance of Natural Resources,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Natural Resources Revenue Data, https://revenuedata.doi.gov/how-revenue-works/native-american-ownership-governance/#natural-resource-ownership; and Friends Committee on National Legislation, “The Origins of our Trust Responsibility towards Tribes,” http://fcnl.org/issues/nativeam/the_origins_of_our_trust_responsibility_towards_the_tribes/index.html.

[53] Francis Jennings, The Invasion of American: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1975).  On the paradigm shift in historical narratives, see Section V of this essay.

[54] The Holocaust Museum in Houston, Texas, includes in its education and research the “Genocide of Indigenous Peoples,” https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-of-indigenous-peoples-guide.

[55] Michael John Witgen, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), vii.

[56] Native American and Indigenous Studies, https://naisa.org; and “Tribal Colleges & Universities,” https://www.aihec.org/tribal-colleges-universities.

[57] Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 7.  See Patricia Pierce Erikson, Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Research Center (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).  Federal regulations today require museums and related institutions to obtain the consent of “lineal descendants” of American Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations for their exhibits.  Julia Jacobs and Zachary Small, “Top Museums Shutter Native American Exhibits,” New York Times, January 27, 2024.

[58] Stacy Pratt, “Dawning of a New Era: First Americans Museum Opens in Oklahoma City,” First American Art Magazine, No. 32, Fall 2021, 19-20.  On “survivance,” see Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Christian Ayne Crouch, “Survivance: About Process and Historical Structures.” Journal of the Early Republic 43, no. 1 (2023): 131-38; and Donald Fixico, Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013).

[59] “Pow Wows in Oklahoma – Oklahoma Pow Wow Calendar,” https://calendar.powwows.com/events/categories/pow-wows/pow-wows-in-oklahoma.

[60] Peter Baker and Aishvarya Kavi, “Biden Apologizes for Mistreatment of Native American Children,” New York Times, October 26, 2024.  The Washington Post found more than three times as many deaths as the U.S. government documented in its investigation of Indian boarding schools.  The newspaper’s year-long investigation documented 3,104 student deaths at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970.  Dana Hedgpeth, Sari Horwitz, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Andrew Ba Tran, Nilo Tabrizy, and Jahi Chikwendiu, “More than 3,100 students died at schools built to crush Native American cultures,” The Washington Post, December 22, 2024.

[61] Baker and Kavi, “Biden Apologizes for Mistreatment of Native American Children.”

[62] U.S. Department of the Interior, “Interior Department Announces Partnerships to Memorialize Stories and Impacts of the Federal Indian Boarding School System,” December 9, 2024, https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-department-announces-partnerships-memorialize-stories-and-impacts-federal.

[63] “Culture. Knowledge. Leadership.” Bureau of Indian Education, https://www.bie.edu/topic-page/bureau-indian-education.  The Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) “serves approximately 40,000 K–12 students at 183 elementary and secondary schools on 64 reservations in 23 states.  This network includes 55 BIE-operated and 128 Tribally controlled schools, all providing culturally relevant education grounded in Tribal languages, traditions, and community values.  In addition, through the Johnson O’Malley program, BIE supports the educational and cultural needs of more than 325,000 Native students enrolled in public schools and other eligible institutions.”

[64] Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters, 204-205; David Helvarg, “The Dark History of California’s Gold Rush,” American Indian, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Fall 2024), https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/California-gold-rush; and California Truth & Healing Council website, https://tribalaffairs.ca.gov/cthc.

[65] Ancient Ashiwi (Zuni) prayer-song, translated and published in Ruth Bunzel, “Introduction to Zuni Ceremonialism,” Forty-Seventh Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), 483–486; republished in Jack D. Forbes, “Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos,” Daedalus, Fall 2001, https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/indigenous-americans-spirituality-and-ecos.

[66] Binalakshmi Nepram. “Looking to Indigenous Pathways to Peace,” American Indian (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian), Winter 2024, 9; International Peace Bureau, “Healing People, Peace & Planet: World’s Indigenous Leaders at the First Global Summit on Indigenous Peacebuilding held in Washington DC Urges United Nations to include Indigenous Peacebuilding Approaches in Resolving Global Conflicts,” April 30, 2024, https://ipb.org/healing-people-peace-planet-worlds-indigenous-leaders-at-the-first-global-summit-on-indigenous-peacebuilding-held-in-washington-dc-urges-united-nations-to-include-indigenous-peacebui; and “Indigenous Leaders Call for Global Recognition of Peacebuilding Role as UN Forum Echoes Summit Outcomes,” May 6, 2026, International Peace Bureau, https://ipb.org/indigenous-leaders-call-for-global-recognition-of-peacebuilding-role-as-un-forum-echoes-summit-outcomes.

[67] Somini Sengupta, Brad Plumer, and David Gelles, “Indigenous People Make Voices Heard at Climate Talks,” New York Times, November 15, 1015.

[68] Charlotte Dulany, “Tribes That Embrace Water Are Now Threatened by It,” New York Times, January 12, 2026.

[69] “Interior Department Signed 69 Tribal Co-Stewardship Agreements In 2024,” National Parks Traveler, December 12, 2024, https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2024/12/interior-department-signed-69-tribal-co-stewardship-agreements-2024.  In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed an Executive Order, “Consultation and Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments,” that called for federal agencies to consult with tribes when developing policies or management actions that impact Native American communities.  “A Tribal Model of Wildlife Stewardship – from The Wildlife Professional,” The Wildlife Society, December 21, 2016, https://wildlife.org/a-tribal-model-of-wildlife-stewardship-from-the-wildlife-professional.

[70] Rebecca Dzombak, “Dams Dismantled, Salmon Return to Their Oregon Spawning Grounds,” New York Times, October 30, 2025.

[71] Raymond Zhong, “Reviving a Region’s Kelp Forests, Cove by Cove, a Dive at a Time,” New York Times, November 30, 2025.

