American Indian History (Magill’s Choice), 2v 9781587650673, 9781587652493, 1587650673
1,170 72 14MB
English Pages 854 Year 2002
Polecaj historie
Table of contents :
COMPLETE LIST OF CONTENTS......Page 17
PUBLISHER’S NOTE......Page 9
CONTRIBUTORS......Page 13
CONTENTS — VOLUME 1 (A-O)......Page 5
Aboriginal Action Plan......Page 36
Acoma, Battle of......Page 37
Adobe Walls, Battles of......Page 39
Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood......Page 40
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act......Page 41
Albany Congress......Page 46
Alcatraz Island occupation......Page 50
All-Pueblo Council......Page 52
Allotment system......Page 53
American Indian......Page 56
American Indian Defense Association......Page 57
American Indian Higher Education Consortium......Page 58
American Indian Movement......Page 60
American Indian Policy Review Commission......Page 62
American Indian Religious Freedom Act......Page 64
Amerind......Page 68
Apache Wars......Page 69
Articles of Agreement......Page 73
Bacon’s Rebellion......Page 75
Bannock War......Page 78
Bear River Campaign......Page 80
Beaver Wars......Page 81
Bering Strait migrations......Page 85
Bison slaughter......Page 90
Black Hawk War......Page 95
Boarding and residential schools......Page 99
Bozeman Trail War......Page 104
Bureau of Indian Affairs......Page 108
Burke Act......Page 110
California missions......Page 111
Carlisle Indian School......Page 115
Cayuse War......Page 117
Cherokee legal cases......Page 118
Cherokee Phoenix......Page 122
Cherokee Tobacco case......Page 127
Cherokee War......Page 129
Civil War......Page 132
Code of Handsome Lake......Page 136
Code talkers......Page 140
Council of Energy Resource Tribes......Page 144
Creek War......Page 145
Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of......Page 150
Declaration of First Nations......Page 151
Delgamuukw v. British Columbia......Page 152
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development......Page 154
Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty......Page 156
Duro v. Reina......Page 157
Elk v. Wilkins......Page 158
Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith......Page 159
Epidemics and diseases......Page 160
Ex parte Crow Dog......Page 165
F......Page 167
Fallen Timbers, Battle of......Page 166
Federally recognized tribes......Page 171
Fifteen Principles......Page 172
Fish-ins......Page 173
Fort Greenville Treaty......Page 175
Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851......Page 180
Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868......Page 182
Fort Mims, Battle of......Page 184
Fort Stanwix Treaty......Page 186
Fort Wayne Treaty......Page 190
Fox Wars......Page 191
French and Indian War......Page 195
Friends of the Indian organizations......Page 200
Fur trade......Page 201
General Allotment Act......Page 204
Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of......Page 209
Horseshoe Bend Treaty......Page 211
Indian......Page 212
Indian Act of 1876......Page 213
Indian Act of 1951......Page 216
Indian Act of 1989......Page 217
Indian Appropriation Act......Page 219
Indian Child Welfare Act......Page 223
Indian Citizenship Act......Page 224
Indian Civil Rights Act......Page 228
Indian Claims Commission......Page 231
Indian Education Acts......Page 233
Indian Gaming Regulatory Act......Page 235
Indian Health Service......Page 238
Indian New Deal......Page 239
Indian Offenses Act......Page 240
Indian preference......Page 241
Indian Removal Act......Page 242
Indian Reorganization Act......Page 248
Indian Rights Association......Page 253
Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act......Page 254
Indian slave trade......Page 255
Indian trust fund lawsuits......Page 259
Indian-white relations: Canadian......Page 261
Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial......Page 269
Indian-white relations: English colonial......Page 272
Indian-white relations: French colonial......Page 280
Indian-white relations: Norse......Page 289
Indian-white relations: Russian colonial......Page 292
Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial......Page 295
Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial......Page 303
Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830......Page 307
Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870......Page 313
Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933......Page 319
Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002......Page 327
International Indian Treaty Council......Page 335
Irish Potato Famine......Page 337
Iroquois Confederacy......Page 339
Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting......Page 344
Jay’s Treaty......Page 348
K......Page 350
Keeler Commission......Page 349
Keetoowah Society......Page 351
Kennedy Report......Page 352
Kennewick Man controversy......Page 353
Kickapoo Resistance......Page 358
Lewis and Clark expedition......Page 359
L......Page 360
Little Bighorn, Battle of the......Page 364
Little Turtle’s War......Page 368
Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock......Page 371
Long Walk......Page 375
Longest Walk......Page 380
Lord Dunmore’s War......Page 381
Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association......Page 385
Maine Indian Claims Act......Page 386
Major Crimes Act......Page 387
Manhattan Island purchase......Page 388
Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty......Page 392
Meech Lake Accord......Page 397
Menominee Restoration Act......Page 398
Meriam Report......Page 399
Metacom’s War......Page 400
Minnesota Uprising......Page 405
Modoc War......Page 407
Natchez Revolt......Page 409
National Congress of American Indians......Page 410
National Council of American Indians......Page 411
National Indian Association......Page 413
National Indian Education Association......Page 414
National Indian Youth Council......Page 415
Native American......Page 416
Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council......Page 417
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act......Page 418
Native American Rights Fund......Page 420
Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act......Page 422
Navajo Rehabilitation Act......Page 423
Navajo War......Page 425
Nez Perce War......Page 426
Nisga’a Agreement in Principle......Page 430
Northwest Ordinance......Page 432
Nunavut Territory......Page 433
Oka crisis......Page 434
Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act......Page 436
Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe......Page 437
CONTENTS — VOLUME 2 (P-Z)......Page 27
Paxton Boys’ Massacres......Page 438
Peach Wars......Page 443
Pequot War......Page 444
Pima uprisings......Page 448
Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings......Page 449
Pontiac’s Resistance......Page 451
Powhatan Confederacy......Page 455
Powhatan Wars......Page 459
Prehistory: Arctic......Page 462
Prehistory: California......Page 463
Prehistory: Great Basin......Page 465
Prehistory: Northeast......Page 467
Prehistory: Northwest Coast......Page 470
Prehistory: Plains......Page 474
Prehistory: Plateau......Page 479
Prehistory: Southeast......Page 482
Prehistory: Southwest......Page 484
Prehistory: Subarctic......Page 488
Proclamation of 1763......Page 490
Prophetstown......Page 495
Public Law 280......Page 499
Pueblo Revolt......Page 500
Red River Raids......Page 504
Red River War......Page 508
Reservation system of the United States......Page 513
Reserve system of Canada......Page 519
Riel Rebellions......Page 523
Rosebud Creek, Battle of......Page 527
Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples......Page 529
Sand Creek Massacre......Page 535
Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez......Page 538
Saybrook, Battle of......Page 539
Seminole Wars......Page 541
Sioux War......Page 546
Snake War......Page 550
Society of American Indians......Page 551
Sports mascot controversies......Page 553
Standing Bear v. Crook......Page 555
Taos Rebellion......Page 556
Tecumseh’s Rebellion......Page 560
Termination Resolution......Page 563
Thames, Battle of the......Page 567
Tippecanoe, Battle of......Page 571
Trade and Intercourse Acts......Page 573
Trail of Broken Treaties......Page 575
Trail of Tears......Page 579
Treaties and agreements in Canada......Page 584
Treaties and agreements in the United States......Page 590
Tribal courts......Page 595
Tribe......Page 596
Tuscarora War......Page 601
United States v. Washington......Page 605
Walking Purchase......Page 609
Wabash, Battle of the......Page 607
Walla Walla Council......Page 612
Washita River Massacre......Page 614
West Indian uprisings......Page 618
White Paper of Canada......Page 621
Wild west shows......Page 623
Winnebago Uprising......Page 625
Winters v. United States......Page 626
Wolf Mountains, Battle of......Page 627
World wars......Page 628
Wounded Knee Massacre......Page 633
Wounded Knee occupation......Page 637
Yakima War......Page 642
Yamasee War......Page 643
Zuni Rebellion......Page 644
Gazetteer of Historic Places......Page 650
Historic Native Americans......Page 683
Museums, Archives, and Libraries......Page 689
Organizations, Agencies, and Societies......Page 720
Time Line......Page 726
Tribes by Culture Area......Page 742
Bibliography......Page 748
Web Resources......Page 800
Categorized Index......Page 806
Geographical Index......Page 814
Personages Index......Page 821
Tribes Index......Page 828
Subject Index......Page 842
Citation preview
American Indian History
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MAGILL’S C H O I C E
American Indian History Volume 1 Aboriginal Action Plan— Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe
edited by
Carole A. Barrett University of Mary
Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey
Copyright © 2003, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Essays originally appeared in Ready Reference: American Indians (1995), Great Events from History: North American Series, Revised Edition (1997), and Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (2000). New material has been added. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American Indian history / edited by Carole A. Barrett. p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58765-067-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-068-1 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-069-X (vol. 2 : alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America—History. I. Barrett, Carole A. II. Series. E77 .A496 2003 970’.00497—dc21 2002007731
First Printing
printed in the united states of america
CONTENTS — VOLUME 1 Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Aboriginal Action Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Acoma, Battle of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Adobe Walls, Battles of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood . . . . . . . . . 5 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Albany Congress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Alcatraz Island occupation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 All-Pueblo Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Allotment system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 American Indian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 American Indian Defense Association . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 American Indian Higher Education Consortium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 American Indian Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 American Indian Policy Review Commission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 American Indian Religious Freedom Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Amerind. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Apache Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Articles of Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Bacon’s Rebellion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Bannock War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Bear River Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Beaver Wars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Bering Strait migrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Bison slaughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Black Hawk War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Boarding and residential schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Bozeman Trail War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Bureau of Indian Affairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Burke Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 California missions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Carlisle Indian School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 v
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Cayuse War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Cherokee legal cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Cherokee Phoenix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Cherokee Tobacco case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Cherokee War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Civil War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Code of Handsome Lake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Code talkers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Colliflower v. Garland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Council of Energy Resource Tribes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Creek War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Declaration of First Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. . . . . . . . 119 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty . . . . . . . . . 121 Duro v. Reina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Elk v. Wilkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 Epidemics and diseases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Ex parte Crow Dog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Fallen Timbers, Battle of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Federally recognized tribes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Fifteen Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Fish-ins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Fort Atkinson Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Fort Greenville Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Fort Mims, Battle of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Fort Stanwix Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Fort Wayne Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Fox Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 French and Indian War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Friends of the Indian organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Fur trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Gadsden Purchase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 General Allotment Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Horseshoe Bend Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 vi
Contents
Indian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Act of 1876 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Act of 1951 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Act of 1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Appropriation Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Child Welfare Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Citizenship Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Civil Rights Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Claims Commission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Education Acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Gaming Regulatory Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Health Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian New Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Offenses Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian preference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Removal Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Reorganization Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Rights Association . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act Indian slave trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian trust fund lawsuits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: Canadian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial . . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: English colonial . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: French colonial . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: Norse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: Russian colonial . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830. . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870. . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933. . . . . . . . . . . Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002. . . . . . . . . . . International Indian Treaty Council . . . . . . . . . . . . Irish Potato Famine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iroquois Confederacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting . . . . . . . Jay’s Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Keeler Commission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Keetoowah Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kennedy Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
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Contents
Kennewick Man controversy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kickapoo Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kickapoo uprisings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lewis and Clark expedition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Bighorn, Battle of the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Turtle’s War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Long Walk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Longest Walk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lord Dunmore’s War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association . . . Maine Indian Claims Act. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Crimes Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manhattan Island purchase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meech Lake Accord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Menominee Restoration Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meriam Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metacom’s War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minnesota Uprising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modoc War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natchez Revolt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Congress of American Indians . . . . . . . . . . . National Council of American Indians . . . . . . . . . . . . National Indian Association . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Indian Education Association . . . . . . . . . . . National Indian Youth Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native American . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council . . . . . . . Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act . Native American Rights Fund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Navajo Rehabilitation Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Navajo War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nez Perce War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nisga’a Agreement in Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Northwest Ordinance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nunavut Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oka crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
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318 323 324 324 329 333 336 340 345 346 350 351 352 353 357 362 363 364 365 370 372 374 375 376 378 379 380 381 382 383 385 387 388 390 391 395 397 398 399 401 402
PUBLISHER’S NOTE American Indian History joins two other publications in the Magill’s Choice series of core teaching tools for public, school, and college libraries: American Indian Biographies (1 volume, 1999), covering 329 Native North Americans from the sixteenth century to the present day, and American Indian Tribes (2 volumes, 2000), with surveys of the ten major culture areas of North America and nearly 300 tribes and nations. To these 636 essays we now add 224 more, covering the major events and developments in the history of Native Americans of North America, from the earliest prehistoric traditions through the activism and legislation of the present day. The essays in these two volumes are drawn from three previous Salem Press publications: Ready Reference: American Indians (3 volumes, 1996), winner of the American Library Association’s Outstanding Reference Source Award; Great Events from History: Revised North American Series (4 volumes, 1997); and Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (3 volumes, 1999). In addition, 16 essays were newly commissioned for this publication and appear nowhere else. Arranged alphabetically by keyword, each of the essays addresses a turning point in the history of the indigenous peoples of present-day Canada and the United States in their struggle to maintain their autonomy and lifeways after European contact. Essays range in length from 250 to 3,000 words and cover battles, treaties, legislation, court cases, protest movements, organizations, and institutions from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to tribal courts. Here students will find chronological narratives of not only the basics—the Powhatan Wars, the Pueblo Revolt, the Riel Rebellions, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Indian Bill of Rights—but also trends and developments that reveal more about the Native American experience, from the Carlisle Indian School to the Trail of Tears and William Cody’s wild west shows. In addition, each of ten major prehistoric traditions is surveyed in a series of essays filed under “Prehistory,” from the Arctic through the Northwest Coast to the Southeast. The set’s 100 illustrations include photographs, engravings, and 29 maps for locating events, tribes, routes, and the ever-retreating boundaries of “Indian Territory.” Each essay is arranged in a ready-reference format that calls out the following elements at the top: name of the event or topic by keyword; date or ix
Publisher’s Note
dates of its occurrence, founding, or existence; locale where the event took place (or where it had its effect); tribe or tribes involved; category or categories, such as nineteenth century history or protest movements, to which it belongs; and finally a brief synopsis of the topic’s significance. These reference features are followed by a full narrative of the event or topic. Articles longer than 1,000 words conclude with bibliographies of sources for further study on the topic; bibliographies of articles 2,000 words or longer include annotations. These bibliographies have been updated for American Indian History. Several appendixes and indexes at the end of volume 2 function as research tools for the student: a Gazetteer of Historic Places; a list of more than 100 Historic Native Americans, with their birth and death dates, alternative names, and significance; a directory of Museums, Archives, and Libraries; a list of Organizations, Agencies, and Societies; a Time Line of major events in the history of Native Americans (including some not covered in separate essays); a list of Tribes by Culture Area; a general Bibliography of sources for further study; and a list of Web Resources, with their sponsoring institutions, Web addresses, and a brief description of their usefulness. Topics addressed in the text are fully accessible through five indexes: a Categorized Index, a Geographical Index, a Personages Index, a Tribes Index, and a full Subject Index. Finally, the front matter to both volumes contains the full list of contents for ready reference. A few comments must be made on certain editorial decisions. Terms ranging from “American Indian” to “Native American” to “tribe” are accepted by some and disapproved of by others. We have used American Indians for the title of this set, as it is today the most widely accepted collective name for the first inhabitants of North America and their descendants. (It might be noted that some American Indians essentially find all such collective terms equally offensive.) We have allowed authors to use either “American Indian” or “Native American” in their articles rather than impose a term editorially, recognizing that individual writers have their own preferences. Similarly, we have used the title “Inuit” for the article on that Arctic people, but the term “Eskimo” also appears in the set, as it has a long tradition of scientific usage and encompasses a variety of Arctic peoples to whom “Inuit” does not adequately apply. Contributors were also free to use singular or plural designations for tribal names. Spellings of tribal names, however, have been standardized throughout the set. We have attempted to use names and spellings that are both accepted by the tribes themselves and widely recognized. Parenthetical notes are occasionally provided to identify alternative names for tribes; although such alternative names (“Fox” and “Mesquakie,” for example) do x
Publisher’s Note
not always signify exactly identical groups, they are intended to help readers recognize the tribe being discussed. The editors wish to acknowledge the invaluable guidance and assistance of Professor Carole A. Barrett of the University of Mary, who specializes in American Indian studies. She selected the essays and recommended the new essays, all of which were commissioned and are found here. In addition, we wish to thank the contributing writers, without whose expertise such breadth of coverage would not be possible.
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CONTRIBUTORS Carole A. Barrett, Editor University of Mary McCrea Adams Independent Scholar
Byron D. Cannon University of Utah
Thomas L. Altherr Metropolitan State College of Denver
Ward Churchill University of Colorado at Boulder
Tanya M. Backinger Jackson Community College
Thomas Clarkin San Antonio College
Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University
David Coffey Texas Christian University
S. Carol Berg College of St. Benedict
Richard G. Condon University of Arkansas
Warren M. Billings Louisiana State University, New Orleans
David A. Crain South Dakota State University LouAnn Faris Culley Kansas State University
Cynthia A. Bily Adrian College
S. Matthew Despain University of Oklahoma
Suzanne Riffle Boyce Independent Scholar
Paul E. Doutrich York College of Pennsylvania
John A. Britton Francis Marion University
T. W. Dreier Portland State University
Daniel A. Brown California State University, Fullerton
John L. Farbo University of Idaho
Gregory R. Campbell University of Montana
Anne-Marie E. Ferngren Oregon State University xiii
Contributors
John W. Fiero University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Kay Hively Independent Scholar
Michael Shaw Findlay California State University, Chico
Russell Hively Independent Scholar
C. George Fry University of Findlay
Carl W. Hoagstrom Ohio Northern University
Lucy Ganje University of North Dakota
John Hoopes University of Kansas
Lynne M. Getz Appalachian State University
William E. Huntzicker University of Minnesota
Marc Goldstein Independent Scholar
Andrew C. Isenberg University of Puget Sound
Nancy M. Gordon Independent Scholar
M. A. Jaimes University of Colorado at Boulder
Larry Gragg University of Missouri, Rolla
Joseph C. Jastrzembski Minot State University
Kelley Graham Butler University
Albert C. Jensen Central Florida Community College
William H. Green University of Missouri, Columbia
Bruce E. Johansen University of Nebraska at Omaha
Arthur Gribben Pierce College
Jane Anderson Jones Manatee Community College
Eric Henderson University of Northern Iowa
Leslie Ellen Jones Independent Scholar
Howard M. Hensel United States Air Force Air War College
Charles L. Kammer III The College of Wooster Richard S. Keating United States Air Force Academy
R. Don Higginbotham University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abraham D. Lavender Florida International University
C. L. Higham Winona State University xiv
Contributors
Thomas T. Lewis Mount Senario College
Bert M. Mutersbaugh Eastern Kentucky University
John L. Loos Louisiana State University
Michael V. Namorato University of Mississippi
William C. Lowe Mount St. Clare College
Gary A. Olson San Bernardino Valley College
Richard B. McCaslin High Point University
Patrick M. O’Neil Broome Community College
Paul Madden Hardin-Simmons University
Martha I. Pallante Youngstown State University
Lynn M. Mason Lubbock Christian University
William A. Paquette Tidewater Community College
Thomas D. Matijasic Prestonsburg Community College
Francis P. Prucha Marquette University
Steve J. Mazurana University of Northern Colorado
Jon Reyhner Montana State University, Billings
Maurice Melton Andrew College
William L. Richter Cameron College
Howard Meredith University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma
Moises Roizen West Valley College Fred S. Rolater Middle Tennessee State University
David N. Mielke Appalachian State University
Mary Ellen Rowe Central Missouri State University
Laurence Miller Western Washington State University
Richard Sax Madonna University
Bruce M. Mitchell Eastern Washington University
Glenn Schiffman Independent Scholar
Michael J. Mullin Augustana College
Rose Secrest Independent Scholar
Molly H. Mullin Duke University xv
Contributors
Michael W. Simpson Chimanade University
Gale M. Thompson Delta College
David Curtis Skaggs Bowling Green State University
Leslie V. Tischauser Prairie State College
Glenn Ellen Starr Appalachian State University
Brian G. Tobin Lassen College
David L. Sterling University of Cincinnati
Spencer C. Tucker Virginia Military Institute
Pamela R. Stern University of Arkansas
Mary E. Virginia Independent Scholar
Ruffin Stirling Independent Scholar
Gregory Walters University of Ottawa
Leslie Stricker Park University
David E. Wilkins University of Colorado at Boulder
Glenn L. Swygart Tennessee Temple University
Raymond Wilson Fort Hays State University
Stephen G. Sylvester Montana State UniversityùNorthern
Sharon K. Wilson Fort Hays State University
Robert D. Talbott University of Northern Iowa
Susan J. Wurtzburg Lincoln University
Harold D. Tallant Georgetown College
Clifton K. Yearley State University of New York at Buffalo
xvi
COMPLETE LIST OF CONTENTS Volume 1 Black Hawk War Boarding and residential schools Bozeman Trail War Bureau of Indian Affairs Burke Act California missions Carlisle Indian School Cayuse War Cherokee legal cases Cherokee Phoenix Cherokee Tobacco case Cherokee War Civil War Code of Handsome Lake Code talkers Colliflower v. Garland Council of Energy Resource Tribes Creek War Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of Declaration of First Nations Delgamuukw v. British Columbia Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty Duro v. Reina Elk v. Wilkins Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith
Aboriginal Action Plan Acoma, Battle of Adobe Walls, Battles of Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act Albany Congress Alcatraz Island occupation All-Pueblo Council Allotment system American Indian American Indian Defense Association American Indian Higher Education Consortium American Indian Movement American Indian Policy Review Commission American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amerind Apache Wars Articles of Agreement Bacon’s Rebellion Bannock War Bear River Campaign Beaver Wars Bering Strait migrations Bison slaughter xvii
Complete List of Contents
Indian slave trade Indian trust fund lawsuits Indian-white relations: Canadian Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial Indian-white relations: English colonial Indian-white relations: French colonial Indian-white relations: Norse Indian-white relations: Russian colonial Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933 Indian-white relations: U.S., 19342002 International Indian Treaty Council Irish Potato Famine Iroquois Confederacy Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting Jay’s Treaty Keeler Commission Keetoowah Society Kennedy Report Kennewick Man controversy Kickapoo Resistance Kickapoo uprisings Lewis and Clark expedition Little Bighorn, Battle of the Little Turtle’s War Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock
Epidemics and diseases Ex parte Crow Dog Fallen Timbers, Battle of Federally recognized tribes Fifteen Principles Fish-ins Fort Atkinson Treaty Fort Greenville Treaty Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 Fort Mims, Battle of Fort Stanwix Treaty Fort Wayne Treaty Fox Wars French and Indian War Friends of the Indian organizations Fur trade Gadsden Purchase General Allotment Act Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of Horseshoe Bend Treaty Indian Indian Act of 1876 Indian Act of 1951 Indian Act of 1989 Indian Appropriation Act Indian Child Welfare Act Indian Citizenship Act Indian Civil Rights Act Indian Claims Commission Indian Education Acts Indian Gaming Regulatory Act Indian Health Service Indian New Deal Indian Offenses Act Indian preference Indian Removal Act Indian Reorganization Act Indian Rights Association Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act xviii
Complete List of Contents
National Indian Association National Indian Education Association National Indian Youth Council Native American Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Native American Rights Fund Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act Navajo Rehabilitation Act Navajo War Nez Perce War Nisga’a Agreement in Principle Northwest Ordinance Nunavut Territory Oka crisis Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe
Long Walk Longest Walk Lord Dunmore’s War Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association Maine Indian Claims Act Major Crimes Act Manhattan Island purchase Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty Meech Lake Accord Menominee Restoration Act Meriam Report Metacom’s War Minnesota Uprising Modoc War Natchez Revolt National Congress of American Indians National Council of American Indians
Volume 2 Prehistory: Southeast Prehistory: Southwest Prehistory: Subarctic Proclamation of 1763 Prophetstown Public Law 280 Pueblo Revolt Red River Raids Red River War Reservation system of the United States Reserve system of Canada Riel Rebellions Rosebud Creek, Battle of Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples Sand Creek Massacre
Pavonia Massacre Paxton Boys’ Massacres Peach Wars Pequot War Pima uprisings Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings Pontiac’s Resistance Powhatan Confederacy Powhatan Wars Prehistory: Arctic Prehistory: California Prehistory: Great Basin Prehistory: Northeast Prehistory: Northwest Coast Prehistory: Plains Prehistory: Plateau xix
Complete List of Contents
Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez Saybrook, Battle of Seminole Wars Sioux War Snake War Society of American Indians Sports mascot controversies Standing Bear v. Crook Taos Rebellion Tecumseh’s Rebellion Termination Resolution Thames, Battle of the Tippecanoe, Battle of Trade and Intercourse Acts Trail of Broken Treaties Trail of Tears Treaties and agreements in Canada Treaties and agreements in the United States Tribal courts Tribe Tuscarora War United States v. Kagama United States v. Washington Wabash, Battle of the Walking Purchase Walla Walla Council Washita River Massacre
West Indian uprisings White Paper of Canada Wild west shows Winnebago Uprising Winters v. United States Wolf Mountains, Battle of Women of All Red Nations World wars Wounded Knee Massacre Wounded Knee occupation Yakima War Yamasee War Zuñi Rebellion Gazetteer of Historic Places Historic Native Americans Museums, Archives, and Libraries Organizations, Agencies, and Societies Time Line Tribes by Culture Area Bibliography Web Resources Categorized Index Geographical Index Personages Index Tribes Index Subject Index
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American Indian History
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American Indian History
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MAGILL’S C H O I C E
American Indian History Volume 2 Pavonia Massacre—Zuñi Rebellion Appendixes Indexes edited by
Carole A. Barrett University of Mary
Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey
Copyright © 2003, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Essays originally appeared in Ready Reference: American Indians (1995), Great Events from History: North American Series, Revised Edition (1997), and Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (2000). New material has been added. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American Indian history / edited by Carole A. Barrett. p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58765-067-3 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-068-1 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-069-X (vol. 2 : alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America—History. I. Barrett, Carole A. II. Series. E77 .A496 2003 970’.00497—dc21 2002007731
First Printing
printed in the united states of america
CONTENTS — VOLUME 2 Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi Pavonia Massacre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paxton Boys’ Massacres . . . . . . . . . . . Peach Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pequot War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pima uprisings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings . . Pontiac’s Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . Powhatan Confederacy . . . . . . . . . . . Powhatan Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Arctic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: California . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Great Basin . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Northeast . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Northwest Coast . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Plains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Plateau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Southeast. . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Southwest . . . . . . . . . . . . Prehistory: Subarctic . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proclamation of 1763 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prophetstown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Public Law 280 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pueblo Revolt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Red River Raids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Red River War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reservation system of the United States . . Reserve system of Canada . . . . . . . . . . Riel Rebellions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rosebud Creek, Battle of . . . . . . . . . . . Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples . Sand Creek Massacre . . . . . . . . . . . . . Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez . . . . . . . . Saybrook, Battle of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvii
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403 403 408 409 413 414 416 420 424 427 428 430 432 435 439 444 447 449 453 455 460 464 465 469 473 478 484 488 492 494 500 503 504
Contents
Seminole Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sioux War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Snake War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Society of American Indians . . . . . . . . . . Sports mascot controversies . . . . . . . . . . Standing Bear v. Crook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Taos Rebellion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tecumseh’s Rebellion . . . . . . . . . . . . . Termination Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . Thames, Battle of the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tippecanoe, Battle of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trade and Intercourse Acts . . . . . . . . . . Trail of Broken Treaties . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trail of Tears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Treaties and agreements in Canada . . . . . . Treaties and agreements in the United States Tribal courts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tribe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tuscarora War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . United States v. Kagama . . . . . . . . . . . . . United States v. Washington . . . . . . . . . . . Wabash, Battle of the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Walking Purchase. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Walla Walla Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Washita River Massacre . . . . . . . . . . . . West Indian uprisings . . . . . . . . . . . . . White Paper of Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wild west shows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winnebago Uprising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winters v. United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wolf Mountains, Battle of . . . . . . . . . . . Women of All Red Nations . . . . . . . . . . . World wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wounded Knee Massacre . . . . . . . . . . . Wounded Knee occupation . . . . . . . . . . Yakima War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yamasee War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zuñi Rebellion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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506 511 515 516 518 520 521 525 528 532 536 538 540 544 549 555 560 561 566 570 570 572 574 577 579 583 586 588 590 591 592 593 593 598 602 607 608 609
Gazetteer of Historic Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615 Historic Native Americans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 648 xxviii
Contents
Museums, Archives, and Libraries . . . Organizations, Agencies, and Societies. Time Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tribes by Culture Area . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Web Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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654 685 691 707 713 765
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xxix
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COMPLETE LIST OF CONTENTS Volume 1 Black Hawk War Boarding and residential schools Bozeman Trail War Bureau of Indian Affairs Burke Act California missions Carlisle Indian School Cayuse War Cherokee legal cases Cherokee Phoenix Cherokee Tobacco case Cherokee War Civil War Code of Handsome Lake Code talkers Colliflower v. Garland Council of Energy Resource Tribes Creek War Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of Declaration of First Nations Delgamuukw v. British Columbia Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty Duro v. Reina Elk v. Wilkins Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith
Aboriginal Action Plan Acoma, Battle of Adobe Walls, Battles of Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act Albany Congress Alcatraz Island occupation All-Pueblo Council Allotment system American Indian American Indian Defense Association American Indian Higher Education Consortium American Indian Movement American Indian Policy Review Commission American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amerind Apache Wars Articles of Agreement Bacon’s Rebellion Bannock War Bear River Campaign Beaver Wars Bering Strait migrations Bison slaughter xxxi
Complete List of Contents
Epidemics and diseases Ex parte Crow Dog Fallen Timbers, Battle of Federally recognized tribes Fifteen Principles Fish-ins Fort Atkinson Treaty Fort Greenville Treaty Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 Fort Mims, Battle of Fort Stanwix Treaty Fort Wayne Treaty Fox Wars French and Indian War Friends of the Indian organizations Fur trade Gadsden Purchase General Allotment Act Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of Horseshoe Bend Treaty Indian Indian Act of 1876 Indian Act of 1951 Indian Act of 1989 Indian Appropriation Act Indian Child Welfare Act Indian Citizenship Act Indian Civil Rights Act Indian Claims Commission Indian Education Acts Indian Gaming Regulatory Act Indian Health Service Indian New Deal Indian Offenses Act Indian preference Indian Removal Act Indian Reorganization Act Indian Rights Association Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act
Indian slave trade Indian trust fund lawsuits Indian-white relations: Canadian Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial Indian-white relations: English colonial Indian-white relations: French colonial Indian-white relations: Norse Indian-white relations: Russian colonial Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933 Indian-white relations: U.S., 19342002 International Indian Treaty Council Irish Potato Famine Iroquois Confederacy Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting Jay’s Treaty Keeler Commission Keetoowah Society Kennedy Report Kennewick Man controversy Kickapoo Resistance Kickapoo uprisings Lewis and Clark expedition Little Bighorn, Battle of the Little Turtle’s War Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock xxxii
Complete List of Contents
Long Walk Longest Walk Lord Dunmore’s War Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association Maine Indian Claims Act Major Crimes Act Manhattan Island purchase Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty Meech Lake Accord Menominee Restoration Act Meriam Report Metacom’s War Minnesota Uprising Modoc War Natchez Revolt National Congress of American Indians National Council of American Indians
National Indian Association National Indian Education Association National Indian Youth Council Native American Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Native American Rights Fund Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act Navajo Rehabilitation Act Navajo War Nez Perce War Nisga’a Agreement in Principle Northwest Ordinance Nunavut Territory Oka crisis Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe
Volume 2 Pavonia Massacre Paxton Boys’ Massacres Peach Wars Pequot War Pima uprisings Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings Pontiac’s Resistance Powhatan Confederacy Powhatan Wars Prehistory: Arctic Prehistory: California Prehistory: Great Basin Prehistory: Northeast Prehistory: Northwest Coast Prehistory: Plains Prehistory: Plateau
Prehistory: Southeast Prehistory: Southwest Prehistory: Subarctic Proclamation of 1763 Prophetstown Public Law 280 Pueblo Revolt Red River Raids Red River War Reservation system of the United States Reserve system of Canada Riel Rebellions Rosebud Creek, Battle of Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples Sand Creek Massacre xxxiii
Complete List of Contents
Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez Saybrook, Battle of Seminole Wars Sioux War Snake War Society of American Indians Sports mascot controversies Standing Bear v. Crook Taos Rebellion Tecumseh’s Rebellion Termination Resolution Thames, Battle of the Tippecanoe, Battle of Trade and Intercourse Acts Trail of Broken Treaties Trail of Tears Treaties and agreements in Canada Treaties and agreements in the United States Tribal courts Tribe Tuscarora War United States v. Kagama United States v. Washington Wabash, Battle of the Walking Purchase Walla Walla Council Washita River Massacre
West Indian uprisings White Paper of Canada Wild west shows Winnebago Uprising Winters v. United States Wolf Mountains, Battle of Women of All Red Nations World wars Wounded Knee Massacre Wounded Knee occupation Yakima War Yamasee War Zuñi Rebellion Gazetteer of Historic Places Historic Native Americans Museums, Archives, and Libraries Organizations, Agencies, and Societies Time Line Tribes by Culture Area Bibliography Web Resources Categorized Index Geographical Index Personages Index Tribes Index Subject Index
xxxiv
American Indian History
Aboriginal Action Plan / 1
Aboriginal Action Plan Date: January 7, 1998 Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: The Aboriginal Action Plan sought to improve living conditions for aboriginal Canadians through an emphasis on partnerships, aboriginal self-government, and other recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. They included recognition of, apologies for, and reconciliation over past injustices and abuses suffered by many aboriginal Canadians, often at the hands of the federal government. The Canadian Aboriginal Action Plan, released on January 7, 1998, focused on aboriginal communities and the tasks of reconciliation and renewal as recommended by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The plan had four main objectives: renewing partnerships, strengthening aboriginal governance, developing a new fiscal relationship, and supporting strong communities, people, and economies. The first objective, the renewal of partnerships, included a statement of reconciliation, community-based healing of sexual and physical abuse in the residential schools, public education to help nonaboriginals better appreciate aboriginal peoples, and a coordinated approach to addressing the problems of aboriginals living in urban settings. The second objective was strengthening aboriginal governance through such steps as affirming treaty relationships, commemoration of the historic treaties, a new independent claims body, cost-shared Metis enumeration, funding for aboriginal women’s organizations, establishment of an aboriginal center of excellence to assist groups in promoting self-government, and professional development strategies in lawmaking, environmental stewardship, and resource management. The third objective was developing a new fiscal relationship through a more stable, accountable relationship that promotes greater self-reliance, new financial standards for governments to comply with generally accepted accounting procedures, support for development of First Nations sources of revenue including taxation, statistical training for aboriginal groups to promote data collection and information exchanges, as well as an aboriginal peoples survey following the 2001 national census. The fourth objective was supporting strong communities, people, and economies through a five-year
2 / Acoma, Battle of
strategy to develop aboriginal human resources, providing for an increase in the number of houses on reserves and a remedy for the shortage of water and sewer facilities. Other specific goals of the strategy included expanded aboriginal policing services, an aboriginal Head Start program available on reserves, reduced welfare dependence, increased access of aboriginal businesses to capital and markets, the creation of urban aboriginal youth centers, education reform, and greater focus on prevention, treatment, and care of diabetes. See also: Declaration of First Nations; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian. Gregory Walters
Acoma, Battle of Date: December, 1598-February, 1599 Locale: Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico Tribe involved: Acoma (Keres), Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: After this first major Puebloan uprising against the Spanish invaders, defeat and the Spaniards’ cruel punishment of the survivors kept the Puebloans from attempting another rebellion for many decades. In May, 1598, Don Juan de Oñate, appointed by the Spanish authorities as governor and captain general of all the kingdoms and provinces of New Mexico, reached the Rio Grande valley with a large contingent of priests, soldiers, settlers, and servants as well as two nephews, Vincente and Juan de Zaldivar. Although many Puebloans fled in terror before the invaders, those who remained received Oñate and his men hospitably. In each pueblo he entered, Oñate declared that he had come to protect the Indians and save their souls, and he demanded that they swear allegiance and vassalage to their new rulers, the Spanish king and the Catholic church. At the pueblos of Ohke and Yunque, he drove the Indians from their homes and moved his own people in, leaving King Phillip’s new subjects to survive as best they could in the countryside. By October, Oñate had reached Acoma Pueblo, where, after the usual ceremony of swearing allegiance to king and church, the inhabitants were asked to give generously of their food, robes, and blankets. Oñate then con-
Acoma, Battle of / 3
Acoma Pueblo, photographed by Ansel Adams in 1941 or 1942. (National Archives)
tinued on to the Zuñi and Hopi pueblos. In early December, Juan de Zaldivar and thirty soldiers, following Oñate, arrived at Acoma and demanded to be provisioned, ignoring the Indians’ pleas that they had nothing left to spare. The Indians then attacked, killing Zaldivar and twelve of his men. Oñate, vowing to avenge this serious blow to Spanish authority, called a general meeting to plan for the punishment of Acoma. He consulted the friars, who agreed that this was a “just war” under Spanish law, since the Puebloans had sworn obedience and vassalage to the Spanish crown and were therefore royal subjects who were now guilty of treason. On January 21, 1599, Vincente de Zaldivar and his forces reached Acoma, where they found the Puebloans ready to defend themselves. The Indians, fighting with arrows and stones, were no match for men armed with guns; after two days of bitter fighting, Acoma was defeated, with more than eight hundred of its people dead. The pueblo was destroyed, and some five hundred men, women, and children were captured. Those who did not immediately surrender were dragged from their hiding places and killed. On February 12, Oñate himself decreed the punishment of the captives: All men over twenty-five had one foot cut off and served twenty years in slavery; all men between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and all women over twelve served twenty years in slavery; the old men and women were given to the Querechos (Plains Apache) as slaves; the children under twelve were given to Fray Alonso Martinez (father commissary of the
4 / Adobe Walls, Battles of
Church) and to Vincente de Zaldivar; two Hopi men, at Acoma when the battle began, had their right hands cut off and were sent back to Hopi as an object lesson. See also: Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Pueblo Revolt; Zuñi Rebellion. LouAnn Faris Culley
Adobe Walls, Battles of Date: November 26, 1864, and June 27, 1874 Locale: Texas Tribes involved: Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The confrontations at Adobe Walls reflect a pattern of ongoing conflict between whites and Plains Indians that culminated in the decisive defeat of the latter in the Red River War. There were two engagements in present-day Hutchinson County, Texas, near Adobe Walls, which were the ruins of a trading post built in 1843 by William Bent and abandoned before 1864. The first clash occurred when Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson was told to attack the winter camps of the Kiowa and Comanche, who were threatening federal posts in New Mexico. Carson moved down the Canadian River into Texas with 14 officers and 321 enlisted men of the First New Mexico Cavalry, as well as 75 Ute and Apache allies, two howitzers, and a wagon train. On the morning of November 26, 1864, he attacked a Kiowa encampment with his mounted troops, leaving the infantry with the wagons. The ensuing alarm brought several thousand Kiowa and Comanche warriors to confront Carson, who established a defensive position at Adobe Walls. Sporadic attacks by Kiowa and Comanche were disrupted primarily by Carson’s howitzers, and at dusk he retreated to reunite his command. The next day he continued his withdrawal, having lost three killed and fifteen wounded but having inflicted perhaps a hundred casualties on his opponents. Carson was praised for extricating his force from their predicament. The second engagement occurred nearly ten years later in 1874, after white buffalo hunters built a trading post near Adobe Walls. Angry clashes led to an attack by about seven hundred Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne,
Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood / 5
Quanah Parker, the Comanche Chief who led the second Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874 as white buffalo hunters devasted the bison herds at the base of his people’s economy. (National Archives)
led by Quanah Parker and Lone Wolf, on the post, which was occupied by about two dozen men and one woman. The warriors were told by a shaman that they could not be harmed, but heavy casualties led to the failure of their assault on June 27, 1874. After five days of siege, the hunters had lost four men, while the number of defenders had increased to about a hundred. The attackers, who had lost several dozen, withdrew. This escalating pattern of violence led to the Red River War, during which Adobe Walls was abandoned for good in August, 1874. See also: Apache Wars; Kickapoo uprisings; Long Walk; Navajo War; Red River War. Richard B. MacCaslin
Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood Date: Beginning 1912 Locale: Alaska Tribes involved: Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, other southeast Alaskan tribes Sisterhood Categories: Civil rights, Organizations, Religion and missionary activities, Twentieth century history Significance: Founded to fight social and political discrimination against Alaska Natives, the Alaska Native Brotherhood is the oldest modern Alaska Native or American Indian organization in the United States. With the stated goal of winning citizenship for Alaska Natives, twelve men and one woman formed the Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) in Sitka in
6 / Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
1912. One member was Tsimshian; the rest were Tlingit. A companion organization, the Alaska Native Sisterhood, is variously reported to have been established in 1915 or 1923. Within a decade there were chapters, called camps, throughout southeastern Alaska. The founders of the Alaska Native Brotherhood were heavily influenced by Presbyterian missionaries, and in addition to promoting native civil rights, the organization urged the abandonment of traditional native languages and customs. In the 1960’s, it reversed itself on this latter issue and was instrumental in the revival of many Haida and Tlingit traditions. In the area of civil rights the ANB was active in the pursuit of voting rights and citizenship for Alaska Natives. In 1922, an ANB leader and attorney, William Paul, successfully defended his great-uncle Chief Shakes against the felony charge of voting illegally. Thus, Alaska Natives won the right to vote two years before Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. The brotherhood led a series of boycotts against businesses that discriminated against natives and in 1945 lobbied successfully for the passage of the Antidiscrimination Act by the territorial legislature. It also successfully lobbied Congress to extend the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act to include Alaska. This contributed significantly to economic development in southeastern Alaska by enabling several native villages to apply for federal loans to purchase fishing boats and canneries. The brotherhood mounted the first organized efforts to secure land rights for Alaska Natives. Its efforts were a precursor to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. See also: Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act; Fish-ins. Richard G. Condon
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act Date: December 18, 1971 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Aleut, Eskimo, Inuit Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: Native Alaskans receive compensation in return for relinquishing their claims to lands they historically occupied.