[72] “Fact Sheet: Recent National Park Service Work with Indian Country,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/nov2024-indiancountryfactsheet.htm; Collin O’Mara, “The Power of Working Together,” National Wildlife, Winter 2025, 6; and Garrit Voggesser, “Following Their Lead,” National Wildlife, Fall 2024, 6.

[73] Katie O’Reilly, “The Reciprocity Way: Indigenous knowledge and climate science combine to chart a path forward,” Sierra magazine, Spring 2026, 6.  The American buffalo is technically a bison, but the name “buffalo” has stuck since being labeled as such by French and English explorers in the 17th century.

[74] Michael Jamison, “How We Heal,” National Parks Conservation Association, Fall 2003, https://www.npca.org/articles/3579-how-we-heal.  See also, Secretary of the Interior, Washington, “Order No. 3410; Subject: Restoration of American Bison and the Prairie Grasslands,” March 3, 2023, https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/elips/documents/so-3410.pdf.

[75] Lindsey Botts, “Kindred Spirits: Tribal Nations Play a Growing Role in Addressing the Biodiversity Crisis,” Sierra Club Magazine, Winter 2023, 38.  See the Resource section for organizations directed by or collaborating with Indigenous groups on environmental stewardship projects.

[76] On the theory of dehumanization, see Alexander P. Landry & all, “The Uniquely Powerful Impact of Explicit, Blatant Dehumanization on Support for Intergroup Violence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, Online First Publication, May 5, 2025, https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000492.

[77] The abuses committed in the name of Christianity have not gone without criticism.  The Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), wrote of the “many ravages” and “savage injustice” committed by his fellow Spaniards against the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean.  Four centuries later, Catholic theologian Gusavo Gutiérrez-Merino led a movement for Liberation Theology in the Catholic Church which set forth a preferential option for the poor and challenged the alliance of the Church and economic and political elites.

[78] “The Bull Romanus Pontifex (Nicholas V), January 8, 1455, https://caid.ca/Bull_Romanus_Pontifex_1455.pdf.

[79] Pope Alexander VI, “Inter Caetera: Division of the Undiscovered World Between Spain and Portugal,” 1493, Papal Encyclicals Online, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Alex06/alex06inter.htm; and “The Doctrine of Discovery, 1493,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/doctrine-discovery-1493.  Pope Alexander VI’s papal bull drew an imaginary north-south line down the Atlantic Ocean and declared all newly discovered lands west of the line to belong to Spain, and those to the east, to Portugal.

[80] “Columbus reports on his first voyage, 1493” (English translation), page 7, The Gilder Lehrman Institute on American History, 2012, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/01427_fps.pdf.  See also, Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise:  Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Plume, 1991).  Columbus, on his first voyage, kidnapped between ten and twenty-five Natives, of which eight survived the journey back to Spain.  In subsequent years, tens of thousands of enslaved Indigenous people were brought back to Spain.  Their story is told by Caroline Dodds Pennock in On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (New York: Penguin Random House, 2024).

[81] Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (New York: Mariner Books, 2018); see especially Appendix 1.

[82] “Patent Granted by King Henry VII to John Cabot and his Sons, March 1496,” Heritage Newfoundland & Labrador, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/exploration/1496-cabot-patent.php.

[83] John Winthrop, Massachusetts governor, writing in 1633 and 1634 from Boston, quoted in “The Great Dying 1616-1619, ‘By God’s visitation, a Wonderful Plague,’” Historic Ipswich, https://historicipswich.net/2025/12/11/the-great-dying; and “The Charter of New England: 1620,” The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass01.asp.

[84] Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury, edited and with an Introduction by Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/whatmore-the-law-of-nations-lf-ed, Chapter VII.  The word “savage” derives from the Latin words “silva” (wood) and “silvaticus” (of the woods), and from the old French word “sauvage” (wild), which became “savage” in English.

[85] Blake A. Watson, “John Marshall and Indian Land Rights: A Historical Rejoinder to the Claim of ‘Universal Recognition’ of the Doctrine of Discovery,” Seton Hall Repository, page 43, https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1169&context=shlr.  See also, Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrent, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790-1834 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 227-29.

[86] Thomas Harriot, “A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,” The Complete 1590 Theodor de Bry Edition (New York: New Dover Publications, 1972).  One year later, in 1591, Theodor de Bry published “Narrative of Le Moyne: An Artist Who Accompanied the French Expedition to Florida under Laudonniere, 1564.”  Both reports are available online through the Library of Congress.

[87] James H. Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 3 (July 2012), 463.

[88] Merrill, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” 464-65.

[89] Robin Wall Kimmerer quoted in Paige Raibmon, “How to Talk about Relations between Indigenous Peoples and Europeans,” The Tyee, September 28, 2018, https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2018/09/28/Relations-Indigenous-Peoples-Europeans.

[90] Jacob Betz, “Beyond the Judeo-Christian Tradition: Restoring American Indian Religion to Twentieth-Century U.S. History,” in Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens, eds., Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 229.

[91] Merrill, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” 464-65, 510, 475.  See also, Bill Cronin, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983; 2003); and Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, 1997), 18-22.

[92] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, 42.

[93] Merrill, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” 458, quoting Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada (1870), page 147.

[94] Peter Cozzens, Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 27-28.

[95] Merrill, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” 477.

[96] James Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35.

[97] John J. Kucich, Unsettling Thoreau: Native Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Power of Place (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024; and Lydia Willsky-Ciollo, Henry David Thoreau and the Making of an American Theology (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2026).

[98] Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893,” The American Yawp Reader, https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/17-conquering-the-west/frederick-jackson-turner-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-1893.

[99] Sarah E. McKibben, “In Their ‘Owne Countre’: Deriding and Defending the Early Modern Irish Nation after Gerald of Wales,” Eolas: The Journal of the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies 8 (2015), 43.

[100] Katherine Harvey, “Gerald of Wales, chronicler of the Celtic world,” Engelsberg Ideas, July 24, 2024, https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/gerald-of-wales-chronicler-of-the-celtic-fringes.

[101] Harding, David. “Objects of English Colonial Discourse: The Irish and Native Americans.” Nordic Irish Studies 4 (2005): 39.

[102] “First Charter of Virginia (1606),” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/first-charter-of-virginia-1606.

[103] Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage: And the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1997), xiii.

[104] On the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in New England, see Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); and Linford D. Fisher, “Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves”: Indian Surrenderers during and after King Philip’s War,” Ethnohistory 64:1 (January 2017).  On enslavement of Indians more broadly, see Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Jennifer Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe, Vol. 22, No. 1, March 2018 (No. 55): 1-17.

[105] Abraham D. Lavender, “American Indian Slave Trade,” EBSCO, 2022, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/american-indian-slave-trade.

[106] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, 27; and “Population of the Original Thirteen Colonies, selected years by type,” Statistics on Slavery – Weber State University, https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm.

[107] “Barbados Slave Code 1688,” https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A30866.0001.001/1:8.281?rgn=div2&view=fulltext; and Kate Egner, “Slavery in Colonial America,” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/slavery-colonial-america.  See also, Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), which examines the construction of race through the religious beliefs and practices of English Virginians.

[108] Among European philosophers, Frenchman Denis Diderot was in the minority when he wrote in 1772, “This buying of Negroes, to reduce them to slavery, is one business that violates religion, morality, natural laws, and the rights of all human nature.”  Denis Diderot, “Encyclopedia” (1772), in Marvin Perry, et. al., Sources of the Western Tradition, Vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 43-46, https://sites.pitt.edu/~syd/did.html.

[109] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, 41.

[110] Calloway, “The Chiefs Now in This City”, 27, 26, 141-42.

[111] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 39.  The quotation is from Brother Gabriel Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons (1632).  Although Europeans had written languages, most of the population was illiterate before the 19th century.  The literacy rate in Western Europe was 18 percent in 1500, rising to 31 percent in 1700, according to “Estimated historical literacy rates, 1451 to 1701,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-literacy-rates.

[112] Duval, in Native Nations, distinguishes Native American spirituality from Western religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in terms of “inclusive” and “exclusive” qualities, respectively (66).  This may overstate the case, however, as many Native people rejected Christianity as presented or imposed on them.

[113] Kathleen DuVal, “How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny,” The Conversation (online), November 5, 2024.  See also, DuVal, Native Nations, Chapters 1 & 2.

[114] DuVal, Native Nations, 57-58, 59-60, 63.

[115] “To form a more perfect Union” is the opening phrase of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.  The idea that the “fall” of an empire may be conducive to better societal formations, can be seen in the general view in the United States that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a positive development.  Similarly in the Global South, the “fall” of European empires was welcomed.

[116] On Indian diplomacy, see Tim Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009); and Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

[117] John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27-28.

[118] See, for example, the story of Mary Campbell in Alysa Landry, “Native History: White Child Abducted by Delaware Embraced Native Life,” IndiJ Public Media, May 22, 2014, https://ictnews.org/archive/native-history-white-child-abducted-by-delaware-embraced-native-life.

[119] Pascal Daudin, “The Thirty Years’ War: The first modern war?” International Committee of the Red Cross, May 23, 2017, https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2017/05/23/thirty-years-war-first-modern-war.

[120] Hugo Grotius quoted in Stefan Aune, Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 21.  The term, “savage exception” is Aune’s term.

[121] Grenier, The First Way of War, 44.

[122] “The Scalp Act, 1751,” Project 1492, https://project1492.org/origin-of-the-scalp-act; and Henry J. Young, “Not on Scalp Bounties in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania State University, pp. 208-209, online. On scalp taking, see Wayne Lee, The Cutting Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023); and William S. Kiser, The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).  On the French and Indian War (1754-1763), see Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); and Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004).

[123] Kiser, The Business of Killing Indians, 4.

[124] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, 127.

[125] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

[126] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, 228, 231.

[127] Roney, “An Expansion of the Same Society,” 24.

[128] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, 233, 253-55; Aune, Indian Wars Everywhere, 22.; and “Classroom Connection:  Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Lands and the American Revolution,” Native Knowledge 360, National Museum of the American Indian, https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/haudenosaunee-lands/pdf/Haudenosaunee-Classroom-Connections.pdf.

[129] “’The Poor Defenseless Ones Together Bowed in Prayer’: The Gnadenhutten Massacre,” Ohio Memory: A Collaborative Program of the Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio, https://ohiomemory.ohiohistory.org/archives/2686; Eric Sterner, “The War Years (1775-1783),” Journal of the American Revolution, February 6, 2018, https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/02/moravians-middle-gnadenhutten-massacre; and Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970, 1984), 87.

[130] Grenier, The First Way of War, 10.

[131] Colin G. Calloway, Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996), 102

[132] “General Orders No. 100: The Lieber Code; Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, Prepared by Francis Lieber promulgated as General Orders No. 100 by President Lincoln, 24 April 1863,” The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lieber.asp#sec2.

[133] “Final Special Resource Study Environmental Assessment: Bear Creek Massacre Site, Idaho,” U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, page 9, https://npshistory.com/publications/srs/bear-river-massacre-srs-ea.pdf; and “Sand Creek Massacre,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/sand/learn/historyculture/index.htm.

[134] Lt. Gen. William T. Sherman to General Ulysses S. Grant, 28 December 1866, quoted in Russell F. Weigley, “A Historian Looks at the Army,” Army University Press, February 1972, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/50th-Anniversary/50th-Weigley/a-look-at-the-army.pdf.

[135] Jerry Green, “Medals of Wounded Knee,” Nebraska History 75 (Summer 1994), 203, cited in Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 140.

[136] Madley, An American Genocide, 68.

[137] Peter Burnett, 1^st Governor, Independent Democrat, 1849-1851, State of the State Address, Delivered: January 6, 1851,” The Governors’ Gallery, https://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/s_01-Burnett2.html.