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act / 7
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon on December 18, 1971. It represented the culmination of a long struggle over native land claims that was compounded by the immediate need to construct a pipeline to carry oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez through lands claimed by Native Alaskans. The ANCSA granted forty-four million acres of land and $962.5 million to Native Alaskans in exchange for the relinquishment of their claims to the remaining nine-tenths of the land in Alaska. The law provided for an equitable distribution of funds among the three primary native groups (the Aleuts, Inuits, and Eskimos) and allowed first village corporations and then the regional native corporations, formed by the ANCSA, to select their lands. The Alaska Federation of Natives, speaking for the Alaskan native groups, accepted the settlement by a vote of 511 to 56, despite concerns about how it would affect traditional native patterns of hunting and fishing. Land claims had long been a disputed issue between Native Alaskans and the U.S. government. A Supreme Court ruling in 1955 declared that the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution did not protect native land rights. When Alaska became the forty-ninth state of the Union in 1959, it was granted the right to select 103.3 million acres of land over the next twentyfive years without any acknowledgment of claims by Native Alaskans. Between 1959 and 1969, the state claimed nineteen million acres. By comparison, Native Alaskans owned only five hundred acres and had restricted title to another fifteen thousand acres. Since the state claimed nearly 28 percent of Alaskan territory, fears arose that there would be little valuable land remaining to satisfy native claims, and native opposition to state land claims intensified. Competing Parties. Some Native Alaskans believed that proposed use of their lands by the state or federal government would violate traditional rights enjoyed by the native inhabitants. The Atomic Energy Commission, for example, sought to use Cape Thompson as a nuclear testing site; it was situated near an Eskimo village, with a population of three hundred, at Point Hope and the ancestral lands the villagers used for hunting. Another issue under dispute was the proposed Rampart Dam, a hydroelectric project that was to be built on the Yukon River in the north-central region of the state. Opponents of the dam argued that it would damage wildlife breeding grounds, displace twelve hundred natives from seven small villages, and endanger the livelihood of five thousand to six thousand others who depended on salmon in that area. Finally, the state was beginning to legislate hunting restrictions on state-owned land, which natives believed
8 / Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
would threaten their traditional way of life. In the early 1960’s, native groups began to take action to protect their interests. Between 1961 and 1968, Alaskan natives filed claims protesting the state’s use of 337 million acres of Alaskan territory. In 1960, Native Alaskans constituted roughly 20 percent of the Alaskan population. For those living in native communities or villages, life consisted of subsistence hunting and fishing, which necessitated access to large amounts of land. Many were seasonally employed and lived in poverty. Seventy percent had less than an elementary education, and only ten percent had received a secondary education. Owing to disease, alcoholism, and impoverished conditions, the life span of Native Alaskans was about thirty-five years of age, half the national average. Many Native Alaskans believed that existing laws, rather than protecting them, stripped them of rights to lands that they claimed. They generally did not consider either the state or the federal government to be supportive of their concerns. Two other groups who entered the contest over land claims were developers and environmentalists. Developers desired the construction of more fisheries and canneries, as well as highways and industries that would enable Alaska’s natural resources to be fully developed. Environmentalists sought protection of certain lands as parks, natural wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges. By 1966, land disputes had become so hotly contested that Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall ordered a freeze on all transfers of land claimed by the natives until a mutually acceptable agreement could be reached. Following the discovery at Prudhoe Bay, on the North Slope of Alaska, of one of the largest oil fields ever found, the federal government proposed that a pipeline be constructed across the state to transport the oil to Valdez, a city easily accessible for loading petroleum because of its position as a year-round ice-free port on Prince William Sound. The proposed route of the eight-hundred-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline included twenty miles of land that was claimed by Native Alaskans, who feared that construction of the pipeline would likely lead to other infringements of their land claims. By this time, however, the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Alaska Federation of Natives, among other native groups, were well organized to press for their interests. It became evident that the land issue would have to be resolved before the pipeline was built. Government Intervention. Walter Hickel, Udall’s successor as secretary of the interior, extended the land-freeze in 1970. A federal restraining order halted the project until a settlement could be reached. Because develop-
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act / 9
ers and oil companies were anxious to get the project under way, pressure was applied to settle the issue quickly. Other interested parties anticipated benefits from the construction of the pipeline, which promised lower petroleum prices to the federal government, revenue to the state, land preservation to environmentalists, and previously denied rights to natives, particularly title to land that they believed was theirs. British Petroleum, one of the interested parties, agreed to lobby for a bill that would protect native land interests. A joint Senate-House conference committee drew up the final bill, which gained widespread support. It passed Congress and was signed into law by Nixon on December 18, 1971. The ANCSA resolved the long-standing dispute regarding native rights to land in Alaska. Native land claims were extinguished in return for title to forty-four million acres that included mineral rights, as well as $962.5 million in additional compensation. Twelve regional corporations were established between 1972 and 1974 (to which a thirteenth was added for natives not living in Alaska) in order to manage the funds and organize land selection. Every Alaskan native became a member of a regional corporation, in which he or she was given one hundred shares of stock. In addition, about 220 village corporations were formed to oversee the distribution of land at the local level. Native reservations were abolished, and sixteen million acres of land were set aside for selection by the village corporations. The village corporations were allowed to select their land over a threeyear period and the regional corporations over four years. Beneficiaries of the land claims were required to be one-quarter native Alaskan (either Inuit, Aleut, or Eskimo) and had to be born on or before December 18, 1971. While the land selection involved a lengthy process, native corporations eventually selected 102 million acres instead of the allotted 44 million. For twenty years after the passage of the act, Native Alaskans were not permitted to sell their stock to non-natives, and their undeveloped land was not to be taxed. In 1987, Congress passed the “1991 amendments,” which preserved the tax-exemption benefits on undeveloped lands indefinitely and allowed new stock to be issued to Native Alaskans born after December 18, 1971. The ANCSA was, in many respects, a watershed in the history of Native Alaskans that promised to change their way of life permanently. The act began the transformation of Alaskan native cultures from a subsistence economy based on traditional hunting and fishing patterns to one based on ownership of modern business-for-profit ventures. Many Native Alaskans embarked on a difficult transition from life on reservations to membership in native corporations that undertook a variety of commercial enterprises.
10 / Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
These corporations invested in banking, hotels, fisheries, real estate, and mineral exploration. Some were successful and some were not. Nevertheless, the acquisition of land and income gave Native Alaskans a position of influence in state politics that they had never had before. See also: Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood; Fish-ins. Anne-Marie E. Ferngren Sources for Further Study Anders, Gary C. “Social and Economic Consequences of Federal Indian Policy.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 37, no. 2 (January, 1989): 285-303. Includes discussion of the effects of the ANCSA on the Alaskan Natives. Arnold, Robert D., et al. Alaska Native Land Claims. Anchorage: Alaska Native Foundation, 1978. A comprehensive discussion of the act and its significance. Berger, Thomas R. Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission. New York: Hill & Wang, 1985. A critical account of the effects of the ANCSA on Native Alaskans. Berry, Mary Clay. The Alaska Pipeline: The Politics of Oil and Native Land Claims. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. Describes the influence of the construction of the pipeline on the passage of the ANCSA. Case, David S. Alaska Natives and American Laws. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1984. A detailed description of the historical interaction of Native Alaskans and U.S. law. Flanders, Nicholas E. “The ANCSA Amendments of 1987 and Land Management in Alaska.” The Polar Record 25, no. 155 (October, 1989): 315322. Discusses the modifications of the ANCSA by the 1991 Amendments. Mitchell, Donald Craig. Take My Land, Take My Life: The Story of Congress’s Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, 1960-1971. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2000. Discusses the legal and regulatory history of ANCSA. Strohmeyer, John. Extreme Conditions: Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Illustrates the impact of the petroleum industry and law on native peoples.
Albany Congress / 11
Albany Congress Date: June 19-July 10, 1754 Locale: Albany, New York Tribes involved: Iroquois Confederacy Categories: Colonial history, National government and legislation, Treaties Significance: To resolve Iroquois land and trade complaints, colonial delegates draft the Plan of Union. In June, 1753, the Mohawk leader Hendrick declared the Covenant Chain— a term used to symbolize the Iroquois Confederacy’s alliance with New York and the other colonies—to be broken. Hendrick’s action shocked colonial and imperial officials. From their perspective, Hendrick’s timing could not have been worse. Tensions between the French and English were increasing, and British officials had based their military strategy for North America on an Anglo-Iroquois alliance. Just when the Iroquois alliance was most needed, the Mohawks had voided the centerpiece of Britain’s military strategy for North America. Something had to be done, and that something was the Albany Congress of 1754. Hendrick’s declaration represented a culmination of events dating back a decade. In 1744, the Onondaga, believing they were ceding the Shenandoah Valley to Virginia, agreed to the Treaty of Lancaster. Virginians, however, used this treaty to claim the entire Ohio region. Over the next decade, Virginian officials opened nearly three hundred thousand acres of land to settlement through land companies such as the Ohio Company of Virginia. King George’s War (1739-1748) temporarily delayed settlement. Once the war ended, however, the Ohio Company renewed its efforts at settling the region. French officials responded by sending Captain de Céleron into the Ohio Valley in 1750. French soldiers also began building forts in the region. One such outpost, Presque Isle, was in the heart of Iroquoia. When the Iroquois asked for assistance in removing the French from Presque Isle, Virginian officials refused to help. By the early 1750’s, the Mohawks and other Indian groups felt themselves trapped between the English and French. Need for Negotiation. Following Virginia’s response to the Iroquois, members of the Board of Trade recommended that King George II call a congress to address Indian complaints about colonial behavior. In September, 1753, the Board of Trade notified colonial governors that King George II wanted all colonies having a relationship with the Iroquois to attend a conference
12 / Albany Congress
that was to resolve existing Iroquois complaints about land and trade with the colonists. The resulting Albany Congress was unlike any other AngloIroquois conference. It was the first intercolonial-Indian conference called by London officials. The proposed conference met with the approval of Massachusetts governor William Shirley and the Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin. However, the lieutenant governors of New York and Virginia were less enthralled with the board’s directive. New York lieutenant governor James De Lancey could not escape the conference. Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia, however, failed to send a representative to Albany. Still, when the conference began in June, 1754, representatives from nine colonies attended. The delegates met at Albany for specific reasons. It was the historic meeting place for Iroquois-European conferences. Albany was the site of one of the two council fires the English and Iroquois maintained. As one of the anchors of the Covenant Chain, official business could be conducted and ratified there. It was also the Hendrick, chief of the Mohawks, who in 1753 closest city to the frontier that declared the Covenant Chain—the Iroquois delegates could reach by boat.
Confederacy’s alliance with New York and other British colonies—to be broken as a result of Iroquois attacks against westwardexpanding settlers. The Albany Congress was designed to allow the British to make peace with their long-standing Iroquois allies in the face of mounting French-British tensions. Mohawk leaders such as Hendrick hoped that the congress’ proposed Plan of Union would allow all British colonists to speak with a single voice, thus alleviating Iroquoissettler tensions, but the plan was rejected. (Library of Congress)
Agenda. When representatives met at Albany, they needed not only to address Iroquois complaints but also to prepare for war. Delegates saw the two issues as interrelated. On June 19, 1754, they created a sevenperson committee to prepare James De Lancey’s opening speech to the American Indi-
Albany Congress / 13
ans. Five days later, the representatives created a second committee to consider “some Method of affecting the Union between the Colonies.” This latter delegation produced the Plan of Union associated with the Albany Congress. It did so, however, “as a Branch of Indian Affairs.” Mohawk leaders such as Hendrick hoped confederation would allow the colonists to speak with a single voice. Some delegates agreed. They thought colonial confederation would alleviate the problems of which the Iroquois complained. Therefore, the Albany Plan of Union was designed primarily as a mechanism for conducting Indian affairs. Besides improving colonial policy toward the natives, representatives thought colonial confederation would improve their military preparedness and help them defeat New France. There were mutual security reasons for confederation. Politicians did not prepare their plan to tamper with each colony’s internal autonomy. Common wisdom maintains that Benjamin Franklin is the father of the colonial confederation. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts wrote the plan. If Hutchinson was the author, then American Indian affairs were probably an important influence on the Plan of Union, because Hutchinson was a member of the original subcommittee appointed to study American Indian affairs. Franklin was not. Proposals. Whoever the author was, the Plan of Union contained specific proposals. It created a unicameral legislature, to be called the Grand Council. This council would consist of forty-eight representatives chosen from the lower houses of the colonies. Representation in the Grand Council was limited to members of the lower houses of assembly in the colonies because it was assumed that only directly elected representatives had the right to tax the colonists. Initially, representation in the Grand Council would be based on the population of each colony. After three years, representation would be based on the revenue a colony generated for the confederation, so as to reward participation. In both its name and the number of delegates, the Plan of Union paid homage to the Iroquois League. The new government also would have a president general. This executive would receive his salary directly from England, so the president general would be independent of the colonial legislatures. This proposal recognized the problems confronting the relationship between governor and lower house in colonial America. The proposed confederation government had eight functions. One of the most important was the right to direct all Indian treaties for the colonies. The government also would make declarations of war and peace toward
14 / Albany Congress
the natives, make all land purchases from the natives in the name of the king, and regulate trade with the natives. Purchased land would reside outside the existing boundaries of established colonies. The government would direct the creation of settlements in the territory, would rule them in the name of the king, and would be responsible for the defense of the frontier. The Plan of Union also gave the proposed government the ability to tax. The Grand Council could enforce an excise tax on luxury goods. The government would secure additional money by regulating the Indian trade. Traders would be required to carry licenses and post bonds of good behavior before being allowed to trade with the natives. Traders were to purchase these licenses and bonds from the confederation government. Trade would be restricted to specific forts, built just for that purpose. It was hoped that by regulating trade with the Indians, many of the problems associated with the traders would be curtailed. Finally, the government would receive quitrent from colonists as they settled lands newly purchased from the Indians. Politicians thus pursued colonial confederation as a method of addressing Indian affairs. Rejection. The Albany delegates approved the Plan of Union on July 10 and adjourned to take the proposals back to their respective colonies. Not one colonial legislature accepted the plan. Legislators in seven colonies voted the Plan of Union down. The other six legislatures let the issue die away during the Seven Years’ (French and Indian) War. Each colonial legislature had specific reasons for rejecting the Albany Plan. Some politicians feared that the plan gave too much power to the governor. Others feared the creation of a president general. Still others believed that the confederation government threatened the western lands included in their original charters. Colonial legislators were not the only ones to repudiate the Plan of Union. The Board of Trade rejected it too, believing the idea of a Grand Council to be cumbersome. They wanted a smaller council, with delegates chosen by the royal governors. They also thought that the Albany Plan gave too much power to colonial assemblies. From the Board of Trade’s perspective, the Albany Congress was a failure. If the Albany Congress was a failure, it was an important one. The congress showed how different England and America had grown since the Glorious Revolution in the 1680’s. The Seven Years’ War would strain the imperial-colonial relationship even more. The failure of delegates to the Albany Congress to address Iroquois complaints directly forced the home government to become an active participant in colonial-Indian relations. The result was the creation of an Indian superintendent system. This new
Alcatraz Island occupation / 15
system, begun in 1755, made imperial policies, not colonial desires, the primary focus of Anglo-Iroquois dialogue in the years to come. See also: French and Indian War; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Iroquois Confederacy; Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting; Paxton Boys’ Massacres; Proclamation of 1763. Michael J. Mullin Sources for Further Study Alden, John R. “The Albany Congress and the Creation of the Indian Superintendencies.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27, no. 2 (September, 1940): 193-210. Describes how the Albany Congress led British officials to create the Indian superintendent system. Gipson, Lawrence Henry. “The Drafting of the Albany Plan of Union: The Problem of Semantics.” Pennsylvania History 26, no. 4 (October, 1959): 291-316. Argues that Thomas Hutchinson was responsible for writing the Albany Plan of Union. Hopkins, Stephen. A True Representation of the Plan Formed at Albany. Providence, R.I.: Sidney S. Rider, 1880. Hopkins, who represented Rhode Island at the Albany Congress, details the issues that delegates discussed concerning Indian affairs. Mullin, Michael J. “The Albany Congress and Colonial Confederation.” Mid-America 72, no. 2 (April-July, 1990): 93-105. Discusses the role of Indian affairs at the Congress. Newbold, Robert C. The Albany Congress and Plan of Union of 1754. New York: Vantage Press, 1955. A summation of the scholarship on Albany at the time. Shannon, Timothy J. Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Argues that the Albany Congress was actually the moment of shifting European-Indian relationships from independent commerce to an imperialist model, based on hierarchy and governed by a distant authority rather than face-to-face.
Alcatraz Island occupation Date: 1969-1971 Locale: Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States
16 / Alcatraz Island occupation
Categories: Protest movements, Twentieth century history Significance: The takeover of Alcatraz Island symbolized the awakening of American Indian peoples to cultural and political concerns, even though its stated goal, the establishment of a Center for Native American Studies, was not realized. The occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay by an organization calling itself Indians of All Tribes was a high-profile act of self-empowerment by native American people. In 1962, the United States government closed operations of the federal penitentiary situated on the island. There were actually two subsequent occupations of the island by young American Indian people. First came a short-lived effort in 1964, then the highly publicized takeover of 1969 which lasted until June of 1971, when federal marshals and other law enforcement officials removed all American Indians left on the island. The occupying Indians wanted the island to be transformed into a center for Native American studies. This would involve the practice of traditional tribal spirituality; people would be trained in song, dance, and healing ceremonies. It would also be a place of training in scientific research and ecology. Also, it was to become an Indian training school whose purpose would be to teach the use of modern economics to end hunger and unemployment. The Indians of All Tribes organization desired transfer of Alcatraz as surplus federal property, in the same manner that facilities such as Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico, the Stead Air Force Base in Nevada, the Madera Radar Station, and Camp Parks were transferred to such profit-making organizations as Philco-Ford, Radio Corporation of American (RCA), and Litton. Negotiations were carried out with Robert Robinson of the National Council on Indian Opportunity representing the United States. In March of 1970, the government’s counterproposal included these ideas: a new name for the island, possibly from the Ohlone language; monuments commemorating noted American Indian people placed on the island park; a cultural center and museum built as an integral part of the park plan; and a number of Indians professionally trained as park rangers by the National Park Service. The federal government balked at the idea of locating an institution of higher learning on the island, noting that the first tribally controlled college was already being established at Many Farms on the Navajo Reservation and that a number of Native American studies courses were being offered at universities across the nation. This proposal was rejected by the Indians of All Tribes, and the negotiations broke down. On June 11, 1971, federal marshals arrested everyone on Alcatraz Island.
All-Pueblo Council / 17
The takeover of Alcatraz Island served as a symbol in re-awakening American Indian people, as self-determination continued to replace federal policies of relocation and termination. See also: American Indian Movement; Indian Civil Rights Act; Indianwhite relations: U.S., 1934-2002. Howard Meredith
All-Pueblo Council Date: Established 1922 Locale: New Mexico Tribes involved: Pueblo Categories: Native government, Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: The All-Pueblo Council defended the integrity of Pueblo lands, communal life, and tribal traditions in the face of federal legislation threatening Pueblo reservation lands. The All-Pueblo Council was established in response to the proposed Bursum bill of 1922. This legislation resulted from decades of controversy over land that had been purchased since 1848 by Hispanic and white settlers from the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. In 1913, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Sandoval case that the Pueblo Indians came under federal jurisdiction as wards of the government and therefore did not have the authority to sell their lands. Occasional violence broke out as Pueblos challenged the right of white settlers to be on former Pueblo lands. In 1922, Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, a former New Mexico senator, asked New Mexico senator Holm O. Bursum to introduce legislation to confirm the land titles of all non-Pueblo claimants and place Pueblo water rights under the jurisdiction of the state courts. The intention of Fall and Bursum was to settle the controversy over Pueblo lands in favor of Hispanic and white settlers and to prevent further violence. Sympathetic whites, including the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, artists from Santa Fe and Taos, and sociologist John Collier, organized a movement to stop the Bursum bill. After Collier alerted the Pueblos to the danger of the bill, they responded by calling an All-Pueblo Council, which met on November 5, 1922, at Santo Domingo. The 121 delegates drafted “An Appeal by the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico to the People of the
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United States.” They claimed that the Bursum bill would destroy their communal life, land, customs, and traditions. A delegation from the AllPueblo Council went with Collier to Washington, D.C., to testify before the Senate Committee on Public Lands. The Bursum bill was defeated in Congress as a result of the public outcry against it. In 1923, a compromise bill, the Public Lands Act, was passed; it empowered a board to determine the status and boundaries of Pueblo lands. See also: Gadsden Purchase; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Pueblo Revolt; Zuñi Rebellion. Lynne M. Getz
Allotment system Date: 1887-1934 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: Intended to assimilate Indians by making them small farmers, the allotment system instead led to a massive loss of Indian land. Allotment—the division of tribal lands among individual Indians—became the dominant theme in federal Indian policy in the years between 1887 and 1934. During the 1880’s many whites who regarded themselves as “friends of the Indians” came to believe that Indians could be saved from extinction only by assimilation into American society. Tribal loyalties and cultures were seen as barriers to this end. Reformers hoped that by carving up reservations and making small farmers of the Indians, they could effectively detribalize and assimilate the Indians into American culture. This policy also attracted support from those who wanted to open up tribal lands for settlement or exploitation. There were precedents for this policy. In the first half of the nineteenth century, several eastern states had broken up staterecognized reservations by dividing land among tribal members, and a number of the removal treaties of the 1830’s made provision for allotments to individual Indians who wished to remain east of the Mississippi. In 1887 Congress enacted the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Severalty Act (for Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, one of its
Allotment system / 19
proponents). The act gave the president authority to allot reservation lands in “severalty” (to individual Indians). As a general rule, heads of families would receive 160 acres, single Indians less. Title to the allotments would be held in trust by the government for twenty-five years to enable allottees to acquire the necessary skills, and the land could not be sold during the trust period. Once an Indian took up an allotment, he became an American citizen. Land not required for distribution could be sold off or opened to white settlement, with the proceeds intended to support assimilationist policies. It was suggested that the Indians, freed from tribal domination, would develop as small farmers and so be capable of taking their place in American society. The Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory, along with a few others, were originally exempted from the act, but in the 1890’s Congress established a commission headed by Senator Dawes to negotiate allotment and thus the abolition of their tribal governments. The actual process of allotment was complex and went on for more than forty years. Along the way Congress made several modifications: In 1900, the leasing of allotments before the end of the trust period was allowed; in 1902, heirs of allottees were
An 1879 advertisement for white settlement on land bought by the U.S. government from the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole in 1866 (the government’s original intent was that the land be settled by other Indians and former slaves). (Library of Congress)
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permitted to sell their lands with the permission of the secretary of the interior; and in 1906, the Burke Act delayed citizenship until the end of the trust period (also permitting the secretary of the interior to cut short the trust period for Indians deemed competent to manage their own affairs). The system did not work as intended. Many Indians came from nonagricultural tribal backgrounds and were reluctant to become farmers. Others found their allotments too small to support a family or of little agricultural value. Whites often encouraged Indians to lease or sell their lands, sometimes resorting to intimidation or outright fraud. It often proved easy to separate Indians from allotments. The foremost result of the allotment policy was a drastic reduction in the amount of land controlled by Native Americans, from 138 million acres in 1887 to 52 million acres when the policy ceased in 1934. Of the amount lost, 60 million acres had been declared “excess land” and disposed of by the government to non-Indians. By 1934, two-thirds of Native Americans were either landless or without enough land to provide subsistence. The policy weakened tribal cultures and fostered the growth of a large bureaucracy in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By the late 1920’s, doubts about the allotment system were growing. An investigation led by Lewis Meriam shocked many when its findings were published in 1928 as The Problem of Indian Administration (better known as the Meriam Report). The report detailed dismal conditions and poverty among American Indians and identified the allotment system as the major source of Indian problems. In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act stopped the process of allotment and allowed the reorganization of tribal governments. See also: Burke Act; Friends of the Indian organizations; General Allotment Act; Indian Reorganization Act; Meriam Report. William C. Lowe Sources for Further Study Greenwald, Emily. Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, the Jicarilla Apache, and the Dawes Act. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Kinney, J. P. A Continent Lost, a Civilization Won: Indian Land Tenure in America. 1937. Reprint. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. McDonnell, Janet A. The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
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Otis, Delos S. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. Edited by Francis Paul Prucha. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975.
American Indian Date: Colonial times-present Locale: Americas and West Indies Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Terminology Significance: An “American Indian” is broadly defined as a member of any of the aboriginal peoples of North, Central, or South America and the West Indies. Peoples covered under this definition are also generally considered part of a group once widely referred to by anthropologists as “Mongoloid” in reference to certain physical characteristics and facial features. The term “American Indian” is an obvious misnomer on two counts: First, the word “American” refers to explorer Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the Americas were named by European explorers. Second, the word “Indian” refers to inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), which explorer Christopher Columbus mistakenly thought he had reached when he arrived in the Americas in the late 1400’s. As colonization of the Americas by Europeans progressed, the term continued to be used by the European immigrants, regardless of its inappropriateness. The early European explorers and colonists were not interested in exploring differences among native cultures; they simplistically perceived the hundreds of distinct indigenous cultures of North America as a singular primitive, barbaric, and uncivilized entity. “American Indian,” or “Indian,” became the standard term used by Europeans and European Americans simply through common usage. Many indigenous peoples, in their own languages, call themselves “the people” or “human beings,” emphasizing their distinctive qualities among all living creatures, to which they believe themselves related. In the mid-twentieth century, “Native American” became a widely used alternative collective name. By the 1990’s, however, the popularity of this term had also waned, and many native people found American Indian to
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be relatively acceptable, even preferable. Some American Indians find all terms such as American Indian, Native American, and Amerind to be equally objectionable, as all owe a debt to European views and, at worst, to the racism of dominant American society. The most accurate—and most widely accepted—way to identify a person or tradition is simply to refer to the specific tribe or group to which the person or tradition belongs. When referring to the many indigenous cultures collectively, “American Indians” is still widely used, essentially because no consensus has been reached on a preferable term. See also: Amerind; Federally recognized tribes; Indian; Native American; Tribe. Michael W. Simpson
American Indian Defense Association Date: Established 1923 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: Organized by social reformer and later Bureau of Indian Affairs commissioner John Collier, the American Indian Defense Association (AIDA) was the primary advocate for tribal revitalization. The American Indian Defense Association (AIDA) was organized in New York City in May, 1923, by white reformers sympathetic to Indian causes. Under the leadership of John Collier, the AIDA’s founder and first executive secretary, the organization consisted primarily of wealthy, liberal Californians who joined hands in opposition to a proposed bill addressing land disputes in the Northwest that might have resulted in the loss of Pueblo lands. Led by Collier, members of the AIDA were critical of the General Allotment Act of 1887, pleading for the maintenance of Indian tribal integrity. In 1922, Collier explicitly stated the AIDA’s goals. The association was to aid in the preservation of Indian culture, including a revitalization program of Indian arts and crafts. It sought to entitle Indians to social and religious freedoms and to rejuvenate tribal governments. Provisions were also made for safeguarding Indian civil liberties. Furthermore, Indians were to be entitled to federal aid in the form of Farm Loan Bank credits, public health services, and other federal assistance programs. To break its monop-
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oly over Indian programs, Collier suggested reform of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Through congressional lobbying, publication of pamphlets, and advice to Indian tribes, Collier and the AIDA labored to influence federal Indian policy and to improve conditions on Indian reservations. In its first decade, the AIDA grew to more than 1,700 members. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the organization maintained branches in cities throughout the country. During the 1920’s, executive secretary Collier became the nation’s leading advocate of Indian rights. With the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, Indian reform organizations furnished candidates for appointment as commissioner in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Collier foremost among them. Although Collier was considered controversial because of his communist sympathies and his confrontational nature, Roosevelt nevertheless appointed him commissioner in 1933. Under Roosevelt, Collier initiated his own Indian New Deal, whereby governmental Indian policy shifted away from assimilation and toward tribal revitalization. Collier’s culminating triumph was passage in 1934 of the Indian Reorganization Act, the heart of the Indian New Deal. The American Indian Defense Association consistently supported Collier and the Indian New Deal, although the association was frequently critical of its application. In 1936, the American Indian Defense Association merged with the National Association on Indian Affairs, becoming the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA). By the 1990’s, the AAIA was headquartered in New York City. There it maintained a staff of employees and had thousands of members nationwide with an annual operating budget of more than $1 million. The AAIA provided legal and technical assistance in health, education, economic development, the administration of justice, and resource utilization to United States tribes. In addition, the AAIA maintained the American Indian Fund, published the newsletter Indian Affairs, and occasionally published books. See also: Indian New Deal; Indian Reorganization Act. Mary E. Virginia
American Indian Higher Education Consortium Date: Established 1972 Locale: United States and Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States
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Categories: Education, Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: The American Indian Higher Education Consortium promotes tribally controlled colleges and monitors state and federal legislation affecting Indian higher education. The American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) was formed by six tribal college leaders in 1972 to protect the interests of tribally controlled colleges in the United States and Canada. The overall goal of the organization is to ensure survival of tribal colleges, maintain Indian control of the colleges, and secure an adequate funding base. The consortium promotes culturally meaningful training for college administrators and teachers working in the tribal colleges; it promotes and encourages the preservation and teaching of American Indian, Inuit, and Alaska Native languages, cultures, and traditions; and it encourages programs that are consistent with the inherent rights of tribal sovereignty and self-determination. AIHEC came about at a time when Indian people were identifying common goals and establishing issue-oriented organizations that promoted sovereignty and represented both tribal and pantribal needs. Because of the complex issues connected with the implementation of the Tribally Controlled Community College Act of 1978, AIHEC has become a vital force in monitoring political and legislative issues connected with American Indian higher education at the state and federal levels. AIHEC also functions as a national forum to promote Indian higher education and recognition of the tribal college movement. AIHEC provides considerable support to the tribal college infrastructure and sponsors annual conferences at which administrators, faculty, and students from the various colleges meet to participate in training workshops, seminars, and a variety of intercollegiate activities. AIHEC also publishes Tribal College: Journal of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which focuses on issues of Indian higher education and provides a forum to address Indian research issues. In an effort to raise money and establish endowments, AIHEC created and oversees the American Indian College Fund, intended to promote personal, corporate, and foundation gift-giving to support the tribal college movement. Through the various activities of AIHEC, the Indian tribal colleges are connected by a national organization that promotes their well-being while respecting their inherent sovereignty. See also: Carlisle Indian School; Indian Education Acts; Indian SelfDetermination and Education Assistance Act; Kennedy Report; National Congress of American Indians. Carole A. Barrett
American Indian Movement / 25
American Indian Movement Date: Established 1968 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Organizations, Protest movements, National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: Creates public awareness of injustices to Indians; struggles for American Indian treaty rights; encourages self-determination among native peoples. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded by Chippewas Dennis Banks and George Mitchell in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during July, 1968. Taking its initial ideas from the Black Panther Party, AIM sought to protect urban Indians from police abuse and to create programs promoting community self-sufficiency. Inspired by the 1969 takeover of Alcatraz Island, however, the movement adopted an agenda centered on indigenous spiritual traditions, land recovery, and treaty rights. AIM’s credibility in “Indian country” was truly established in early 1972, when Russell Means led a large caravan to tiny Gordon, Nebraska, protesting the fact that two local whites who had brutally murdered an Oglala Lakota from the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation were charged only with manslaughter. As a result, the culprits became the first white men in Nebraska history to be imprisoned for killing an Indian. In November, 1972, AIM played a key role in a spectacular seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. This was followed, in January, 1973, by a major confrontation between AIM and police in the streets of Custer, South Dakota, which left the county courthouse in flames (the issue again concerned official inaction after the murder of an Oglala). In February, 1973, while supporting Lakota treaty rights, AIM undertook a lengthy armed standoff with federal authorities at Wounded Knee. Afterward, the Federal Bureau of Investigation mounted a grim campaign of repression against “insurgents” on Pine Ridge. Over the next three years, AIM’s leadership was largely tied up in what one federal official admitted was “an effort to destroy these radicals via the judicial process.” Meanwhile, more than sixty AIM members and supporters were murdered on the reservation, many of them by a federally sponsored entity calling itself “the Goon Squad,” and more than three hundred others suffered serious physical assault. On June 26, 1975, AIM’s efforts to defend itself led to a massive firefight that left an Indian and two FBI agents dead. Three AIM members—Bob
26 / American Indian Movement
Robideau, Dino Butler, and Leonard Peltier—were charged with murdering the agents. Butler and Robideau were acquitted by an all-white jury after a U.S. Civil Rights Commission representative testified that they had merely responded to a government-induced “reign of terror” on Pine Ridge. Peltier, however, was convicted and sentenced to a double life term in a controversial process that a federal appellate court later described as “fraught with FBI misconduct.” By 1977, AIM had entered an extended period of relative dormancy, although it did go on to organize or participate in such events as the 1978 Longest Walk, the 1980 Black Hills Survival Poster urging support for the American In- Gathering, the Yellow Thunder dian Movement in New York City. (Library of Camp occupation of 1981-1985, Congress) and the anti-Columbus demonstrations of the early 1990’s. Although it may never reconstitute itself in a form exhibiting the power it once displayed, some analysts believe that the movement had achieved its major objectives by 1975. “AIM instilled a deep sense of pride and resistance to oppression among Indians which was greatly lacking at the time,” Vine Deloria, Jr., observed, “and for that we owe it a real debt.” Lakota traditionalist Birgil Kills Straight concurs: “Whatever else may be said,” he maintains, “AIM acted as the shock troops of Indian sovereignty at a time when we needed them most.” See also: Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings. Ward Churchill Sources for Further Study Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1988.
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Deloria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Johansen, Bruce, and Roberto Maestas. Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979. Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. 2d ed. New York: Viking Press, 1991. Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1997. Weyler, Rex. Blood of the Land: The U.S. Government and Corporate War Against the First Nations. 2d ed. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992.
American Indian Policy Review Commission Date: Established 1975 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: This federal commission, after two years of study, published an extensive report calling for major reforms of U.S. Indian policy. The American Indian Policy Review Commission (AIPRC) was established in 1975 as a follow-up to the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, passed in the same year. The commission was chaired by Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota (it is sometimes referred to as the Abourezk Commission). The commission’s findings were published in 1977 in its multivolume report. The report opposed assimilationist policies and recommended continuing the 1968 initiative for the establishment of permanent government units in the federal system to protect and strengthen tribal governments. Among the factors that led to the establishment of the commission was the activism and unrest sweeping American Indian communities in the early 1970’s. According to Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle, the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee in particular was a catalytic event in the decision to create a new commission to reexamine the government’s Indian policy.
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The AIPRC included Indian representatives in various positions; they were selected according to partisan tribal politics of the time. Indians dominated the staff; a significant number of contracted consultants were also native individuals. In addition to there being five Indian commissioners and thirty-one (out of a total of thirty-three) Indian task force members, the commission included six members of Congress. Inevitably, complicated political dynamics plagued the commission behind the scenes. The final report of the AIPRC generally followed the line of Indian militants who had previously been excluded from positions on commissions and task forces. The extensive document listed more than two hundred recommendations. It claimed that the relationship between American Indian tribes and the United States was political and was established via treaties, according to international law. The commission recommended that two fundamental concepts should guide all future federal policy: First, Indian tribes are sovereign political bodies having the power to enact laws and enforce them within reservation boundaries; second, the relationship between the tribes and the United States “is premised on a special trust that must govern the conduct of the stronger toward the weaker.” The AIPRC report also stated that the right to choose a form of government is an inherent right of any Indian tribe. No actual social reform directed toward improving the lot of American Indians took place following publication of the AIPRC report. Moreover, Congress soon afterward abolished the standing Indian Affairs Subcommittees that operated under the Department of the Interior. Eventually a Senate Select Subcommittee on Indian Affairs was authorized by Congress to sort out the many AIPRC recommendations. The commission was not without criticism from both ends of the political spectrum. Some (including the commission’s vice chair, Representative Lloyd Meems) criticized it for going too far. Others have argued that, although the commission had good intentions in its promotion of selfdetermination, its recommendations in reality represented a continuation of the paternalistic relationship between the U.S. government and the tribes. See also: Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; Wounded Knee occupation. M. A. Jaimes Sources for Further Study American Indian Policy Review Commission Task Force. Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977.
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Clarkin, Thomas. Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Deloria, Vine, Jr., ed. American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. American Indians, American Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. ____________. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Robbins, Rebecca L. “Self-Determination and Subordination: The Past, Present, and Future of American Indian Governance.” In The State of Native America, edited by M. A. Jaimes. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
American Indian Religious Freedom Act Date: August 11, 1978 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Civil rights, National government and legislation, Religion and missionary activities, Twentieth century history Significance: The U.S. Congress recognizes its obligation “to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise traditional religions.” Throughout most of U.S. history, the federal government has discouraged and abridged the free exercise of traditional American Indian religions. The federal government provided direct and indirect support to a variety of Christian denominations who sought to Christianize and “civilize” American Indians. In 1883, bowing to pressure from Christian churches, the federal government forbade “the savage and barbarous practices that are calculated to continue [American Indians] in savagery, no matter what exterior influences are brought to bear on them.” The Sun Dance, rites of purification, other religious ceremonies, and the practices of medicine men were forbidden. Violators could be prosecuted and receive ten days in jail if they continued their “heathenish practices.” Such a law restricting freedom of religion was possible because tribes were regarded as distinct political units separate and apart from the United States, and so were not covered by the protections of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
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In the 1920’s, there was a crusade for reform in federal American Indian policy, and there were outspoken concerns for the support of freedom of religion for American Indian peoples. In 1933, John Collier was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin Roosevelt. On January 31, 1934, he circulated a pamphlet entitled Indian Religious Freedom and Indian Culture among employees of the Indian Service. This pamphlet, which stressed that “the fullest constitutional liberty, in all matters affecting religion, conscience, and culture” should be extended to all American Indians, established policies for Indian Service employees to follow. Collier directed unequivocally, “No interference with Indian religious life or ceremonial expression will hereafter be tolerated. The cultural liberty of Indians in all respects is to be considered equal to that of any non-Indian group.” Two weeks later, Collier issued a second order, which dealt with religious services at governmentoperated schools. It had been common practice to require students in government schools to attend church services. This new policy statement, “Regulations for Religious Worship and Instruction,” prohibited compulsory attendance at services, although it did allow religious denominations to use school facilities for services. Religious instruction was permitted one hour per week in the day schools; however, parents had to give written permission for their children to attend. This policy was especially controversial, because these regulations extended to representatives of native religions as well as to Christian missionaries. These policy statements were not well received by missionaries who had been active on various reservations, and many regarded Collier’s move to protect American Indian religious freedoms as a direct attack on the churches and Christianity. Collier was accused of being an atheist and of being antireligious. Criticism of Collier was especially strong among Protestant missionary societies and included attacks from Christian Indians who decried this return to the old ways as subverting American Indian progress. Nevertheless, Collier insisted that American Indians be granted complete constitutional liberty in all matters affecting religion, conscience, and culture, and he asserted that religious liberty extended to all people, not just Christians. Native Religious Freedom. Most tribal governments endorsed Collier’s policy of religious freedom, and, on many reservations, there was a revival of the older spiritual traditions. However, federal and state laws have not endorsed or permitted freedom of religion for American Indians consistently. Certain state and federal laws and policies prevented the free exercise of religion for many American Indian people. A large area of concern was that many areas that were considered to be sacred lands by the tribes
American Indian Religious Freedom Act / 31
had passed from Indian control to state or federal jurisdiction. Access to such sacred sites often was limited or not permitted. The use of peyote in Native American Church ceremonies was a contentious issue because peyote is a restricted substance due to its hallucinogenic properties. The use of eagle feathers in a variety of rituals was another source of friction with federal officials, because eagles were protected under endangered species laws. There also have been occasions of interference in religious ceremonies by government agents and curious onlookers. American Indian people had little recourse to remedy these situations, and tribal governments had no powers of prosecution or enforcement. As a result of continuing problems with the free exercise of traditional American Indian religions, Congress passed a broad policy statement, Senate Joint Resolution 102, commonly known as the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA), on August 11, 1978. After noting the U.S. right to freedom of religion and the inconsistent extension of that right to American Indian people, Congress acknowledged its obligation to “protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiian, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonial and traditional rites.” AIRFA also required all federal agencies to examine their regulations and practices for any inherent conflict with the practice of American Indian religions. These agencies were required to report back to Congress and recommend areas in which changes in policies and procedures were needed to ensure that American Indian religious freedoms were protected. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act is a key element in selfdetermination and cultural freedom in the United States. However, even with passage of this act, Native Americans have continued to experience problems in access to sacred sites and the use of peyote. The right of Native Americans to use peyote is an unsettled issue in both federal and state courts. Although peyote is subject to control under the Federal Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, a number of states exempt its use in Native American Church ceremonies. Some courts uphold the right of Native Americans who are church members to possess and use peyote; other courts do not. Likewise, American Indians are not guaranteed access to sacred sites that are located outside the bounds of Indian lands, even when these lands are under federal control. The United States Supreme Court has ruled that AIRFA is a policy statement only, and it does now allow American Indians to sue when federal agencies disregard native religious practices or when agencies pursue plans
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that will have an adverse impact on Native American religion or beliefs. In 1987, in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, the United States was granted the right to build a logging road through federal lands that were central to the traditional religions of the Yurok, Karuk, and Talowac tribes. In 1990, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon et al. v. Smith, that the state of Oregon could prohibit a member of the Native American Church from using peyote, because that state regarded peyote as an illegal substance. These Supreme Court decisions make clear that if federal or state agencies fail to comply with the policies established in AIRFA, American Indian people have no legal recourse to sue or claim adverse impact on their religion. The extension of full religious freedom to Native American people is an evolving concept in U.S. jurisprudence, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act constitutes an important philosophical foundation toward ensuring the free exercise of religion and access to sacred areas. See also: Carlisle Indian School; Employment Division, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith; Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association; National Council of American Indians; Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council; Society of American Indians. Carole A. Barrett Sources for Further Study Deloria, Vine, Jr., ed. American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. These essays interpret American Indian policy through important legal decisions. One essay explores AIRFA and its ineffectiveness in protecting access to sacred sites. Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford Lytle. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. A thorough examination of the Collier years and their impact on later American Indian poetry. Echo-Hawk, Walter E. “Loopholes in Religious Liberty. The Need for a Federal Law to Protect Freedom of Worship for Native American People.” NARF Legal Review 14 (Summer, 1991): 7-14. An important analysis of what AIRFA should provide in the way of legal protection of religious freedoms for American Indian peoples. Josephy, Alvin M. Now That the Buffalo’s Gone: A Study of Today’s American Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984. Contains a chapter on American Indian efforts to retain their spirituality and provides American Indian perspective on this issue. Long, Carolyn N. Religious Freedom and Indian Rights: The Case of Oregon v. Smith. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Part of the Land-
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mark Law Cases and American Society series, this is the first booklength study of Oregon v. Smith, focusing on the case’s sharp differences from previous opinions on First Amendment freedom of religion rights.