[138] James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Chapter 33, p. 10, https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/James_Fenimore_Cooper/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans/Chapter_33_p10.html.

[139] Madley, An American Genocide, 185-86.  Source of quotation: Daily Alta California, December 30, 1850.

[140] Sarah Fling, “The Myth of the Vanishing Indian: Art in the White House Collection,” The White House Historical Association, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-myth-of-the-vanishing-indian.

[141] Nicole Eustace, “The Expanding Vision of America,” The New York Review of Books, March 27, 2025.

[142] Thomas Jefferson quoted in Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019), 36.

[143] “John O’Sullivan Declares America’s Manifest Destiny, 1845,” The American Yawp Reader, https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/manifest-destiny/john-osullivan-declares-americas-manifest-destiny-1845; and John L. O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” The United States Democratic Review (1839), https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/readings/manifest.html.

[144] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 118.

[145] Jonathan Marks, Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015) 8-9.

[146] F.S. Collins and M.K. Mansoura, “The Human Genome Project: Revealing the shared inheritance of all humankind,” Cancer, January 1, 2001, National Library of Medicine, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11148583; and Alan R. Templeton, “Human races: A genetic and evolutionary perspective,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 100:3 (1998), 640, 646.  See also, Michael Yudell, Dorothy Roberts, Rob DeSalle and Sarah Tishkoff, “Taking Race Out of Human Genetics,” Science, Vol. 351, No. 6273 (2016): 564-65.

[147] See Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine, From Man to Ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1980-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).  In discussing South America’s colonization, the authors note that the theory of “natural selection had naturalized the extinction of the Indians, granting a plenary indulgence for their slaughter” (178).

[148] Thanks to Tom Clark for his insights on theories of human evolution.  Charles Darwin did not directly endorse Social Darwinism, but his studies in 1859 and 1871 tended to blend, or confuse, biological evolution and human history, according to the anthropologist Tony Barta.  “Darwin’s fateful confusion of natural history and human history would be exploited fatally by others,” writes Barta.  Tony Barta, “Mr Darwin’s shooters: on natural selection and the naturalizing of genocide,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2005), 118.

[149] Ruth Kinna, “Forward,” in Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution (Oakland: PM Press, 2021; first published in 1902), 4-16.

[150] Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 183-84.

[151] David Michael Smith, “Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present,” https://www.se.edu/native-american/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2019/09/A-NAS-2017-Proceedings-Smith.pdf.

[152] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 190.

[153] “Indian statistics of the United States – 1789, 1825, 1853,” Census of 1850, https://www2.census.gov/about/history/census-records/american-indians/1850aian032022.pdf; and “1890: Native population,” Native Voices, National Institute for Health, <https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/379.html.  See also, Linda A. Newson, “The Demographic Collapse of Native Peoples of the Americas, 1492-1650, Proceedings of the British Academy, 81, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/4002/81p247.pdf; and Jeffrey Ostler, “Genocide and American Indian History,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia (online), March 2, 2015.

[154] John Collier, “Office of Indian Affairs,” in Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1938 (Washington, D.C., 1938), 209; quoted in Brian W. Dippie, “This Bold but Wasting Race: Stereotypes and American Indian Policy,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 23, no. 1 (1973), 4.

[155] Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 185.

[156] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, 2-3, 427.

[157] “George Washington to the Five Nations, 23 march 1792,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-10-02-0088.

[158] Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington, 3, 2, 7.

[159] “The Treaty of Greenville 1795,” The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/greenvil.asp.  For a brief account of the war, see “Little Turtle’s War and Native America’s Greatest Victory over American Forces,” Potawatomi Nation, July 15, 2019, https://www.potawatomi.org/blog/2019/07/15/little-turtles-war-and-native-americas-greatest-victory-over-american-forces.

[160] Secretary of War Henry Knox. “Enclosure: Report on Indian Affairs, 29 December 1794,” National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-17-02-0223-0002.

[161] Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln:  Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1975), 2.

[162] Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8.

[163] “To George Washington from Henry Knox, 7 July 1789,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-03-02-0067.  See also, Lori J. Daggar, Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country by (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

[164] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 84; and “Cherokee History Timeline,” https://wsharing.com/WscherokeeTimeline.htm.

[165] “Indian Territory,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=IN018#:~:text=Pres.,river%2C%20Indians%20west%20of%20it.

[166] Thomas Jefferson letter to Handsome Lake, November 3, 1802, quoted in Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating & Empire-Building (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 86.

[167] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 192-93.

[168] “1805 Treaty of Mount Dexter,” Tribal Treaties Database, https://www.choctawnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/1805treaty-of-mount-dexter.pdf; and Donna Akers, “Decolonizing the Master Narrative: Treaties and Other American Myths,” Wicazo Sa Review 29, no. 1 (2014), 69.

[169] “From Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, 27 February 1803,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-39-02-0500.  Jefferson expressed a similar sentiment in December 1813 in a letter to German scholar Alexander von Humboldt, complaining that the British had “seduced the greater part of the tribes within our neighborhood to take up the hatchet against us.”  This, he surmised, “will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.” “Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December 1813,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0011.

[170] Patrick Feng, “The Battle of the Wabash: The Forgotten Disaster of the Indian Wars,” The Army Historical Foundation, https://armyhistory.org/the-battle-of-the-wabash-the-forgotten-disaster-of-the-indian-wars.  U.S. casualties totaled 918 killed and 276 wounded.

[171] David Dewitt, “Tecumseh and the war for the Northwest Territory,” Wisconsin Examiner, October 10, 2022, https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/10/10/tecumseh-and-the-war-for-the-northwest-territory.

[172] “War of 1812 Aftermath, 1818,” Treaty Signers Project, https://treatysigners.us/historical-overview/war-of-1812-aftermath-1818-historical-overview-child.

[173] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 192-93, 224.

[174] Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 227-28.