Amerind Date: 1970’s-present Locale: Americas and West Indies Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Terminology Significance: The term “Amerind” is a neologism combining the words “American” and “Indian.” It came into common usage during the 1970’s. A result of tribal activism meant to counter racism toward native peoples, this term was chosen as an alternative to “American Indian” and “Native American.” The people to whom this term refers include members of any of the aboriginal peoples of North America, Central America, South America, and the West Indies. Europeans and European Americans have continually sought to lump all the original inhabitants of the Americas into a convenient single group. “Amerind” represents an attempt to refer to native groups collectively with a term that could be considered (to use a post-1970’s term) politically correct. Yet although the term may be descriptive and less inaccurate than others, it falls short of the redefinition needed when referring to the multitude of distinct original cultures of North America. There are more than five hundred groups of indigenous peoples in the United States alone, each with its own name for itself, and each with a unique tribal specific cultural heritage and political legacy. Who a people are can be defined only in terms of specific environment, language, customs, traditions, taboos, and so on. Until modern Americans recognize the distinctive elements inherent in each indigenous community, any new terms such as “Amerind” will be viewed by scholars as empty generalizations. Such terms, although convenient, are more a reflection of American cultural bias than they are descriptive of the nature, quality, or diversity of the original inhabitants of the Americas. See also: American Indian; Federally recognized tribes; Indian; Native American; Tribe. Byron D. Cannon
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Apache Wars Date: February 6, 1861-September 4, 1886 Locale: Southwest Tribes involved: Apache Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The incursion of white settlers into the Southwest leads to armed conflicts with indigenous Chiricahua Apaches. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, large portions of northern Mexico were ceded to the United States. As a result of the acquisition of these new lands, numerous white settlers began moving into the newly formed Arizona and New Mexico territories. Much of this region was the traditional range of various Apache groups, particularly numerous bands of Chiricahua, Coyotero, and Mimbreño Apache. Many of these groups practiced raiding, taking goods from others as an extension of their traditional methods of subsistence. Raiding increased in frequency as more white settlers moved into Apache territory. In 1861, an Apache raiding party (thought to have been Coyotero Apache, not Chiricahua) kidnaped a boy who had been a member of a group of white settlers. The U.S. military reacted quickly by ordering Lieutenant George Bascom to investigate the incident and, if necessary, to take action against the “hostiles” that were thought to have committed the raid. On February 6, 1861, Bascom, possibly as a result of an invitation to the Chiricahua, persuaded Cochise, the principal chief of the eastern Chiricahua, and some of his family and followers, to come in for a peace parley. During the early stages of what has been termed the Bascom affair, Cochise, speaking on behalf of the eastern Chiricahua, tried to convince Bascom that it was not Chiricahua Apache who had conducted the raid. Bascom had Cochise and several of the chief’s relatives arrested. Cochise later escaped. Bascom, as an act of reprisal for the kidnaping and Cochise’s escape, ordered the execution of the chief’s relatives. Although conflicts between white settlers and Apache groups had occurred before 1861, this incident is generally viewed by historians as the starting point of what has come to be called the Apache Wars. Numerous armed conflicts involving various Apache groups occurred from 1861 to 1886 on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. For example, in retaliation for the execution of his relatives, Cochise organized a surprise attack on the Gidding party at Stein’s Peak near Doubtful Canyon. Cochise killed nine of the settlers but lost sixty of his warriors in the attack. Numerous battles en-
Apache Wars / 35
sued in the years that followed. In July, 1862, Cochise and his father-in-law Mangas Coloradus and other Chiricahuas were attacked by infantry under the command of “Star Chief Carleton.” During the battle, Mangas Coloradus was wounded. Mangas Coloradus survived the wound, but in January, 1863, he was covertly executed and beheaded after he had attempted to surrender and sue for peace with captain Edmond Shirland of the California Volunteers. This sentence was delivered without any official record of a fair trial. Post-Civil War Hostilities. In the year 1865, the Apache Wars reached a pinnacle. With the end of the American Civil War the attention of the United States military, along with the bulk of its forces, shifted west to land traditionally occupied by Native American tribal groups. Action taken against the Apache by the Mexican military was also increasing. In late winter of 1865, for example, Mexican Federales from Sonora attacked and killed thirty-nine Apaches. Mexican forces, combined with pressure exerted by U.S. military forces in the American Southwest, caused Cochise and other Apache leaders to remain constantly on the run. In 1866, Cochise was driven by U.S. forces into hiding in Mexico, where he continued to harass white settlers by periodically crossing the border to conduct surprise attacks. These skirmishes continued until October 10, 1872, when Cochise finally signed a truce with the Americans at Cochise’s camp in the Dragoon mountains in For a decade, Geronimo, a Bedonkohe/Chiri- southern Arizona. Cochise died cahua shaman from northern Mexico, fought two years later. white incursion into his people’s land until he Other Apache leaders, howwas finally captured and removed to Florida, shortly before this picture was taken. (National ever, refused to abide by the truce of 1872 and continued Archives)
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Apache leaders Geronimo and Nana meeting with General George Crook and his men toward the end of the Apache Wars, probably in 1886. (Library of Congress)
their attacks on settler groups. Farther west, Geronimo, a Bedonkohe/ Chiricahua shaman from northern Mexico, was fighting his own wars against both Mexican and U.S. forces. By 1861, the U.S. Army was firmly established in southern Arizona. Forts Bowie and Apache had been built to assist the army in protecting the increasing numbers of settlers who continued to enter the Arizona territory. In 1871, the Camp Grant Massacre destroyed an entire Apache camp. General Cook and Geronimo. In 1872, General George Cook, who had a reputation among Washington politicians for decisiveness in his dealings with Indian groups, took command of the Southwest operation. From 1872 until 1886 and his dismissal, Cook’s career was dominated by attempts to keep Geronimo in check. In 1877, Geronimo, along with family members and other Chiricahuas, was arrested by Cook’s men. Geronimo and his people were subsequently resettled on the reservation at San Carlos. Sometimes referred to as “Hell’s Forty Acres,” San Carlos proved to be an inhospitable environment lacking sufficient water and game for Apache survival. The army, in an attempt to conciliate the Apache, introduced corn agriculture to the reservation. The Chiricahua were traditional hunters and gatherers and attempts at agriculture, especially on arid reservation land,
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soon failed. Four years later, many Apache—including Geronimo—fled the reservation. From 1881 until his surrender at Skeleton Canyon in 1886, Geronimo fought numerous battles with both U.S. and Mexican forces. He also continued raiding white settlements. During this period of time Geronimo surrendered several times to the U.S. military. Late in the year 1881, for example, Geronimo was recaptured by General Cook and taken to Fort Apache. Geronimo and his followers were again taken to the reservation. Nothing had changed; the Apache could not make a sufficient living on the reservation, so they eventually fled to Mexico. In April, 1882, Geronimo returned to San Carlos and conducted a raid. There he killed the chief of police and captured several Mimbreño Apache (former followers of the Apache leader Victorio), whom Geronimo forced to go back to Mexico with him. In May, 1883, Cook decided to pursue Geronimo by taking several units of infantry and cavalry into Mexico. On May 15, after several days of strenuous marching through Mexico’s Sierra Madre, Cook attacked the camp of a group of Mimbreño Apache headed by Apache Chief, Chato. Although the battle itself was indecisive, it had become evident that the military was not going to give up its pursuit of Geronimo. In the days that followed the battle several chiefs of the Mimbreño Apache, including Chato, Loco, and Nana, surrendered to Cook. In March, 1884, Geronimo, by now a revered Apache leader, surrendered to Cook. This surrender and the subsequent confinement on the reservation, like the others, did not last. Geronimo fled and surrendered two more times. Historians generally agree that Cook’s goal was to secure a lasting peace with Geronimo and other Apaches. Cook’s inability to keep Geronimo under the purview of the U.S. government, however, forced military and political leaders in Washington, D.C., to remove Cook from his command. General Nelson Miles was sent to replace Cook. General Miles was not as sympathetic to the plight of the Apache as had been General Cook. General Miles immediately sent out a force of approximately five thousand soldiers to seek out and capture Geronimo and his small band (estimated to be about twenty-four in number). On September 4, 1886, Geronimo, along with twenty-three members of his band of Chiricahuas (mostly women and children), surrendered for the final time at Skeleton Canyon—about sixtyfive miles from Apache Pass, where the first skirmish of the Apache Wars had been fought. After Geronimo’s surrender General Miles had all Chiricahuas in the immediate vicinity arrested, including the scouts that had been used by the army to track down Geronimo. Geronimo, his followers, and the former Apache scouts were placed in rail cars and transported east to a reservation in St. Augustine, Florida. With Geronimo’s surrender and his removal to Florida, the Apache Wars ended.
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See also: Adobe Walls, Battles of; Fort Atkinson Treaty; Gadsden Purchase; Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Kickapoo uprisings; Long Walk; Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty; Taos Rebellion. Michael Shaw Findlay Sources for Further Study Cole, D. C. The Chiricahua Apache, 1846-1876: From War to Reservation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. A general history of Chiricahua with special attention to cultural conflicts with Euro-Americans. Griffen, William B. Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750-1858. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Details the emergence of the Mexican presidio system and the subsequent relocation and resettlement of various Apache groups in southern New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico. ____________. Utmost Good Faith: Patterns of Apache-Mexican Hostilities in Northern Chihuahua Border Warfare, 1821-1848. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Summarizes historical accounts of hostilities between the Chiricahua Apache and Mexican military forces in Northern Mexico. Kraft, Louis. Gatewood and Geronimo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Focuses on the events leading up to Geronimo’s surrender. Skimin, Robert. Apache Autumn. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. A historical novel that describes the Apache Wars. Stockel, Henrietta H. Survival of the Spirit: Chiricahua Apaches in Captivity. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press. Describes the history of Chiricahua captivity.
Articles of Agreement Date: 1730 Locale: North America Tribes involved: Cherokee Categories: Colonial history, Treaties Significance: Although not a major treaty between Indians and the English, the Articles of Agreement were unique in that they were engineered by one man and that the Cherokees went to England to sign it.
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During the late 1720’s, it became evident that stronger ties were needed between the English colonists and the Cherokee Nation. The increasing conflict between France and England over interests in North America necessitated that each country have the loyalty of Indian tribes. Colonel George Chicken, English commissioner of Indian Affairs, obtained Cherokee loyalty. In 1728, when he left the Cherokee, several French emissaries began working within the tribe. The French influence among the Cherokees had become so great by 1730 that an alarmed English government dispatched Sir Alexander Cumming for the purpose of bringing the tribe into sure alliance. Upon Cumming’s arrival in the province, a council of the entire Cherokee Nation was called to meet at Keowee, and allegiance was sealed with the English. The Cherokees’ Nequasse crown, a construction of opossum fur and feathers, and some scalps and feathers were laid at Cumming’s feet along with a request that they be delivered to the king of England. Six Cherokee chiefs were selected to accompany Cumming to England. A seventh chief, plus Indian trader Eleazer “Old Rabbit” Wiggins and an interpreter, joined them at the Port of Charleston on May 13, 1730. They set sail, landing in Dover in June. The seven Indians remained in England for three months, visiting all the important places and inciting curiosity among the English. They were presented to King George II on September 7 and gave him the crown and artifacts; each signed the Articles of Agreement, a treaty of friendship and commerce. The treaty consisted of a preamble of friendship and devotion along with the following six provisions: (1) The English and Cherokee shall live in peace and trade with each other. The Indians and English may live wherever they please, but the English are forbidden to live near the Cherokee towns. (For that pledge the Cherokees were given two pieces of white cloth, dyed red.) (2) The Cherokee pledge to fight against any enemy of the English, white or red. (For that pledge the Cherokees were given twenty guns.) (3) The Cherokee pledge not to interfere with other Indians trading with the English. (For that pledge the Cherokees were given four hundred pounds of gunpowder.) (4) The Cherokee will not be permitted to trade with any other white nation nor allow any other nation to build forts or cabins, or even plant corn near them. (For that pledge the Cherokees were given five hundred pounds of shot and five hundred pounds of bullets.) (5) The Cherokee will return any runaway “Negro slaves” to the English. For each returned slave, a reward of a gun and coat will be paid. (For that pledge the Cherokees were given ten thousand gun flints and six hatchets.)
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(6) The English government, through English law, is responsible for the trial and punishment of an Englishman should he kill a Cherokee and a Cherokee if he should kill an Englishman. (For that pledge, the Cherokees were given twelve dozen spring knives, four brass kettles, and ten dozen belts.) The 1730 Articles of Agreement had little influence on the entire Cherokee tribe. It was signed by only seven of their chiefs; to be binding on the entire tribe it needed the signatures of all chiefs. The seven chiefs returned to their people and told of the greatness and splendor of England, contrasting it to the primitiveness and struggles of the Cherokee people. As a result of this visit and treaty, the English acquired five years of allegiance from the Cherokee people. See also: Cherokee legal cases; Cherokee Phoenix; Cherokee Tobacco case; Cherokee War; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indian Removal Act; Trail of Tears; Yamasee War. David N. Mielke
Bacon’s Rebellion Date: May 10-October 18, 1676 Locale: Eastern Virginia Tribes involved: Doeg, Pamunkey, Susquehannock Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: Colonial planters rise up against both Virginia’s governor and Native Americans, causing destruction and death. Instability was inherent in the rapid growth of the English population in Virginia after 1640. Competition for political power and social position increased after 1660, as the earlier settlers entrenched themselves in local political offices. Land hunger was also a problem: Since the end of the second Powhatan War in 1646, the Powhatans had held the land north of the York River, which had the effect of hemming in English expansion. Landownership was a requirement for the vote as well as the key to personal fortune. Later settlers, many of whom had come to Virginia as indentured servants, found high land prices and limited opportunities, and they began to view the land held by the Powhatans as the answer to their problem. At the same time, the return of the Susquehannocks to the northern Chesapeake area
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meant the extension of their war with the Iroquois into that area. That European settlers would be caught in the crossfire of this war was inevitable, and also helped fuel frustrations. A prosperous economy might have counteracted unstable political and social conditions, but Virginia’s economy stagnated after 1660. Chronic overproduction of an inferior quality of tobacco, aggravated by restrictive features of the Navigation Acts, drove the price of tobacco down. Expensive experimentation with methods of diversifying the economy and the need for defense measures against the Dutch and the natives resulted in high taxes. In 1674, the colonists were further taxed to send agents to London to lobby against proprietary land grants. Circumstances conspired to exacerbate the planters’ miseries, and Governor Sir William Berkeley’s ineffectual leadership led to a general disaffection toward the government. Berkeley’s own comfortable circumstances, derived in part from a profitable monopoly in the fur trade with local tribes, seemed to prove his indifference to the planters’ troubles. The events immediately leading to the rebellion grew out of a dispute between a planter and members of the Doeg tribe in June, 1675. After forces of Virginians pursuing the Doegs murdered numbers of friendly Susquehannocks on two separate occasions, the natives increased the intensity of their raids throughout the fall and winter. Governor Berkeley angered the planters in the frontier settlements when he countermanded the order for a force to proceed against the marauding warriors. In keeping with Berkeley’s overall American Indian policy, the Assembly committed the colony to a defensive war, and the governor ordered the erection of a chain of forts on the frontier. Berkeley’s solution was no solution in the planters’ view, as the forts would add to the burden of taxation and hemmed in further settlement. The settlers’ worst fears about Berkeley had been confirmed. The Planters’ Uprising. In April, an impatient group of upcountry planters persuaded one of their number, Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., to lead a band of volunteers against the natives. What followed on May 10 was a war of extermination, in which Native Americans of all tribes, friendly or hostile, were killed. Bacon, the son of an English gentleman and related to Berkeley through marriage, had not arrived in Virginia until 1674, but he had already been appointed to the Council of State. Governor Berkeley refused Bacon’s request for a commission to raise volunteers and sent several letters warning him against becoming a mutineer. Unable to head off Bacon with his force of three hundred men, Berkeley, on May 26, 1676, declared him a rebel. On the same day, the governor dissolved the Long Assembly
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and called for the first general elections in fifteen years, promising that the new Assembly would deal with the American Indian threat and any other grievances. Bacon’s success in killing some natives prompted the residents of Henrico County to send him to Jamestown as one of their new burgesses, but the governor ordered his capture before he could take his seat. Bacon confessed his error and received a pardon from the governor. Several days later, he slipped off to Henrico. The June Assembly met for twenty days and passed a series of acts dealing with the prosecution of the war with the natives and with various local problems, especially concerning the misuse of political power. Although Bacon has often been credited with pushing through reform legislation, he did not return to Jamestown until June 23, when the session was nearly over. Arriving with five hundred armed men, he terrorized the governor and the burgesses into granting him a commission to fight the natives. As soon as Bacon marched toward the falls of the James River, Berkeley again proclaimed him a rebel and tried to raise a force against him. Failing in his attempt, Berkeley fled to the eastern shore, leaving Bacon in control of the western shore. Upon arriving in Middle Plantation, Bacon issued a manifesto, the Declaration of the People, that accused the governor of numerous offenses against the colonists and called for his surrender. While Bacon then proceeded to seek out and fall upon the friendly Pamunkey Indians, Berkeley returned to Jamestown and, having reached agreement with Bacon’s garrison, took possession of the capital. Several days later, Bacon arrived with six hundred troops and besieged the town. The faintheartedness of Berkeley’s men forced the governor to concede the town. Bacon burned it on September 19. A little more than a month later, the rebellion fell apart at the news of Bacon’s sudden death of the “bloody flux” and “lousey disease,” possibly dysentery. On January 29, the royal commissioners John Berry, Francis Moryson, and Herbert Jeffreys arrived from England, along with a thousand British soldiers, to investigate the uprising and restore order. Berkeley nullified the royal pardons that they brought for the rebels and ordered the execution of twenty-three men. His extreme cruelty was criticized by the commissioners, and Sir Herbert Jeffreys formally took over the government in April upon Berkeley’s recall by the Crown. Although Bacon was dead, the disorder and protest would not end until 1683, with the reconfiguring of imperial government in Virginia. See also: Indian slave trade; Metacom’s War; Powhatan Confederacy; Powhatan Wars. Warren M. Billings, updated by Kelley Graham
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Sources for Further Study Fausz, J. Frederick. “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake.” In Colonial Chesapeake Society, edited by Lois Green Carr et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Details the changing English view of the Native Americans in the Chesapeake from “noble savages” to important trading partners. Horn, James. Adapting to a New World: English Society in the SeventeenthCentury Chesapeake. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. A scholarly but lively study of the extent to which English colonists in the Chesapeake were influenced by their homeland in their attitudes about race, authority, and other matters. Middlekauff, Robert. Bacon’s Rebellion. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. A good collection of the primary documents associated with the uprising, beginning with Berkeley’s American Indian policy and concluding with the official report submitted to London. Tate, Thad W., and David L. Ammerman. The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on the Anglo-American Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. An essential collection of articles addressing race relations, class structure, and the demographics of the seventeenth century Chesapeake. Includes a historiographic discussion of Bacon’s Rebellion. Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Governor and the Rebel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957. A classic study of the small details of the uprising; generous in its forgiveness of Governor Berkeley. Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Places the rebellion in a larger context, as a prerevolutionary condition, while providing a detailed study of the events of 1676-1677.
Bannock War Date: 1878 Locale: Idaho and Oregon Tribes involved: Bannock, Paiute, Sheepeater, Umatilla Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Wars and battles
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Significance: The Bannock War ended a series of resistance efforts by the northern mountain tribes of the Idaho/Oregon/Wyoming area and resulted in permanent relocation to reservations. The Bannocks, a northern mountain branch of the Paiute language group, originally occupied the mountain areas of southern Idaho and northwestern Wyoming. In the 1850’s they had accepted treaties that limited their area to southern Idaho. During the 1850’s, raids by Bannock, Shoshone, Paiute, and others occurred often along the trails to Oregon and California. By the 1860 Pyramid Lake and 1863 Bear Paw campaigns and the victories of George Crook in the Snake War of 1866-1868, European Americans were in control of the area and the Bannock had peacefully begun drawing meager rations that amounted to two and a half cents per person per day. They supplemented this with their traditional hunting and gathering. The 1877 escape attempt by their northern neighbors, the Nez Perce, caused considerable upset among the Bannock, but they did not join the resistance that year. The immediate cause of the Bannock War of 1878 was the issue of digging camas roots on the Camas Prairie, located about 90 miles southeast of Fort Boise. The right to dig camas roots had been guaranteed by earlier treaties, but hogs owned by white settlers were now eating many of the roots. In May, a Bannock wounded two whites, an event that led to the creation of a two-hundred-man war party under Buffalo Horn. This unit was defeated by Idaho volunteers, and Buffalo Horn was killed in June. The warriors moved to southeastern Oregon and joined Paiute from the Malheur Agency under the leadership of Chief Egan and medicine man Oyte. The regular army units from Fort Boise were mobilized under General Oliver O. Howard. A chase through southern Idaho and eastern Oregon ended with the defeat of the Indians at Birch Creek, Oregon, on July 8, 1878. Some of the Indians escaped to the Umatilla Agency near Pendleton, Oregon, where Chief Egan was killed by the Umatillas, and the rebels were betrayed and captured. Another smaller group of Bannock had escaped and were captured east of Yellowstone Park in September, 1878. A subsidiary war developed with the smaller Sheepeater group in the extremely rugged Salmon River Mountains of central Idaho. The fifty warriors eluded the cavalry under Captain Reuben Bernard and defeated another unit under Lieutenant Henry Catley, but persistent tracking forced their surrender in October, 1878. The Paiute reservation at Malheur in southeastern Oregon was terminated and the Paiute prisoners were placed on the Yakima reservation
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in central Washington. The Bannock were held at various military posts for a time and then returned to their reservation on the Snake River in southern Idaho, where the Sheepeaters soon joined them. Except for some outbreaks by the Ute to the south, this ended the northern mountain Indian wars. See also: Bear River Campaign; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; National Indian Association; Nez Perce War; Snake War. Fred S. Rolater
Bear River Campaign Date: 1863 Locale: Idaho Tribes involved: Bannock, Shoshone Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Like the Sand Creek Massacre, the Bear River Campaign exemplified the antagonistic nature of military leadership when state militias replaced federal troops in the West during the Civil War. At the beginning of the Civil War (1861-1865), some 2,500 federal troops under General Albert Sydney Johnston left Utah to fight in the East. Utah Territory, like the West in general at the time, was placed militarily under a volunteer state militia. The regarrisoning of Utah fell to the volatile California businessman and former Mexican-American War veteran Colonel Patrick Edward Connor. Connor organized his California volunteers, numbering about a thousand, and marched them to Salt Lake City in 1862 to assume the task of policing the Overland Mail Route across Utah. Connor held even more contempt for American Indians than he did for the Mormons, and both experienced his fiery temper and decisive, vicious action. At one time Connor had a number of Indians hanged or shot, leaving their bodies exposed as an example. At the time, the Shoshone and Bannock held a somewhat amicable relationship with the Mormon settlers, but occasionally they committed depredations on the Oregon and California trails as well as on the mail and telegraph routes—enough to cause Connor to muster his energies against them. Connor dispersed his forces throughout the region in an attempt to control the Indians, yet reports of belligerent activity continued. Incensed, Connor determined to deliver a decisive blow to the Shoshone and Bannock.
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In the dead of winter, he marched a detachment of three hundred men, mostly cavalry, northward from Salt Lake City to attack the village of Shoshone leader Bear Hunter on the Bear River near Preston, Idaho. At daybreak on January 27, 1863, the Shoshone were in wait as Connor pressed his attack. About two-thirds of Connor’s men forded the ice-choked Bear River and commenced a frontal assault on the village, but they met heavy resistance. Connor sent detachments to flank the village, thus trapping the Indians in the large ravine where they were wintering. As troops sealed off any escape routes, others swept over the rims of the ravine, pouring a murderous volley into the encampment. The Shoshone fought back desperately, having no alternative. Most were slain defending their positions. Others, who attempted to escape, were shot trying to swim the icy river. By mid-morning the fight was over. Connor’s troops counted 224 bodies, including that of Bear Hunter, though the death toll was higher. The troopers destroyed the village (seventy lodges), seized 175 ponies, and captured more than 150 women and children, who were then left in the razed village with a small store of food. Connor’s losses were only 14 dead, 53 wounded, and 75 with frostbite. Connor’s attack upon the village gained him the War Department’s praise as well as quick promotion to brigadier general. Today the Bear River Campaign is perceived in much the same light as the Sand Creek Massacre: as an act of pointless, excessive bloodshed. See also: Bannock War; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; National Indian Association; Nez Perce War; Snake War. S. Matthew Despain
Beaver Wars Date: 1642-1685 Locale: Northeastern woodlands, from the Hudson River west to the Great Lakes and from the Ohio River north to Ontario Tribes involved: Huron, Iroquois Confederacy Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: The Iroquois Five Nations challenge the French-Huron trade monopoly, leading to large-scale intertribal warfare. During the seventeenth century, the principal mode of subsistence for the Iroquois changed from farming to trapping. After the Iroquois had traded
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successfully with the Dutch for several decades, a seemingly insatiable demand for furs to make fashionable top hats for European gentlemen had depleted the Iroquois’ source of beaver pelts. Meanwhile, the French had become allies with the Algonquians and Hurons to the north, establishing a lucrative monopoly on the fur trade in the upper Great Lakes. Acting as middlemen, the Hurons bought huge quantities of furs from the Ottawa, then sold them to the French. Seeking an expedient solution to the problem of a diminishing supply of furs, the Iroquois began attacking Huron villages and intercepting and confiscating fur shipments along trade routes, provoking a series of conflicts known as the Beaver Wars. The name “Iroquois” refers both to the members of the Iroquois Confederacy, or League of Five Nations (Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks), and to their language. Consolidation of the league in 1570 (although it had existed informally for several decades before that) helped end centuries of warring among these neighboring tribes and protected them from attacks by surrounding tribes. Although known throughout the woodlands as fierce warriors, the Iroquois had met European advances into their territory peacefully and created profitable alliances, such as their trade agreement with the Dutch at Albany. In 1608, French explorer Samuel de Champlain established Quebec at a deserted Iroquois site on the St. Lawrence River. In the area, the Huron Confederacy of four tribes and their Algonquian allies began a trade agreement with the French that was coveted by the Iroquois. This rivalry increased long-existing hostility between Hurons and Iroquois. In July, 1609, Champlain, two soldiers, and sixty Algonquians and Hurons followed a war party of two hundred Mohawks along what is now called Lake Champlain. In the traditional manner, both sides agreed to engage in battle in the morning. Iroquois warriors preferred close-in fighting with wooden clubs and leather shields, and were accustomed to using bows and arrows only for ambushes. As the battle began, both sides advanced, but the French remained hidden among the Hurons. Advancing closely, the French fired their guns, killing two Mohawk chiefs instantly and mortally wounding the third. Many Mohawks died and a dozen captives were taken, one of whom was tortured during the victory celebration. This dramatic battle was the Iroquois’ first encounter with Europeans and their dreadful weapons. Their humiliation left the Iroquois with a fierce hatred of the French. A few weeks later, Henry Hudson arrived at Albany to initiate the Dutch fur trade, which eventually brought guns to the Iroquois. Wars of Attrition. In the next three decades, the Hurons and Iroquois lost many warriors in battle. The Jesuit priests who brought Christianity to
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Quebec also brought European diseases. By 1640, through warfare and epidemics, only ten thousand Hurons remained, less than half of their previous number. However, they retained their alliance with the French. Iroquois offers of peace with the Hurons were dissuaded by the French. In 1640, five hundred Iroquois approached a French village to negotiate for peace and trade a French captive for guns. When French offers were not acceptable, the council disbanded and the Iroquois began planning for war. Early Iroquois warfare was guerrilla-style fighting by small bands, so the beginning date of the Beaver Wars is difficult to determine, but an attack by a Seneca war party on the Huron village of Arendaronon in 1642 is marked as the first event. Iroquois also raided the Algonquian village of Chief Iroquet on the Ottawa River, capturing and later releasing Father Isaac Jogues. In 1645, the French bargained for peace, using Iroquois captives. The Iroquois wanted to share the middleman role with the Hurons and continue trading with the Dutch. At the council, the great Mohawk orator Kiotsaeton appealed to the French, Hurons, and Algonquians, presenting fifteen wampum belts. He translated the symbolic messages coded in the shell beads. After the council, Father Jogues and Father Paul Le Junne continued to support the peace effort. Months later, some Mohawks reported to Huron chief Tandihetsi about secrecy and intrigue involving the possible exclusion of the Algonquians. The chief had a wife and many relatives among the Algonquians. Finally, a trade-related treaty was made, honored for a time, then broken when a huge shipment of furs passed down the Ottawa River and the Iroquois were given no share. In retaliation, the popular Father Jogues was killed when he returned to visit a Mohawk village. European presence in North America affected Iroquois social and cultural systems that had provided earlier stability. Ecological balance was upset by the high demand for beaver pelts; economic balance, by the shift from farming to trapping; and political balance, by rivalries among tribes. The Iroquois had become dependent upon the Dutch for food, metal tools, weapons, and ammunition. Since the primary commodity was beaver pelts and the agreement had been broken, the Iroquois began attacking Huron villages and intercepting travel along their trade routes, confiscating whole shipments of pelts. In times of warfare, one gun was well worth the price of twenty beaver pelts. Huron Defeat. By March, 1649, the Iroquois had declared open warfare, and a thousand Iroquois set out for the Huron homeland. The starving Hu-
Beaver Wars / 49
rons, fearing annihilation, burned their villages and escaped into the woods, some to a Jesuit encampment, others divided into clan groups. Eventually, several thousand Hurons were adopted into the five Iroquois tribes. By late 1649, the Iroquois had defeated the Tobaccos; from 1650 to 1656, they warred against the Neutrals on the Niagara peninsula and the Eries on southern Lake Erie, devastating them and taking over their hunting territories. They successfully maintained trade with the Dutch under Governor Peter Stuyvesant. By 1654, the Ottawas had taken over the Hurons’ position as middlemen for the French. When the Iroquois attempted to displace them, the Ottawas moved westward to the Straits of Mackinac. For the next thirty years, they supplied two-thirds of the furs sent to France. By 1670, the Iroquois controlled the woodland territory surrounding the eastern Great Lakes, while the French claimed Lakes Huron and Superior. In 1680, several hundred Iroquois invaded the territory of the Illinois and Miami tribes. In 1684, an unsuccessful attempt to take Fort St. Louis from Illinois marked the end of the nearly century-long Iroquois campaign to overturn the French-Huron trade monopoly. During the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois had established a political agreement with the English through Governor Edmond Andros. This Covenant Chain was forged for two purposes: safe access to Albany for Iroquois traders and easy entry into the natives’ affairs for the English. By 1685, the League of Five Nations had been consolidated to deal with external affairs. Leagues, alliances, treaties, covenants, and confederacies all worked against the Europeans’ establishing a niche in the New World. The powers of France and England had been balanced almost equally for many years, but long-held Iroquois hostility turned the scale against the French, and their magnificent schemes of colonization in the northern part of America were lost. Had it not been for the determination of the Iroquois, the official language throughout North America might have been French. See also: Fur trade; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indianwhite relations: French colonial; Iroquois Confederacy. Gale M. Thompson Sources for Further Study Brandao, Jose. Your Fyre Shall Burn No More: Iroquois Policy Toward New France and its Allies to 1701. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Offers a revisionist stance toward the Beaver Wars, arguing that the Iroquois were more interested in taking captives to replenish their diseaseravaged populations than in obtaining beaver skins for trade.
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Cleland, Charles E. Rites of Conquest: The History and Culture of Michigan’s Native Americans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. A multiethnic, regional approach to the history of the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, from precontact to the late twentieth century. Maps, photographs, biographical sketches, chapter notes, bibliography, index. Grinde, Donald A., Jr. The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1977. Provides cultural and historical background; discusses Iroquois relationships with colonists before and after the American Revolution. Photographs, maps, illustrations, references, sources. Constitution of the Five Nations and Albany Plan of Union are included as appendices. Harvey, Karen D., and Lisa D. Harjo. Indian Country: A History of Native People in America. Golden, Colo.: North American Press, 1994. Written and illustrated by American Indians. Presents ten culture areas, historical perspectives, contemporary issues, major ceremonies, and time lines from 50,000 b.c.e. to the twentieth century. Summaries, lesson plans, resources, and index; appendices include “Threats to Religious Freedom,” the text of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and a list of Indian activist organizations and events. Steele, Ian K. Warpaths: Invasions of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Discusses American Indian-European warfare in eastern North America, from the defeat of Juan Ponce de León (1513) to negotiated peace with the British (1765); combines social and military history for a balanced perspective. Maps, illustrations, extensive chapter notes, index.
Bering Strait migrations Date: Beginning c. 10,000 b.c.e. Locale: Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska Tribes involved: Paleo-Indians Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The first humans arrive in the Western Hemisphere. About two million years ago, for reasons not entirely understood, Earth’s temperature began to fall. In the north, more snow fell in winter than
Bering Strait migrations / 51
melted in summer, and great sheets of ice formed on the landmasses. These glaciers went through a series of advances and retreats—sliding forward under the influence of gravity and melting back under warmer climatic conditions. At the same time, a group of primates (monkeys, apes, and their relatives) was evolving in Africa. The group of interest had already developed the ability to walk on their hind limbs rather than on four feet, thus freeing the forelimbs for functions other than locomotion. Climatic change had initiated a drying trend in Africa, replacing rain forests with grasslands and savannas. Several species of the two-legged primate group had successfully invaded the grassland environment and spread throughout Africa. Well into the ice age, late-developing species migrated north into Europe and Asia, using tools, animal skins, and especially fire to cope with the cold. Some members of one species, today called Homo sapiens (literally, “wise human”), eventually moved into frigid Siberian environments. Eastern Siberia and western Alaska were not covered by glaciers, even at the height of glacial advance. Although the climate in these unglaciated regions was cold, a number of large mammal species (mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, and others) had invaded the northern environment ahead of the humans. The newcomers probably used many food sources, but they became especially skilled at hunting the large animals. Tremendous amounts of water were required to build the continental glaciers. That water came primarily from the most abundant source of water on the planet, the oceans. As a result, each advance and retreat of the glaciers was accompanied by dramatic changes in sea level—the sea rose as glaciers melted, and fell with each glacial advance. Today, only about fifty miles of water separate Siberia from Alaska across the Bering Strait. The Bering Strait is less than two hundred feet deep, and the adjacent parts of the Chukchi and Bering seas are not much deeper. Because of this, a strip of Bering Strait and adjacent sea floor one thousand miles wide became dry land whenever extensive glaciation occurred. Along with adjacent parts of Siberia and Alaska, this region is called Beringia. When the glaciers were in full retreat, the Bering Strait reformed, splitting Beringia and placing a barrier between the two continents. The sea level rose and fell throughout glacial times, and the connection between Alaska and Siberia was established and broken repeatedly. Various land organisms crossed the bridge when it was available, but exchange between the continents was blocked when it was inundated. Mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, and many other species of animals and plants
Bering Strait Migrations SIBERIA
Bering Strait Land Bridge
As early as 15,000 B.C.E., during a period when the huge ice sheet covering the top half of North America had retreated, indigenous peoples from Siberia began to make their way across a land bridge that today is the Bering Strait. Eventually, traveling between glaciers, they reached eastern, central, and southern North America and Mesoamerica.
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crossed throughout the ice age, but humans probably did not reach northeastern Siberia until the most recent glacial advance. In North America, the last glacier (the Wisconsin) advanced until approximately sixty thousand years ago, at which time it began a retreat called the “mid-Wisconsin interglacial.” Fewer than thirty thousand years ago, it began its final advance (the late Wisconsin glaciation) followed by its most recent retreat, which began eighteen thousand years ago. It was during or after the mid-Wisconsin interglacial that humans from Siberia made their way across Beringia into North America. The Post-Glacial Period. This migration was not a directed, purposeful movement to a new continent. It is unlikely that the first Americans had any sense of their role in history or the nature of continents. The migration probably was the simple result of growing populations expanding into new regions, perhaps drawn by the presence of herds of the large mammals they were so adept at hunting. The populations continued to expand throughout Alaska and adjacent Canada but were restricted from much of Canada by two major glacial masses. The Laurentide ice sheet covered most of Canada and much of the northern United States, from the east coast to the Rocky Mountains. The second mass of ice resulted from the coalescence of a number of mountain glaciers into a single glacial complex, the Cordilleran glacier, located between the Rockies and the coastal mountain ranges. During glacial advance, the two ice masses probably met and blocked the migrants’ route south. However, when the glaciers melted, a corridor opened between them. The migrants moved south through Mexico and Central America, and on to the tip of South America. As the most recent glacial retreat continued, the first Americans expanded their range into all parts of Canada as well. Paleo-Indians. Anthropologists and archaeologists call these first Americans (or their immediate descendants) Paleo-Indians. Many details of relationship and pathways of descent are not known, but the Paleo-Indian culture gave rise to another widespread culture, called the Archaic, around 7000 b.c.e. Approximately two thousand years ago, the Archaic culture began to give way to the mound-building culture of eastern North America (the Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian), the agricultural groups of the southwestern deserts (the Hohokam, Mogollon, and Anasazi), and other cultures. Some time before 1500 c.e., these prehistoric cultures gave rise to the Native American tribes that were later displaced by European settlement. A similar sequence of cultural replacement took place in Mexico and
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Central and South America, culminating in the Inca, Aztec, and Mayan civilizations that were later decimated by the Spanish conquistadores in the 1500’s. One of the most vituperative arguments in the history of science centers on the question of when the first Americans arrived. A few students of the question argue for dates earlier than the mid-Wisconsin interglacial, many argue for entry times more than thirty thousand years ago (during the midWisconsin interglacial), but most favor a time somewhat more than twelve thousand years ago (during the Wisconsin glacier’s retreat). The basis for the most popular position is the absence of strong evidence for earlier human occupation of the continent. The widespread occurrence of a particular type of spear point found at archaeological sites all over North America, sites determined to be between 11,500 and 10,500 years old, is the first irrefutable and extensive evidence of such occupation. These sites constitute the first recognized North American Paleo-Indian culture, now called the Clovis culture because it was established on the basis of finds in Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico. Because the culture was so widespread, archaeologists assume that Native Americans must have been on the continent some time before the Clovis dates. Some believe that a thousand years is enough time for the first immigrants to have spread from Beringia to Tierra del Fuego and throughout both continents; others think a longer time was required. Evidence based on Native American languages, tooth anatomy, and genetics suggests that there were at least three migrations of different Siberian peoples into North America. The first group of migrants gave rise to most Native American groups. One of the later migrant groups was ancestral to the Navajo, Apache, and some western Canadian tribes; the Eskimo (Inuit) and Aleut peoples derived from the other group. Each migration probably involved movement of many subgroups through an extended time period. Some archaeologists believe that marine travelers, along the coast or across open seas, may have contributed to the colonization as well. The timing and details of the colonization of North America are unsettled, but most archaeologists agree on its basic character. Northern Asiatic people crossed Beringia into North America some time before twelve thousand years ago and spread fairly rapidly throughout North and South America. These people, with possible contributions from later (and earlier) immigrants, developed into the multitude of Native American groups present when Europeans “discovered” the continents. Ancestors of the Native Americans who met the European explorers and colonists some five hundred years ago had occupied the Americas for more than twelve thousand years.