[175] “Native Americans and the White House: Prehistory to 1924,” The White House Historical Association, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/galleries/native-american-delegations-diplomacy-and-protests-at-the-white-house-hayne-hudjihini-chief-sumonyeacathee.  “The Bureau of Indian Affairs commissioned Charles Bird King to paint a series of over one hundred portraits of Native American leaders who visited the White House beginning with the presidency of James Monroe. In 1865, a fire destroyed almost all of King’s portraits. Five portraits are now housed in the White House collection, which are drawn from King’s personal replicas of the original portraits.”

[176] President James Monroe, “December 7, 1824: Eighth Annual Message,” Presidential Speeches, University of Virginia Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-7-1824-eighth-annual-message.

[177] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 205-206, 247.

[178] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 248.

[179] John A. Andrew III, From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992, 2007), 125.

[180] In 1832, Secretary of War Lewis Cass admitted that the “business of emigration commenced before we had much knowledge of the country. . . . The boundaries of the grants are confused and contradictory; the extent of the cessions unknown; the quantity of land now at the disposal of the Government, merely conjectural; and the proper locations for most of the tribes who are yet to go, indeterminate.”  Quoted in Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 106.

[181] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 226-32, 234-35.

[182] “Overview of Quapaw History” and “Who was Saracen?” Quapaw Nation, https://www.quapawtribe.com/736/Overview-of-Quapaw-History; and Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 230.

[183] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 200.

[184] In one case, an 1824 treaty signed by ostensible leaders of the Muscogee Nation (Creeks) was set aside by President John Quincy Adams (1825-1829), recognizing that those who signed the treaty had no authority to do so.

[185] Trafzer, “Introduction,” in Trafzer, ed., American Indians, American Presidents, 16.

[186] Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy: 1816-1830 (Chicago: Sage Books, 1974), 202.  See also, Yumiko Nakano, “The Campaign for Civilization or Removal: Thomas L. McKenney and Federal Indian Affairs in the Formative Years,” Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities, Seikei University No. 48 (2013), https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/51928784.pdf.

[187] In 1830, the Cherokee population in northern Georgia stood at about 13,500, including 1,277 Black slaves.  Stephen Breyer, “The Cherokee Indians and the Supreme Court.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 87, no. 3/4 (2003): 409.

[188] President Andrew Jackson, “December 8, 1829: First Annual Message to Congress,” University of Virginia Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-8-1829-first-annual-message-congress.

[189] Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 64, 67.

[190] Catharine Beecher, “Circular Addressed to Benevolent Ladies of the U. States,” December 1829, in Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Harvard University Press, 2005); and Will Chavez, “Historic Profile: Missionaries stood with Cherokees to fight removal,” Cherokee Phoenix, August 12, 2012, https://www.cherokeephoenix.org/culture/historic-profile-missionaries-stood-with-cherokees-to-fight-removal/article_c465a5a2-6344-5054-9d87-e0c89756d3d8.html.

[191] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 211.

[192] Lewis Cass, “Removal of the Indians,” North American Review, January 1830, excerpts, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/triumphnationalism/expansion/text4/cassremoval.pdf.  Claudio Saunt, in Unworthy Republic, describes Lewis Cass’s 63-page essay as “a morass of distortion and empty speculation” (63).

[193] “Indian Removal Act: Primary Documents in American History,” Library of Congress, https://guides.loc.gov/indian-removal-act/digital-collections.

[194] David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee, 1834 (The Project Gutenberg Ebook, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37925/37925-h/37925-h.htm), p. 206.

[195] Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians, Delivered in the Congress of the United States, April and May, 1830 (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830).

[196] “Andrew Jackson’s Speech to Congress on Indian Removal,” Second Annual Message, December 6, 1830, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/museum/tmc/manz/handouts/andrew_jackson_annual_message.pdf.

[197] Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 396.

[198] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 212-13, 266.  On

[199] “The Trail of Tears: Why we remember,” July 5, 2023, Biskinik, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma,  https://www.choctawnation.com/biskinik/news/the-trail-of-tears-why-we-remember.

[200] “A Story of Cherokee Removal: Forced Removal,” Native 360 Degree Knowledge, National American Indian Museum, https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/removal-cherokee/forced-removal.html.  See also, Jace Weaver and Laura Adams Weaver, Red Clay, 1835: Cherokee Removal and the Meaning of Sovereignty (New York: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2022).

[201] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 174, 263.

[202] “Seminole History,” Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Seminole Tribe of Florida, https://stofthpo.com/seminole-history.

[203] Donna Akers, “Native Nations in an Age of Western Expansion, 1820-80,” in Trafzer, ed., American Indians, American Presidents, 83; and “The Seminole Wars,” Florida Department of State, https://dos.fl.gov/florida-facts/florida-history/seminole-history/the-seminole-wars.

[204] Drinnon, Facing West, 154.  The Quakers, or Religious Society of Friends, actually opposed the Indian Removal bill.

[205] “The Trail of Tears and the Forced Relocation of the Cherokee Nation (Teaching with Historic Places),” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-trail-of-tears-and-the-forced-relocation-of-the-cherokee-nation-teaching-with-historic-places.htm; and “Trail of Tears,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/trte/learn/historyculture/what-happened-on-the-trail-of-tears.htm.

[206] Saunt, in Unworthy Republic, details the inept and corrupt U.S. removal operations in Chapters 5 and 6.

[207] Edward  Pessen, Jacksonian America:  Society, Personality, and Politics (Urbana:  Univ. of Illinois Press, 1985), 321.

[208] Donna L. Akers, “Decolonizing the Master Narrative: Treaties and Other American Myths,” Wicazo Sa Review, Vol. 29, No. 1,  Special Issue: A Tribute to Russell Means (Spring 2014), 59, 61.

[209] “Trail of Death,” Citizen Potawatomi Nation, https://www.potawatomiheritage.com/encyclopedia/trail-of-death.

[210] DuVal, Native Nations, 317-325.

[211] See Michael Leroy Oberg, The Iroquois, The United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[212] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 322-25.