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See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. Carl W. Hoagstrom Sources for Further Study Dillehay, Thomas D. The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Offers the archaeological and anthropological evidence for population of the Americas prior to the glaciation twenty thousand years ago. Dillehay, Tom D., and David J. Meltzer. The First Americans: Search and Research. Boca Raton, Fla.: Chemical Rubber Company Press, 1991. A set of papers written to explore and encourage exploration of the total context of migrations into North America. Illustrations, reference lists. Dixon, E. James. Quest for the Origins of the First Americans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. An archaeologist discusses the first Americans in the context of his own research. Illustrations, index, bibliography. Fagan, Brian M. Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent. Rev. ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. A consideration of the first Americans in the context of North American archaeology. Illustrations, index, bibliography. Fladmark, Knut R. “Getting One’s Berings.” Natural History 95, no. 11 (November, 1986): 8-19. The first of thirteen articles on the peopling of North America published in Natural History between November, 1986, and January, 1988. Illustrations. Thomas, David Hurst. Exploring Ancient Native America: An Archaeological Guide. New York: Macmillan, 1994. An outline of Native American prehistory and a guide to accessible sites. Illustrations, index, appendix of sites to visit, bibliography.
Bison slaughter Date: Peaked 1872-1874 Locale: Great Plains Tribes involved: Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota Sioux Categories: Nineteenth century history
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Significance: Mass killings of buffalo lead to the near-extinction of the species and destroy the lifeblood of the Plains Indians. In 1853, the American bison population was estimated at between sixty and seventy million animals. It was reduced to a few thousand in thirty years. The bison’s decline was the result of human greed, uncontrolled exploitation, and United States government policy. Also called the American buffalo, the bison ranged throughout North America from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic shoreline and from northern Mexico to southern Canada. Its greatest concentration was on the grasslands of the Great Plains. It was the basis for a total way of life for the Native Americans. The animals provided food, clothing, and shelter. An important part of the nomadic plains tribes’ culture was the buffalo-hide tipi, which could be collapsed quickly when the tribe was ready to move on. On the treeless plains, the herds’ dried droppings were fuel for the cooking fires. On the northern Great Plains, where the terrain was rugged, a herd feeding near a cliff would be driven over the precipice by Indian men and boys waving buffalo robes and shouting, an event known as a buffalo jump. The
The bison, which formed the basis for the economy of many Native Americans, once roved the Great Plains in large herds, but during the 1870’s the incursion of the railroads hastened their demise as thousands were helplessly slaughtered by white “buffalo hunters,” engaging in the activity for sport as well as profit. (Library of Congress)
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waiting tribe rushed in to butcher as many of the animals as they could. Frequently, many more animals were left dead or dying than could be handled. Contemporaneous writers described the slaughter of from two hundred to two thousand bison in such hunts. However, because of the relatively small population of Native Americans in North America and their primitive weapons, the impact on the bison was slight. With the end of the Civil War, in April, 1865, army troops traveled west to battle the Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, and Crow. The army contracted with local settlers to supply the troops with “buffalo beef.” Workers constructing the new transcontinental railroad also had to be fed. Contractors included William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, probably the bestrecognized of all the bison killers. Hunters frequently skinned the bison, cut out the tongue, and took only some of the meat, leaving the remainder to rot on the prairie. Bison Products. Dressed hides were shipped east as lap robes for winter sleigh and buggy rides or were turned into overcoats. Highly romanticized stories by eastern writers about the exploits of Buffalo Bill and other bison hunters quickly made buffalo robes a status symbol. Demand increased and more bison were slaughtered. Often only the skin was taken, the carcass left to scavengers. Hundreds of thousands of bison were killed each year for food and hides. Bison also were killed for sport, as it became popular for groups of people to travel to the Great Plains simply to shoot bison. The railroads that linked the East and West cut across the ancient north-south routes of the bison. The seemingly endless herds were an annoyance to the train crews and a temptation to the passengers. When trains were delayed, passengers fired into the massed animals, killing some and wounding many more. The railroads encouraged this, with advertising to induce people to ride their trains. Extent of Slaughter. It is difficult to obtain accurate data on the number of bison slaughtered. Few records were kept and the killing took place over a wide area. In 1872, in western Kansas, approximately two thousand hide hunters were each bringing down about fifteen bison a day. At that rate, hunters were killing thirty thousand bison per day. As soon as the herds in one area were reduced beyond the point of diminishing returns, the hunters moved elsewhere, seeking larger herds. An 1869 report notes that in a good year, about two hundred fifty thousand hides were shipped to the New York market alone. Railroad shipments between 1872 and 1874 totaled 1,378,359 hides.
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A peculiarity in the behavior of the bison made them easy targets for hunters. Although bison could be stampeded, hunters in ambush could pick off the animals one by one, because they simply stood as others were shot and dropped in place. Hide hunters called it “a stand.” Some of the herd nosed at their fallen comrades and then calmly joined the rest of the animals in grazing. A good hunter could kill seventy-five to one hundred bison per day. One especially skillful hunter, in a bet with his fellows and shooting at a stand from ambush, killed one hundred twenty bison in forty minutes. The slaughter of the bison was far from a managed or controlled affair. Hunters indiscriminately shot the adults and subadults. Calves were ignored except, possibly, for camp meat. Unweaned, orphaned calves, not yet able to graze the abundant grasses, were left to starve to death. After one particularly large herd was killed, five hundred to one thousand calves wandered off to starve. The United States government took the position that the still-warring Native Americans could be subdued if the bison were denied to them. The U.S. Army began a program of interdiction of the herds. General Philip Sheridan spoke out strongly in favor of continuing the slaughter of the buffalo “to settle the Indian question.” Sheridan’s Civil War comrade, General William Sherman, echoed these sentiments. He stated that the only way to force the Native Americans to reservations and turn them into farmers was to clear the prairies of the bison. The government further supported the bison slaughter by providing free ammunition to any buffalo hunter on request. As early as 1873, fewer and fewer bison were encountered in western Kansas. Hide hunters moved to the northern Great Plains territories and continued the slaughter. The decline spread throughout the range of the bison, and it soon became obvious to most observers that the great herds were gone. Aftereffects. The intensive slaughter for hides was brief, occurring mostly from 1872 to 1874, but the activity extended from 1871 through 1883. Most herds were shot out in about four years, and the hunters then moved on to other areas. Although a few bison survived, undoubtedly the species’ numbers had slipped below that level ecologists call the minimum viable population size. For many animals, more than one male and one female are required to begin a breeding population. The great slaughter left the prairies littered with bison skeletons. For years, farmers could gather a cartload or two of bones and sell them to processors for fertilizer. One bone buyer estimated that from 1884 to 1891, he bought the bones of approximately six million bison skeletons.
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Buffalo Depletion from 1850 to 1895 20,000,000
20,000,000
18,000,000
16,000,000
15,000,000
14,000,000
14,000,000
12,000,000
10,000,000
8,000,000
6,000,000
395,000 20,000 1,091 800
4,000,000
2,000,000
1,000,000
1895
1890
1885
1880
1875
1870
1865
1860
1855
0
1850
Neither the settlers nor the Native Americans could believe that the bison was no more. The settlers thought that the herds had migrated to Canada and would soon return. The Native Americans, drawing on their mythology, believed the animals had returned to a great cavern in the ground to reappear if the right prayers were said and the right supplications were made. The great herds were, however, gone. The impact of the hide hunters’ indiscriminate slaughter and the U.S. government’s interdiction policy eliminated not only the bison but also the Native American’s traditional nomadic way of life. Reluctantly, but with resignation, they became farmers on reservations as the U.S. government had sought. Perhaps the worst blow to the plains Indians was their loss of the religious and cultural relationship with the bison. Their entire civilization and lifeways had been destroyed along with the animals on which they depended. Only a few scattered bison and some in private herds escaped the slaughter. Today, brought together in national parks, preserves, and other protected areas, they have survived and multiplied.
Note: In the twentieth century the buffalo population began to rebound from its 1895 low of about 800; in 1983 it was estimated at 50,000. Source: Data are from Thornton, Russell, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Thornton, Russell, We Shall Live Again: The 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance Movements as Demographic Revitalization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
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See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Sioux War. Albert C. Jensen Sources for Further Study Dary, David A. The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974. Detailed account of bison in North America. Black-and-white photos, index, bibliography. Foster, John, ed. Buffalo. Edmonton, Canada: University of Alberta Press, 1992. A short collection of papers by specialists in ecology and sociology detailing the relationship between the plains Indians and the American bison. Illustrations. Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A study of the human and ecological factors leading to the near-extinction of the bison. McHugh, Tom. The Time of the Buffalo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. A factual, readable revision of a professional wildlife biologist’s dissertation. Illustrations, index, and detailed bibliography. Matthews, Anne. Where the Buffalo Roam. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992. Describes a plan to restore the Great Plains to their natural condition and the bison to their former numbers. Illustrations and index. Russell, Don. The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. A detailed examination of the Army scout and bison hunter. Footnotes, extensive bibliography, index, illustrations.
Black Hawk War Date: 1832 Locale: Illinois and Wisconsin Tribes involved: Fox, Sauk, Winnebago Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Defeated by U.S. troops, the Sauks, Fox, and Winnebagos lost most of their land in futile resistance to white settlement. Into the early nineteenth century, the Sauks, Fox, and Winnebagos were relatively free of white pressure, most warfare being against such enemies as the Sioux or Osage. Their traditional world remained strong until the post-
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An engraving of the Battle of Bad Axe, the fight that ended the Black Hawk War on August 2, 1832. (Library of Congress)
revolutionary decades. Yet soon American settlers, migrating west in steady streams, threatened to destroy the old ways. Historical Background. Fleeing powerful eastern rivals, the Sauks (Black Hawk’s people) and their main allies, the Fox (Mesquakies), had migrated into parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa by the late 1600’s. They became farmers and trappers, trading regularly with the French, whose hunger for furs and competition with the British would embroil the tribes in warfare. By the time of Black Hawk’s birth in 1776, the Sauks were settled near present-day Rock Island, Illinois, and in eastern Iowa. His childhood and youth were years of seasonal moves dictated by farming, fishing, and trapping. Frequent warfare gave warriors a high status within the tribe, and Black Hawk joined a war party at fifteen, seeking family and tribal respect. By his thirties, he was a premier war leader and a committed traditionalist who, at a terrible cost to his people, would resist change.
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Before 1800, neither the Sauks nor the Mesquakies had signed a peace treaty with the United States, resenting bitterly the seeming American favoritism toward the hated Osages. In 1804, however, the United States, Sauk, and Mesquakie leaders signed a treaty wherein the chiefs ceded fifty million acres of land. Disregarding any Indian rights, white settlers poured into the territory. They burned Indian homes and cornfields while the Indians received neither adequate compensation nor protection from the federal government. Black Hawk protested, claiming that the chiefs had not understood the full implications of the 1804 treaty and that his people were being cheated. Tribal cohesion was splintering among the Sauks and the Mesquakies. Traditionalists—with Black Hawk as their main spokesman—wanted to retain the old ways and therefore sought to resist the Americans. Nontraditionalists—led by a young Sauk warrior named Keokuk—called for accommodation with the Americans. Keokuk had visited Washington and feared the strength of the government, but Black Hawk and his followers, relatively isolated, refused to compromise. The rivalry between Black Hawk and Keokuk broke the Sauks into factions; gradually Keokuk’s influence grew stronger. In a council held at Prairie du Chien in 1825, Keokuk was a major spokesman for the Sauks and the Mesquakies. Black Hawk refused to attend and brushed aside the council’s decisions for peace. He was further enraged when, in 1827, the government began plans to remove all Indians from Illinois as of 1829. The 1832 War. White squatters moved into Saukenuk, Black Hawk’s home and the major Sauk village. In July, 1829, the United States General Land Office announced that the land around Saukenuk would go on sale in October. Black Hawk and his people—some three hundred warriors and their families—vowed to reoccupy their land. General Edmund P. Gaines, commander of the army’s Western Department in St. Louis, led troops to the area. Gaines and Black Hawk confronted each other, the latter insisting that the treaty of 1804 was invalid and that he would not leave Saukenuk. Gaines, in turn, warned that he was there to enforce the treaty, either peacefully or by force. Keokuk persuaded some Indian families to join his peace faction, but Black Hawk resisted removal, counting on aid from nearby Winnebagos and Potawatomis. On June 25, 1831, soldiers attacked Saukenuk at dawn. Black Hawk and his followers had left during the night, crossing to the west side of the Mississippi. His village in ruins, Black Hawk signed a peace treaty with Gaines
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on June 30. Gaines then ordered white settlers at Rock River to provide the Indians with corn. Only token amounts were sent, however, and Black Hawk’s band faced starvation. Convinced by his chief lieutenant, Napope, that the British would assist him and that the Potawatomis and Chippewas were also ready to enlist, Black Hawk chose to go to war. By early 1832 he commanded some six hundred warriors and prepared to retake Saukenuk. Hoping to defuse the situation, General Henry Atkinson called on friendly Sauk and Mesquakie chiefs to negotiate and warned that if Black Hawk crossed to the east side of the Mississippi his troops would attack. Neither the Potawatomis nor the Winnebagos gave Black Hawk the help he expected. General Atkinson had mustered more than 1,700 Illinois militia into federal service in early May, 1832, combining them with his regular army troops, numbering three hundred. By late May he led these forces toward Rock River. The militia was in advance, and, fearing treachery, they killed several of Black Hawk’s scouts carrying a flag of truce. The Sauks fought back, defeating the militia in what is called the Battle of Stillman’s Run. The Sauks kept on the move, eluding Atkinson and his men. During the summer, Black Hawk’s band raided frontier settlements for food and livestock. Atkinson sent Colonel Henry Dodge to lead a militia against the band. Weakened by malnutrition, Black Hawk and his band were overtaken by the militia in late July, 1832. As the band began crossing the Wisconsin River, the militia attacked. Although most of the band escaped, many lives were lost. The remainder pressed on toward the Mississippi, reaching it on August 1. The Battles of August 1 and 2. While the Sauks were crossing the river, the steamboat Warrior appeared with troops aboard. They opened fire, and a fierce battle ensued. The Warrior broke off the fight when it ran low on fuel. The main battle between the Sauks and the army began on the morning of August 2. Atkinson’s and Dodge’s men, supported by the Warrior, trapped the Sauks and began a systematic slaughter. The Battle of Bad Axe, resulting in some 150 to 300 Sauk deaths, ended the Black Hawk War. Black Hawk and perhaps fifty others escaped, heading for LaCrosse, Wisconsin, site of a Winnebago village. There they decided to surrender, traveling to Prairie du Chien, headquarters of the Indian agency. Black Hawk, two of his sons, and eight other ringleaders were imprisoned, but all were released within a year. A treaty, signed on September 21, 1832, formally ended the war. The Sauks, Mesquakies, and Winnebagos lost approximately six million acres of land—most of eastern Iowa—receiving in return a promise of an annuity
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of $20,000 for thirty years. Broken in spirit and poverty-stricken, the Sauks and their allies never again attempted armed resistance against the United States. See also: Fox Wars; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Kickapoo Resistance. S. Carol Berg Sources for Further Study Gurko, Miriam. Indian America: The Black Hawk War. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970. Jackson, Donald, ed. Black Hawk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Patriot Chiefs: A Chronicle of American Indian Resistance. New York: Viking Press, 1961. Reprint. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Nichols, Roger L. Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992. Utley, Robert M., and Wilcomb E. Washburn. The Indian Wars. Rev. ed. New York: American Heritage, 1985. Waters, Frank. Brave Are My People: Indian Heroes Not Forgotten. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Clear Light Publishers, 1992.
Boarding and residential schools Date: 1568-present Locale: Canada, United States Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Colonial history, Education, Eighteenth century history, National government and legislation, Nineteenth century history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: Boarding and residential schools, established for Indian youth by both Canada and the United States, intended to accelerate the assimilation of Indian children into mainstream society. Treaties concluded with Indians beginning in the colonial era contained provisions for education. Indians sought schools and envisioned them as a means to prepare their children for dealing with the new way of life that lay ahead. Native people expected to retain their own languages and traditions as well as to learn European-American ways. However, from the ear-
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liest days, the European (later Canadian and American) goal was to use the schools as instruments of European civilization. Churches and religious institutions took on the task of educating Indian youth. Boarding schools were viewed as the optimum means to accomplish these ends, because they separated Indian children from their families, extinguished tribal knowledge and languages, and imprinted children with Christian teachings. As early as 1568, Indian children from Georgia and Florida were placed in Jesuit schools in Cuba. Commitments to educating Indian children during colonial times were inconsistent due to political rivalries among the various powers.
Girls study shorthand in a classroom c. 1910 at the Haskell Institute, a boarding school established in 1884 in Lawrence, Kansas. In the 1990’s it was renamed Haskell Indian Nations University, offering degrees in disciplines such as American Indian studies, environmental science, and business administration. (National Archives)
Government-Sponsored Schools. Prior to 1870, Indian education in the United States was almost exclusively in the hands of religious organizations. Beginning in 1802, Congress appropriated funds to religious groups to establish schools, and in 1819, Congress increased the appropriation with passage of the Indian Civilization Fund Act. Numerous schools, both boarding and day schools, were established for the education of Indian youth. Churches that sponsored schools received access to treaty monies and assumed the federal obligation to educate Indian people. These schools became known as “contract schools.” Since Indian children generally were prohibited from attending public schools until the turn of the twentieth century, religious contract schools became primary education institutions until the 1880’s. In Canada, the government also was obliged, through treaty provisions, to develop facilities for the education of Indian youth. The government deemed it more economical to develop and fund existing missionary schools rather than develop its own infrastructure. The government contracted for educational services with the Anglican and Catholic churches. The
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government financed construction and maintenance of the schools, while the churches provided teachers and staff for day-to-day operations. In Canada there were two types of residential schools: boarding schools were located on reservations and served students between eight and fourteen years old; and industrial schools were located off reservations, close to non-Indian towns, and admitted students up to fourteen years old. The industrial schools sought to prepare students for life off the reserves and vocational education was a mainstay of the curriculum. Boarding schools were favored in the United States and Canada because it was believed they would be the most efficient means to accomplish assimilation. Squabbling among Protestants and Catholics in the United States led to repeal of the Civilization Fund in 1873, and this marked a transition period when the federal government began to assume a more direct role in operating Indian schools. Religious schools continued to operate, but federal officials were convinced they could run schools more efficiently and accomplish assimilation with greater success. The federal government endorsed education as the quickest way to civilize Indians and stated that the soundest education policies would entail removal of children from their homes. Carlisle Indian School, the first federally operated boarding school, opened in 1879 with the goal of transforming the Indian into a patriotic American citizen. Indian education, whether sponsored by the United States government, sponsored by religious organizations, or in partnership, was intended to strip Indian children of their language and culture and change them into mainstream Americans. Schools in both Canada and the United States mandated that English be the only language spoken both in and out of the classroom and emphasized the acquisition of basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with industrial training. Many of these schools were supported by the manual labor of their students. Girls worked in the laundry, kitchen, dining hall, and sewing rooms; boys worked in fields, dairy barns, carpentry shops, and blacksmith and tinsmith shops. At many schools, students spent more time working than in learning basic skills, and this became an issue in both Canada and the United States. After unfavorable publicity, both governments insisted on greater balance between basic skills and industrial education. Nonetheless, the goal of this education remained the provision of a trade, so the young people would no longer return to the reservation once they completed their education. Poor health was a continuous problem in boarding schools. Students contracted communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, trachoma, measles, and whooping cough, and some youth died while at school. Be-
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cause parents were fearful their children would die in the schools, they began to hide the young people from agency officials at the start of the school year. In both Canada and the United States, agents of the federal governments would sweep through Indian camps and literally take children. In the United States, this was known as “kid catching.” Discipline was harsh and punitive in the schools and was in stark contrast to the positive reinforcement Indian children were familiar with in their families. Reforms to Hasten Assimilation. Canadian residential schools came under increasing attack in the early 1900’s because they were expensive, inefficient, and rife with health and physical and sexual abuse problems. The Bureau of Indian Affairs assumed greater responsibility for managing the finances of the schools, while the churches continued to provide personnel. In 1927, compulsory attendance was strengthened, and on authority of the Indian agent, children could be committed to boarding schools and kept until age eighteen. Once done with their education, Indian youth were generally told they were not to return to their reserves or reservations. In the United States, a scathing critique of federal Indian programs, the Meriam Report, was published in 1928. It condemned almost every aspect of Indian education, particularly boarding schools. School reforms were instituted, many boarding schools closed, and children were sent to day schools located on their reservations. Progressive educators stepped forward and stressed the importance of family to children, provided training to teachers, and began to include tribal cultures in school curriculum. However, school reforms ended with the Great Depression of the 1930’s and World War II. After World War II, federal policies in Canada and the United States once again sought to dissolve the trust relationship with tribes. In the 1950’s, as a way to accomplish assimilation once and for all, the United States government again reopened many off-reservation boarding schools. Similarly, in Canada, concerns surfaced about how to best accomplish assimilation, and the government’s solution was to revise the Indian Act in 1951 and integrate Indian children into public schools. Indian-Controlled Schools. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, tribes began to insist on the trust relationship with their governments, and they asserted their rights to set their own direction and especially to manage the education of their children. American and Canadian Indians pressed for self-deter-
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mination and lobbied intensely to close boarding schools and put education in the hands of Native people. In both Canada and the United States, a series of education acts permitted tribes to have a more active role in directing education, and to enfold tribal languages and cultures into the curriculum. The last federal residential school closed in Canada in 1988. Many boarding schools in the United States closed during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and those that remain open provide specialized services such as foster care and developmental education to small numbers of youth. The goal is no longer to assimilate but to educate and instill a sense of pride and selfworth in the students. Boarding schools, once considered by both countries the optimal way to educate Indian children, have given way to innovative tribal-controlled schools that underscore self-determination and sovereignty. Tribal languages, cultures, and histories are vital parts of the curriculum in these schools. In both Canada and the United States, Indian education is a federal responsibility, but budgets are inadequate. See also: American Indian Higher Education Consortium; Bureau of Indian Affairs; California missions; Carlisle Indian School; Indian Education Acts; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933; Kennedy Report; Meriam Report; National Indian Education Association. Carole A. Barrett Sources for Further Study Child, Brenda. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. The author uses letters from students at Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota and Haskell Institute in Kansas to chronicle the emotional and cultural impact of boarding schools on students, families, and communities. Ellis, Clyde. To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1996. A case study of one school, illustrating the forced assimilation policies of the federal government through students’ oral accounts and government documents. Johnston, Basil. Indian School Days. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. This first-person narrative explores experiences and contains analysis of student life in a Jesuit boarding school in Ontario, Canada. Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chiloco Indian School. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Through
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oral histories of former students and archival materials, the author examines the effect the boarding school had on its students and provides insight into why the school’s assimilation policies never succeeded. Standing Bear, Luther. Land of the Spotted Eagle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. In this autobiography a young Lakota boy compares and contrasts traditional tribal education with education at Carlisle Indian School.
Bozeman Trail War Date: June 13, 1866-November 6, 1868 Locale: Powder River country, Dakota Territory, east of the Bighorn Mountains Tribes involved: Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Wars and battles Significance: The end of Red Cloud’s war opens the door to the U.S. reservation system. In 1862, John M. Bozeman sought a more direct route connecting the newly discovered gold fields around Virginia City, Montana, to the east. Leaving Virginia City, he located a pass that led him to the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, then southeastward along the eastern flank of the Bighorn Mountains, where he traversed the headwaters of the Bighorn, Tongue, and Powder Rivers. Continuing southeast, he intersected the Oregon Trail along the North Platte River seventy miles west of Fort Laramie. This new Bozeman Trail cut directly through the best hunting grounds of the Teton Dakota Sioux—Red Cloud’s people. The Powder River country was a hunter’s paradise, home to the great northern bison herd. It had been guaranteed to the Sioux by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, it was the locus of their free-ranging lifestyle, and they meant to keep it. Responding to growing pressure from miners and settlers, however, the government was keenly interested in securing the Bozeman Trail but was uncertain of the best method. Using force to subjugate or exterminate native peoples was a popular idea in the West. Alternatively, an approach based on peace through justice gained support, especially in the East after the Civil War (1861-1865), when humanitarians who
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previously had been devoted to emancipation and the abolition of slavery turned their attention to the “Indian problem.” This East-West rift led to a schizophrenic policy toward American Indians, in which both approaches were tried, often at the same time. Forts and Treaties. Pursuing force, a string of three forts was built along the Bozeman Trail. Fort Reno was the first, built seventy miles up the Bozeman Trail in late summer of 1865 by General Patrick E. Connor. Best known for slaughtering 273 Paiutes at Bear Creek in 1863, Connor issued the directive to “accept no peace offers and kill any male over twelve.” Red Cloud, with Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, mauled Connor’s columns; they withdrew, but the fort remained. On July 10 of the following year, Colonel Henry B. Carrington established Fort Phil Kearny forty miles north of Fort Reno at the fork of the Piney Creeks, and in early August, Fort C. F. Smith ninety miles beyond that. The peace process was tried also. On October 28, 1865, a commission under Governor Newton Edmunds of Dakota Territory announced peace with the Sioux, producing a treaty signed by chiefs already friendly to the settlers. None of the Powder River chiefs signed, as they were all fighting Connor. Red Cloud did go to Fort Laramie the next spring to discuss peace, trade, and Fort Reno. In the middle of peace negotiations, Colonel Carrington arrived at Fort Laramie on June 13, 1866, in a masterpiece of bad timing. He had seven hundred troops, more than two hundred wagons, and orders to build his Bozeman forts. Red Cloud excoriated the Red Cloud, leader of the Teton Dakota commissioner, E. B. Edwards, for Sioux, not only led his people to a victori- already stealing what they were ous conclusion of the Bozeman Trail War negotiating, and his entire camp but also became famous nationwide as a diplomat and negotiator, deeply respected was gone the next morning. Edwards collected some signaby both his people and white reformers. (National Archives) tures and blithely informed Wash-
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ington that a satisfactory treaty had been concluded with the Sioux. While Colonel Carrington went on to build his forts, Red Cloud was galvanizing opposition with stunning oratory: Hear Ye, Dakotas! . . . before the ashes of the council fire are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. You have heard the sound of the white soldier’s axe upon the Little Piney. His presence here is an insult and a threat. It is an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be plowed for corn? Dakotas, I am for war!
Recruiting a coalition of three thousand warriors, Red Cloud’s war against the Thieves’ Road began in earnest. Guerrilla Warfare. Within days of their completion, Carrington’s forts were under unrelenting guerrilla warfare. In the first five weeks, the colonel reported thirty-three whites killed. By December, ninety-six soldiers and fifty-eight civilians had been killed, many were wounded, and nearly one thousand oxen, cows, mules, and horses had been lost. There were fifty-one separate attacks on Fort Kearny alone. The worst loss came on December 21, 1866, when the command of Captain William Fetterman was completely annihilated. Having once boasted that he could ride through the whole Sioux nation with eighty good men, Fetterman led exactly eighty soldiers out of Fort Kearny to relieve an embattled party of woodcutters. Disobeying Carrington’s orders not to ride out of view of the fort, Fetterman could not resist chasing Crazy Horse, who, acting as a decoy, lured Fetterman into an ambush by two thousand Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. In the Battle of One Hundred Slain, Fetterman’s arrogance had handed the U.S. Army its worst defeat in the Plains Wars. On August 1, 1867, the Cheyenne attacked hay cutters at Fort Smith, and the next day at Fort Kearny, Red Cloud’s Sioux attacked a woodcutters’ camp. Although these Hayfield and Wagon Box fights were standoffs, the government began to realize the speciousness of Edmunds’s and Taylor’s treaties. John Bozeman himself had been caught in 1867 by Blackfoot warriors and killed on his own road. Major peace initiatives in 1867 were rebuffed by Red Cloud, who persistently refused to sign anything until the forts were gone. Concerned about the cost of a full military campaign and the safety of the new railroads inching westward, Congress decided to concede the Bozeman overland route. Soldiers left Fort Smith on July 29, 1868, Fort Kearny a month later, and Fort Reno a few days after that. Jubilant warriors burned the three forts to the ground, and the Bozeman Trail was closed. On November 6, 1868, Red
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Cloud signed the Sioux Treaty of 1868 at Fort Laramie. Red Cloud had won his war. Red Cloud Goes to Washington. In 1870, Red Cloud and other Sioux were invited to Washington, D.C., to discuss the treaty. Here Red Cloud heard for the first time of provisions calling for permanent settlements on a reservation. Although deeply upset, he was persuaded to make an address at the Cooper Institute in New York City before an audience of social reformers. At noon on June 16, he began with a prayer to the Almighty Spirit, then recited wrongs done to his people, and asked for justice. Praised for its piety, charisma, and sincerity, the speech was an immense success. His growing influence with the Eastern peace and reform circles allowed Red Cloud to extract future concessions for his people from the government. The treaty articles that had not been explained to him, however, hastened the pace of the Sioux toward becoming “reservation Indians.” Still, the success of his implacable opposition to the Bozeman Trail makes his name an appropriate eponym for “Red Cloud’s War.” See also: Bear River Campaign; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868; Wolf Mountains, Battle of; Wounded Knee Massacre. Gary A. Olson Sources for Further Study Armstrong, Virginia Irving, comp. I Have Spoken: American History Through the Voices of the Indians. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971. Includes three orations by Red Cloud, including the Powder River exhortation (1866) and the complete Cooper Institute speech (1870). Brown, Dee. “Red Cloud’s War.” In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. A good overview of the nineteenth century wars from the Native American point of view. Hyde, George E. “Red Cloud’s War.” In Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians. Rev. ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. Originally published in 1937 and revised in 1957, this is considered to be a definitive history of the Oglala Sioux. Includes extensive background for the events on the Bozeman Trail. Thirteen illustrations, two maps. Keenan, Jerry. The Wagon Box Fight: An Episode of Red Cloud’s War. Conshohocken, Pa.: Savas, 2000. A thorough account of this encounter, with detailed appendices of the official army reports and results of recent archaeological excavation at the site. Lazarus, Edward. Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Includes the full text of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.
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McDermott, John D. “Price of Arrogance: The Short and Controversial Life of William Judd Fetterman.” Annals of Wyoming 63, no. 2 (Spring, 1991): 42-53. A look at Fetterman’s character and its fatal consequences. ____________, ed. “Wyoming Scrapbook: Documents Relating to the Fetterman Fight.” Annals of Wyoming 63, no. 2 (Spring, 1991): 68-72. Gives details of the most significant Army loss in the war.
Bureau of Indian Affairs Date: Established March 11, 1824 Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is the central U.S. federal agency for the management of Indian affairs. Attempting to centralize Indian administration, previously controlled by a bewildering array of government and military officials, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun in 1824 created the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Although authority over Indians initially resided in the Secretary of War, the fledgling bureau controlled all annuities and expenditures, managed funds for the civilization of Indians, mediated disputes between Indians under the trade and intercourse laws, and handled all correspondence. In 1832 the president was empowered to appoint a commissioner of Indian affairs. In 1849, the BIA was transferred to the newly created Department of the Interior. Thereafter authority descended from the president of the United States to the secretary of the interior to the commissioner of Indian affairs. The coordination of field superintendents, agents, missionaries, traders, and local Indians was entrusted to a field superintendent who corresponded directly with the commissioner. The BIA grew rapidly, from its original three members to six thousand employees in 1911. By the late twentieth century it had thirteen thousand employees and controlled a budget of nearly $900 million. Designed to implement federal policy, the BIA has historically reflected prevailing government attitudes toward Indians. Initially it oversaw funding under the 1819 civilization plan designed to aid assimilation through education. Similarly, under the General Allotment Act, passed in 1887, the
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BIA was charged with the mammoth task of preparing a list of members of tribes as well as classifying and appraising Indian lands. After World War I, responding to government economizing mandates, the BIA decentralized its operations. Regional offices were superimposed over the existing administrative structure, and further reorganization in 1946 provided for separate geographical divisions with regional headquarters. Surveys and studies during the 1920’s, including the scathing Meriam Report, revealed the appalling conditions of Indian life under the allotment plan, thereby giving impetus to fresh reforms. Between 1933 and 1945, during Commissioner John Collier’s tenure, the BIA for the first time turned from its assimilationist policy. Because of Collier’s influence, the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934 provided for a revitalization of tribal government and social customs. The IRA also granted Indians priority hiring within the BIA. Indeed, by 1982, Indians accounted for 78 percent of BIA personnel. Since the 1960’s, the BIA’s influence over Indian affairs has eroded, thereby favoring a shift of responsibility to Indians themselves. In 1975, for example, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act encouraged Indians to assume control over pertinent government programs. In the 1990’s, dispersion of BIA activities to states, to other agencies, and to Indians continued, yet the bureau remained a vast organization supporting twelve regional offices and eighty-two agencies headed by a commissioner. The BIA still oversaw several features of Indian life, including education, law enforcement, and the mobilization of public and private funds for economic development and natural resource management. See also: Allotment system; American Indian Defense Association; Indian Citizenship Act; Indian New Deal; Indian Offenses Act; Indian preference; Indian Reorganization Act; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Keeler Commission; Meriam Report; Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act; Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act; Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings; Reservation system of the United States; Termination Resolution; Trail of Broken Treaties; Wounded Knee occupation. Mary E. Virginia
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Burke Act Date: May 8, 1906 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: Passed to improve the process of allotting tribal lands to individual American Indians, the Burke Act contributed to the largescale loss of Indian land between 1887 and 1934. In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act (or Dawes Act). This act sought to make small farmers out of American Indians by dividing tribal lands into individual allotments. Indians taking allotments received United States citizenship; the government held the title for the lands in trust for twenty-five years, during which time they could not be sold. At the end of the period, the Indian would receive a fee patent giving him full ownership of the land. The administration of the General Allotment Act prompted considerable criticism. Many of those sympathetic to the Indians were concerned at the distinction between citizenship, which was taken up at the outset, and ownership, which came at the end of the trust period. The discrepancy became a source of worry in 1905 when the Supreme Court ruled that citizenship exempted an Indian from direct federal supervision, thus invalidating federal restrictions on liquor on allotments. Other people simply thought that the trust period postponed too long the time when an Indian might sell his allotment. In 1906, Congress passed the Burke Act, named for South Dakota Congressman Charles Henry Burke. The act provided that the trust period could be extended indefinitely on presidential authority, though it also permitted the secretary of the interior to cut the period short if requested, provided an individual Indian could prove that he was competent to manage his own affairs. In either case, there would be no citizenship until the end of the trust period, during which the Indian would remain subject to federal control. The Burke Act had a major effect on the awarding of allotments, though not the one that some of its supporters had hoped. Though certificates of competency (and fee patents) were awarded cautiously at first, there were clear signs that many allotments quickly passed out of Indian possession once they could be sold or mortgaged. During the act’s first decade of oper-
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ation, roughly ten thousand fee patents were issued, the vast majority of allotments passing out of Indian ownership. When the ardent assimilationist Fred K. Lane became secretary of the interior in 1917, the process speeded up. Competency certificates and fee patents were often given without the requisite individual investigation, sometimes to Indians who had not asked for them. In four years twenty thousand fee patents were issued, again with much of the land quickly alienated. During the 1920’s, when Burke himself was commissioner of Indian affairs, the process slowed, but the overall trend of allotment lands passing into the hands of non-Indians continued. By 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act finally stopped the allotment process, Indians had lost 86 million of the 138 million acres they had controlled in 1887. In the meantime the citizenship available under the Burke Act had been made redundant by Congress’s grant of citizenship to all Indians in 1924. See also: Allotment system; General Allotment Act; Indian Reorganization Act. William C. Lowe
California missions Date: July 17, 1769-1824 Locale: Coastal regions of California, from San Diego to Sonoma Tribes involved: Achumawi, Atsugewi, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Chumash, Costano, Cupeño, Diegueño, Esselen, Fernandeño, Gabrielino, Hupa, Juaneño, Kamia, Karok, Kato, Luiseño, Maidu, Mattole, Miwok, Patwin, Pomo, Quechan, Salinan, Serrano, Shasta, Tolowa, Tubatulabal, Wailaki, Wappo, Wintun, Wiyot, Yahi, Yana, Yokuts, Yuki, Yurok Categories: Colonial history, Nineteenth century history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: Twenty-one Catholic missions, four military installations, and several towns established Spain’s claim to Alta California and altered the lives of thousands of Native Americans. The worldwide Spanish Empire had gradually developed a mission system that suited imperial policy in places as distant as the Philippines, Paraguay, and Baja California. With a relatively modest investment, the Crown could extend its frontiers and establish opportunities for further expansion
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later. Two or three missionaries per location could attract indigenous peoples to a different way of life. The native peoples would learn manual trades, farming, cattle-raising, smithing, tanning, weaving, and other rudimentary skills, so that they could manage the institution on their own. A few soldiers at each mission—never more than ten—would enforce discipline. On occasions of serious trouble, appeal could be made to strategically placed presidios that housed sizable, highly mobile military forces capable of putting down any rebellions. When the missions developed enough, a pueblo might be established nearby, able to make use of the growing mission economy without having to follow the often austere mission routine. The Spanish missionaries, usually members of religious orders (the regular clergy), expected to complete their work in ten years, after which the establishments were to be secularized: The administration of church affairs would be in the hands of the secular clergy, and all the mission’s properties and possessions would be dispersed. Church authorities would receive the church buildings and some surrounding land. Indigenous peoples would receive at least half of all the possessions and land. For 160 years, missionaries in New Spain sought to evangelize the peoples of the Upper California territories, claimed for Spain by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1524 and Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1611. Without royal approval, however, ecclesiastical initiatives were not implemented in the Spanish Empire. Even many popes, as well as lowly missionaries, discovered this policy. In 1741, Captain Vitus Bering had reached Alaska and claimed much of North America’s west coast. Carlos Francisco de Croix became the Viceroy of New Spain in 1766. Along with Don José de Gálvez, visitador general of King Charles III, Croix laid plans for a series of missions in Alta California to blunt Russian expansionist plans. Galvez’s plans called for a mission and fort at Monterey Bay in the north. They chose San Diego in the south as the site of the first mission, because it was about half the distance from the base in Loreto, Baja California. Gálvez selected Don Gaspar de Portolá to be governor of California and Fray Junípero Serra as president of the missions. The Mission Trail. Four foundation parties, two by land and two by sea, set out from Baja for the arduous journey. Most of the sailors died, as did many of those taking part in the overland trek. On July 17, 1769, Serra dedicated the mission of San Diego de Alcalá on a site five miles west of the present mission. Portola pushed on to Monterey with a small party, but left no permanent settlement. That came about the following year, under Serra.
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Between Serra and his immediate successor, Fray Fermín de Lausen, eighteen of the twenty-one missions were built by 1798. Economics determined the sequence of building the missions. Largely dependent on shipping for supplies in the earliest years, the missions were first clustered in three coastal areas: south (San Diego), central (Santa Barbara Channel), and north (Monterey). Gradually, the gaps between the missions were closed to lessen their reliance on the vagaries of eighteenth century shipping. In 1776, Juan Bautista de Anza led an arduous overland expedition to San Francisco through the southern deserts, demonstrating that New Spain no longer need rely on the sea to supply California. In all, Spain founded twenty of the missions. After independence, Mexican authorities founded the last of the missions at Sonoma, San Francisco Solano, dedicated in 1824. In late eighteenth century California, there were about 130,000 Native Americans living in many small bands. The land supported them well in a life that was not much different from the one they had lived five thousand years before. Abundant potable water, fish, and game were within easy reach. Of all the indigenous peoples of what would become the United States, they made the swiftest, most seaworthy boats, without knowing metal trades. Their loosely structured societies lacked a central organization. They had no writing system for their six languages and several dialects. There were no organized wars, although occasional raids to steal goods were not unknown. Shelter was modest, at most. It quickly became clear to the missionaries that they needed more workers if the missions were to become self-sufficient. They stepped up recruitment of the indigenous people as laborers, often luring them with trinkets. The Franciscan missionary plan initially included teaching the native populations in their own languages, but the diversity was so extensive that that plan was abandoned, and Spanish was chosen instead to be the common language of California. Cultural Effects. The missions attracted people from surrounding areas with the promise of better living conditions and some amenities unavailable to those on the outside. If the natives converted to Christianity—a condition for remaining within the economic ambit of the mission—they were no longer at liberty to return to their previous way of life, although many did, in fact, escape. Native Americans living in the mission were permitted, even encouraged, to visit their families for weeks at a time. This policy proved to be the best recruiting tool the missionaries possessed. The workers did learn trades and some even learned to read and write. Daily work usually finished by mid-morning, and numerous feast days
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provided diversion from the normal regimen. By the time of secularization in 1834, approximately thirty thousand natives resided at the missions, with only sixty friars and three hundred soldiers along the 650 miles from San Diego to Sonoma. The missions held 230,000 cattle, 34,000 horses, and 268,000 hogs, sheep, and goats. The life was far removed from that visited upon the natives’ ancestors by the savage conquistadores of the sixteenth century. The process of colonization was relatively peaceful, and on balance the native population fared better under the Spanish friars than people in other colonies and received better treatment than they received subsequently in Mexico or in the United States. However, because the mission system destroyed their previous tranquil existence and failed to prepare them for the promised secularization, it cannot escape historical criticism. The Indians were introduced into an alien culture as little more than slaves; they suffered tragically from European diseases and, in the end, were ill-equipped for any other existence, either that of their own rapidly declining culture or that of the new California. When Mexico gained independence from Spain, the new government resolved to secularize the missions. When secularization began, Native Americans were either tricked into giving up their rights or their rights simply were ignored in the land grab of what had been the missions. Stranded after secularization, many of the natives at the missions had nowhere else to go, so they stayed on, continuing menial work under new masters. Only in the twentieth century were there some modest advances in their status. The U.S. government gave most of the mission buildings back to the Catholic church after California entered the Union. Many of the missions have been restored to a romantic, tranquil, even charming condition that belies their troubled history. See also: Boarding and residential schools; Indian-white relations; Spanish colonial. Daniel A. Brown Sources for Further Study Cook, Sherburne Friend. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization. 4 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943. A scholarly collection that chronicles the troubled history of Native Americans during and after the mission period. Rich bibliographies. Costo, Rupert, and Jeannette Henry Costo, eds. The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1987. A collection that vigorously indicts the evils of the mission system. Englehardt, Zephyrin. The Missions and Missionaries of California. 4 vols.
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Santa Barbara, Calif.: Mission Santa Barbara, 1929. The monumental standard reference work on the missions, giving an overall positive evaluation of the system. Font Obrador, Bartolome. Fr. Junipero Serra: Mallorca, Mexico, Sierra Gorda, Californias. Palma, Mallorca, Spain: Comissio de Cultura, 1992. A biography of Serra that depends on, but summarizes well, the work of many earlier authors. Geiger, Maynard J. The Life and Times of Fray Junipero Serra, OFM. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1959. A large, sympathetic biography that relies heavily on original sources. Jackson, Robert H., and Edward Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. An ethnohistory of Indian life under the mission system. Johnson, Paul C., et al., eds. The California Missions: A Pictorial History. Menlo Park, Calif.: Lane, 1985. A colorful, popular, accessible, and reliable work. Kroeber, Alfred Louis. Handbook of the Indians of California. New York: Dover, 1976. A large anthropological tome.
Carlisle Indian School Date: 1879-1918 Locale: Carlisle, Pennsylvania Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Education, Nineteenth century history, Organizations, Religion and missionary activities, Twentieth century history Significance: The Carlisle Indian School sought to assimilate Indian children into white society; it served as a model for many other Indian boarding schools. In 1879, a U.S. military officer, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, opened a school for Indians in a military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Pratt belonged to a generation of policy-makers working for what many believed to be a more humane, progressive approach to Indian policy. Unlike many of his predecessors, Pratt believed that Indian people were capable of being transformed into the European American model of the law-abiding, Chris-
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tian, wage-earning citizen. According to Pratt, this was the only way for Indian people to survive—by leaving behind everything that distinguished Indian people as “Indian,” including language and spirituality. Pratt first experimented with Indian education by training Plains Indian prisoners being held at Fort Marion in Florida. After persuading the federal government to allow eighteen male prisoners to attend Hampton Normal Institute, an all-black school in Virginia, Pratt recruited both male and female students from Indian communities across the country for enrollment in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. At Carlisle, students were required to speak only English and to adopt middle-class European American ways of living. Students did not, however, follow a middle-class curriculum: In addition to being taught very basic academic skills, girls were trained in domestic skills such as ironing and cooking, while boys learned industrial skills. Such a curriculum did little to prepare students for life in Indian communities. Students, however, proved much more able to maintain strong Indian identities than Captain Pratt had expected. Pratt was disappointed that so many students left Carlisle to return to their tribal homelands. The Carlisle experience also fostered new forms of Indian identity. Bringing together students from many different Indian communities, Carlisle tended to encourage students to form new bonds with members of other tribes and to work together, not just as members of specific tribes and local communities, but as American Indians with certain interests in common. Although Carlisle required a traumatic isolation from family and community, some students did, nevertheless, emerge from the experience with new skills and a determination to improve political and social conditions for other native A group of Sioux boys being “civilized” at the people. Carlisle Indian School. (Library of Congress)
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See also: American Indian Higher Education Consortium; Indian Education Acts; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; Kennedy Report; National Congress of American Indians. Molly H. Mullin
Cayuse War Date: 1847-1850 Locale: Southeastern Washington State Tribes involved: Cayuse, Tenino Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The Cayuse War began when the Cayuse attacked a mission because they were angry about the disruption and disease that had come with the whites; the war gained the Cayuse a reputation as a fierce and warlike tribe. The Waiilatpu Mission was established near Fort Walla Walla in southeastern Washington by a medical doctor, Marcus Whitman. The mission was located on Pasha Creek (called Mill Creek by most European Americans). The land on which the mission was built was actually part of the ancient Cayuse lands, a situation which would later lead to friction between the missionaries and the Cayuse. The Cayuse land was in the center of an area through which many Europeans passed on their way to a number of destinations in the Pacific Northwest, another cause of friction between the two groups. Whitman’s preachings in the mission were designed to persuade the Cayuse to forsake their traditional ways and adopt his version of Christian values. Gradually, the Cayuse became convinced that Whitman was an evil man. To make matters worse, many Cayuse tribal members contracted measles, and some of them blamed Whitman. He returned to his mission during the fall of 1847 after ministering to the sick at Umatilla. His mission complex was attacked by the Cayuse, and the Whitmans and twelve others were killed. A retaliatory effort was mounted against the small group of Cayuse and the dissidents, but it was repulsed. On January 28, 1848, a group of Cayuse warriors and some recruited Teninos defeated a volunteer party under the command of Major Henry Lee; although the Cayuse tried to persuade other area tribes to join them in the battle, only a few did.
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The Cayuse later suffered a defeat during the Sand Hollow battle of 1848, in which Cayuse chief Gray Eagle was killed. A number of other skirmishes ensued during the remainder of 1848 and in 1849. The refusal of other tribes to join the Cayuse would ultimately lead to their downfall. In a message to the territorial legislature in 1850, Joseph Lane, the new governor of Oregon Territory, declared that the entire Cayuse tribe would be considered responsible for the deaths of the European Americans in the Whitman mission attack until the guilty parties were turned over to the government for trial. An increasing number of Cayuse and other bands attempted to capture the members of the Cayuse tribe who had attacked the missionaries. Finally, five of the attackers were captured after being pursued by members of their own tribe. They were turned over to the Oregon territorial government for trial. It has been speculated that the accused Cayuse had little understanding of the American legal system which would judge their case. They were provided defense council by the Oregon territorial government. On May 24, 1850, the jury pronounced them guilty as charged, and they were hanged on Monday, June 3, 1850. See also: Walla Walla Council. Bruce M. Mitchell
Cherokee legal cases Date: March 18, 1831, and March 3, 1832 Locale: Georgia Tribes involved: Cherokee Categories: Court cases, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: Two decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court limit the sovereignty of Native American tribes by placing them under federal protection. In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court, with John Marshall as chief justice, made the first serious judicial effort to define the relationship between the federal government and Native Americans. The case, concerning disputed land titles, was Johnson v. McIntosh. The decision was that the federal government was, in effect, the Native Americans’ ultimate landlord and they were the government’s tenants. Marshall and the Court major-
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ity thus judged the federal government to be responsible for Native American affairs, including the protection of Native American peoples against state actions, which materially affected Native American lives and property. During a period in which the federal government and the states were locked in disputes about where the Constitution intended ultimate sovereignty to reside and federal authority seemed unsure, Georgia contemplated removing Cherokee and Creek peoples from northern and western portions of the state. To legitimate its plans, Georgia charged that when it had agreed, in 1802, to cede its western land claims to the federal government, the latter had agreed to extinguish Native American titles to those lands and then to return them to the state. The federal government had not done so, and Georgia had been obliged to live since with a Native American state within a state. Land-hungry as a result of expansive pressures from the cotton culture, Georgians themselves initiated steps to remove Native Americans, primarily Cherokees. They denied the relevance of federal treaties with the Cherokees and threatened to use force against federal troops if they were dispatched to protect the tribe. Andrew Jackson’s election as president in 1828 accelerated Georgia’s actions to begin removal, because Jackson, a veteran Indian fighter who deemed Native Americans “savages,” was a proponent of removal. In December, 1828, the Georgia legislature added Cherokee lands to a number of Georgia counties. Far from being savages, the Cherokees who protested this action had become a successful farming people. Thanks to a syllabary produced by their own Sequoyah, they were literate and produced their own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. They instantly assembled a distinguished delegation to appeal to Congress for assistance. This course was applauded by a host of congressmen and public officials— including Daniel Webster and William Wirt—who proclaimed Georgia’s legislation unjust, on moral as well as legal grounds. Nevertheless, in December, 1829, Georgia’s legislature enacted a comprehensive law that essentially nullified all Cherokee laws. Aggravating the Cherokees’ plight, gold was discovered in the following year in western Georgia, and a gold rush flooded their lands with gold seekers, in violation of Cherokee treaties. Under great pressure, Governor George Gilmer claimed the gold as state property and threatened to oust the Cherokees forcibly. Having failed in Georgia’s courts, the Cherokees, as a last peaceful resort and encouraged by missionaries such as Jeremiah Evarts and public officials such as Webster and Wirt, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court under Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, which gave the
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Court original jurisdiction in cases brought under treaties or by foreign nations. Georgia Land Disputes. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Chief Justice Marshall, who had been sympathetic to Cherokee claims but also was aware of Jackson’s hostility toward both Native Americans and Marshall’s court, dismissed the case. Marshall asserted that the Court lacked the jurisdiction to halt Georgia’s sequestration of Cherokee lands. In doing so, he defined the relationship of Cherokees (and, by inference, other Native American tribes) to the federal government as that of a “domestic, dependent nation” rather than a sovereign one. Marshall modified his decision in 1832, however, when deciding Worcester v. Georgia. Worcester resulted from a Georgia law enacted in 1831. The law forbade whites from residing on Cherokee lands without a state license; it was aimed primarily at white missionaries who were encouraging Cherokee resistance to removal. Georgia arrested, convicted, and sentenced two unlicensed missionaries, Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler, whom the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions promptly defended, hiring William Wirt as their counsel. Wirt then was running as a vice presidential candidate for the National Republican Party and as a presidential candidate for the Anti-Masonic Party. Therefore, he hoped for a decision that would embarrass Jackson. Because the plaintiff in Worcester was a white missionary and the defendant the State of Georgia, the Court had clear jurisdiction. Without overruling his Cherokee Nation decision, Marshall ruled that the Georgia law was unconstitutional and therefore void, because it violated treaties, as well as the commerce and contract clauses of the Constitution. Furthermore, Marshall declared, Georgia’s laws violated the sovereignty of the Cherokee nation, and, in this case, the Court was constrained to define relationships between Native Americans and a state. Competing Concepts of Sovereignty. As historians and legal scholars have observed, the Cherokee cases advanced two contradictory descriptions of Native American sovereignty. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Marshall delineated the dependent relationship of Native American tribes to the federal government. In Worcester, sympathetically stressing historic aspects of Native American independence, nationhood, and foreignness rather than their domestic dependency, he defined the relationship of Native American tribes to the states. Together, these decisions suggested that although Native American tribes lacked sufficient sovereignty to claim political independence and were therefore wards of the federal government,
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they nevertheless possessed sufficient sovereignty to guard themselves against intrusions by the states, and that it was a federal responsibility to preserve this sovereignty. In subsequent years, these conflicting interpretations were exploited by both the federal government and Native Americans to serve their own purposes. Marshall’s pronouncements were one thing; making them effective was yet another thing. President Jackson, who as chief executive was the only party capable of enforcing the Court’s decision, chose to ignore it. Instead, Jackson threw federal troops into the removal of Cherokees and others of the Five Civilized Tribes to designated Indian Territory beyond the Mississippi. The resulting tragedy became known as the Trail of Tears. See also: Cherokee Phoenix; Cherokee Tobacco case; Cherokee War; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Trail of Tears. Mary E. Virginia Sources for Further Study Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. American Indians, American Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. A clearly written study focusing on the development of the Native American judicial system as it existed in the early 1980’s. Explains the complexities of Native American legal and political rights as they are understood by the tribes and by the federal government. ____________. The Nations Within. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Traces the past and weighs the future of Native American sovereignty, from the Doctrine of Discovery through the shift from tribal and federal notions of self-government to self-determination. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Unravels the political anomaly of the treaty system, a system devised according to white perspectives that made the relationships between Native Americans and the federal government unlike the legal and political relationships of any other two peoples. ____________. The Great Father. Vol. 1. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. A masterful, detailed analysis of historical relationships— political, economic, and social—between the federal government and Native Americans through cultural changes affecting both groups, from the Revolutionary War to 1980. Chapter 2 discusses the Cherokee cases and American Indian removal. Satz, Ronald N. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. Excellent coverage of the Cherokee cases; also clarifies the complex political climate in which the cases de-
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veloped around conflicts between the Jackson administration, Georgia, and the Cherokees. Wilkins, David E. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Close analysis of legal cases that Wilkins argues “mask questionable federal and administrative activities against tribes and individual Indians.” Williams, Robert A. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Starting with the thirteenth century notion that the West had a mandate to conquer the earth, this intriguing study explores the laws that evolved to legitimate this mandate, specifically as the mandate was interpreted by Spanish, English, and U.S. laws regarding relations with Native Americans.
Cherokee Phoenix Date: 1828-1839 Locale: New Echota, Cherokee Nation, Georgia Tribes involved: Cherokee Categories: Education, Nineteenth century history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: The Cherokee Phoenix was the first Native American newspaper and the first published in a Native American language. The Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper, began on February 21, 1828, as the Cherokee nation created institutions and built its new capital at New Echota in Georgia. Cherokees, who had ceded land in several Southeastern states, remained on a reservation in northwestern Georgia. There they created their own governing institutions following the European model: They wrote a constitution, established a legislature, and built schools and churches. While Georgia passed laws stripping Cherokees of their rights, the Cherokees used every peaceful means of protest, including the printing press. When the Cherokee Phoenix wrote editorials against the laws, Georgians stole the printing press and jailed the staff. Cherokees fought against their removal from Georgia through the press, the courts, and Congress. Editor Elias Boudinot, a college-educated missionary and clerk of the Cherokee National Council, wrote in both Cherokee and English, hoping
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the newspaper would help Native Americans to improve both their living conditions and their image in the larger white society. In this era, newspaper editors were often advocates, and political parties or other special interests often subsidized their publications. The Cherokee Phoenix received its support from the National Council, white Christian missionaries, and the fund-raising efforts of Boudinot and other Cherokee leaders. Improving a people’s image through newspapers was another premise of contemporary journalism, especially among political parties and town boosters. As the First Amendment protected the U.S. press, the Native American press was to be free from restraint, despite its subsidy from the National Council. The Cherokee Phoenix also depended upon the Cherokee language, a writing system that had been invented by a young Cherokee genius, Sequoyah, a few years earlier. Sequoyah was born around 1770 of a Cherokee mother and a white drifter. He saw that his people were at a disadvantage compared to the whites, who had a printed and written language. With no formal education, this half-breed child grew up to be the only person in history known to have created a written language single-handedly. His eighty-six-character syllabary, using syllables or sounds instead of letters as a basic form, allowed the easy translation of the traditionally oral Cherokee language into written form. Assembling words from these sounds proved easier than doing it from twenty-six letters. White observers were astonished at the speed with which young people learned the language. Cherokee children learned as much language in a few days as English children learned of their language in one or two years. Most of the nation became literate in a matter of months. In its prospectus, the Cherokee Phoenix said the biweekly newspaper would provide laws and public documents of the Cherokee nation; accounts of manners, customs, and the progress of the nation in education, religion, and “the arts of civilized life”; the interesting news of the day; and miscellaneous articles to promote learning among the Cherokees. The Reverend Samuel Worcester, a Protestant missionary to the Cherokees, provided essential support for the newspaper. Two white printers also accompanied the press, which had to await the manufacture of special type in New England to accommodate Sequoyah’s syllabary. The printers set type on the hand press by taking detailed instructions from Worcester instead of learning the language. The printing office also published translations of the Bible into Cherokee. Trying to build an independent state within Georgia, the Cherokees received support from missionaries, Whig Party leaders, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia (1832).
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Worcester had refused to sign the loyalty oath that Georgia required of whites working among Native Americans. President Jackson refused to enforce the Court’s decision, and Congress had passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, setting up the process of forcing the Cherokees to move to Indian Territory, now parts of Oklahoma and Kansas. Reflecting his missionary-school background, Boudinot editorialized that Cherokees could become civilized and showed a condescending attitude toward Native Americans and other ethnic groups that did not accept Christian assumptions of progress. At first, Boudinot strongly editorialized against removal, despite the growth of individual acts of violence against Cherokees. As a relative of the Ridge family that eventually concluded that getting the best terms for removal was better than resistance, Boudinot signed the removal treaty without approval of the National Council. Boudinot resisted pressure from Georgians, whose legislature in 1829 stripped Cherokees of their civil rights. Under the new laws, whites could commit crimes against Cherokees without punishment, because Cherokees were not allowed to testify against whites in court. Despite a Supreme Court decision supporting them, Jackson refused to intervene. “Full license to our oppressors, and every avenue of justice closed against us,” the Cherokee Phoenix said. “Yes, this is the bitter cup prepared for us by a republican and religious government—we shall drink it to the very dregs.” A year later, the newspaper reported harassment, arrest, and threats of physical harm to its staff members. After the newspaper protested the postmaster’s sale of liquor to American Indians to encourage violent incidents, the postmaster retaliated by cutting off the mail. The move left the Cherokee Phoenix without its source of supplies and exchange papers. “This new era,” Boudinot wrote, “has not only wrested from us our rights and privileges as a people, but it has closed the channel through which we could formerly obtain our news. By this means the resources of the Phoenix are cut off.” The newspaper said Native Americans had become more dependent upon sympathetic whites. The Cherokee Phoenix debated basic issues within the Cherokee nation, including acculturation and Christianity. In the paper, national leaders debated how the new government should be organized and how elections should be conducted. While political candidates argued election issues, the newspaper proclaimed the need for national unity. Leaders debated the division of the legislature into two houses and the political system into two parties. The newspaper said all Cherokees must keep “the preservation of ourselves as a free and sovereign people” as their primary goal. The National Council approved a punishment of one hundred lashes
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against people who formed organizations to foster disunity among the Cherokees. Violent conflicts between whites and natives became so common that many feared for the safety of Native Americans who remained in the Southeast. Friends seeking to protect Native Americans and enemies seeking to eliminate them came together to remove the Five Civilized Tribes to land west of the Mississippi. Because early voluntary removals had proved so disastrous to the Cherokees and the Choctaws, those remaining in Georgia vowed to remain on their native land. The elected principal chief, John Ross, ordered Boudinot to suppress news of dissention within the National Council over the removal issue; instead, the editor was to present a united front of Cherokee resistance against white encroachment. The editor resigned in 1832, revealing that he could not manage the paper without a free discussion of such important issues. “I should think it my duty to tell them the whole truth. I cannot tell them that we shall be reinstated in our rights when I have no such hope.” Ross appointed his brother-in-law, Elijah Hicks, but Hicks lacked Boudinot’s journalistic experience and rhetorical power. Outside pressure continued. In 1833, the postmaster sent letters to the Cherokee Phoenix’s exchanges, stating that the newspaper had been discontinued. The paper’s publication became erratic, and in 1834, Hicks suspended publication. His parting editorial asked readers not to give up the fight. “Although our enemies are numerous we are still in the land of the living and the JUDGE of all the earth will impart the means for the salvation of our suffering Nation.” In the fall of 1838, Cherokee men, women, and children were rounded up and forced by the U.S. Cavalry to march from their Georgia home to Indian Territory. Thousands of people suffered and died on the walk that became known as the Trail of Tears. One morning in June, 1839, a band awaited Boudinot in trees near his new home, under construction. Two men approached him and asked him, as keeper of public medicine, for help. While they walked together, two others joined them. The group then stabbed Boudinot and smashed the former editor’s head with a tomahawk six or seven times. They were part of a vigilante organization that held Boudinot and two other members of the Ridge faction responsible for selling Cherokee land, and in revenge carried out their capital punishment. Worcester, with whom Boudinot and his family had been staying, said the killers had cut off his right hand. Boudinot left a wife and six children. Worcester and printer John F. Wheeler, both of whom served prison time in Georgia for their work on the Cherokee Phoenix, helped the Cherokees start
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the Cherokee Advocate in 1844 with William P. Ross, the chief’s nephew, as editor. It continued free distribution and publication in both Cherokee and English. See also: Cherokee legal cases; Cherokee Tobacco case; Cherokee War; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Trail of Tears. William E. Huntzicker Sources for Further Study Boudinet, Elias. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinet. Edited by Theda Perdue. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Collects nearly all of Boudinet’s writings, with a biographical introduction and thorough annotations. Danky, James P., ed. Native American Periodicals and Newspapers, 1828-1982. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. Overview of the history of Native American newspapers. Luebke, Barbara P. “Elias Boudinot, Indian Editor: Editorial Columns from the Cherokee Phoenix.” Journalism History 6 (1979): 48-51. Discusses Boudinot’s conflicts as editor of the Cherokee Phoenix. McLoughlin, William G. Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. Discusses missionary support for the Cherokees. Mooney, James. Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. Chicago: Aldine, 1975. Valuable study by a contemporary who interviewed people involved. Murphy, James E., and Sharon M. Murphy. Let My People Know: American Indian Journalism, 1828-1978. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. A history of Native American journalism, with some discussion of the Cherokee Phoenix. Perdue, Theda, ed. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Brief biographical introduction to Boudinot, with reproductions of important documents in the history of the Cherokee Phoenix and Boudinot’s fund-raising. Riley, Sam G. “The Cherokee Phoenix: The Short, Unhappy Life of the First American Indian Newspaper.” Journalism Quarterly 53, no. 4 (Winter, 1976): 666-671. Discusses Boudinot’s editorial dilemmas and political pressure.
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Cherokee Tobacco case Date: Argued April 11, 1871; decided May 1, 1871 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Cherokee, pantribal Categories: Court cases, Nineteenth century history Significance: This case, also known as Boudinot v. United States, established the “last-in-time” precedent—the concept that later statutes overrode earlier treaties—and the rule that tribes are “included” in congressional acts unless they are specifically “excluded.” In the Cherokee Tobacco suit, two Cherokee nationals, Elias Cornelius Boudinot and Stand Watie, challenged the imposition of an 1868 federal tax law on their tobacco factory, which had been established in the Cherokee Nation under provisions of the Cherokee/U.S. Treaty of 1866. (Although the year 1870 is often given for this case, it was actually argued in 1871; it was received by the Court in 1870.) Article 10 of the 1866 treaty stated that Cherokee citizens had the right to sell any product or merchandise without having to pay “any tax thereon which is now or may be levied by the U.S.” Two years later, Congress enacted a general revenue law which imposed taxes on liquor and tobacco products “produced anywhere within the exterior boundaries of the U.S.” Justice Noah Swayne, speaking for a deeply fractured court (three justices concurred with Swayne, two dissented, and three did not participate), said that the case boiled down to which of the two laws—treaty or general domestic—was superior. (Swayne created this scenario even though there was no evidence that Congress in enacting the 1868 revenue law intended to abrogate Article 10 of the treaty.) “Undoubtedly,” said Swayne, “one or the other must yield. The repugnancy is clear and they cannot stand together.” Swayne then developed what has been termed the “last-in-time” rule. In effect, whichever is latest in time, be it treaty or statute, stands. This was a catastrophic precedent for tribes, since the treaty termination law, which had been attached as a rider to the March 3, 1871, Indian Appropriation Act, had closed the door on Indian treaties, although preexisting ratified treaties were still to be honored by the U.S. This law effectively froze tribes in political limbo: They were no longer recognized as nations capable of treating with the federal government, yet they remained separate sovereignties outside the pale of the federal Constitution.
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Tribes, as a result of this decision, were virtually bereft of legal or political protection. The federal government could hereafter explicitly or implicitly abrogate treaty provisions and tribes had little recourse, save returning to the corridors of the very Congress that had enacted the abrogating legislation. The Supreme Court generally deferred to the political branches on Indian matters, going so far as to say that “the act of Congress must prevail as if the treaty were not an element to be considered.” This opinion ignored the historical and political reality that the Cherokee Nation was a separate and autonomous political entity not subject to general domestic laws unless they had given their express consent; it denied the fact that Congress itself had not explicitly stated in the 1868 law that the revenue act applied to Indian Territory. Moreover, it disavowed the general principle that specific laws, such as treaties, which create special rights are not to be held “repealed by implication by any subsequent law couched in general terms.” Notwithstanding earlier U.S. guarantees of the sanctity of treaty rights, Cherokee Tobacco announced that those hard-fought-for rights, often secured at the cost of great amounts of tribal land and the loss of other rights, could be destroyed by mere implication.
This cartoon in Puck magazine satirizes the confused and inconsistent nature of U.S. Indian policy in the late nineteenth century; among the problems here are the “Boston sentimentalist,” the weapons trader, and the government Indian agent. (Library of Congress)
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See also: Cherokee legal cases; Cherokee Phoenix; Cherokee War; Indian Appropriation Act; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870; Trail of Tears. David E. Wilkins
Cherokee War Date: October 5, 1759-November 19, 1761 Locale: Charles Town, South Carolina, and several Cherokee territories Tribes involved: Cherokee Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: Total destruction of several Cherokee communities presages the Cherokee alliance with the British in the Revolutionary War. The Cherokees, a Native American people inhabiting the southern Appalachian highlands, first encountered visitors from the Old World on May 30, 1540, during the wanderings of the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. For more than a century after this first meeting, the Cherokees had little direct contact with European colonists. During the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, trade began to develop between the Cherokees and the English colonies of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. This relationship was strengthened during the Yamasee War (1715-1728), when the Cherokees were allied with the colonists against other Native American peoples. The relationship was enhanced in 1730, when Scottish aristocrat Alexander Cumming visited the Cherokees and took seven of them to England, where they met King George II and signed a trade agreement. One of the seven was the young Attakullakulla, who would turn out to be the strongest advocate for peace with the English colonists. The 1750’s saw increasing rivalry between France and England, which evolved into the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), a conflict that had already begun to manifest itself in North America as the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Because of the threat of the French and their Native American allies, the South Carolinians built Fort Prince George near the Cherokee town of Keowee in 1753 and Fort Loudoun near the town of Chota in 1756. These forts were designed to offer protection to the Cherokees in exchange for their aid to the English in the war with the French. From 1756 to 1759, even as the forts were being built, several violent incidents between Cherokees and colonists led the way to war. The most crit-
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ical of these occurred when a group of Cherokees making their way home from an abortive battle with the French-allied Shawnee through the backcountry of Virginia were attacked by settlers, who killed twenty-four of them. The settlers defended their action by accusing the Cherokees of stealing their horses and food. The governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, offered gifts and apologies to the relatives of the victims, but many Cherokees demanded retribution. Cherokee warriors killed twenty-four settlers in South Carolina in revenge. Lyttleton Plans an Invasion. The Cherokee War can be thought of as officially beginning on October 5, 1759, when William Henry Lyttelton, governor of South Carolina, announced his intention to lead an army into Cherokee territory. On October 20, a peace delegation led by Oconostota, the head warrior of the Cherokees, arrived in Charles Town in an attempt to prevent further hostilities. They were placed under arrest and forced to march with the troops. When Lyttelton arrived at Fort Prince George on December 10, the prisoners were held captive inside the fort. Attakullakulla, the most important negotiator for the Cherokees, arrived on December 17 and managed to secure the release of Oconostota and several other prisoners, but twenty-two remained hostages. Lyttelton refused to release them until twenty-four Cherokees were executed for the killing of the settlers. He was forced to retreat on December 28, when symptoms of smallpox, which had been raging in the town of Keowee, began to appear among his troops. Cherokee warriors led by Oconostota surrounded the fort as soon as Lyttelton left. On February 16, 1760, the commander of the fort was lured out with the promise of negotiation and shot by concealed warriors. In retaliation, the soldiers at the fort killed the hostages. This ended any possibility of preventing a full-scale war and led to attacks on settlers. William Bull, lieutenant governor and Lyttleton’s successor, appealed to General Jeffrey Amherst, supreme commander of British forces in North America, for help. On April 1, twelve hundred soldiers commanded by Colonel Archibald Montgomery arrived in Charles Town. On June 1, they reached Keowee, which they burned to the ground. Other towns in the area, known to the colonists as the Lower Towns, were also destroyed, along with all the crops being grown there. During these attacks, Montgomery’s troops killed sixty Cherokees and took forty prisoners, while facing little opposition. Montgomery relieved the garrison at Fort Prince George and marched toward the area known as the Middle Towns. On June 27, near the town of Echoe, Cherokee warriors launched a surprise attack on the British troops, killing twenty of them and
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wounding seventy. Although the Cherokees withdrew, the British were forced to retreat. A month later, they left South Carolina to rejoin the war against the French in Canada. Meanwhile, Oconostota’s warriors had surrounded Fort Loudoun. Deprived of the relief given to Fort Prince George, Captain Paul Demere, commander of the fort, surrendered on August 8 rather than face starvation. The surrendering garrison was to turn over all its munitions and be escorted safely out of Cherokee territory. Because Demere attempted to conceal some of the fort’s munitions, he and thirty-two of his soldiers were killed and the rest taken prisoner. Amherst sent two thousand troops under the command of Colonel James Grant to avenge the loss of the fort. On March 20, 1761, Grant left Charles Town, arriving at Fort Prince George on May 27. There he met with Attakullakulla, but Grant refused the Cherokee’s offer to intercede with the warriors. On June 7, Grant left the fort and headed for the Middle Towns. On June 10, within two miles of the place where Montgomery’s troops were attacked, Grant fought a battle with the Cherokees, leaving ten British soldiers killed and fifty wounded. The Cherokees withdrew because of a lack of ammunition. Grant spent the next month destroying fifteen Middle Towns and fifteen hundred acres of crops. Approximately five thousand Cherokees were forced to flee into the forest to survive on whatever food they could find in the wild. Peace Negotiations. After this devastating attack, Attakullakulla and several other Cherokee leaders met with Grant at Fort Prince George to ask for peace. A treaty was prepared demanding the execution of four Cherokee leaders, the elimination of all relations between the Cherokees and the French, the sovereignty of the British courts over all offenders within Cherokee territory, and the establishment of a line twenty-six miles east of Keowee as the border of South Carolina. The Cherokees could not accept the demand for executions. Attakullakulla asked to speak to Bull directly. He was allowed to travel to Charles Town and was welcomed by the governor as a loyal friend of the English. The demand for executions was dropped, and the treaty was signed on September 23. A separate treaty was signed with Virginia on November 19, officially ending the Cherokee War. Conflicts between the Cherokees and the colonists continued until well after the end of the American Revolution (1783), during which the Cherokees were allied with the British. A series of land cessions to the newly independent United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries left the Cherokees with only a small portion of their land. In a final attempt to survive as an independent people, the Cherokees adopted
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the ways of the Americans, even going so far as to set up a government modeled after that of the United States. Despite this effort, the Cherokees were finally forced to leave their native land for Oklahoma during the infamous Trail of Tears removals in the 1830’s. See also: Cherokee legal cases; Cherokee Phoenix; Cherokee Tobacco case; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Trail of Tears; Yamasee War. Rose Secrest Sources for Further Study Corkran, David H. The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival 1740-1762. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. A detailed account of the complex relations between the Cherokees and English colonists during the mid-1700’s. Hatley, Tom. The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Focuses on the multicultural aspects of the Cherokee War, including a discussion of the roles of women and African slaves. Mails, Thomas E. “Transformation of a Culture.” In The Cherokee People: The Story of the Cherokees from Earliest Origins to Contemporary Times. Tulsa, Okla.: Council Oak Books, 1992. Describes the history of relations between Cherokees and Europeans up to the Trail of Tears. Milling, Chapman J. “The Cherokee War.” In Red Carolinians. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940. A detailed, carefully documented account of the war. An important reference despite its age. Oliphant, John. Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 1976-1763. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Focuses on the clashes of individual personalities that fomented the war. Woodward, Grace Steele. “’The King, Our Father.’” In The Cherokees. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. A history of the Cherokee people from the start of the Yamasee War until the end of the Cherokee War.
Civil War Date: 1861-1865 Locale: Indian Territory, southwest Missouri, western Arkansas Tribes involved: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole
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Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: A great Native American leads an Indian regiment for the Confederacy and is the last to surrender. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, both the Union and the Confederacy looked toward the Indian Territory for support. American Indians there, mostly members of the famed Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole), had connections with the federal government through various agencies, but most also had Southern roots in the Carolinas, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, and Tennessee. In March, 1861, Confederate president Jefferson Davis commissioned Albert Pike to visit Indian Territory to seek treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes. It was hoped that a strong Confederate force in Indian Territory would prevent Union sympathizers in Kansas from raiding Texas. Pike’s visit with all the tribes in Indian Territory was largely successful. Shortly afterward, General Ben McCulloch raised two American Indian regiments: one led by Colonel John Drew and the other by Colonel Stand Watie. Drew and Watie were bitter enemies, and during much of the war commanders on the western front kept the two Cherokee regiments separated as much as possible. Watie, a mixed-blood Cherokee, had been born in Georgia and was one of the signers of the New Echota Treaty, which sold Cherokee lands in Georgia to the United States government. He was also a prosperous Cherokee landowner and businessman, a brilliant warrior, and a member of an opposition faction within the Cherokee tribe. His signature on the new Echota Treaty put him at odds with the Stand Watie was one of the Cherokee signmore dominant faction of the ers of the Treaty of New Echota; he later Cherokee Nation, led by John raised a Cherokee regiment for the ConfedRoss. eracy. (Library of Congress)
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Watie Joins the Confederacy. Watie was a great leader, and even in the face of extreme hardships, especially during the winter months, he kept his regiment together and participated in numerous battles. Although the treaties that had been signed with the Confederacy promised that Indian regiments would not be required to fight outside Indian Territory, Watie’s troops also were called to duty in Missouri and Arkansas. Over a four-year span, the old Cherokee warrior and his forces fought at Wilson’s Creek, Newtonia, Bird Creek, Pea Ridge, Spavinaw, Fort Wayne, Fort Gibson, Honey Springs, Webber’s Falls, Poison Spring, Massard Prairie, and Cabin Creek. Watie’s abilities on the battlefield were widely recognized and greatly heralded by both his contemporaries and historians. His greatest skills were gaining and keeping the confidence of his troops and his wily guerrilla tactics. Watie’s regiment, without his presence on the field, also fought the Second Battle at Newtonia in Southwest Missouri in 1864. The first Newtonia battle, fought in 1862, is of major historic significance, because it was the only Civil War battle in which American Indians fought on both sides. In most battles, Watie’s Confederate Cherokees fought admirably. In a losing cause at the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas, however, they and Colonel Drew’s troops were accused of bad conduct because they were too easily routed during the battle and because they allegedly scalped some of the federal casualties. This act, when reported to the upper command of the Confederate Army, created a great embarrassment among officers, most of whom had been trained at such prestigious military academies as West Point, where cadets were taught to be gentlemen as well as warriors. The loss at Pea Ridge was made even greater by the death of General McCulloch, who had organized and fought with the Cherokees from the beginning. Despite the overwhelming support given the Confederacy in 1861, when the tide of war turned in favor of the Union and the Confederacy became unable to supply its forces on the frontier, disenchantment took hold of the leaders of the various tribes. In February, 1863, the Cherokee Council met on Cowskin Prairie in Indian Territory and voted to end its alliance with the Confederacy. Colonel Watie refused to accept the vote and vowed to continue his fight. This created an even deeper split in the Cherokee tribe. Watie’s forces and Cherokee civilians with attachments in the South remained loyal to Watie, even establishing a government that they claimed was the legitimate government of the Cherokee Nation. These Southern sympathizers elected Watie as the principal chief. Those now aligned with Union forces recognized John Ross as their chief, although he left Indian Territory and returned to his wife’s family in Pennsylvania. At the time of this deepening split, there were about ten thou-
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sand Cherokees with Union sympathies and seven thousand supporters of the Confederacy. This situation actually created a civil war within a civil war. On May 10, 1864, Watie was promoted to the rank of brigadier general, the only American Indian to attain this rank in the Civil War. In the remaining months of the conflict, General Watie fought without reservations for his beloved Confederacy. One of his most spectacular successes was the sinking of the steam-driven ferry J. R. Williams on the Arkansas River at Pleasant Bluff and making off with food and clothing for his Cherokee and Creek troopers, breaking a major supply route for Union forces at Fort Gibson. Successful raids on Union supplies kept Watie’s forces busy, supplied, and inspired to stay in the fight. The Battle of Cabin Creek. Because the battlefield situation for the Confederacy was growing worse, Watie called all the Cherokee units to his camp on June 24, 1864. At that meeting, the Cherokee Troops, Confederate States of America, resolved to “unanimously re-enlist as soldiers for the war, be it long or short.” In September of 1864, Watie masterminded a plan to attack and steal a Union supply-wagon train worth one million dollars. This battle was fought at Cabin Creek in Indian Territory and is said to have been Watie’s greatest success. His brilliance and bravery were not enough, however, as the Confederacy was losing battle after battle. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered for the Confederacy at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. General Watie fought on, hoping to win the battle for the West, but it was not to be. On June 23, 1865, Brigadier General Stand Watie surrendered at Doakesville in Indian Territory, the last Confederate general to lay down his sword. The contribution made by American Indians in the Civil War was enormous. An estimated 3,500 fought for the Union and 1,018, or more than 28 percent, died while in service to their country. Census figures in the Cherokee Nation showed a population of 21,000 in 1860. By 1867, that number had dropped to 13,566. Approximately one-third of the nation had been lost, either in battle or to hunger and exposure, which were suffered by soldiers and civilians alike. After the war, General Watie became more involved in the political activities of the Cherokee Nation and in resettling his people in the aftermath of the conflict. On September 7, 1871, the great general became ill and was taken to his old home at Honey Creek, where he died on September 9. See also: Cherokee Tobacco case; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870. Kay Hively
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Sources for Further Study Cunningham, Frank. General Stand Watie’s Confederate Indians. 1959. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. A full account of Stand Watie’s efforts during the Civil War and his political life within the Cherokee Nation. Many photographs of that era. Dale, Edward Everett, and Morris L. Wardell. History of Oklahoma. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948. Contains a thorough chapter on the Civil War in Oklahoma by two outstanding Oklahoma historians. Gaines, W. Craig. The Confederate Cherokees: John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Rifles. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Concentrates on Colonel John Drew’s regiment and contrasts it with Stand Watie’s more successful regiment. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Civil War in the American West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Discusses the Civil War battles that were fought west of the Mississippi River. Woodworth, S. E. Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990. Discusses Jefferson’s top military men and their leadership on the Western front during the Civil War.