[213] Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 145.

[214] “Bad Axe, Battle of,” Wisconsin Historical Society, https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS1604.

[215] Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 147.

[216] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 289.

[217] “The Indians at the Time of Contact, 1600-1850,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/pioneering-the-upper-midwest/articles-and-essays/history-of-the-upper-midwest-overview/indians-at-the-time-of-contact.

[218] Donna Akers, “Native Nations in an Age of Western Expansion, 1820-80,” in Trafzer, ed., American Indians, American Presidents, 88.

[219] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 232, 370.  The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina achieved full federal recognition on December 18, 2025, becoming the 575th federally recognized tribe in the United States.

[220] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 371.

[221] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, Appendix 2.

[222] Jeffrey Ostler, “How Many Trails of Tears Were There?” Yale University Press (blog), May 31, 2019, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2019/05/31/how-many-trails-of-tears-were-there.

[223] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 361.

[224] Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 315.

[225] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 361, 364-65.

[226] Peter Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 15.  The annexation of Texas added 376,168 square miles; the Oregon Treaty added 291,000 square miles, and the Mexican Cession encompassed 529,017 square miles, including present-day California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Kansas.

[227] Madley, An American Genocide, 23.

[228] Madley, An American Genocide, 18.

[229] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 17.  See also, David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

[230] Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 275.

[231] Ostler, The Plains Sioux, 22.

[232] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 18, 23-24.

[233] Edgar I. Bernal Sevilla, “Acoma Pueblo and the Spanish Arrival to New Mexico,” Intermountain Histories, https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/324.

[234] Edward D. Castillo, “Short Overview of California Indian History,” State of California Native American heritage Commission, https://nahc.ca.gov/native-americans/california-indian-history.

[235] Madley, An American Genocide, 27, 31, 36.  Serra’s letter to a colleague is dated May 21, 1773.

[236] Madley, An American Genocide, 38-39.

[237] “The Missions,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/california-first-person-narratives/articles-and-essays/early-california-history/missions; Madley, An American Genocide, 36-37; and “History of Russian America,” Fort Ross Conservancy, https://www.fortross.org/history/russian-american-company.

[238] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 10.

[239] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 23.

[240] Aune, Indian Wars Everywhere, 26.

[241] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 16.

[242] “Commissioner Parker on Trial,” Public Broadcasting Service, https://www.pbs.org/warrior/content/timeline/hero/grace.html.

[243] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 292-293.

[244] “President Ulysses S. Grant and Federal Indian Policy,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/president-ulysses-s-grant-and-federal-indian-policy.htm; and Ulysses S. Grant, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1873, https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/inaugural-addresses-of-the-presidents-of-the-united-states/ulysses-s.-grant-second-inaugural-address.

[245] Jeffrey Ostler, “How Many Trails of Tears Were There?”

[246] “Culture – Pawnee History,” Pawnee Nation, https://pawneenation.org/pawnee-history.

[247] Jericka Handie, “Pawnee Nation,” Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Oklahoma, https://www.ou.edu/gaylord/exiled-to-indian-country/content/pawnee-nation.

[248] Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters, 72, 75.

[249] Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters, 76, 77.

[250] Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters, 78-86.

[251] “Chief Standing Bear,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/mnrr/learn/historyculture/standingbear.htm.

[252] Madley, An American Genocide, 47-48.

[253] Madley, An American Genocide, 47.

[254] Madley, An American Genocide, 84, 143.

[255] Madley, An American Genocide, 60-61; and Erin Blakemore, “The Enslaved Native Americans Who Made The Gold Rush Possible,” History.com, February 18, 2025, https://www.history.com/articles/the-enslaved-native-americans-who-made-the-gold-rush-possible.

[256] Madley, An American Genocide, 56, 101.  In addition to American immigrants, tens of thousands of individuals, mainly men, arrived in California from other lands, including some 20,000 Chinese between 1848 and 1855.  Other fortune seekers came from Mexico, Chile, Peru, Ireland, England, France, Germany, and Italy, creating a cacophonous multicultural society.

[257] Madley, An American Genocide, 61.

[258] Madley, An American Genocide, 51.  White American discrimination and abuse was also directed at Hispanic Californios, as documented by Leonard Pitt in The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), and by William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb in “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (2003).  Through meticulous research, Carrigan and Webb found “at least 163 Mexicans were lynched in California between 1848 and 1860” (422).

[259] Madley, An American Genocide, 86-89.

[260] Madley, An American Genocide, 114.

[261] Madley, An American Genocide, 125.

[262] Madley, An American Genocide, 119, 132, 141.

[263] Madley, An American Genocide, 122.

[264] Madley, An American Genocide, 180-181; and “Gila Expedition,” Grokipedia, https://grokipedia.com/page/Gila_Expedition.

[265] Madley, An American Genocide, 250, 174.

[266] Madley, An American Genocide, 158-159.  The California Constitution, ratified in 1850, had a progressive twist in granting women the right to own property after marriage, a right not recognized in other states.

[267] Madley, An American Genocide, 161-162.

[268] Madley, An American Genocide, 163-164.

[269] Madley, An American Genocide, 164.

[270] Edward D. Castillo, “Short Overview of California Indian History,” State of California Native American heritage Commission, https://nahc.ca.gov/native-americans/california-indian-history.

[271] Madley, An American Genocide, 171.

[272] “List of Indian massacres in North America,” Wikipedia; and Madley, An American Genocide, 163.

[273] “Modoc War,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/labe/learn/historyculture/modoc-war.htm.

[274] Madley, An American Genocide, 171.

[275] Ostler, The Plains Sioux, 32-34.

[276] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 19.

[277] Ostler, The Plains Sioux, 33.

[278] Madley, An American Genocide, 78.

[279] John D. Unruh, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 121 (Table 4), https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminarsflvs/UnruhTables.pdf.