Code of Handsome Lake Date: 1799 Locale: Western New York State Tribes involved: Iroquois Confederacy Categories: Eighteenth century history, Nineteenth century history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: Native American and Christian traditions merge to create the Longhouse religion, aimed at reviving indigenous cultures. The Code of Handsome Lake was one of several Native American religions that evolved in reaction to European colonization. These religions often combined traditional Native American beliefs and rituals with the introduction of a Christian-style savior who was said to be able to recapture for Native Americans the better days they had known before colonization. One well-known example of this fusion was the Ghost Dance religion, which was begun by the prophet Wovoka, who had been raised with both Native American and Christian influences. Tenskwatawa (also known as
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the Delaware Prophet) also formulated a religion that combined both traditions during the eighteenth century. Handsome Lake. Handsome Lake was born at Conawagus, a Seneca village near contemporary Avon, New York, on the Genesee River. He was a member of the Seneca nation, one of the five nations that had joined together as the Iroquois Confederacy. His personal name was Ganeodiyo; Handsome Lake, a reference to Lake Ontario, is one of the fifty chieftainship lines of the Iroquois Confederacy, a title bestowed on him by clan mothers. He was a half brother of the Seneca chief Cornplanter and an uncle of Red Jacket. Handsome Lake and many other Senecas sided with the British in the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. George Washington and his subcommanders, principally General John Sullivan, were merciless with Native Americans who supported the British. During the late stages of the revolution, many Seneca communities were laid waste by scorched-earth marches that destroyed crops, livestock, and homes. After that war, many Iroquois and other Native Americans who had supported the British were forced into Canada, principally to lands secured by Joseph Brant at Grand River. Others fled westward to join other Native Americans who were still free. Those who remained in their homelands were forced onto small, impoverished reservations, and repeated attempts were made to force them out. It is estimated that by 1794, the Iroquois population had shrunk to approximately four thousand people. Handsome Lake’s revival occurred in an atmosphere of dissension within a fractured Iroquois Confederacy. The course of his life reflected the devastation of his people. Born into a prominent family of the Turtle clan, Handsome Lake distinguished himself as a leader as a young man, before the American Revolution, when Iroquois society was still largely intact. Handsome Lake’s decline began after his birthplace was taken by whites, and he was forced to move to the Allegheny Seneca reservation. The Seneca ethnologist Arthur Parker characterized Handsome Lake as a middle-sized man, unhealthy looking, dissolute, and an alcoholic. After four years lying ill in a small cabin under the care of a daughter, Handsome Lake began having a series of visions. Later, he used these visions to rally the Iroquois at a time when some of them were selling their entire winter harvest of furs for hard liquor, turning traditional ceremonies into drunken brawls, and in winter, often dying of exposure in drunken stupors. Visions and Spiritual Rebirth. Handsome Lake experienced considerable remorse over his alcoholism, but he did not stop drinking until he was
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nearly dead. In 1799, Handsome Lake experienced a number of visions in which he was taken on a great journey to the sky. During this journey, he was shown a number of personages and events from the past, present, and future. In one of his visions, Handsome Lake met George Washington, who had died that year, and heard him confirm the sovereignty of the Iroquois. After this series of visions, Handsome Lake stopped his heavy drinking and later committed his code to writing. He persuaded many other Iroquois to stop drinking and to reconstruct their lives. During his own lifetime, Handsome Lake achieved some political influence among the Senecas, but his popularity was limited because of his ideological rigidity. In 1801 and 1802, he traveled to Washington, D.C., with a delegation of Senecas to meet with President Thomas Jefferson and resist the reduction of Iroquois landholdings. The Code of Handsome Lake combines European religious influences (especially those practiced by the Quakers, which Handsome Lake had studied) with a traditional Iroquois emphasis on family, community, and the centrality of the land to the maintenance of culture. Handsome Lake’s largest following came after his death. Adherents to his code rejected alcohol and accepted his concepts of social relationships, good, and evil, which closely resemble Quakerism. The Quaker creed appealed to many Iroquois because the Quakers had been persecuted before coming to America, they had no ornate temples, and they lived frugally and communally, doing their best to respect their Native American neighbors. Syncretistic Religion. A nationalistic figure in a religious context, Handsome Lake also borrowed heavily from the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, popularizing concepts such as looking into the future for seven generations and regarding the earth as mother, ideas that became part of panIndian thought across North America and were incorporated into late twentieth century popular environmental symbolism. With its combination of Old and New World theologies, the Code of Handsome Lake sought to reconcile the gods of Europe and America. It was to be so successful that it both subsumed the ancient religion and halted the spread of Christianity among the Iroquois. The Code of Handsome Lake has continued to be widely followed in Iroquois country as the Longhouse religion. In the late twentieth century, roughly a third of the thirty thousand Iroquois in New York State attended Longhouse rites. Although his code remained popular among many Iroquois, others accused Handsome Lake of having sold out to the Quakers and white religious interests in general. Louis Hall, ideological founder of the Warrior
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Society in Iroquois country, regarded the religion of Handsome Lake as a bastardized form of Christianity grafted onto native traditions. Hall called Handsome Lake’s visions “the hallucinations of a drunk.” Opposition to these teachings is one plank in an intellectual platform that allows the Warriors to brand both the Mohawk Nation Council at Akwesasne and the Iroquois Confederacy Council as enemies of the people, and to claim that the Warriors are the true protectors of “Mohawk sovereignty.” Hall, who died in 1993, regarded Handsome Lake’s followers as traitors or “Tontos.” Hall’s Warriors split bitterly with followers of Handsome Lake over gambling and other issues, leading to violence at Akwesasne, which peaked in 1990 with the deaths of two Mohawks. See also: Iroquois Confederacy; Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting. Bruce E. Johansen Sources for Further Study Deardorff, Merle H. The Religion of Handsome Lake: Its Origins and Development. American Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 149. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1951. Presents a detailed analysis of the Handsome Lake religion from an ethnographic perspective. Handsome Lake. The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet. New York State Museum Bulletin 163. Albany: University of the State of New York, 1913. Outlines the Handsome Lake religion and discusses the historical circumstances of its creation. Johansen, Bruce E. Life and Death in Mohawk Country. Golden, Colo.: North American Press, 1993. Details conflicts involving followers of Handsome Lake’s code and Louis Hall’s Warriors at Akwesasne in the late twentieth century. Parker, Arthur. Parker on the Iroquois. Edited by William Fenton. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968. A detailed description of the Handsome Lake religion by a noted Seneca ethnologist. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. A classic work on the history of the Seneca at the time of Handsome Lake. Wright, Ronald. Stolen Continents. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. A wideranging study of North America since the voyages of Columbus. Contains extensive treatment of the Iroquois Confederacy; describes Handsome Lake and his religion in the general context of the subjugation of the confederacy after the Revolutionary War.
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Code talkers Date: 1942-1945 Locale: United States, Pacific theater of World War II Tribes involved: Navajo Categories: Twentieth century history Significance: Navajo code talkers provided a secure communications system that helped significantly in the United States’ defeat of Japan in World War II. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrialization had progressed to such a point that every area of American life was impacted. Communications particularly was affected by the invention and widespread adoption of the telephone, telegraph, and radio. When applied to military operations and strategy, the impact of such devices was readily apparent. As military operations reached large-scale operations, as field commanders’ need to keep in touch with ground and air forces intensified, and as the avoidance of “friendly fire” casualties became a serious concern, the armed services searched for ways to communicate with each sector of their organizations without having the enemy eavesdrop or decipher what was being said. Early examples of these efforts to secure an effective encrypted communications network included the British reliance on Latin in the Boer War; the United States’ reliance on the Choctaw language in October, 1918, against the German army in field operations; and American army efforts, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs early in World War II, to use the Comanche language. Although each of these attempts had limited success, it was the Navajo code talkers who would be the most important of all. Given the lack of knowledge of Native American languages by America’s enemies in World War II, as well as the reliance of these languages on oral, not written, tradition, the American military command, especially Major General Clayton Vogel (Army) and General Thomas Holcomb (Marines), investigated the possibilities of using these languages. What made the Navajo language so attractive was that fact that it is primarily verbal, relies heavily on intonation, and includes words with multiple meanings and highly complex verbs. Once the logistical problems were resolved, the Navajo language would prove to be an almost perfectly encrypted tool for military communications in the Pacific theater of the American war. Adoption and Recruitment of Code Talkers. The individual most responsible for the Marines’ use of the Navajo language in World War II was
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Philip Johnston. The son of missionaries, he was familiar with the Navajo’s culture and language. He contacted the Marine Corps’ Signal Corps and explained his ideas to the officers in charge. Arguing that the Navajo language was not well known and relied heavily on verbal intonations, Johnston persuaded the Marines to give it a test. On February 28, 1942, the test was conducted at Camp Elliot in California. In every test situation, the Navajos successfully sent and received messages. Within three months of the successful test, twenty-nine Navajos (the First 29) were recruited and sent to San Diego, California, for training. Recruit Platoon 382 was in boot camp for eight weeks and then shipped out. This original group of the First 29 developed the code that would be used throughout the war. Working together, First 29 established a code of 211 words and phrases. After field experience and experimentation, the code increased to 619 words and phrases by the end of 1945. Given the fact that the Navajo language did not contain words for military names or operations, the code talkers devised their own code for identifying what was lacking in the language itself. For instance, Adolf Hitler was Daghailchiih (Mustard Smeller), “bat-
Navajo communications men known as “code talkers” with the U.S. Marines on Saipan c. June, 1944. (National Archives)
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tleship” was lotso (whale), and “torpedo plane” became taschizzie (swallow). Many other name changes, vowel inversions, and specific intonations were incorporated into the code, making it even more difficult to unravel—so much so that even native Navajos had a difficult time in understanding everything that was being said unless they had been trained in the code itself. World War II. Given the government’s policy of assimilation and all it entailed for Native Americans, it is surprising that the Navajo were interested in helping the American war effort. If nothing else, the Meriam Report (1928) demonstrated just how terrible conditions were on the reservations throughout the country. Fortunately, enough attention was drawn to these problems that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Wheeler-Howard Act (the Indian New Deal) in 1934. Under the guidance of John Collier at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the dismemberment of general allotment took place and Native Americans were at least accorded their rights to communal land ownership and tribal identity. What made the Navajos join in the war effort depended on each individual. Essentially, however, it seems that the New Deal effort had its effect, because those Navajos who did sign up did so for patriotic reasons, to defend their country. Some Navajos also openly admitted that the Marines were very attractive to them because of their dress uniforms. Due to the efforts of John Benally and John Manuelito, two hundred Navajos were recruited for the code talking sector of the Corps. Recruiting was a difficult task, in that the Navajos recruited had to speak both Navajo and English proficiently. Also, the problems associated with the code and its importance had to be overcome. For example, since the code was so important to military operations, the Marines literally kept it secret, thereby preventing the Navajos from keeping in touch with relatives and friends. Even in field operations, not all officers and men were informed of the purpose of the Navajos. To make matters worse, the Navajos, who in many ways physically looked like the enemy, were sometimes mistaken for Japanese. The Marines overcame these problems quickly by assigning bodyguards to each code talker, as well as allowing the tribal members to continue cultural practices whenever feasible. Despite the fact that they were often referred to as “Chief” or “Geronimo,” the Navajos got along well with their compatriots in the Corps. Thirty-six hundred Navajos served in World War II, but only 420 were code talkers. The list of battles in which the code talkers participated was impressive: Saipan, Tinian, Bougainville, Okinawa, Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, the Solomon Islands (on loan to the American Navy). The code
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talkers were also used to report on the effects of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite all their efforts, the Japanese could never successfully break the Navajo code. At one point, the Japanese captured a code talker and tortured him to get the secrets of encryption. However, what the Japanese did not realize was that even the captured Navajo could not completely unravel the language and codes developed by the First 29. Postwar Recognition. The Marines were so concerned with protecting the secrecy of the code talkers that anyone who gave the information out was dealt with immediately. One good example was Philip Johnston himself, who had approached the Army with the possibility of using the code talkers. The Marines actually reprimanded Johnston for doing so. Such secrecy also meant that the code talkers could not tell their relatives and friends what they had done during the war. This often led to psychological problems for the code talkers themselves. It was not until much later that official recognition was finally accorded to the Navajo code talkers. The Navajo code talkers had their first reunion in 1969, thereby drawing national attention to what they had done. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan pronounced August 14 as “National Navajo Code Talkers Day.” Ten years later, the Pentagon officially recognized the code talkers in ceremonies performed there when an historical exhibit was opened to the public. Today, the remaining code talkers still maintain contact through their organization, the Navajo Code Talkers Association (formed in July, 1971). Fortunately for posterity, the significant contributions of the Navajo code talkers in World War II will not be forgotten. Michael V. Namorato See also: World wars. Sources for Further Study Adkins, Adam. “The Navajo Code Talkers in World War II.” New Mexico Historical Review (October, 1997): 319-347. Good overview of the literature, founding, and problems of the code talkers in World War II. McClain, Sally. Navajo Weapon. Boulder, Colo.: Books Beyond Borders, 1994. Provides an overview of the code talkers. Paul, Doris. The Navajo Code Talkers. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Dorrance, 1973. Gives a good overview of the Navajo code talkers and their contributions during World War II. Watson, Bruce. “Navajo Code Talkers: A Few Good Men.” Smithsonian (August, 1993): 34-43. A personal account of some of the code talkers themselves.
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Colliflower v. Garland Date: 1964 Locale: Fort Belknap, Montana Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Civil rights, Court cases, Twentieth century history Significance: The U.S. Court of Appeals decision that federal courts do have the right to determine the legality of tribal court orders of detention influenced the U.S. Congress to pass the Indian Civil Rights Act in 1968. In 1964, Madeline Colliflower was arrested and held in jail over a minor dispute with the Fort Belknap (Montana) tribal council and tribal court about renewal of a land lease. She was an enrolled member of the tribe. She objected to being jailed and sued the tribe in federal court on a writ of habeas corpus, claiming she was illegally imprisoned, was denied the right to counsel, was denied a trial, and was never confronted with witnesses against her. She charged that her constitutional rights had been violated. The federal district court denied Colliflower’s petition, stating that tribal governments were not bound to protect constitutional rights of enrolled members living on the reservation. The U.S. Court of Appeals overturned that decision and ruled in Colliflower’s favor. It ruled that federal courts do have the right to determine the validity and legality of tribal court orders of detention. This decision was a blow to tribal sovereignty and brought forth issues of civil rights in Indian country. Among others, this case influenced the U.S. Congress to pass the Indian Civil Rights Act (1968), which extends certain protections to individuals living under tribal government. See also: Indian Civil Rights Act; Carole A. Barrett
Council of Energy Resource Tribes Date: Established 1975 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States
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Categories: Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: The Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT), founded by a group of tribal leaders, provides tribes with advice on developing and marketing the mineral and energy resources on their lands in ways that will maximize profit for, and control by, the tribes themselves. The Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT), with offices in Denver, Colorado, was organized in 1975 to gain an understanding of the natural resources controlled by the Native American tribes within the United States. Peter MacDonald, then chairperson of the Navajo Nation, was the first elected chair of the organization. It initially set out to inventory the natural resources of the various tribes in the western United States. It found that the tribes controlled one-third of the energy sources in coal and uranium as well as large supplies of petroleum, natural gas, and other essential resources. The next step was to integrate all aspects of reservation development. The Council of Energy Resource Tribes undertook a series of studies that indicated that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) had based its development efforts on irrelevant and inaccurate assumptions. CERT indicated that it was imperative that American Indian tribes work harder to provide employment. Tribes and CERT had to leverage funds and services to obtain the financial resources necessary for balanced development. CERT recognized the desire to advance on the part of the tribes, whereas the BIA could not recognize this in tribal actions. CERT also saw that prosperity and the Indian ways of doing things were not mutually exclusive. See also: Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood; Bureau of Indian Affairs. Howard Meredith
Creek War Date: July 27, 1813-August 9, 1814 Locale: Alabama Tribes involved: Muscogee (Creek) Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The destruction of the Creek nation opens Alabama to settlement and positions Andrew Jackson to win the War of 1812.
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Of all American Indian cultures, the Muscogee (called “Creeks” by the white populace) seemed the most likely to assimilate into the advancing white culture of the 1700’s and early 1800’s. Colonial deerskin traders from Charleston, South Carolina, married into this matrilineal native culture, establishing kinship ties with their wives’ families throughout the nation of Muscogee and siring mixed-blood children who became the nation’s cultural and political elite. Alexander McGillivray—of Scottish, French, and Muscogee background—was educated in Charleston and became one of the most powerful and influential micos (chiefs) in the culture’s history. William Weatherford, William McIntosh, and others born to both cultures remained influential in the tribe through and beyond the coming Creek War. President George Washington appointed Revolutionary War veteran Benjamin Hawkins as Indian Agent to the Muscogee, and Hawkins attempted to teach the Muscogee modern, European-derived farming techniques. With well-established agricultural traditions of their own, the Muscogee took easily to the teachings of both Hawkins and their own mixed-blood people. The Muscogees established within their nation a subculture that featured frame houses, fenced fields, domesticated animals, the adoption of Anglo clothing and technology, and all the other vestments of the traditional frontier South, including cotton production with African American slave labor for the wealthy. The transition was not smooth, however. One problem was the continued encroachment of white civilization. So relentless were the demands of state governments for cessions of Muscogee lands that the natives named one Tennessee governor the Dirt King and gave a Georgia governor the name Always Asking for Land. Land Hunger and Genocide. As buckskin breeches went out of fashion in Europe, the market for American deerskins evaporated. The Muscogee now found themselves with nothing to trade for the white man’s clothing, weapons, household utensils, and other goods to which they had become accustomed. Continuing to buy these goods on credit, they fell deeply into debt to U.S. and British trading houses. The Jefferson administration, through Hawkins, encouraged the paying off of these debts through cessions of land. The Muscogee strenuously objected to this plan, even when the U.S. government offered perpetual annuities to the tribe and bonuses to local micos who signed land treaties. The pressure on Muscogee hunting grounds intensified, and those micos who ceded land became enemies in the eyes of many of their kinsmen. More sinister than the United States’ insatiable land hunger was its innate distrust of American Indians and its general desire to eliminate
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rather than assimilate them. Some segments of the native population—Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, Muscogee— seemed to be constantly at war with the frontiersmen. For whites, these violent clashes supported their belief that American Indians were dangerous savages in need of extermination. Another problem was the strength and depth of the Muscogees’ own native culture. Their relationship to their environment and their tribal traditions had been deeply satisfying. Although white culture made life more comfortable, it did Choctaw leader Pushmataha was made a brinot resolve any life-threaten- gadier general in the U.S. Army for his service in the Creek War and the War of 1812. (Library ing problem for the Muscoof Congress) gee. Thus, it was a luxury, not a necessity. The pressure of encroaching white settlement continued to increase all along the U.S. frontier in the early 1800’s, prompting the Shawnee chief Tecumseh to attempt an alliance of all Native American tribes so that, together, they might resist further white advances and save American Indian lands and culture. When Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, visited the Muscogee tribal council to urge an alliance with the Shawnee, head mico Big Warrior rejected the idea and called for continued peace with white Americans. A movement—part spiritual, part political—was already growing among the Muscogee, however, calling for a return to the roots of Muscogee tradition and a rejection of the values and artifacts of white society. The traditionalists were primarily young. Among their leaders were men who had successfully assimilated white culture—half-white cotton planters such as Peter McQueen, and such white traders’ sons as William Weatherford and Josiah Francis. The leaders of the progressive, assimilationist wing were often older. Some, like William McIntosh, lived like white men. Others, like Big Warrior, maintained a traditional Muscogee lifestyle yet accepted the reality of progress.
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Indian Civil War. On July 27, 1813, this cultural and political dispute broke into open warfare, a civil war within the nation over the direction the culture should take: toward the white man’s style of life or back to the purity and spirituality of Muscogee life. The reactionary wing, led by a reluctant Weatherford, a vengeful Francis, and McQueen, became known, from the red color symbolic of war, as Red Sticks. The war spilled over into white society with the killing of isolated settlers in southern Tennessee and the massacre of two large populations of whites, blacks, and Creeks at Forts Sinquefield and Mims in lower Alabama. These killings brought Major General Andrew Jackson into the conflict with an army of Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee militia, joined by progressive Muscogee, Choctaw, and Cherokee allies. The early campaign was tedious and unsuccessful. With winter approaching, pay in arrears, little to eat, and enlistments expiring, many militiamen prepared to go home. Jackson branded them all mutineers and arrested and executed six leaders, cowing the frontiersmen into remaining to continue the fight. Through hard marching and sporadic fighting, the allied force of frontiersmen and progressive Native Americans chased and battled the Red Sticks across Alabama, finally cornering a large contingent at Tohopeka (Horseshoe Bend) on the Tallapoosa River. In this battle, more than five hundred Red Sticks were killed, destroying Red Stick resistance. In the ensuing Treaty of Horseshoe Bend (August 9, 1814), Jackson took approximately twenty-five million acres of land from both Red Stick insurgents and his Muscogee, Choctaw, and Cherokee allies. The cession opened the land to immediate white and African American settlement and created the heart of the cotton South. The Creek Indian War left Andrew Jackson with a veteran and victorious army well-positioned to block the British invasion of New Orleans, giving the United States its most impressive land victory in the War of 1812 and opening the path to the White House for Andrew Jackson. For the Muscogee, the defeat spelled the beginning of the end of their existence in their homeland. Within two decades, they and most other surviving members of the South’s Five Civilized Tribes were banished to the Indian Territory, Oklahoma. See also: Horseshoe Bend Treaty; Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830. Maurice Melton Sources for Further Study Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
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1993. Describes the competitors, pricing, credit policies, markets, and distribution of the Muscogee deerskin trade; provides a detailed look at Muscogee life. George, Noah Jackson. A Memorandum of the Creek Indian War. Meredith, N.H.: R. Lothrop, 1815. 2d ed. Edited by W. Stanley Hoole. University, Ala: Confederate Publishing Company, 1986. Based on General Jackson’s reports and correspondence, this pamphlet gives a battle-by-battle account of the campaign from the U.S. perspective. Written amid the passions of the War of 1812, it asserts that the Red Sticks were tools of the British. Griffith, Benjamin W., Jr. McIntosh and Weatherford, Creek Indian Leaders. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988. A highly readable account of the war. Argues that Weatherford was a most reluctant Red Stick, knowing from the outset that the movement was doomed. Halbert, Henry Sale, and T. H. Ball. The Creek War of 1813 and 1814. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1895. Reprint with introduction and annotation by Frank L. Owsley, Jr. University: University of Alabama Press, 1969. Provides a lengthy discussion of the causes of the war, presenting it as an intertribal difference that would have been resolved had whites not interfered. Hudson, Charles M. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976. Places the Muscogee within the larger framework of the native population of the area. One of several excellent volumes on Southeastern American Indians by ethnologist Hudson. Martin, Joel. Sacred Revolt: The Muscogees’ Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Emphasizes the importance of spirituality in Muscogee life, in the evolution of the Red Sticks’ back-to-our-culture campaign, and in their war making. Owsley, Frank Lawrence, Jr. Struggle for the Borderlands: The Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans, 1812-1815. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. Considers the Creek War in the larger context of the War of 1812. Woodward, Thomas S. Woodward’s Reminiscences of the Creek, or Muscogee Indians, Contained in Letters to Friends in Georgia and Alabama. Tuscaloosa: Alabama Book Store, 1859. Reprint. Mobile, Ala.: Southern University Press, 1965. A veteran of the war, Woodward knew many Muscogee leaders and their culture. Although written with the wisdom and common sense of later years, this entertaining little volume has its errors and must be read with a critical eye.
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Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of Date: September 27, 1830 Locale: Mississippi Tribes involved: Choctaw Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Treaties Significance: In the first treaty signed after passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the experience of the Choctaws foreshadowed that of many tribes as they sold their lands in Mississippi and agreed to move west. The Choctaws originally occupied much of present-day Mississippi. The tribe prided itself on good relations with the United States and the fact that it had never fought against the United States. Instead Choctaws had fought as American allies in the Creek War (1813-1814) and War of 1812. Nevertheless the Choctaws came under increasing pressure from American settlers as the area filled rapidly after the War of 1812. In treaties going back to 1801, the Choctaws had ceded land to facilitate settlement. Pressed by General Andrew Jackson, in 1820 the tribe agreed to the Treaty of Doak’s Stand. Five million acres of land in western and west-central Mississippi were sold to the United States; in return, the Choctaws acquired thirteen million acres west of the Mississippi. The acquisition of western land clearly raised the prospect of removal, though few Choctaws chose to emigrate. American pressure mounted, however, especially after Jackson’s election to the presidency in 1828. Encouraged by his administration’s stated goal of removing the tribes east of the Mississippi, in January, 1830, the Mississippi legislature voted to extend state jurisdiction over Choctaw lands, effectively ignoring tribal claims to the land. Feeling pressured and believing that American power was irresistible, Choctaw leaders agreed to negotiate. Terms proposed by Greenwood LeFlore, recently elected principal chief of the tribe, were rejected as too expensive. The Choctaws then agreed to a new round of negotiations at Dancing Rabbit Creek. There in September, 1813, chiefs LeFlore, Mushulatubbee, and Nitekechi and six thousand Choctaws met American commissioners John Eaton and John Coffee. The Americans had made elaborate preparations to feed and entertain the Choctaws and to create a festive air for the negotiations. Reluctantly, the chiefs agreed to the terms requested: In return for a $20,000,
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twenty-year annuity and other financial considerations, the Choctaws would give up the remaining ten million acres of their land in Mississippi and move to their lands in present-day southeastern Oklahoma. Choctaws who wished to stay in Mississippi would receive one-squaremile allotments and U.S. citizenship, provided they registered within six months of the treaty’s ratification and lived on their lands for five years. (Federal officials saw to it that relatively few Choctaws remained under this provision.) Though a few hundred Choctaws had departed for Indian Territory in 1830 in hopes of locating the best land, removal of the bulk of the tribe began in 1831 and extended over a three-year period. Much hardship accompanied the Choctaw Trail of Tears, especially in 1831, and about 15 percent of the tribe died during removal. The Choctaws were the first major tribe to be moved under the Indian Removal Act, and their experience established an important precedent that would be followed with other eastern tribes. See also: Creek War; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Trail of Tears. William C. Lowe
Declaration of First Nations Date: 1981 Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: Increased activism beginning in the 1960’s resulted in a statement of principles that has guided subsequent native political activities and land-claims negotiations in Canada. Though not without strains, Canadians generally regard their country’s multiethnic heritage with pride. Diversity is applauded in a variety of ways, but special recognition is accorded to the “founding nations” of Canada. Unfortunately for Native Canadians, the term “founding nation” is usually reserved for only two groups—the French and the English. Public and government recognition that Canadian Indians as a group had suffered economically, socially, and educationally became widespread
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in the 1960’s. In order to engage natives in a dialogue regarding the issues that most affected them, the federal government encouraged the development of both regional and national native political organizations. The National Indian Council, which was formed in 1961, represented treaty Indians, nontreaty Indians, nonstatus Indians, and Metis. In 1968 this group divided into the Canadian Metis Society, representing Metis and nonstatus Indians, and the National Indian Brotherhood as the organization of status Indians (both treaty and nontreaty). Politicization grew, particularly following introduction by the government of its White Paper on Indian Affairs in 1969. In 1975, the various Dene bands sought Canadian recognition of the Subarctic Athapaskans as a distinct nation. The National Indian Brotherhood became highly involved in Canadian constitutional reform. The Declaration of First Nations, issued in 1981, was a concise statement of native sovereignty meant to influence the constitutional reform process. Following the Declaration of First Nations, the National Indian Brotherhood was dissolved and reconstituted as the Assembly of First Nations. They were ultimately successful in inserting language that affirmed “existing aboriginal and treaty rights,” though not explicitly defined, into the Constitution Act of 1982. Natives continued to pursue the recognition of their cultures as distinct societies and as “founding nations” of Canada by defeating the Meech Lake Accord and by working for a form of native self-government apart from the provinces and the federal government. See also: Fifteen Principles; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Meech Lake Accord. Pamela R. Stern
Delgamuukw v. British Columbia Date: December, 1997 Locale: British Columbia and Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: Court cases, Twentieth century history Significance: A landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision on land claims proclaimed the acceptability of oral tradition as legal evidence and outlined eight core components and a threefold test of aboriginal title to land.
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This landmark case involving the Supreme Court of Canada, decided in December, 1997, conceivably revolutionized aboriginal affairs in Canada— particularly land claims—as well as jurisprudence in some fundamental ways. The high court overturned the decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal in the matter of land claims by the House of Delgamuukw. The House, speaking on behalf of fifty-one hereditary chiefs, claimed ownership and jurisdiction over fifty-eight thousand square kilometers of land in northwestern British Columbia as native lands whose title dated back before confederation. The group further argued that aboriginal title had not been extinguished when British Columbia entered the confederation. The group attempted to use oral tradition to argue the first claim and section 35 of the 1982 Constitution Act to argue the latter point. Justice Alan McEachern of the British Columbia Supreme Court threw out the aboriginal case after one of the longest trials in Canadian history, rejecting the use of oral evidence and agreeing with the British Columbia government’s position that title had been extinguished with entrance into the confederation. The case then went to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, which, by a three-to-two decision, overruled Judge McEachern on the question of extinguishment. The court did, however, agree with him on rejecting claims of ownership although it did not entertain questions of the fiduciary duties of the Crown in relation to lands claimed. The case then went before the Supreme Court of Canada, which issued a unanimous landmark decision in December, 1997. The Court ordered a new trial, largely for two reasons. First, it ruled that Judge McEachern had erred in rejecting oral tradition as evidence. Noting that the laws of evidence typically work against the rights and customs of aboriginal people, the Court argued that, notwithstanding the challenges created by the use of oral histories as proof of historical facts, the laws of evidence must be adapted in order that this type of evidence can be accommodated and placed on an equal footing with the type of historical evidence that courts are familiar with, which largely consists of documentary evidence. Second, it ruled that the question of aboriginal title had to be dealt with more closely and clearly. The court therefore spelled out eight core components of aboriginal title. Title is a collective right, it is inalienable, it is a legal right to the land itself, it arises from aboriginal occupation of the land before colonial assertion, it is an exclusive right to use the land for a variety of purposes, it includes mineral rights, it is to protect aboriginal relationship to the land, and lastly it is a right but not an absolute right. To prove aboriginal title, the Supreme Court set out a threefold test. First, the land must have been occupied by aboriginal peoples before
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Crown assertion of sovereignty (for British Columbia, that means before 1846); second, there must be continuity between present occupancy of the land extending back prior to 1846 (that is, occupancy must not have been interrupted or given up); and third, at the date of Crown assertion of sovereignty, the occupation of the land by aboriginals must have been exclusive. The case presented many issues unaddressed by the Canadian Supreme Court, issues largely outside its competency, so it ordered a new trial in which the foregoing principles were to have been taken into account. The high court thus urged all parties to serious negotiations in “good faith,” which it hoped would result in compromises but ultimately a settlement because, as the majority decision concluded, “let us face it, we are all here to stay.” See also: Fifteen Principles; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Meech Lake Accord; Nisga’a Agreement in Principle; Nunavut Territory; Reserve system of Canada; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Gregory Walters
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Date: Established 1967 Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: Since the Indian Act of 1868, Indian affairs have been handled by various Canadian government departments; DIAND officially took over this function in 1967. The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in its present form was created as a separate entity within the Canadian government in 1967 by an act of Parliament. Before that time, Indian affairs and policy were overseen by a Department of Indian Affairs that was often part of a larger governmental unit with other responsibilities. The Indian Act of 1868 gave responsibility for Indian affairs to the secretary of state. In 1880, a revision of the 1876 Indian Act created a separate Department of
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Indian Affairs. The department was given the power to “depose” western Indian leaders in 1894; in 1895 it was given the power to rent out reserve lands to individual Indians regardless of whether the band approved. In 1936, Indian affairs became the responsibility of a branch of the Department of Mines and Resources. In 1959 the Indian Affairs branch was transferred to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. In 1965 the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources took charge of Indian affairs. As its name implies, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development was established with a twofold purpose: to administer the Indian Act, including the provision of funds and services to the eligible Indian and Inuit populations, and to promote and manage development of the northern territories. DIAND is involved in providing or assisting with Indian education, housing, medical care, and economic assistance. DIAND generally is concerned with those bands recognized under the Indian Act; therefore, many thousands of Indian, Inuit, and Metis people—perhaps 75 percent of the population of these groups— receive no services from DIAND. The Indian and Inuit services section of DIAND is composed of a number of branches that report to a deputy minister and to the minister, who is a member of Parliament. There are also a number of regional and district offices; since 1988, the structure has been changing (many district offices have been closed) as First Nations themselves have assumed responsibility for delivering proUnder Canada’s Department of Indian Af- grams, with DIAND acting in an fairs and Northern Development, eligible advisory capacity and providing indigenous Indian and Inuit populations re- technical support. ceive education, housing, medical care, and Historically, the Department economic assistance, but because DIAND of Indian Affairs long continued generally is concerned with those bands the paternalistic attitude estabrecognized under the Indian Act thousands of Indian, Inuit, and Metis receive no ser- lished by the British; this began to change significantly only in vices. (National Archives)
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the late 1960’s. One controversy involved the Canadian government’s proposed “White Paper,” released in 1969, intended to provide a new framework for Indian-government relations. Many bands strongly opposed the White Paper’s proposals, and the government withdrew it two years later. In 1973, the Office of Native Claims was established as a branch of DIAND to consider and negotiate native land claims. Since the 1970’s, DIAND has been dealing with Indian concerns about environmental damage to their land base. DIAND has also been involved in negotiations concerning the establishment of a new native territory in the north, to be known as Nunavut. Nunavut will comprise most of the eastern Northwest Territories. See also: Indian Act of 1876; Indian Act of 1951; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Gregory Walters
Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty Date: Established 1974 Locale: U.S.-Canadian border of New York State and Ontario Tribes involved: Mohawk Categories: Organizations, Protest movements, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: DRUMS opposed speakeasies and casinos on Mohawk reservations. Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty (DRUMS) was established at the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation in 1974. The Akwesasne Mohawk reservation (also called the Saint Regis Mohawk reserve) straddles the United States-Canadian border near Massena, New York, and Cornwall, Ontario. Beginning in the early 1970’s, Akwesasne residents established DRUMS to combat increasing smuggling across the border. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, DRUMS’s main focus turned to “speakeasies”—small, illegal drinking establishments that were contributing to an increasing number of traffic accidents on the reservation. By June, 1989, DRUMS members were beginning to talk of blockading Route 37, the reservation’s main highway, to keep away the clientele of several illegal casinos that had been constructed with smuggling profits.
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Many people believed that, if the New York state police refused to close the gaming houses, civil disobedience was their only option. DRUMS planned a blockade for June 9 but abandoned it in favor of a peaceful march. On July 20, two hundred Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and New York state troopers raided seven casinos on the reservation, arresting thirteen people and seizing cash and financial records. DRUMS continued to oppose the casinos until May 1, 1990, when two Mohawk men, Mathew Pyke and “Junior” Edwards, were shot to death in firefights. After that, New York, Ontario, and Quebec police occupied the reservation, and the gaming houses were closed. See also: Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Bruce E. Johansen
Duro v. Reina Date: 1984-1990 Locale: Arizona Tribes involved: Pima-Maricopa Categories: Court cases, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: A U.S. Supreme Court decision on tribal sovereignty limited the legal jurisdiction of a tribe to its members only. In 1984, while living on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation in Arizona, Albert Duro, an enrolled member of another tribe, shot and killed an Indian youth within reservation boundaries. Under the Major Crimes Act (1885 and amended), Duro was charged with murder, but eventually federal charges were dismissed. Duro then was placed in the custody of the Pima-Maricopa police and was charged in tribal court with illegally firing a weapon on the reservation. Tribal courts’ powers are regulated by a federal statute that limits tribal criminal penalties to misdemeanors. After the tribal court denied Duro’s motion to dismiss his case for lack of jurisdiction, he brought a petition before the federal court to dismiss. Duro’s case was accepted on the basis that the Pima-Maricopa tribe’s attempt to assert jurisdiction over a nonmember Indian would constitute discrimination based on race, a violation of equal protection guarantees of the Indian Civil Rights Act (1968). Ultimately, in 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that Indian tribes lack jurisdiction over per-
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sons who are not tribal members. Therefore, the Pima-Maricopa tribe had no criminal jurisdiction over Duro, a nonmember. The Court’s decision set boundaries on the concept of tribal sovereignty in criminal cases and limited tribes to controlling internal relations among their own tribal members. See also: Indian Civil Rights Act; Major Crimes Act. Carole A. Barrett
Elk v. Wilkins Date: 1884 Locale: Nebraska Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Court cases, Nineteenth century history Significance: A U.S. Supreme Court decision found that Native Americans are not citizens of the United States and therefore not entitled to vote in U.S. elections. In 1884, John Elk, an American Indian, was refused permission to register to vote in a local election in Omaha, Nebraska. When he later appeared at the polls, he was again refused the right to vote. Elk lived apart from his tribe and met all residence and other requirements of the city of Omaha and the state of Nebraska but was turned away on the basis that he was an Indian and, therefore, not a United States citizen. Elk filed a lawsuit charging the state of Nebraska with violation of his Fourteenth Amendment rights by denying his right to vote. As an Indian born in the United States, Elk argued he was a United States citizen as well as a state citizen. Nebraska courts ruled Elk ineligible to vote, and on November 3, 1884, the U.S. Supreme Court found Nebraska correct in denying Elk’s right to vote. The majority of the Court determined that an Indian who was born a member of a tribe was not a United States citizen but a member of a distinct nation that was separate and apart from the United States. Therefore, the Court determined, a specific act of Congress would be required to make Indian people citizens of the United States. See also: Indian Citizenship Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933. Carole A. Barrett
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Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith Date: 1990 Locale: Oregon Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Court cases, Religion and missionary activities, Twentieth century history Significance: A U.S. Supreme Court decision allows states to apply drug laws to Native American employees who use peyote as a religious sacrament. In this April 17, 1990, decision, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted a narrow interpretation of the free exercise clause, allowing Oregon to apply its drug laws to prohibit Native Americans from using peyote in religious ceremonies. Alfred Smith and Galen Black, two members of the Native American Church, were fired from their jobs in a drug rehabilitation clinic after their employer discovered that they used the hallucinogenic drug peyote during religious rituals. They applied for unemployment compensation, but Oregon’s Department of Human Resources denied their claims based on a state law that disqualified employees who were discharged for work-related “misconduct.” A state appellate court and the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the denial of benefits was a violation of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. Oregon appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that Smith’s free exercise of religion had to be balanced by the state’s interest in preventing the use of harmful drugs. The Supreme Court’s first judgment was to remand the case to the Oregon Supreme Court to decide whether state law made an exception for the religious use of peyote. Oregon’s court responded that state law provided no exception and that the only issue was the religious freedom of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court accepted the case for a second time. The Supreme Court’s major precedent, Sherbert v. Verner (1963), suggested that Oregon could prevail only if it could defend its policy with the “compelling state interest” test combined with the “least restrictive alternative” test. From this perspective, it appeared difficult for Oregon to justify the refusal of unemployment benefits to Smith and Black. The Court had upheld the Sherbert tests in at least seven cases since 1963.
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In the Smith case, however, the Court voted six to three that Oregon had no constitutional obligation to make a religious exception for illegal drugs, provided that the law was reasonable, neutral, and generally applicable to all persons. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that in enforcing valid criminal laws not specifically directed at religious acts, government had no obligation to make a religious exemption. Such matters were generally left to the legislature’s discretion, even if an “unfortunate consequence” was an incidental burden on unpopular religious practices. The three dissenting justices maintained that Oregon had not shown a compelling state interest to refuse to allow peyote for religious usage. The Smith decision appeared to limit the extent to which religious minorities might claim constitutional protection for unpopular practices. Religious leaders and civil libertarians were outraged at the ruling, and Congress responded to the anti-Smith movement by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, which was designed to restore both the compelling state interest test and the least restrictive means test against any incidental burden on religious practice. See also: American Indian Religious Freedom Act; Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association; National Council of American Indians; Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council; Society of American Indians. Thomas T. Lewis
Epidemics and diseases Date: Colonial times-present Locale: North America Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Colonial history, Eighteenth century history, Nineteenth century history, Twentieth century history Significance: Within decades after contact with Europeans, Native American societies experienced rapid population declines; although the reasons for the demographic collapse of native North America are complex, a prominent factor in that decline was Old World infectious diseases, introduced by European explorers and settlers. After the arrival of Europeans, the estimated aboriginal population of native North America began to decline. The Spanish intrusion into the South-
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west and Southeast (c. 1520) launched a series of lethal epidemics that infected various Native American people. The epidemiological conquest of native North America accelerated after the early seventeenth century with English and French colonization along the Atlantic seaboard. The dramatic population decline of indigenous people continued until the early twentieth century. By 1920, only 270,995 Native Americans remained after the epidemiological onslaught of European colonization. They were the survivors of perhaps 1.2 million to 18 million Native Americans who inhabited North America at the time of the arrival of Europeans. Increased mortality among Native Americans as a result of introduced European diseases is not attributable to a lack of sufficient immunological response to infections in general but to the fact that Native Americans had no prior exposure to these pathogens. The “new” pathogens therefore not only created a high degree of physiological stress but also engendered cultural stress. Epidemic episodes often resulted in a breakdown in the social system, elevating mortality levels. Although it is recognized that European infectious diseases devastated many Native American societies, it also must be acknowledged that precontact native North America was not a disease-free paradise. Biological and archaeological evidence documents the fact that pre-contact Native American populations suffered from a number of afflictions. Malnutrition, anemia, and a variety of tuberculoid, trepanematoid, and other degenerative, chronic, and congenital conditions plagued indigenous populations. The general state of health, in combination with ecological and cultural factors, therefore, greatly affected the post-contact disease experience of Native American societies. Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. No Old World pathogen was more lethal than smallpox, which was unleashed in the Americas during the Spanish conquest. For four years, 1520-1524, the disease diffused across Central and North America. Whether smallpox reached pandemic proportions is debatable, but in populations with no prior exposure, mortality could be as high as 60 percent. The infected native populations experienced high death rates. Florida’s Timucua population may have once had 772,000 people, but by 1524 the group was reduced to 361,000. Today the timucua are no longer a distinct ethnic group. Throughout the 1500’s and into the next century, twenty-three European infectious diseases appeared in native North America. In these various regions, Native American populations contracted diseases on the average of every 7.3 years. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and the bubonic plague affected Native American populations largely east of the Mississippi and in
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North American Epidemics and Regions Affected, 1520-1696 Date of Onset
Epidemic
1520 1531 1545 1559 1586 1592
Smallpox Measles Bubonic plague Influenza Typhus Smallpox
1602 1612
Smallpox Bubonic plague
1633 1637 1639
Measles Scarlet fever Smallpox
1646 1647 1649
Smallpox Influenza Smallpox
1655 1658
Smallpox Measles, diphtheria
1662
Smallpox
1665
Smallpox
1669 1674 1675 1677 1687 1692
Smallpox Smallpox Influenza Smallpox Smallpox Measles
1696
Smallpox, Influenza
Regions Affected All regions Southwest Southwest South Atlantic states, Gulf area, Southwest South Atlantic states, Gulf area North Atlantic states, South Atlantic states, Old Northwest, Great Lakes states, Midwest east of Mississippi River, Southwest Southwest North Atlantic states, South Atlantic states, Gulf area, Southwest North Atlantic states North Atlantic states North Atlantic states, South Atlantic states, Old Northwest, Great Lakes states, Midwest east of Mississippi River Gulf area, Southwest North Atlantic states North Atlantic states, South Atlantic states, Gulf area Gulf area North Atlantic states, Gulf area, Old Northwest, Great Lakes states, Midwest east of Mississippi River, Southwest North Atlantic states, Old Northwest, Great Lakes states, Midwest east of Mississippi River South Atlantic states, Old Northwest, Great Lakes states, Midwest east of Mississippi River North Atlantic states Gulf area, southern Plains North Atlantic states North Atlantic states North Atlantic states North Atlantic states, Old Northwest, Great Lakes states, Midwest east of Mississippi River South Atlantic states, Gulf area
Sources: Data are from Dobyns, Henry, F., Their Number Became Thinned (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1983); Thornton, Russell, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).
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the Southwest. The Huron tribe, which possibly numbered up to thirty-five thousand people in the early 1600’s, was reduced by 1640 to an estimated ten thousand people. Seventeenth century Europeans generally viewed the decline of surrounding Native American populations as evidence of divine intervention. God would destroy “Godless savages,” they thought, so that Christian civilization could prosper. Demographically, European populations grew and expanded geographically as declining indigenous populations relinquished their lands and resources. Those Native Americans that resisted white encroachment were vanquished through genocidal warfare or reduced to mission life. Eighteenth Century. By the eighteenth century, the European population had reached an estimated 223,000 people. Although Europeans were not the demographic majority, epidemics continued to pave the way for further colonization. Throughout the Atlantic coastal region and into the interior westward, native populations were decimated through genocidal warfare and diseases. In the southeastern region of North America, for example, the estimated Native American population in 1685 was 199,400. By 1970, the population was reduced to approximately 55,900—a decline of 71.9 percent. By contrast, Europeans and African Americans in the region increased their population to 1,630,100 or 31.4 percent. In sum, European expansion during the three first centuries of colonization produced a demographic collapse of Native American populations. Introduced European infectious diseases, combined with periodic genocidal warfare and the destruction of indigenous lifeways, reduced Native Americans to approximately 600,000. By contrast, the European population grew to 5,308,483. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The nineteenth century represents the final century of Native American population decline as a result of epidemics. During this century, twenty-four epidemics affected Native American populations. Smallpox continued to appear every 7.9 years among some segment of the Native American population. Between the smallpox episodes, Native Americans contracted measles and cholera every 22.5 years. According to Henry Dobyns, an anthropologist and authority on Native American historical demography, more epidemics occurred during this century, with more frequency, than during any other. One of the most devastating epidemics during this century was the 1837-1838 smallpox epidemic. The disease diffused across most of native North America, but the Northern Plans region was hit especially hard. It is
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estimated that seventeen thousand Native Americans on the northern Plains died before the epidemic subsided. Such acute infectious diseases continued to plague Native American communities into the early reservation period. Only then did these infections give way to the twentieth century epidemics of influenza, tuberculosis, and trachoma—chronic conditions that would infect Native Americans until the 1950’s. The post-contact epidemic history of Native North America can be described as one of continual population decline coupled with the destruction of numerous unique lifeways. Native Americans, however, during these tragic times, did not remain passive actors. Native American societies employed a number of cultural adaptations to respond to the onslaught of infectious diseases. Some societies modified their kin systems, fused with other tribal nations, or created new nations from various remnant tribes. Diseases were powerful agents of cultural and biological change. The placement of Native Americans on reservations or in rural communities did not mark the end of epidemics. Acute infectious diseases have been replaced by “diseases of poverty.” Many of these afflictions reach epidemic proportions in some Native American communities. Deaths from tuberculosis, type II diabetes mellitus, violence, suicide, accidents, and alcoholism exceed the national average. In addition, Native Americans now have to contend with another epidemic—the threat of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection—a disease that has made its presence felt in some Native American communities. See also: Beaver Wars; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indianwhite relations: French colonial; Indian-white relations: Norse; Indianwhite relations: Russian colonial; Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial. Gregory R. Campbell Sources for Further Study American Indian Culture and Research Journal 13 (1989). Special issue on contemporary issues in Native American health, edited by Gregory R. Campbell. A collection of articles that focus on issues revolving around American Indians’ health in the later 1980’s. Campbell, Gregory R. “The Politics of Counting: Critical Reflections About the Depopulation Question of Native North America.” In Native Voices on the Columbian Quincentenary, edited by Donald A. Grinde. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California, 1994. An examination of the European manipulation of Native American population counts as justification for continued colonial expansion.
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Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Sweeping yet detailed look at the effect of disease in the European colonization of the Americas. Cook, Noble David, and W. George Lovell, eds. Secret Judgments of God: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. A collection of symposium papers, presented from a wide range of disciplines, assessing the impact of European diseases and epidemics on the Native American population. Dobyns, Henry F. Their Number Became Thinned. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. A comprehensive volume addressing the population dynamics of eastern North America. Stannard, David E. American Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. A discussion of Native American population decline in relation to European conquest and colonization. Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Provides an overview of Native American population and recovery from European contact to 1980. Verano, John W., and Douglas H. Ubelaker, eds. Disease and Demography in the Americas. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. A collection of articles assessing the health and demography of precontact and post-contact Native American populations.
Ex parte Crow Dog Date: 1883 Locale: Dakota Territory Tribes involved: Lakota Categories: Court cases, Native government, Nineteenth century history Significance: A U.S. Supreme Court decision found that the United States had no jurisdiction in cases between two Indians concerning events on Indian land. Crow Dog, a well-known Lakotan, killed Spotted Tail, another popular tribal leader, at the Rosebud Agency in Dakota Territory in 1883. Crow Dog was arrested, removed from the reservation, and tried in the territorial court of Dakota, where he was convicted and sentenced to death. In killing
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Spotted Tail, Crow Dog admitted he had broken Lakota law, but he maintained he should be punished according to Lakota customs, not by United States law. Under tribal law, Crow Dog would be shunned by his own family and would become responsible for care and protection of Spotted Tail’s family. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Crow Dog and declared the United States had no jurisdiction over the crime of one Indian against another on Indian land. Because Congress provided no federal jurisdiction over Indian crimes on reservations, even a murBrule Sioux war chief Crow Dog, pictured circa derer could not be punished. 1900. (Library of Congress) Therefore, Crow Dog returned to his people. This decision proved to be a major step in relations between Native Americans and the U.S. government, in that it encouraged Congress to enact legislation to give federal jurisdiction over Indians in certain legal matters. One key piece of legislation, the Major Crimes Act (1885), directed federal courts to assume jurisdiction over seven crimes committed on Indian land: murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary, and larceny. See also: Major Crimes Act. Carole A. Barrett
Fallen Timbers, Battle of Date: August 20, 1794 Locale: South of present-day Toledo, Ohio Tribes involved: Chickasaw, Choctaw, Miami, Shawnee
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Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: The resulting Treaty of Greenville secures U.S. control over much of Ohio and ousts its resident Native Americans. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, the British acknowledged the United States’ claims to territory west of the Appalachians and made no effort to protect American Indian lands in the Ohio Valley. Incursions by settlers there led to serious problems, because American Indian leaders refused to acknowledge U.S. authority north of the Ohio River. Between 1784 and 1789, U.S. government officials persuaded some chiefs to relinquish lands in southern and eastern Ohio, but most American Indians refused to acknowledge the validity of these treaties. Encouraged by the British, the Miami and Shawnee tribes insisted that the Americans fall back to the Ohio River. When the settlers refused, the Miami attacked them. In 1790 and again in 1791, U.S. troops and militia were sent against American Indians along the Maumee River. The 1790 expedition, the first for the U.S. Army, ended in disaster. In October, Brigadier General Josiah Harmar set out with a poorly trained force of some 1,200 men. Harmar divided his troops into three separate columns, enabling the Miami and Shawnee, led by Miami chief Little Turtle, to win the battle, inflicting three hundred casualties on U.S. troops. In November, 1791, Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory and a commissioned major general, led a second expedition, which included the entire six-hundred-man regular army and fifteen hundred militiamen. At present-day Fort Recovery, Ohio, Little Turtle and his warriors administered the most overwhelming defeat ever by American Indians on the British or Americans. Some 650 U.S. troops and 250 civilians died; another 300 were wounded. American Indian losses were reported as twentyone killed and forty wounded. Mad Anthony Wayne. In December, 1792, Congress authorized establishment of a five-hundred-man Legion of the United States. Despite misgivings, Washington recalled General “Mad” Anthony Wayne from retirement to command the legion. Wayne found his first training camp, near Pittsburgh, too distracting and marched his men twenty-five miles downriver to a site he named Legionville. Utilizing Baron Friedrich von Steuben’s Revolutionary War drill manual, Wayne carried out rigorous training. In May, Wayne moved the legion to Cincinnati and then a few miles north to a new camp, Hobson’s Choice. Wayne issued a call for Kentucky mounted militia and in early October, moved north to Fort Jefferson with two thousand regulars. When Ken-
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tucky militiamen arrived, Wayne moved a few miles farther north and began a camp to accommodate his larger force. He named it Fort Greenville (now Greenville, Ohio) in memory of his Revolutionary War commander, Nathaniel Greene. In December, 1793, Wayne ordered a detachment to the site of the previous massacre. On Christmas Day, 1793, U.S. troops reoccupied the battlefield. After burying human remains still in evidence, they constructed a fort on high ground overlooking the Wabash. Wayne’s timetable for the campaign was delayed because of unreliable civilian contractors, attacks on his supply trains, the loss of some of his men to other campaigns, and a cease-fire that led him to believe peace might be at hand. Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and other tribal chiefs rejected peace negotiations, however. In February, the British commander ordered construction of Fort Miamis, a post on the Maumee River, to mount cannons larger than those that Wayne might be able to bring against it. By mid-April, work on the fort was well along. This further delayed Wayne’s advance, then rescheduled for June. Little Turtle Strikes. On June 29, Little Turtle struck first, at Fort Recovery, Wayne’s staging point for the invasion. A supply train had just arrived and was bivouacked outside the walls when two thousand warriors attacked. They hoped to take both the supplies and fort in one bold stroke, but Fort Recovery’s commander, Captain Alexander Gibson, was ready. Although many soldiers were killed outside the walls, the attackers were beaten back with heavy casualties. After two days with no success, the tribal warriors withdrew. The attack was the high-water mark of their cause; never again would they be able to assemble that many warriors. Defeat at Fort Recovery led some of the smaller tribes to quit the coalition and also caused the eclipse of Little Turtle, who was replaced as principal war leader by the less effective Blue Jacket. Wayne now had two thousand men. In mid-July, the Kentucky militia, ultimately sixteen hundred men, began to arrive. Wayne also had a hundred American Indians, mostly Choctaws and Chickasaws. On July 28, the men left Fort Greenville for Fort Recovery. Much was at stake, and Washington had warned that a third straight defeat would be ruinous to the reputation of the government. The two principal American Indian concentrations were Miami Town, the objective of previous offensives, and the rapids of the Maumee River around Fort Miamis. The two were connected by a hundred-mile Maumee River Valley road. Wayne vowed to cut it at midpoint, forcing his enemy to
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split his forces and defend both possible objectives. By August 3, he had established both Fort Adams and Fort Defiance. Wayne then sent the chiefs a final offer for peace. Little Turtle urged its acceptance, pointing out the great numbers of the enemy and expressing doubts about British support. Blue Jacket and British agents urged war, however, which a majority of the chiefs approved. Wayne Strikes Back. Having learned that the American Indians were congregating near Fort Miamis, Wayne decided to move there first. On August 15, Wayne’s men still were ten miles from the British fort. Sensing an impending fight, Wayne detached unnecessary elements from his column at a hastily constructed position, Fort Deposit. Manned by Captain Zebulon Pike and two hundred men, it would serve as a refuge in case things did not go well. On August 20, Wayne again put his column in motion. More than a thousand American Indian warriors, along with some sixty Canadian militiamen, were lying in wait. They hoped to ambush the U.S. troops from the natural defenses of what had been a forest before it had been uprooted by a tornado. The attack plan was sound but based on the assumption that their enemy would either remain in place or run away. Not expecting the daylong delay to build Fort Deposit, Blue Jacket had thought that Wayne would arrive on August 19. The natives had begun a strict fast on August 18 and continued it the next day. When the Americans did not arrive, many of the natives, tired and half-starved, left for Fort Miamis. Wayne marched his men so as to be ready to meet an attack from any quarter. His infantry were in two wings; well out in front was a select battalion, led by Major William Price, to trigger the enemy attack and allow Wayne time to deploy the main body. When the American Indians opened fire, Price’s men fell back into Wilkinson’s line. Wayne’s troops shattered the ambush with an infantry frontal attack driven home with the bayonet, while cavalry closed in on the flanks. The killing went on to the very gates of the fort, while the British looked on. Of Wayne’s troops, only thirty-three were killed and one hundred wounded (eleven of whom later died of their wounds); tribal losses were in the hundreds. Wayne disregarded Fort Miamis but destroyed American Indian communities and British storehouses in its vicinity. His troops then marched to Miami Town, occupied it without opposition on September 17, and razed it. They then built a fort on the site of Harmar’s 1790 defeat, naming it Fort Wayne.
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Treaty of Fort Greenville. On August 3, 1795, after six weeks of discussions, chiefs representing twelve tribes signed the Treaty of Fort Greenville. The treaty set a definite boundary in the Northwest Territory, forcing the American Indians to give up most of the present state of Ohio and part of Indiana. All hostilities were to cease, prisoners were to be exchanged, and the United States agreed to pay an eight-thousand-dollar-per-year annuity for the loss of hunting lands and twenty thousand dollars in commodities. The brief Battle of Fallen Timbers broke forever the power of the American Indians in the eastern region of the Northwest Territory. It also led the British to evacuate their garrisons below the Great Lakes. The victory did much to restore the prestige of the U.S. Army; Wayne, justifiably, is known as its father. See also: Fort Greenville Treaty; Little Turtle’s War. Spencer C. Tucker Sources for Further Study Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance. The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. A useful short survey of American Indian affairs. Nelson, Paul D. Anthony Wayne: Soldier of the Early Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. The best biography of Wayne to date. ____________. “Anthony Wayne’s Indian War in the Old Northwest, 17921795.” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 56 (1984): 115-140. An excellent short account of this war. Palmer, Dave R. 1794: America, Its Army, and the Birth of the Nation. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1994. A helpful study of early U.S. military policy. Smith, Dwight L. “Wayne and the Treaty of Green Ville.” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 63 (January, 1954): 1-7. Careful analysis of the treaty. Sugden, John. Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. A biography of one of the main Indian leaders in the conflict. Sword, Wiley. President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Discusses the struggle for the northwest frontier. Tebbel, John W. The Battle of Fallen Timbers, August 20, 1794. New York: Franklin Watts, 1972. Useful history of the battle. Wilson, Frazer. The Treaty of Greenville. Pigua, Ohio: Correspondent Press, 1894. The only work specifically devoted to the treaty ending the campaign.
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Federally recognized tribes Date: Established 1978 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Terminology, Twentieth century history Significance: Federal recognition of tribes is an issue with both political and economic ramifications. The term “federally recognized tribe” is a U.S. government designation for an American Indian tribe that has official relations with the United States. These relations have been established in various ways through the years— through treaties (treaty making ended in the late nineteenth century), executive orders, court decrees, and acts of Congress, and through meeting the requirements set forth by the Federal Acknowledgment Program. Federal recognition is both a political and an economic issue, as recognized tribes are eligible for federal services that unrecognized tribes cannot receive, such as education, housing, and health benefits. The Federal Acknowledgment Program (a Bureau of Indian Affairs program) was created in 1978. The Federal Acknowledgment Program established criteria and procedures through which unrecognized tribes could attempt to attain recognized status. The creation of a federal recognition process was hailed a victory by some American Indians, but others countered that the requirements are unnecessarily complex, even unfulfillable. Among the criteria is proof of continuous existence as a tribe; the tribe also must have a governing body, be governed by a constitution or similar document, and have membership criteria and a roll of current members. In the 1950’s a government policy known as termination successfully urged many tribes to disband; subsequently, some terminated tribes have attempted to regain recognized tribal status; the regaining of tribal status by the Menominees was the first major success. (Terminated tribes are not eligible for recognition through the Federal Acknowledgment Program.) In 1991 there were 510 federally recognized tribes; in mid-1994 the number had grown to 543. Some of these groups are very small; for example, there are some two hundred Alaskan village groups. See also: American Indian; Amerind; Indian; Native American; Termination Resolution; Tribe. McCrea Adams
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Fifteen Principles Date: 1983; reaffirmed in 1985 Locale: Quebec Tribes involved: Abenaki, Algonquian, Cree, Huron, Inuit, Micmac, Mohawk, Montagnais, Naskapi Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: Efforts toward Canadian federal constitutional reform prompted the Quebec provincial government to formulate an administrative and legal policy regarding the Indian and Inuit residents of the province. In the midst of federal constitutional negotiations, the province of Quebec established a legal framework to guide its relationships with the Inuit and Indian residents of Quebec. Known as the Fifteen Principles, the policy statement affirmed that the province of Quebec accepted native claims to self-determination with respect to culture, education, language, and economic development. It further acknowledged that natives are entitled to certain aboriginal rights and land claims (left to be determined by future negotiations). Finally, the Fifteen Principles recognized that those aboriginal rights applied equally to men and women. The Fifteen Principles were adopted, in large part, to bolster the claim by the ruling Parti Québécois that Quebec is a distinct and sovereign nation either within or apart from Canada. If this was to be the case, Quebec could not argue, as it had previously, that the federal government bore sole responsibility for natives living within the borders of Quebec. In fact, it was Quebec’s earlier insistence that the federal government must absorb all the costs of native administration that led to the 1939 Supreme Court decision that for legal purposes Inuit were to be regarded as Indians as specified in the British North America Act. By adopting the Fifteen Principles, Quebec attempted to place itself on equal footing with the Canadian government. See also: Declaration of First Nations; Meech Lake Accord. Pamela R. Stern
138 / Fish-ins
Fish-ins Date: 1960’s Locale: Pacific Northwest Tribes involved: Alsea, Bella Bella, Bella Coola, Chehalis, Chinook, Coast Salish, Coos, Eyak, Gitksan, Haida, Klamath, Klikitat, Kwakiutl, Nootka (Nuu-Chah-Nulth), Quileute, Quinault, Siuslaw, Takelma, Tillamook, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Umpqua Categories: Protest movements, Twentieth century history Significance: Native tribes protest the restriction of their fishing rights in an attempt to regain economic self-sufficiency. During the 1960’s, American Indians in the Pacific Northwest began to stage fish-ins to protest restrictions on their fishing rights, especially within the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. In turn, sports fishers’ groups, commercial fishing operations, and canneries pressured the state governments to get American Indians off the rivers. Controversies over fishing rights stemmed from treaties negotiated with various Pacific Northwest tribes in 1854 and 1855. In those treaties, tribes gave up claim to vast areas of land but specifically preserved fishing rights along waterways ceded to the federal government. Those treaties guaranteed to Indians “the right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations . . . in common with all citizens of Johnnie Saux, of the Quinaielts, displays a dog the Territory.” salmon in Taholah, Washington, 1936. Fishing Almost from the start, the has always been a major part of the Native states ignored the treaty pro- American way of life in the Northwest. (Navisions, and by the 1930’s, the tional Archives)
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states openly restricted Indian subsistence and commercial fishing. Some tribes challenged the states; however, they had no legal success. During the next two decades, state restrictions increased, particularly in the state of Washington, and although some cases went to court, restrictions on Indian fishing were upheld. Finally, in the 1960’s, Indian nations began to push for economic development, and tribes began to demand their treaty rights. In the Pacific Northwest, the tribes openly challenged the states’ ability to exert regulatory authority over matters negotiated in treaties between the federal government and tribal nations. The state of Washington responded by issuing a series of orders forbidding Indian fishing, and in 1964, Washington set aside the treaty guarantees. Indians from various affected tribes attempted to channel their energies in a unified front and formed the Survival of American Indians Association in 1964. This organization began a series of actions designed to assert their rights. One important strategy was to engage in night fishing in restricted areas. Washington aggressively policed night fishing, and it confiscated boats, nets, and motors, rammed fishing boats, and prosecuted lawbreakers. The most dramatic and effective protests sponsored by the Indian association were fish-ins. These were highly publicized events, well attended by media, in which Indian people, including many women and children, would assert their treaty rights and fish, despite state restrictions. The state response was aggressive: Often large numbers of game wardens and police swarmed over the protesters and made many arrests. The media documented these incidents, and the fish-ins attracted national attention and even celebrity participants, including actors and entertainers such as Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, and Dick Gregory. As more Indians were arrested, various church organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, and prominent lawyers began to provide legal assistance, and this, in turn, increased media coverage. In 1970, the federal government brought suit to ensure that the states honored the treaties and allowed American Indians a fair harvest of fish. U.S. District Court judge George Boldt sent shockwaves through the Pacific Northwest when he ruled in favor of Indian fishing rights in United States v. Washington (1974) and determined that the treaties entitled the Indians to half the fish passing through the waters. This decision was challenged but remained in force and ultimately allowed many tribes to develop successful economic ventures such as canneries, fish hatcheries, and aquaculture programs. The fish-ins also produced a number of Indian activists who went on to participate in the early
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years of the American Indian Movement, including Dino Butler, Sid Mills, Janet McCloud, Joseph Stuntz Killsright, and Leonard Peltier. See also: American Indian Movement; United States v. Washington. Carole A. Barrett
Fort Atkinson Treaty Date: 1853 Locale: Southwestern Kansas Tribes involved: Apache, Comanche, Kiowa Categories: Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: This treaty was an attempt to establish peace among southern Plains tribes in order to ease white passage westward and facilitate the building of a transcontinental railroad through Indian lands. Personally negotiated by Thomas Fitzpatrick, a white trader and Indian agent of the Upper Platte Agency, the Treaty of Fort Atkinson was one of a series of U.S.-Indian treaties signed during the 1850’s to open passage to America’s Far West while promoting the Christianization and civilization of the Plains Indians. Fitzpatrick previously had helped to bring the Sioux and seven other Plains tribes together to sign the Treaty of Fort Laramie with the United States in 1851. The signatories to the Fort Atkinson Treaty agreed to establish peace among the affected Indian tribes, as well as between Indians and whites. It sanctioned the passage of whites through Indian lands, and acknowledged U.S. rights to establish military roads and posts thereon. It also provided for annuities to be paid by the United States (for a ten-year term) to the affected Indians. See also: Apache Wars; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Clifton K. Yearley
Fort Greenville Treaty Date: 1795 Locale: Between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Tribes involved: Chippewa, Iroquois, Lenni Lenape, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Wyandot (Huron)
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Categories: Colonial history, Treaties Significance: The Treaty of Fort Greenville, combined with Jay’s Treaty, served as an important benchmark in the tripartite Anglo-AmericanIndian struggle for control of the region between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. During the twenty years following the end of the American Revolution in 1783, the question of which power—American Indians, the United States, or England—would control the region between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes constituted one of the greatest challenges confronting the new government of the United States. Historical Background. According to the terms of the Treaty of Paris (signed on September 3, 1783), Great Britain agreed to remove its commercial and military presence from the region between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, a region then called the Old Northwest. Notwithstanding this commitment, however, the British delayed in implementing this treaty provision. Several factors accounted for this delay, but one of the most significant was the conviction of many influential Britons that the region north of the Ohio was too strategic to surrender to the Americans. Instead, they believed that Britain should attempt to maintain at least an indirect presence in the area, thereby placing Great Britain in an advantageous position should the loosely confederated United States politically disintegrate. It was in this context that the British considered the possibility of sponsoring the creation of a British satellite or buffer state spanning the territory between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes and consisting of a confederation of Indian tribes. Thus, in the hope of promoting such an entity (there were also other reasons), London opted to maintain its commercial and military presence south of the Great Lakes. Indeed, not only did the British continue their presence at Michilimackinac, Detroit, Fort Niagara, Oswego, and other locations on American soil, but also, in 1786, British authorities issued a directive to hold or, if necessary, recapture these sites should the United States attempt to seize them. Simultaneously, beginning in 1785, British agents actively attempted to promote the establishment of a pro-British confederation among the tribes. For their part, the Indians were extremely dissatisfied with Congress’s policy toward the tribes and the northwest region generally. The Indians thought that the treaties of Forts Stanwix, McIntosh, and Finney, which had been concluded between several of the tribes and the United States government, were unfair to Indian interests. Indeed, many of the original signatory tribes had subsequently repudiated these treaties. Those tribes that
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had not been parties to these treaties naturally refused to abide by their terms. The treaties, however, provided the context for an infusion of American frontiersmen into the lands north of the Ohio River. The small military force that Congress had raised from the states was clearly insufficient either to prevent the frontiersmen from intruding into Indian territory or to overawe the tribes into abiding by the treaties—to say nothing about convincing them to make additional territorial concessions. Consequently, the British agents sent to promote the establishment of the Indian confederation north of the Ohio under British protection met with a receptive audience. Finally, in 1788, the Chippewa, Delaware (Lenni Lenape), Iroquois, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and Wyandot (Huron) tribes formed a confederation and repudiated the treaties of Forts Stanwix, McIntosh, and Finney, agreed not to cede any additional land to the United States without the consent of the entire confederation, and demanded U.S. recognition of an Indian state between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. This development, combined with the continued British military and commercial presence on U.S. territory south of the Great Lakes, provided London with a strong bargaining position as the United States and Great Britain opened regular diplomatic relations. Great Britain’s new ambassador to the United States arrived in Philadelphia in October, 1791, with instructions from his government to agree to the evacuation of the British presence south of the Great Lakes only if the United States agreed to abide by the British interpretation of the terms of the Treaty of Paris and accepted the establishment of the Indian state, de facto under British protection, between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. The Washington administration totally rejected the British stance as a violation of U.S. territorial integrity and sovereignty. With only a small military force, the administration attempted to negotiate a new treaty with the Indians. In the negotiations, held at Fort Harmar in January, 1789, the territorial governor, Arthur St. Clair, capitalized on dissension among the tribes and succeeded in concluding a treaty that, while providing some compensation to the Indians, reaffirmed the boundaries established under the terms of the treaties of Forts McIntosh and Finney. By the autumn of 1789, however, war had erupted along the frontier as a result of continued Indian resentment of U.S. policy generally and the Treaty of Fort Harmar specifically, as well as the continued provocations from the American frontiersmen in Indian country. Military Operations, 1790-1794. Yielding to pressure from the westerners, the Washington administration dispatched a series of military expeditions
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into the wilderness north of the Ohio River. The first two of these expeditions, in October, 1790, and August-November, 1791, under the successive leadership of Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair, designed to overawe the Indians and assert U.S. control over the region, yielded disastrous results. Harmar’s October, 1790, expedition resulted only in the destruction of a few Miami villages along the Maumee River and the death of a small number of Indians at the cost of 75 regulars and 108 militiamen killed and another 31 wounded. Similarly, St. Clair’s late summer and autumn 1791 expedition resulted in a second disastrous defeat with 623 soldiers killed and 258 wounded. Indeed, St. Clair’s defeat was considered an especially significant setback in asserting U.S. sovereignty over the region north of the Ohio. Conversely, the Indians were euphoric with success and, encouraged by British expression of support for the Indian Confederation, intensified warfare against the American frontiersmen while demanding U.S. recognition of their confederation. In the autumn of 1793, the new U.S. military commander in the Ohio Valley, Major General Anthony Wayne, initiated a new offensive against the Indians. Throughout the winter and spring of 1794, Wayne carefully launched a limited operation into Indian country. He methodically constructed a series of forts to serve both as a line of defense and as a base for a new offensive against the tribes. Moreover, his emphasis on training and his focus on troop discipline, combined with his perseverance during the harsh winter, impressed the Indians. Meanwhile, throughout the winter, as Wayne consolidated his position, the British reinforced their policy in the Northwest. In February, 1794, the British governor in Canada told the Indians that when war between the United States and the tribes came, Britain would support the Indian attempt to regain full control over their lands. Simultaneously, the British began construction of a new post, Fort Miami, on U.S. soil along the Maumee River. The new fort was intended to further solidify the British position in Indian country as well as to provide an advance defense for the British presence at Detroit. These developments convinced the Indians that London would support them against General Wayne’s army. Hence, confident of future success, the tribes assembled approximately two thousand warriors outside Fort Miami. On June 30 and July 1, 1794, the Indians attacked Wayne’s forces but were repulsed and withdrew into the wilderness along the Maumee River. On July 28, Wayne, now reinforced (bringing his total force to about thirtyfive hundred men), advanced into Indian country. Although he reached the Maumee River on August 8, he delayed in assaulting the Indians until he had secured his lines of communications and established a forward base
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(Fort Defiance). Finally, on August 20, after a series of deceptive initiatives, Wayne surprised and defeated the Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Following the battle, the defeated Indians retreated to Fort Miami, whereupon the British refused to provide any refuge or assistance. Realizing that they had been betrayed by the British, the disillusioned Indians retired to the forest. The Treaties. The dramatic change in the British policy toward the Indians reflected a larger transformation in British policy toward the United States. During the spring of 1794, the British government moved toward a rapprochement with the Americans; during the summer of 1794, negotiations were opened in Britain between the U.S. representative, John Jay, and British officials. It was in the context of this change in the complexion of AngloAmerican relations that the British decided to abandon the Indians rather then precipitate a crisis on the Maumee River that could, in turn, lead to the collapse of Anglo-American negotiations before they had begun and possibly provoke a war between the two powers. Eventually, on November 19, 1794, the negotiators concluded a new treaty, Jay’s Treaty, which resolved the outstanding Anglo-American disputes stemming from the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Under the terms of Jay’s Treaty, London, among other things, agreed finally to evacuate the British posts on U.S. soil. Deprived of British support, the demoralized Indians entered into new negotiations with General Wayne from a position of weakness. On August 3, 1795, Wayne and chiefs representing the Delaware, Miami, Shawnee, and Wyandot Indians and the United States delineated a demarcation separating Indian lands from those open to settlement. The line ran along the Cuyahoga River, across the portage to the Tuscarawas River, westward to Fort Recovery, and finally southward to the Ohio River across from its confluence with the Kentucky River. Hence, the U.S. government opened for settlement all of the future state of Ohio, except the north-central and northwest portions of the state, as well as opening the extreme southeastern corner of the present-day state of Indiana. In addition, the U.S. government reserved a series of specific sites within Indian country primarily for commercial and/or military purposes. Thus, as a result of the Treaty of Fort Greenville and Jay’s Treaty, a new balance between the Americans and the Indians was struck along the northwestern frontier. Almost immediately, however, pressure began to mount which soon challenged the supposed permanence of the Fort Greenville Treaty line, and the stage was set for the next phase in American westward expansion at the expense of the Indians. See also: Fallen Timbers, Battle of; Fort Stanwix Treaty; Jay’s Treaty. Howard M. Hensel
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Sources for Further Study Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Jay’s Treaty. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962. Billington, Ray Allen. Westward Expansion. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Kohn, Richard H. Eagle and Sword. New York: Free Press, 1975. Philbrick, Francis S. The Rise of the West, 1754-1830. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Sword of the Republic. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 Date: September 1-20, 1851 Locale: Fort Laramie, Wyoming Tribes involved: Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, Shoshone, Sioux Categories: Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: In an unprecedented effort to promote peace during early western expansion, a treaty council was convened at Fort Laramie whereby ten thousand Indians of various nations gathered at one time to sign a peace treaty with representatives of the U.S. government. During the mid-nineteenth century the continuing rush of covered wagon immigrants across the Plains of the United States began to have an unsettling effect on American Indian tribes living there. Wild game was driven out and grasslands were being cropped close by the immigrants’ cattle and horses. U.S. government policy provided some reimbursement to Indians for losses of game, grass, and land caused by the continuing influx of white settlers. In 1847, Thomas Fitzpatrick was appointed the first U.S. government representative to the various nomad tribes of the High Plains. Aware of the mounting losses and the potential for Indian uprisings against the settlers, Fitzpatrick campaigned long and hard for congressional funding to help alleviate growing tensions. In February, 1851, Congress appropriated $100,000 for the purpose of holding a treaty council with the tribes of the High Plains. D. D. Mitchell, superintendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis, and Fitzpatrick were designated commissioners for the government. They selected Fort Laramie as the meeting location and September 1, 1851, as the meeting date. Word was sent throughout the Plains of the impending treaty council. By Septem-
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ber 1, the first arrivals included the Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. Later arriving participants included the Snakes (Shoshones), and Crows. Because of the vast number of participants—more than ten thousand Indians and 270 soldiers—it became apparent that the forage available for Indian and soldier ponies and horses was insufficient. The council grounds were therefore moved about thirty-six miles south, to Horse Creek. On September 8, the treaty council officially began. The assembly was unprecedented. Each Indian nation approached the council with its own unique song or demonstration, dress, equipment, and mannerisms. Superintendent Mitchell proclaimed that all nations would smoke the pipe of peace together. The proposed treaty asked for unmolested passage for settlers over the roads leading to the West. It included rights for the government to build military posts for immigrants’ protection. The treaty also defined the limits of territory for each tribe and asked for a lasting peace between the various nations. Each nation was to select a representative, a chief who would have control over and be responsible for his nation. In return, the government would provide each Indian nation an annuity of $50,000 for fifty years, the sum to be expended for goods, merchandise, and provisions. After much discussion and conferencing, the treaty was signed on September 17 by the U.S. commissioners and all the attending chiefs. Adding to the festivities, on September 20, a delayed caravan of wagons arrived at the treaty council with $50,000 worth of goods and merchandise. These goods were summarily distributed to all the nations represented, and feelings of good will permeated the gathering. To further the sense of lasting peace, Fitzpatrick later took a delegation of eleven chiefs with him to Washington, D.C., where they visited with President Millard Fillmore in the White House. See also: Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. John L. Farbo Sources for Further Study Ellis, Richard N. The Western American Indian. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Hafen, LeRoy, and Francis Young. Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West, 1834-1890. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1938. Hedren, Paul L. Fort Laramie in 1876. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
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Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 Date: April 29-November 5, 1868 Locale: Laramie fork of the North Platte River in modern Wyoming Tribes involved: Sioux Categories: Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: This treaty was meant to provide a lasting peace through mutual concessions involving territorial rights and peaceful behavior; the treaty ultimately failed. By the mid-1800’s, the vast area of land claimed by the Sioux Nation was subjected to inexorable pressures from America’s westward expansion, which accelerated after the end of the Civil War in 1865. Pioneers, settlers, farmers, gold prospectors, railroads, and the army all encroached on Sioux territory. Inevitably, armed conflict between whites and Indians occurred. Attempts to arrive at a peaceful solution and compromise, such as the treaties of 1851, 1865, and 1866, provided only short-lived respites. On July 20, 1867, after vigorous debate over whether to subdue the Indians militarily and punish them or reach a peaceful accord with them, both houses of Congress approved a bill which authorized a government commission to make peace with the Plains tribes. The commission was directed by Congress to establish peace, remove if possible the causes of war, safeguard frontier settlements and the rights-of-way for the transcontinental railroads, and establish reservations for the Plains Indians with adequate arable land so they could become self-sufficient farmers. Terms of the Treaty. The peace commission, headed by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel Taylor, worked its way west, meeting various tribes of Sioux and listening to their demands. In April, 1868, the commission convened at Fort Laramie with a draft treaty that met many of these demands. Article 2 established the Great Sioux Reservation, which gave to the Sioux all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the sacred Black Hills, “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupancy of the Sioux.” Article 16 established the Powder River Country to the north and west of the Great Sioux Reservation as “unceded Indian territory,” where whites were not permitted to go unless given permission by the Sioux. Article 11 gave the Sioux hunting rights along the Republican River and above the Platte River in Nebraska and Wyoming for “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” Other articles promised that all Sioux who resided within the Great Sioux
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Signing of the Treaty of 1868 by General William Tecumseh Sherman and the Indian delegation at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. (National Archives)
Reservation would be provided with food for the next four years (until they learned to become farmers). The reservation was promised schools, mills, blacksmiths, doctors, and teachers and an agent to administer the various programs and maintain order. Additionally, no chief could unilaterally sign away treaty rights, as any sale of land had to be approved by three-fourths of all adult Sioux males. In return, the United States asked for peace and asked that the Sioux make their permanent residence within the boundaries of the reservation. The Sioux relinquished the right to occupy any lands outside the reservation permanently, including the unceded territory. The Sioux were not to oppose the building of railroads on the plains and were not to attack settlers and their wagon trains or take white prisoners. Additionally, provisions would be distributed by the government not at the western end of the reservation, near traditional hunting grounds and where the Sioux customarily traded with whites, but at agencies established along the Missouri River in the eastern part of the reservation, in order to reorient Sioux life to these agencies. Failure of the Treaty. Red Cloud was the final Sioux chief to sign the treaty, on November 5, 1868, only after the government abandoned its forts along the Bozeman Trail in Sioux territory. The treaty was rejected, however, by
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the influential and powerful Sioux chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, who remained in the unceded territory and refused to live on the reservation. In the end, this treaty proved no more effective in maintaining the peace and Sioux way of life than previous ones had been. Violations of Sioux territory by white emigrants and the army, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills (and the taking of the Black Hills by the government in 1877 without compensation), problems administering the reservation, and the refusal of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to live on the reservation despite government threats of war undermined any hope that the treaty’s terms would be honored and observed. By 1880 the Sioux had been either killed or defeated and were confined to the reservation. See also: Bozeman Trail War; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Laurence Miller
Fort Mims, Battle of Date: August 30, 1813 Locale: Alabama Tribes involved: Creek Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Though William Weatherford’s Creeks won a major victory at Fort Mims, reports of a massacre there led to a rapid mobilization of state and federal forces that eventually overwhelmed the Creeks. Tensions within the Creek (Muskogee) Nation and between some Creeks and European Americans reached the boiling point in 1813. Fighting was already raging between the Creek Red Sticks, who favored maintaining the traditional Creek values and lifestyle and who opposed further encroachments on Creek land, and friendly Creeks, who were more receptive to the assimilationist policies being pushed by the United States government and whose leaders had adopted many aspects of American life, including plantation slavery. On July 27, 1813, a force of territorial militia unsuccessfully attacked a band of Red Sticks at Burnt Corn Creek, a tributary of the Alabama River. The Creek War now began, though it was only the Red Stick faction of Creeks that waged war with the United States. Encouraged by their initial
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success, the Red Sticks determined to attack Fort Mims. William Weatherford (Red Eagle), a mixed-blood traditionalist of considerable ability, gathered a force of about 750 warriors and moved toward the fort. Fort Mims was located near the Alabama River about forty miles north of Mobile and was defended by a garrison of about 120 militia commanded by Major Daniel Beasley. The fort also became a haven for approximately 275 to 300 whites and friendly Creeks plus about a hundred slaves. Doubting that the Red Sticks would attack a fort, Beasley was lax in maintaining security. On August 29, two slaves reported a large number of hostile Indians nearby. When scouts failed to find any, Beasley ordered the slaves whipped for giving a false alarm. The fort’s defenses were unmanned the next day when Weatherford launched his attack at noon, catching the fort’s garrison and inhabitants at lunch. Red Sticks rushed into the fort’s open entrance. Others began firing into the fort through rifle ports in the walls. The battle raged for several hours before the buildings inside the walls were set on fire. A few militiamen and others managed to escape into the surrounding woods. Most of the whites and friendly Creeks who sur-
The 1813 victory of Creek Red Sticks at Fort Mims, reported by whites as a massacre, soon brought white revenge against the Creeks. (Library of Congress)
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vived the battle were killed, some by torture. Most of the slaves who survived the battle were taken away as prisoners. Whites regarded the Fort Mims fight as a massacre, and the numbers reported to have been killed rapidly swelled. No fort of its size had ever been taken by Indians, and something akin to panic seized the southern frontier. Fort Mims proved to be a costly victory for the Creeks, however; around a hundred Red Sticks were killed, and the reports of a massacre roused neighboring white settlers to seek revenge. Georgia and Tennessee mobilized their militias for service against the Creeks, and the federal government diverted some of its scarce military resources from the war it was fighting against England for service against the Creeks. The tide soon turned against the Red Sticks, and all Creeks suffered as a result of their eventual defeat. See also: Creek War; Horseshoe Bend Treaty. William C. Lowe
Fort Stanwix Treaty Date: October 22, 1784 Locale: Fort Stanwix, New York Tribes involved: Iroquois Confederacy Categories: Eighteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Treaties Significance: Iroquois tribes cede lands to the United States and are forced to move westward. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, signed in 1784, was a product of the American Revolution that involved colonists and the Iroquois nations. Because several Iroquois tribes had fought alongside the British during the war, victorious Americans maintained that they had won lands occupied by “defeated” Iroquois. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix marked the beginning of negotiations with Native Americans that dealt with them as a conquered people rather than as equals. The Revolutionary War and resulting treaty negotiations irreparably split the Iroquois Confederacy. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, the Six Nations of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy were divided over whether to support the En-
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glish, to side with the American rebels, or to remain neutral. The confederation had traded and fought alongside the English for many years and considered the English and colonists as the same. Both British and American Indian agents encouraged Native Americans throughout the colonies to remain neutral. Initially, the Iroquois remained nonpartisan. This allowed the Iroquois to deal with both the British in Canada and the Americans in the colonies, playing one against another as they had the French and British prior to the French and Indian War. As the Revolutionary War progressed, however, both the British and the Americans saw the advantages of including American Indians in their ranks and urged Native Americans to ally themselves. The pressure to choose sides exerted by British and American agents split the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy into two groups. Unable to agree on which side to support, the confederation decided to allow each nation to choose which side, if either, to endorse. The Oneidas and Tuscaroras fought for the rebels. American attacks on Mohawk settlements encouraged the Mohawks to support the British; they were joined by the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. These tribes were effective in British attacks on frontier locations, especially in the Mohawk Valley around Fort Stanwix. Competing Promises. During the war, British officers had made promises of land to Native Americans who fought with them, but during the peace negotiations in Paris, the defeated British ignored the interests of their Native American allies. In 1783, the Treaty of Paris surrendered all the land east of the Mississippi River to the former colonists. Some of this land belonged to various Native American tribes and was not England’s to grant. New York State granted Iroquois lands to Revolutionary War soldiers as compensation for services during the war. New York tried to negotiate land sales with the Iroquois that would directly benefit the state. The United States Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, admonished New York officials and appointed Indian commissioners Oliver Wolcott, Richard Butler, and Arthur Lee to negotiate peace and land cessions for the United States with the Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. A peace conference was called and held in New York at Fort Stanwix near Oneida Lake. A number of Iroquois could not attend because of illness and other factors, and only a quickly formed irregular group of Iroquois representatives was present. The commissioners arrived at Fort Stanwix with an intimidating military escort. Rather than negotiating with the Iroquois as equals, as the English had done previously, American commissioners asserted political sovereignty over all
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tribal natives on American soil. Iroquois speeches were cut short and credentials challenged. The commissioners insisted that the Iroquois tribes that fought on the side of the British were a conquered people. All lands held by those tribes, therefore, were forfeit to the United States as spoils of war. The U.S. government would allow them to retain some of their lands but demanded land cessions in reparation for injuries inflicted on Americans during the war. The Iroquois contended (1) that England had had no right to cede tribal lands to the United States (2) that if the Iroquois were to surrender their lands to Americans, they expected something in return, and (3) that they had not, in any event, been defeated in battle and therefore were not party to peace negotiations. Mutual Concessions. As part of the resulting Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the attending Iroquois ceded a strip of land that began at the mouth of Oyonwaye Creek on Lake Ontario four miles south of the Niagara portage path. The boundary line ran south to the mouth of the Tehosaroro, or Buffalo Creek, to the Pennsylvania line, and along its north-south boundary to the Ohio River. In effect, the treaty took all Iroquois lands west of New York and Pennsylvania and all of Ohio. The United States released any claim it may have had by right of conquest to tribal lands west of that boundary. Iroquois property in the western region of New York State east of the Oyonwaye remained unaffected. The treaty assured the Oneida and Tuscarora who had fought on the side of the Americans continued peaceful possession of their lands. The United States agreed to protect the remaining Iroquois territories against encroachments, seizures, and other possible violations, and guaranteed the right of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy to independence. Representatives for the Iroquois Confederacy agreed to peaceful relations with the United States. The tribes who had fought against the colonies promised to deliver up all prisoners, black and white, whom they had taken during the war. As guarantee of that promise, six Iroquois would be taken as hostages to Fort Harmar by General Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory. Immediately after the congressional commissioners concluded their negotiations, commissioners from Pennsylvania negotiated for large land grants in their state. In return, the Iroquois received five thousand dollars in goods and supplies. Soon after, New York State, in defiance of Congress, negotiated land sales with the Oneida and Tuscarora. Additional land treaties quickly ensued. Congress’s inability to prevent New York State from
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negotiating separate land sales and to uphold other aspects of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix highlighted the weaknesses in central government under the Articles of Confederation and served as a reminder that each state considered itself a sovereign nation. In 1786, the Iroquois Confederacy held a council meeting at Buffalo Creek, New York. Disappointed and upset with their delegates, they refused to ratify the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and offered to return gifts presented to the delegates at the negotiations. Congress, however, considered the terms of the treaty to be valid and acted on them accordingly. British Interference. After the American Revolution, British officials did little to discourage continued relations with northern Native American tribes. The English traded with and provided goods to local tribes and allowed large councils to convene at British-held forts. After the council of Buffalo Creek, the Iroquois sought support from the British in their effort to denounce the treaty and continue their war against the United States. The Iroquois Confederacy soon discovered that the British had no intention of militarily supporting their former allies in defense of their land rights. Lacking the desire to go to war against the Americans alone, the Iroquois let the treaty stand. On January 9, 1789, St. Clair negotiated the Treaty of Fort Harmar with a group of Senecas. The treaty reaffirmed the terms and boundaries set forth in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The Iroquois were given permission to hunt on their old lands “as long as they were peaceful about it.” The treaties of Fort Stanwix and Fort Harmar further fractionalized the confederation’s six tribes, a process that had begun in 1777, when the Six Nations had split in choosing sides during the Revolutionary War. Joseph Brant led a group of Mohawk, Cayuga, and other tribe members out of the country and into Ontario, Canada, thereby splitting the confederacy in half. Those who remained in the United States were divided over other issues between the American Indians and the settlers. There was no single chief or council that could speak for the entire Iroquois Confederacy, and the Iroquois Confederacy was never again united. See also: Fort Greenville Treaty; Iroquois Confederacy. Leslie Stricker Sources for Further Study Downes, Randolph C. Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley Until 1795. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940. Discusses the relations between settlers and various tribes in the Ohio Valley, including those at Fort Stanwix.