[280] J. Norman Heard, “The History of Captive-Taking Among North American Indians,” Texas State Historical Association, February 1, 1995; updated July 14, 2021, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/indian-captives.  Regarding adoption into tribes, Heard writes,  “When the Comanches and Kiowas were driven onto reservations north of the Red River and compelled to release their prisoners [after the Red River War of 1874-1875], many captives had become so completely assimilated that they chose to remain with their captors.  Most of these had married American Indians, and it is estimated that 30 percent of Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas had captive blood in their veins.”  See also, J. Norman Heard, Handbook of the American frontier: Four centuries of Indian-White relationships (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987), available through internet archive, https://archive.org/details/handbookofameric0002hear.

[281] Burton Hill, “The Great Indian Treaty Council of 1851,” Nebraska State Historical Society, https://history.nebraska.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/doc_publications_NH1966Indian_Treaty_1851.pdf.

[282] “Treaty with the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache; July 27, 1853,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/cokiap53.asp.

[283] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 20-21; and “Sioux Wars – 1851-1890,” American Indian Relief Council, http://secure.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer;jsessionid=00000000.app20061a?pagename=airc_hist_siouxwars&printer_friendly=1&NONCE_TOKEN=C223B5AFFEF86F99547FD87120E363B5.

[284] Donna Akers, “Native Nations in an Age of Western Expansion, 1820-80,” in Trafzer, ed., American Indians, American Presidents, 93.

[285] “The US Dakota War of 1862,” Minnesota Historical Society, https://www.mnhs.org/usdakotawar/history/aftermath.

[286] “The US Dakota War of 1862,” Minnesota Historical Society.

[287] Michael Clodfelter, The Dakota War: The United States Army Versus the Sioux, 1862-1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 144-45; and Paul R. Wylie, Blood on the Marias: The Baker Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 134-35.

[288] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 22-23, 25, 6.

[289] “A Timeline of events relating to the Sand Creek Massacre,” National Historic Site Colorado, https://www.nps.gov/sand/learn/timeline.htm; and Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters, 27.

[290] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 26-27.

[291] “John Chivington,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/people/john-chivington.htm.

[292] “Sand Creek Massacre,” National Historic Site, Colorado, https://www.nps.gov/sand/learn/historyculture/black-kettle-biography.htm; and “Washita Battlefield,” National Historic Site, Oklahoma, https://www.nps.gov/waba/index.htm.

[293] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 24.

[294] Akers, “Native Nations in an Age of Western Expansion, 1820-80,” in Trafzer, ed., American Indians, American Presidents, 97; and Darlis A. Miller, “James Henry Carleton: A Military Biography,” Texas State Historical Association, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/carleton-james-henry.

[295] Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, “The ‘Camp Grant Massacre’ in the Historical Imagination,” Arizona History Convention, Tempe, AZ, April 2003, https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/pdf/camp_grant.pdf.

[296] “Treaty with the Navaho, 1849,” Tribal Treaties Database, https://treaties.okstate.edu/treaties/treaty-with-the-navaho-1849-0583.

[297] “Navajo War – 1860-1864,” Partnership with Native Americans, http://secure.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=PWNA_Native_History_navajowar; “Manuelito – Navajo War Chief,” Legends of America, https://www.legendsofamerica.com/manuelito-navajo-war-chief; and “Bosque Redondo,” Native Knowledge 360 degrees, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, 2019, https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/navajo/bosque-redondo/bosque-redondo.cshtml.

[298] Clifford Krainik and Michele Krainik, “Photographs of Indian Delegates in the President’s ‘Summer House’,” The White House Historical Association, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photographs-of-indian-delegates-in-the-presidents-summer-house; Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 4-5; and Trafzer, “Introduction,” in Trafzer, ed., American Indians, American Presidents, 7, 20.

[299] Mark Hirsch, “1871: The End of Indian Treaty-Making,” American Indian, Summer/Fall 2014, https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/1871-end-indian-treaty-making.

[300] “Treaty with the Sioux-Brule, Oglala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arcs, and Santee-and Arapaho, 1868,” Tribal Treaties Database, https://treaties.okstate.edu/treaties/treaty-with-the-sioux-brule-oglala-miniconjou-yanktonai-hunkpapa-blackfeet-cuthead-two-kettle-sans-arcs-and-santee-and-arapaho-1868-0998.  The language of this treaty was unnecessarily complex, such that a reasonable person might have difficulty understanding it; to wit, Article 2 is composed of a single sentence, the last one-third of which reads:  “. . . the United States now solemnly agrees that no persons except those herein designated and authorized so to do, and except such officers, agents, and employés of the Government as may be authorized to enter upon Indian reservations in discharge of duties enjoined by law, shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory described in this article, or in such territory as may be added to this reservation for the use of said Indians, and henceforth they will and do hereby relinquish all claims or right in and to any portion of the United States or Territories, except such as is embraced within the limits aforesaid, and except as hereinafter provided.”

[301] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 120-21.

[302] “Indian Treaties,” Justia, https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-2/19-indian-treaties.html.

[303] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 210, 212.  The Lakota named the trail that Custer blazed “Thieves’ Road.”

[304] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 217-20.

[305] “Lower Brule Territory, 1825-present,” Kul Wicasa Oyate: The Official Site of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, https://www.lowerbrulesiouxtribe.com/lower-brule-territory.

[306] “Red River War,” Texas Beyond History, https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/redriver.

[307] Ostler, The Plains Sioux, 109-17.

[308] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 420.

[309] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 315-16.

[310] Amy Corbin, “Nez Perce Homelands,” Sacred Land Film Project, August 15, 2014, https://sacredland.org/nez-perce-homelands-united-states.

[311] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 317-18.

[312] Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping, 321-22.

[313] Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 297-300.

[314] West, The Last Indian War, 305.

[315] “Nez Perce,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=NE015; and West, The Last Indian War, 314.

[316] Leah Binkovitz, “Who Were the Six Native American Chiefs in Teddy Roosevelt’s Inaugural Parade?” Smithsonian magazine, January 16, 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/photos-who-were-the-six-indian-chiefs-in-teddy-roosevelts-inaugural-parade-1976255.

[317] West, The Last Indian War, 289, 292.

[318] Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping, 420.  Regarding white evangelizing efforts in the West, specifically of the Kiowa people, see Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country. Religion and the Struggle for the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[319] E. Berkeley Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890-1920 (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 7-8, 21; and Julius W. Pratt, “Manifest Destiny And The American Century,” Current History 29, no. 172 (1955), 333.

[320] Julius W. Pratt, “The ‘Large Policy’ of 1898.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 19, no. 2 (1932), 226, footnote 24.

[321] Walter Karp, The Politics of War:  The story of two wars which altered forever the political life of the American republic, 1890-1920 (New York:  Harper & Row, 1979), 12.

[322] Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 102.  For background, see essays on this website:  “The War of 1898 and the U.S.-Filipino War, 1899-1902” and “’Yankee Imperialism,’ 1901-1934.”

[323] “U.S. Senator Albert J. Beveridge speaks on the Philippine Question, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., January 9, 1900,” UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, https://www.international.ucla.edu/ccs/article/18454.  On December 6, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that the United States had the right and responsibility to militarily intervene in other nations of the Western Hemisphere in order to correct “chronic wrongdoing.”  This policy statement became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

[324] Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven, CT:  Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 211.

[325] Senator Albert Beveridge, “In Support of an American Empire,” Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session, 9 January 1900, 704-712.  Beveridge was a Republican Senator from Indiana from 1899 to 1911.

[326] Walter LaFeber, “Some Perspectives on U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 31, No. 3 (June 2007), 425.

[327] Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 3, 7, 103, 109, 117.  For background, see “Cold War interventionism, 1945-1990.”

[328] Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, “Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy,” January 1993, pages 1-5, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//nukevault/ebb245/doc15.pdf; and “Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Interview on NBC-TV ‘The Today Show’ with Matt Lauer, Columbus, Ohio, February 9, 1998,” U.S. Department of State Archive, https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html.  For background, see “The post-Cold War era, 1989-2001” and “Afghanistan, Iraq, and the ‘war on terror’.”

[329] Eric Hobsbawm, “America’s imperial delusion,” The Guardian, June 13, 2003.

[330] Bancroft and Parkman are quoted in Harvey Wish, The American Historian:  A Social-Intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (New York:  Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), 79, 99; and in Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (University of California Press, 1988), 162-63.

[331] Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893).  See also, Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

[332] Frederick J. Turner, “The Problem of the West,” Atlantic Monthly, LXXVIII (Sept. 1896), 289-97, quoted in Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Mar., 1980), 817.

[333] William MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, 1829-1837, Vol. 15, in The American Nation:  A History, 27 vols. (New York:  Harper & Row Publishers, 1906), 181.

[334] Olivia B. Waxman, “Why We’ve Gotten ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ Wrong for Nearly 150 Years,” Time Magazine, June 25, 2023, https://time.com/6288437/custer-last-stand-history-education.

[335] “Memorial and Recommendations of the Grand Council Fire of American Indians presented to the Hon. William Hale Thompson, mayor of Chicago, December 1, 1927,” in Robert Custo and Jeannette Henry, Textbooks and the American Indian (American Historian Press, 1970), 2-3.

[336] Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman, Oklahoma, 1932); Foreman, The Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole (Norman, 1934); Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Norman, 1934); Debo, And Still the Waters Run (Princeton, 1940); and Debo, The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Confederacy (Norman, 1941).

[337] Pauline Turner Strong, “Ethnohistory,” in James D. Wright, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (New York: Elsevier, 2^nd ed., Vol. 8), 3; and James Axtell, “The Ethnohistory of Early America:  A Review Essay,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan. 1978), 112.

[338] Quoted in James Axtell, “A Moral History of Indian-White Relations Revisited,” The History Teacher, Vol. 16, No. 2 (February 1983), 170.

[339] Robert Custo, ed., and Jeannette Henry Custo (author), Textbooks and the American Indian (The Indian Historian Press, 1970).

[340] Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York: Henry Holt, 1970) documented the systematic destruction of Native American communities in the second half of the 19th century.  The book became a national bestseller and has been translated into 17 languages.  Other notable studies that reframed US-Indian relations include Roy Harvey Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization:  A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (1953), David Humphrey Miller’s Custer’s Fall:  The Native American Side of the Story (1957), Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of America:  Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975), Richard Drinnon’s Facing West:  The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating & Empire-Building (1980), Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny:  The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1981), and Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (1990).

[341] R. David Edmunds, “Native Americans, New Voices:  American Indian History, 1895-1995,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 3 (June 1995): 717-740.  Regarding Native American women, see Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women (New York: Psychology Press, 1994).

[342] Axtell, “A Moral History of Indian-White Relations Revisited,” 169.  U.S. history textbooks notably lagged behind the changing views of Native Americans at higher levels of academia, as recounted by Axtell in his review of sixteen history textbooks dealing with the “Age of Discovery.”  James Axtell, “Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery in American History Textbooks,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 92, No. 3 (June 1987): 621-632.

[343] Edmunds, “Native Americans, New Voices,” 739.  Edmunds notes that the American Historical Review had a “paucity of articles or essays focusing on Indian history … for the first sixty years of its existence” (1895-1955).

[344] Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Futures of Native American History in the United States: The Future of the Discipline,” Perspectives in History (Organization of American Historians), December 1, 2012.  Hämäläinen is of Finnish heritage.

[345] Cynthia Chavez Lamar, director, National Museum of the American Indian, outreach letter, October 2024.

[346] Choctaw Cultural Center, Calera, Oklahoma, 2025 (exhibit).

[347] Zeke Miller and Ellen Knickmeyer, “Biden is first president to mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” AP News, October 8, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-lifestyle-holidays-columbus-day-a1ad30d52ad7ff80aa8e7621e2f9a425.

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