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Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972. Chapters 6 and 7 describe Iroquois warfare, diplomacy, decline, and removal. Jennings, Francis, ed. The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1985. Extensive discussion of treaty negotiations, terms, and results. Trigger, Bruce G., ed. Northeast. Vol. 15 in Handbook of North American Indians, edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. Discusses Native Americans from the Northeast in considerable detail, including language, history, customs, culture, and religion. Washburn, Wilcomb E., ed. History of Indian-White Relations. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians, edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. Extensive coverage of relations between American Indians and whites across the United States, from first contact to 1987.
Fort Wayne Treaty Date: September 30, 1809 Locale: Indiana Tribes involved: Lenni Lenape, Miami, Potawatomi Categories: Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: Negotiated by William Henry Harrison and repudiated by Tecumseh, the leader of a pan-Indian movement, this treaty precipitated a chain of events that culminated in the Battle of Tippecanoe. On September 30, 1809, the governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison, met with leaders of the Delaware (Lenni Lenape), Miami, and Potawatomi tribes in the fort built by General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. They signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne, which exchanged 2.5 million acres of Indian land southeast of the Wabash River for goods worth about $7,000 and an annuity of $1,750. Later that year, a separate treaty with the Kickapoo and Wea added a half million acres. While the exchange rate of two cents per acre was higher than usual for such treaties, it was still an unfair exchange. The treaty culminated a process begun in 1795 with the Treaty of Fort Greenville, which had ceded a meager six square miles of Miami land
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to the United States government. In the ensuing period, more than fifteen treaties had been signed, most of them negotiated by Harrison, relinquishing control of Indian lands. While Harrison was able to maintain friendly relations with the major tribal leaders, the loss of native lands had started a countermovement. Led by the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, a pan-Indian movement developed based on opposition to the cession of Indian lands and to the tribal leaders who had negotiated the treaties. Tenskwatawa, his brother Tecumseh, and their followers refused to recognize the validity of the treaties on the ground that the land belonged to all Indian peoples so the chiefs had no authority to sign the lands away. To show defiance of the treaties, Tenskwatawa established new Indian towns at Greenville from 1806 to 1808 in defiance of the Treaty of Greenville. From 1808 to 1811, he established Prophetstown at Tippecanoe to show that his movement did not honor the Treaty of Fort Wayne. As Harrison continued his plans to open the recently acquired lands, Tecumseh assumed the role of war chief and took command of the nativist movement. He warned Harrison to keep surveyors and settlers out of the territory. So threatening was his presence that, for two years, virtually no settlement occurred. In order to break the stalemate, Harrison led troops in an attack on Prophetstown in 1811 while Tecumseh was farther south trying to gain allies among the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee. The ensuing Battle of Tippecanoe efficiently removed Tecumseh’s followers from the immediate area. It was also, however, the opening action of a war that would last until 1815 and would see Tecumseh ally his forces with the British in the War of 1812. See also: Fort Greenville Treaty; Tippecanoe, Battle of. Charles L. Kammer III
Fox Wars Date: Summer, 1714-1741 Locale: West and southwest of Lake Michigan Tribes involved: Chippewa, Fox, Huron, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Menominee, Potawatomi, Sac, Seneca, Sioux, Winnebago Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: Generations of intertribal warfare and French attempts to obtain peace.
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Although the Fox people trace their own origins to the northeastern seaboard, they clearly emerged in Native American history in the late seventeenth century in the western Great Lakes region. First known under their Algonquian name, Mesquakies (People of the Red Earth), they were later referred to in early French explorers’ journals as renards, or Foxes, a name that persists in the literature. Most of what is known about the Fox tribe and their often hostile relations with a number of their neighboring tribes comes from the eighteenth century Québécois (New France colonial) archives. Hardly a year passed between 1699 and 1742 without some reference to relations between the Foxes and representatives of Onontia, the natives’ name for the French governor general of New France. In 1699, Governor General Louis-Hector de Callières tried to obtain a peace treaty, not only between France and the tribes of the western Great Lakes region but also among the tribes themselves. His goal was to increase profitable trade in a vast region that remained unpredictable because of recurring intertribal strife. The natives invited to Montreal were well-known tribes associated with the Iroquois Five Nations (including the Senecas) and less well-known tribes along the western shore of Lake Michigan, including the Sacs, Winnebagos, Kickapoos, Menominees, and Foxes. In September, 1700, peace was signed by several important tribes, but many, including the Foxes, held back. Although the Foxes and Chippewas agreed to cease fighting each other in the Wisconsin area, Fox hostilities with neighboring Sioux still raged, disrupting fur trading as far as Sioux territory in Minnesota. In their attempt to stop these conflicts, the French invited Fox chieftains Noro and Miskousouath to Montreal. There the chiefs were assured that, if they remained peaceful in their newly fortified villages at the portage point between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, they would have their share of French fur trade in Sioux territory. The shortcomings of these agreements were particularly evident to Antoine de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, commander of the strategic post at Michilimackinac on the straits between Lakes Michigan and Huron. Cadillac’s goal was to develop another, eventually much better known, post at Detroit into a major trading center for various tribes. In 1710, he invited a number of Algonquian tribes located in the area from the Green Bay to the Wisconsin River, including Sacs, Foxes, Mascoutens, and Kickapoos, to move to eastern Michigan. First Stage. Some Foxes, together with other Wisconsin tribes, did go to the Detroit area, but the venture soon was reversed by Montreal’s governor general, the marquis de Vaudreuil. Not only did the Foxes expect that
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their cooperation with the resettlement scheme should be rewarded, but they also became entangled in skirmishes with other tribes, especially Hurons and members of the Illinois Confederacy. They even raided French colonial farms, stealing food and livestock. Instead of heeding French orders in 1711 to return to Wisconsin, the Foxes became even more belligerent, proceeding to build a fort near Fort Pontchartrain on the Detroit River. It took more than a year for the French, taking advantage of alliances with Huron and Illinois Confederacy tribes, to expel the Foxes by force. Most of the besieged Foxes were massacred brutally by Frenchallied American Indians, despite the French commander’s assurance of safe passage upon surrender. Those who escaped sought refuge among the Seneca Iroquois. These violent events on the Detroit River were bound to have repercussions among the Fox tribes that had stayed behind in Wisconsin alongside their allies, the Sacs and Winnebagos. When the defeated Foxes returned to Wisconsin, new alliances were built; by the summer of 1714, they had begun attacks on French traders passing from Detroit to Michilimackinac. In this first stage of the Fox Wars, some Wisconsin natives hoped that the French would seek an accommodation with the Foxes. As the situation deteriorated and trade became paralyzed, many American Indians began to call for a strong French military campaign against the Foxes. Before long, it appeared that the Foxes had long-distance ties with other allies in British territory, especially the Senecas. This complicated the French strategy considerably, forcing the French to try diplomatic intervention far to the east of Wisconsin. Vaudreuil was unable to report any progress for at least three years. Although Fox chieftains Okimaoussen and Ouchala agreed to de-escalate the conflict, warfare against the Foxes by their inveterate enemies, the Chippewas and Potawatomis, caused strife to spread into Illinois tribal areas in 1719. By 1721, the Foxes had even sealed peace with their former enemies, the Sioux, to have an ally against the Illinois tribes. In 1725, the French reported that their own hopes to tap the Sioux fur market were seriously hampered by the Sioux-Fox alliance. By the time of Vaudreuil’s death in October, 1725, King Louis XV himself sent orders to replace the French commander at Green Bay, François Amariton, who was suspected of encouraging Fox raids into Illinois territory, and to step up activities against the Foxes. This task, which would lead to disastrous consequences for the Fox tribe, fell to Charles de Beauharnais, governor general of New France from 1726 to 1747. A major campaign was set for 1728. French forces of four hundred soldiers were joined by coureurs de bois (freelance French fur trappers
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and traders) and hundreds of western natives. The French claimed success, but in reality the Foxes had withdrawn into Iowa rather than risk a battle. Kickapoo Involvement. The next stage of conflict came when Fox chief Kansekoe tried to force his Kickapoo allies to hand over a dozen French traders who were being held as hostages. Kickapoo refusals incited younger Fox warriors to break away from Kansekoe and attack both Kickapoo and Mascouten hunters. Both tribes soon asked for French alliance status. Then, some Winnebagos and Menominees also joined attacks against the Foxes. Declining chances for a victory again divided the Foxes. Some factions favored a peace, while more hostile tribesmen decided to leave Wisconsin and seek asylum, preferably among the Senecas. The attempted migration left them open to reprisal attacks, especially by members of the Illinois Confederacy, supported by the Foxes’ former neighbors, the Potawatomis, Kickapoos, and Mascoutens. A major siege of Fox fortifications on the Illinois prairie in 1730 involved French relief forces, who joined in a general massacre of more than five hundred Foxes, including women and children. Governor General Beauharnais reported that the remaining Foxes no longer could consider resistance. Continuing reprisals caused Foxes under Chief Kiala to try to resettle peacefully on the north bank of the Wisconsin River and to send emissaries to Montreal. Kiala’s apparent failure to meet French terms tempted Beauharnais to allow the Iroquois “volunteers” to pursue the refugee Foxes spread out in areas of Iowa and Illinois. Intertribal fighting continued until 1735, when two refugee groups separated, one to the Rock River in Illinois and the other to the mouth of the Wisconsin. In 1736, White Cat, a friendly Sac chief, asked Beauharnais to grant a pardon. Beauharnais tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Sacs to gain peace by allowing the French to disperse the Foxes among other American Indian nations. Finally, unable to hold out in the Rock River Valley against other Indians’ attacks, and fearful of massive French reprisals for Fox assistance to Sioux warriors near Lake Peoria who had killed French travelers in the area, Fox chief Mekaga agreed to accept French terms of forced relocation. By the fall of 1741, the Foxes and Sacs were trekking to new settlements: ten lodges to the Chicago River, three to Milwaukee, and the rest to their old homeland village on the Fox River in Wisconsin. Although the formal Fox War was over in 1741, these settlements still suffered from attacks by their Chippewa, Menominee, and Ottawa neighbors. In 1743, Beauharnais himself had to intercede to gain another joint pledge of peace.
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See also: Fur trade; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Iroquois Confederacy. Byron D. Cannon Sources for Further Study Edmunds, R. David, and Joseph L. Peyser. The Fox Wars: The Mesquaki Challenge to New France. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. The most complete study to date of the specific events of the Fox Wars. Hagen, William T. The Sac and Fox Indians. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. A general history, including cultural and religious topics. Parkman, Francis. Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV. 1877. Reprint. New York: Library of America, 1983. A pioneering work providing background on French interests in the Great Lakes area just before dealings with the Foxes became a focal point. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Places the Fox Wars in a wider chronological and geographical context of French, British, and American Indian relations.
French and Indian War Date: May 28, 1754-February 10, 1763 Locale: North America Tribes involved: Algonquian, Huron, Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora) Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: Defeat of French and Native American forces establishes British dominance in North America but increases the mother country’s dependence on colonial resources. The French and Indian War was the North American part of a larger conflict called the Seven Years’ War, fought between France and Great Britain for control of colonies in North America and India and for hegemony in Europe. Both Great Britain and France claimed large territories in North America. In addition to the thirteen colonies spread out along the Atlantic coast, the British claimed what is now northern Canada. The French claimed a huge section of the inner continent, stretching from New Orleans in the
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The taking of Quebec, September 13, 1759, during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham proved to be the decisive battle in the French and Indian War. Effectively, the French stronghold east of the Mississippi River was ceded to the British in the 1763 treaty that ended the war. The rights of the indigenous nations that had prior claim to all of this land were not considered. (Library of Congress)
south to what is now Montana in the northwest and Quebec in the northeast. The French built a series of forts along the Mississippi River and its tributaries to defend their claims. One of these tributaries, the Ohio River, flows southwest along the western frontier of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Both French and British claimed this land. British colonists worried about a French invasion and resented the French presence, which limited western expansion. In 1754, 150 soldiers from Virginia, led by the twenty-two-year-old officer George Washington, headed west to secure British claims by building a fort at the fork where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers meet to form the Ohio River. When they arrived, they discovered that the French had built a fort there already, Fort Duquesne. Washington’s troops lost the ensuing battle (May 28), which marked the beginning of the war. As they struggled to expand their North American empires, the British and French did not consider the rights or needs of the people who had been living on the land for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. The only time Europeans took serious notice of the First Americans was when they needed allies in wartime. Both the French and the British sought and
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received support from some native peoples. For their part, Native Americans, by siding with one party or the other, could get access to European weapons and perhaps succeed in driving at least one group of invading Europeans from the land. Algonquians and Hurons allied themselves with the French, whom they had known mainly as fur traders over the past century and a half. The French seemed less intrusive and permanent than the British, who cleared the land for farming. The Algonquians were, moreover, traditional rivals of those tribes allied with the Iroquois Confederacy. By selling goods at low prices and exploiting traditional enmities, the British also were able to find native allies, including the Mohawks, one of the most powerful Iroquois nations, who agreed to help the British against the French and Algonquians. The Tide Turns for the British. The war went poorly for the British at first. With thirteen separate colonial governments involved, decisions were difficult to make. Nor were British soldiers accustomed to the American landscape. In 1755, the British general Edward Braddock was badly defeated when he attacked the French at Fort Duquesne. The French and their Native American allies easily scouted out and ambushed Braddock’s troops, shooting from behind trees at the British soldiers, whose red coats made good targets. The French won a series of battles until 1757, when the tide changed. The British had had some advantages from the beginning. There were twenty times as many British in North America as French, and the British had the most powerful navy in the world. Then, in 1757, a dynamic new leader, William Pitt, took over the British government. Pitt sent Britain’s best generals to lead the war against the French and motivated British colonists to support the war effort by offering high prices for supplies purchased in America. A year later, the Lenni Lenape (Delawares), an Algonquian people living in Pennsylvania, withdrew their support from the French, leaving Fort Duquesne vulnerable to attack. The British attacked successfully and renamed the fort to honor their new leader. The city that grew on the site of the fort, Pittsburgh, still contains William Pitt’s name. Battle of the Plains of Abraham. The decisive battle came in 1759, when Pitt sent General James Wolfe to attack the city of Quebec, the French capital. If the British could take this city, they would win the war. Quebec, located at the top of a high cliff that rose steeply from the banks of the St. Lawrence River, was easier to defend than to attack. The French general in charge, the marquis de Montcalm, was an experienced leader, but even he was taken by surprise when Wolfe moved four thousand troops across
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the St. Lawrence River in small boats, found ways to scale the cliffs, and attacked in the early hours of the morning. Both generals were killed in the battle, but news of the British victory reached Wolfe before he died. This Battle of the Plains of Abraham was the turning point for the French, effectively ending their stronghold in North America. When the British took Montreal in 1760, fighting ended in North America. There was no formal peace treaty until the war between France and Prussia, Great Britain’s ally in central Europe, finally ground to a halt three years later. Then, in the Treaty of Paris (February 10, 1763), the French ceded Canada and all French lands east of the Mississippi to Great Britain. France retained the land it claimed west of the Mississippi, including the key port of New Orleans. Spain, which had allied itself with France against Great Britain, was forced to give up Florida. The rights of the indigenous nations that had prior claim to all of this land were not considered. Consequences. The French and Indian War had important consequences for the early development of American history. It increased Great Britain’s needs for its North American colonies but had the opposite effect on the colonists’ needs for Great Britain. With the French gone, the need for the protection of the British military began to disappear as well. To some colonists, it seemed that the redcoats were starting to get in the way. The British Proclamation of 1763 forbade colonists from settling land west of a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains. Welcomed by the followers of the Ottawa chief Pontiac, who earlier that year had brought many American Indian nations together to defend their lands against European invasion, the proclamation disappointed those colonists who had expected to benefit from land opened up by the French defeat. In effect, the Proclamation of 1763 had little effect in preserving western lands for their Indian inhabitants as colonists began to push west anyway. The war brought the colonies closer together. There had been a first effort, called the Albany Plan of Union, to unite the colonies under one government. Although the Albany Plan, discussed by representatives of several colonies in Albany, New York, in 1754, was unsuccessful—the individual colonial governments being hesitant to give up any power—the fact that some sort of union was even discussed reflected a growing tendency to see the colonies as a unified entity distinct from the mother country, England. Seven years of fighting on three continents and all the world’s oceans had exhausted British resources as well. War debts forced the British government to increase tax rates drastically. These rates, however, only ap-
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plied to British citizens in Great Britain. British citizens in North America continued to pay relatively low taxes. To many British, it seemed only fair that the British in the colonies pay their share for the war that had made their homes safe from invasion. The self-confidence of the colonists had grown as they helped fight a successful war. They believed they had the same rights to representative government as British citizens in Great Britain. One of these was the right to send representatives to the body of government that levies taxes. Colonists accepted taxes levied by colonial governments, where they were represented, but rejected taxes levied by the British parliament, to which they were not allowed to send representatives. British efforts to tax the colonies, despite colonial protest, thus became one of the causes for the outbreak of the American Revolution. See also: Albany Congress; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Proclamation of 1763. T. W. Dreier Sources for Further Study Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Presents the French and Indian War as a conflict in and of itself, rather than merely as a prelude to the Revolutionary War. ____________. A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. This illustrated regional study reveals how average colonists experienced and affected the war. Auth, Stephen F. The Ten Years War: Indian-White Relations in Pennsylvania, 1755-1765. New York: Garland, 1989. Includes Native American perspectives missing in many studies. Final chapter shows the war’s implications for later treatment of Native Americans. Hamilton, Edward P. The French and Indian Wars: The Story of Battles and Forts in the Wilderness. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962. The first chapters of this narrative history discuss the role played by George Washington. Jennings, Francis. Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. A comprehensive study by a major scholar; offers easily accessible information on all aspects of the war. Illustrations, maps, and indices. Schwartz, Seymour. The French and Indian War, 1754-1763: The Imperial Struggle for North America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. A concise, well-illustrated study that provides a thoughtful, readable overview.
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Friends of the Indian organizations Date: 1879-1900’s Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Nineteenth century history, Organizations, Religion and missionary activities, Twentieth century history Significance: A variety of humanitarian Christian associations sought to reform federal Indian policy by supporting legislation aimed at abolishing “Indianness” and substituting American ideals of individualism, ownership, and Christianity. Friends of the Indian organizations were formed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century by mainly eastern Christian humanitarians who were determined to influence federal Indian policy. Members of these organizations were convinced of the superiority of Christian civilization and were determined to do away with Indianness and tribal traditions; their goal was to turn individual Indians into patriotic American citizens. The friends of the Indian groups supported allotment in order to break up tribal land ownership and force individual ownership; they sought to end tribal jurisdiction and bring Indians as individual citizens before the law. They supported vocational education for Indian children, particularly boarding schools, and they were generally intolerant of Indian culture or spiritual expression and worked to outlaw Sun Dances, vision questing, giveaways, plural marriages, and so on. These well-intentioned Christian men and women sought to influence and direct Indian policy by engaging in intense lobbying efforts with federal officials and by educating the general public through newsletters, pamphlets, and speakers. These reformers and their supporters were convinced of the righteousness of their cause and greatly affected federal Indian policy well into the twentieth century. Beginning in 1883, these groups came together annually for the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian in New Paltz, New York, to coordinate their efforts. General harmony and a good working relationship existed among the various groups because they shared a common religious outlook that they were doing God’s will by guiding Indians from savagery to civilization. The most significant and far-reaching areas affected by these organizations were the federal Indian education system and the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887. One of the most promi-
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nent groups, the Indian Rights Association, continues to exist; however, it now supports tribalism and tribal self-determination. See also: Carlisle Indian School; General Allotment Act; Indian Rights Association. Carole A. Barrett
Fur trade Date: Early to mid-seventeenth century Locale: St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes region Tribes involved: Algonquian peoples, Huron, Iroquois Confederacy Categories: Colonial history Significance: The fur trade involved not only material, but also major social and policy exchanges between Indians and whites. During the early years of fur trading, Europeans and Native Americans met on very widely extended ground. The most concentrated contacts came between the Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes area, down to the Hudson River Valley and westward to Lake Winnipeg. Although forms of interaction varied between regions, two general patterns characterized the impact of the fur trade on Native Americans. One was essentially political (and military) in nature; the other combined commercial considerations with cultural questions. The earliest reports of plentiful furs came from Stephan Gomez, sailing along the northeastern coast of America on a Spanish expedition in 1524. Ten years later, the attraction of luxury furs such as marten and sable, plus the wider commercial possibilities of beaver furs, brought the French explorer Jacques Cartier to the Atlantic coastal lands of the Micmacs. These tribes had already seen European iron implements and eagerly traded furs for axes and knives. Cartier proceeded to explore inland via the St. Lawrence River. It was during the active years of Samuel de Champlain, after he began to serve in 1608 as an explorer for the French fur trade monopolists Francis Pontgravé and Pierre de Guast Sieur de Monts in New France, that prototypic forms of the fur trade emerged. Extension of the fur trade took many generations. It was Champlain who urged establishment of a trading outpost at the Lachine rapids (near the future site of Montreal) to make it easier for Hurons and Algonquians to reach French traders without risking clashes with their enemies, the Iroquois. The latter controlled zones
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south of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario. Although the territory of the Hurons, along the Ottawa River (which drains into the St. Lawrence near Montreal), was not very rich in furs, they brought goods obtained from tribes farther inland to the Ottawa River. To do this, the Hurons needed quite crude European trade items to exchange for valuable furs; they used the furs to obtain for themselves higher quality goods, mainly French tools and firearms. In contrast to early and eager French interest in exporting American furs, the British at first lagged behind in taking major trading initiatives. In fact, until fur prices in England began to rise in the early eighteenth century, Atlantic colonists were much more interested in the export of medicinal roots such as sassafras than in beaver or more exquisite pelts. However, this did not keep them from supporting the Iroquois’ hostile challenges to French fur trading practices. Much of the real work in extending fur trading in the early years was done by what the French called coureurs de bois, or “woods runners.” These were individuals who were able to undergo the rigors of trekking inland, meeting personally with tribal representatives (many learned Indian dialects), and sealing agreements for delivery of furs. The woods runners became the most knowledgeable European intermediaries in dealings with Indians, and they often retained deep respect for Indian cultural traditions. Various Indian groupings competed for favored positions in dealing with European fur traders. Open competition between tribes led to serious conflicts. The most important of these involved the Hurons and Algonquians. For many years until their 1648 defeat by the Iroquois, the Hurons struggled against Algonquian insistence that Huron canoes could not proceed directly to Quebec with furs, but would have to use Algonquian intermediaries. As the easternmost Algonquian lands bordered on Quebec, they were able to extract trade advantages in dealing with both the Hurons and the French. It was this target that attracted attacks by the Iroquois, supported by the British. In the end, both Algonquians and Hurons would be displaced from their traditional homelands by their former European sponsors. Cultural Impacts. The fur trade had many impacts on the material and social culture of Indians. Ecological effects (such as blocking waterways, eventual depletion of select fauna and, as a result of the latter, abnormal distribution of plant species previously controlled by omnivorous animals) are harder to reconstruct than patterns that were immediately observable by the traders themselves. For example, stereotypes concerning “simple”
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Indian acceptance of exploitative terms in the fur trade do not always hold up. It is inaccurate to suggest that, when major trading sites such as those of the Hudson Bay Company or the French One Hundred Associates existed, Native Americans became hopelessly dependent on foreign goods offered for their furs. In some cases, attraction to what Europeans thought would be easy sales just did not develop, because local cultures preferred to hold fast to traditional items of value, many of which had ceremonial significance unknown to outsiders. In other widely documented cases, because of independent Indian preference for certain goods, especially quality French metal tools and weapons, frustrated traders with inferior quality or different style goods were unable to convince consumers to make deals. This does not alter the regrettable fact that many traders took advantage of Indian unfamiliarity with either the real value of trade items, sometimes just worthless trinkets, or the dangers they ran by exchanging furs for alcohol. Omens of the troubles that afflicted later stages and different regions of the fur trade surfaced in 1642, when a number of Indian tribes, supported by Jesuit missionaries, petitioned the governor of New France to return to the higher moral standards of Champlain’s days, when trade involving alcohol had been banned. See also: Beaver Wars; Fox Wars; French and Indian War; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Indianwhite relations: Russian colonial; Iroquois Confederacy; Lewis and Clark expedition; Manhattan Island purchase; Pontiac’s Resistance; Proclamation of 1763; Red River Raids; Trade and Intercourse Acts. Byron D. Cannon Sources for Further Study Brown, Jennifer, et al., eds. The Fur Trade Revisited. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994. Selected papers on different aspects of the fur trade from the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference. Francis, Daniel, and Toby Morantz. Partners in Furs. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1983. A study of the Hudson Bay Company’s impact on Algonquians in the Eastern James Bay. Phillips, Paul. The Fur Trade. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. Although somewhat dated, this general history is extremely complete for all regions and periods.
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Gadsden Purchase Date: December 30, 1853; ratified June 29, 1854 Locale: Southern Arizona, New Mexico Tribes involved: Chiricahua Apache, Tohono O’odham Categories: National government and legislation, Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: The Gadsden Purchase resolved boundary disputes between the United States and Mexico resulting from the Mexican War but ignored consultation with affected Indians. James Gadsden was a South Carolina railroad promoter turned diplomat. On behalf of President James Buchanan, he negotiated America’s purchase of 45,535 square miles of territory from Mexico for the payment of fifteen million dollars (reduced later to ten million). A block of land nearly the size of New York State, the Gadsden Purchase lies south of the Gila River, forming part of present-day Arizona and New Mexico. The treaty embodying the purchase was signed on December 30, 1853, and ratified on June 29, 1854, settling boundary questions between the United States and Mexico left unresolved by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican War in 1848. The purchase was prompted by American politicians eager to build a transcontinental railroad through the Southwest. Neither the Mexican nor American governments consulted with the Tohono O’odhams (Papagos) and Chiricahua Apaches who lived in the area, and these Indians subsequently ignored boundaries that were not theirs. See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of. Clifton K. Yearley
General Allotment Act Date: February 8, 1887 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history Significance: A policy of allotting land to individual Native Americans in severalty begins to dissolve the tribal nations.
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When the General Allotment, or Dawes, Act became law on February 8, 1887, proponents hailed it as the Indian Emancipation Act and Secretary of the Interior L. Q. C. Lamar called it “the most important measure of legislation ever enacted in this country affecting our Indian affairs.” The law dealt primarily with Native American ownership of land. It authorized the president of the United States, through the Office of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, to allot the lands on reservations to individual Native Americans, so that they would hold the land in severalty instead of the tribe’s owning the land communally. Each head of a household would receive a quarter-section of land (160 acres); single persons over eighteen years of age and orphans would receive 80 acres; and other persons, 40 acres. (In 1891, an amendment to the law equalized the allotments to provide 80 acres for each individual, regardless of age or family status.) The United States government would hold the allotments in trust for twenty-five years, during which time the Native American could not sell or otherwise dispose of his or her land. At the end of that period, he or she would receive full title to it. After the process of dividing up the reservation land for allotments, the federal government could sell the surplus land (often a considerable portion of the reservation) to willing purchasers (most of whom would be European Americans). The money from such sales would go to a fund to benefit Native American education.
Effect of Allotment on Land Ownership, 1890-1970 Indian-Owned Year
Trust Allotted
Tribal
GovernmentOwned
Total
1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1949 1960 1970
— 6,737,000 31,094,000 37,159,000 — 17,574,000 16,534,000 12,235,000 10,698,000
104,314,000 77,865,000 41,052,000 35,502,000 32,097,000 36,047,000 38,608,000 41,226,000 39,642,000
— — — — — 1,786,000 863,000 4,618,000 5,068,000
104,314,000 84,602,000 72,146,000 72,661,000 32,097,000 55,407,000 56,005,000 58,079,000 55,408,000
Note: Figures represent acres, rounded off to thousands, under Bureau of Indian Affairs jurisdiction. Dash (—) indicates unavailable data. Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975.
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The Dawes Act also provided for Native American citizenship. Native Americans who received allotments in severalty or who took up residence apart from their tribe and adopted what European Americans considered civilized ways became citizens of the United States and subject to the laws of the state or territory in which they lived. In 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, granting full citizenship to nearly all Native Americans who were not already citizens, and measures in the late 1940’s extended such status to Arizona and New Mexico Native Americans that the 1924 law had missed. Proponents of the Act. Two groups of European Americans especially welcomed the Dawes Act. Land-hungry settlers who had long cast covetous eyes on the reservation lands—which, to European American thinking, were going to waste because of the lack of productive agricultural practices by Native Americans, whom they considered to be hunters and gatherers—were now able to acquire the lands left over from the allotment process. No doubt, the less scrupulous among the settlers also looked forward to the day when individual Native Americans would receive full title to their land and be able to sell, lease, or otherwise dispose of it. Then pressure, legitimate or not, would likely induce the new owner to part with the acreage. A second group of European Americans, however, was more influential in securing passage of the Dawes Act. These were the humanitarian reformers of the day, who considered private ownership of land in severalty, U.S. citizenship, education, and consistent codification of laws to be indispensable means for the acculturation of the Native Americans and their eventual assimilation into the mainstream of U.S. society. As ministers from the several Christian denominations, educators, civil servants, politicians, and even a few military personnel, these philanthropists exerted a clout beyond their numbers. Calling themselves the Friends of the Indian, these reformers had been meeting annually since at the Catskills resort of Lake Mohonk to discuss ways to bring the tribal peoples to what the conveners deemed to be civilization. Federal politicians had long considered private ownership of land essential to the civilizing process. Thomas Jefferson and the like-minded policymakers of his time had strongly advocated it, and in 1838 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs gave voice to a widespread view when he said, “Unless some system is marked out by which there shall be a separate allotment of land to each individual . . . you will look in vain for any general casting off of savagism. Common property and civilization cannot coexist.”
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It was not until the post-Civil War years, when increasing European American pressures on the Native Americans created crisis after crisis, that humanitarians and philanthropists began a concerted drive for “Indian reform.” Land in severalty would be the most important factor in breaking up tribalism. The reform groups that were organized—the Board of Indian Commissioners (1869), the Women’s National Indian Association (1879), the Indian Rights Association (1882), the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian (1883), and the National Indian Defense Association (1885), to name the most important—all strongly espoused allotment in severalty. Nor were they satisfied with the piecemeal legislation that affected one tribe at a time; the panacea they sought was a general allotment law. Although supporters argued over the speed of implementing allotment, such proponents as Carl Schurz, Herbert Welsh, and the Reverend Lyman Abbott fought energetically for such legislation. They finally won to their cause Senator Henry L. Dawes, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, who successfully shepherded through Congress the measure that bears his name. Voices Against Allotment. Only a few European American voices cried out against the proposal. Congressman Russell Errett of Pennsylvania and a few others protested that the bill was a thinly disguised means of getting at the valuable tribal lands. Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado argued that the Native Americans did not want to own land in severalty and were not prepared to assume the responsibilities that went with private property and citizenship. He denied the contention of the reformers that private ownership of land would lead to civilization. Albert Meacham, editor of The Council Fire, maintained that there was little enthusiasm for severalty among traditionalist Native Americans, and anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan thought that allotment would result in massive poverty. Presbyterian missionaries apparently were disunited on the subject of allotment, and their views fell by the wayside as the juggernaut of reform plunged ahead. Native American response to allotment has largely gone unrecorded. The Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Sac, Fox, and a few other tribes in Indian Territory, as well as the Seneca in New York, contended that they already mostly owned land individually and won exclusion from the act’s operation. By 1906, however, Congress extended allotment to them as well. Most of the complaints came after the act’s passage, when Native Americans lost land and found farming difficult under its provisions. “February 8, 1887,” one optimistic spokesman of the Board of Indian Commissioners commented, “may be called the Indian emancipation day.”
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Although much sincere Christian goodwill motivated passage of the Dawes Act, it turned out to be a disaster for Native Americans. The sponsors of the Dawes Act had assumed an unrealistically romantic view of the Native American. People who had had firsthand experience with tribal peoples attempted to prove to the reformers that the “noble savage” had never existed. In 1891, Congress allowed Native Americans to lease their allotments if they were not able to farm for themselves. The allotments and the leasing moved faster and with less careful discrimination than Dawes and other promoters had intended. Instead of being a measure that turned Native Americans into self-supporting farmers, the act, through the rapid alienation of the Native Americans’ lands, meant the loss of the land base on which the tribal people’s hope for future prosperity depended. Tribal peoples held claim to about 150 million acres of land in 1887. The Dawes Act eventually diverted two-thirds of that acreage out of Native American ownership, down to about 48 million acres by 1934. Not until that year, with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (the Wheeler-Howard Act, also known as the “Indian New Deal”), did the federal government repeal the Dawes Act and encourage communal forms of ownership again, but by that time much of the former reservation land was gone as surplus sales, leases, or sales by the individual allottees. See also: Allotment system; Friends of the Indian organizations; Indian Citizenship Act; Indian Reorganization Act. Francis P. Prucha, updated by Thomas L. Altherr Sources for Further Study Coleman, Michael C. “Problematic Panacea: Presbyterian Missionaries and the Allotment of Indian Lands in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Pacific Historical Review 54, no. 2 (1985): 143-159. Shows that the Presbyterians were not united about allotment of tribal lands. Gibson, Arrell Morgan. “The Centennial Legacy of the General Allotment Act.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 65, no. 3 (1987): 228-251. Examines the longrange effects of the Dawes Act on Native Americans. Greenwald, Emily. Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, the Jicarilla Apache, and the Dawes Act. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Examines the effect of the General Allotment Act on two groups of Native Americans. Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Interweaves the story of the Dawes Act with the larger assimilationist programs toward Native Americans.
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Mintz, Steven, ed. Native American Voices. St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 1995. Contains part of the Dawes Act and a complaint by a Cherokee farmer in 1906. Prucha, Francis Paul, ed. Americanizing the American Indians: Writings of the “Friends of the Indian” 1880-1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. Section 2 provides a representative sampling of primary source writings about the Dawes Act. Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975. A concise summary of the attitudes that produced the act and its repercussions for Native Americans; contains the full text of the original law.
Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of Date: February 2, 1848 Locale: Southwest Tribes involved: Pantribal in California and the Southwest Categories: Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: This treaty ended the Mexican-American War; in it, Mexico ceded to the United States about half its national territory, and the ramifications for native peoples in the ceded territory were profound. The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the treaty that ended it were largely the result of a belief that came to be called manifest destiny, the theory that white European settlers of the United States were predestined to settle and dominate the land from coast to coast. This attitude was used to justify U.S. acquisition of both Indian and Mexican territory. President James K. Polk, a leading advocate of manifest destiny, was the most important figure in the Mexican-American War and the peace negotiations that followed. In Mexico chronic instability caused by the struggle between the various political parties and leaders made waging war and negotiating peace difficult and made preserving the peace impossible. Tension between the United States and Mexico had been increasing in the years preceding the war. Mexico was aware of, and feared, the Polk administration’s desire to annex New Mexico and California. The United
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Before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, c. 1835
States was pressing claims against Mexico, and the Texas boundary dispute was becoming more critical. After fighting broke out in the disputed Alta U N I T E D S TAT E S California area along the Rio Grande, the United States declared war. Attempts to negotiate peace before and during the war were Sonora Nueva unsuccessful. Mexico saw no Mexico advantage in it, and the United States hoped to occupy more MEXICO territory. Chihuahua As a result of its military success, the United States was able to make acquisition of New Mexico and California a condition of peace. Polk chose Nicholas P. Trist as peace commissioner in April, 1847, and gave him a draft of a treaty which called for the cession of Alta and Baja California and New Mexico, the right of transit across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Rio Grande as the Texas border, and a payment to Mexico of $15 million plus the assumption of claims of United States citizens against Mexico. Opposition quickly developed in both Mexico and the After the Treaty of Guadalupe United States to the proposed Hidalgo, 1848 treaty. Mexico did not want an imposed peace, and the United States envisioned better terms. When Trist negotiated a peace unacceptable to Polk, the president recalled Trist. Trist reU N I T E D S TAT E S mained in Mexico, however, and finally negotiated a modified treaty that Mexico accepted because of financial Gadsden problems and fear of additional Purchase (1853) losses if war continued. The possibility of a successful revolution in Mexico added urMEXICO gency to the peace process.
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The United States dropped its demand for transit across the isthmus and agreed to stop Indian raids across the border. The treaty was signed on February 2, 1848, in Guadalupe Hidalgo, and ratification was exchanged on May 30, 1848, in Mexico City. Although Articles IX and X guaranteed the political and property rights of Mexican citizens and Indians in the territory transferred to the United States, the Indians of California did not receive citizenship, nor were their property rights protected. As a result of violence and other factors such as disease, the Indian population declined by 100,000 within two decades. In New Mexico Territory the Indians were placed under federal protection and denied citizenship, but they did not lose their lands. Citizenship was granted to the Indians in 1869, and reservations were later created. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Gadsden Purchase. Robert D. Talbott
Horseshoe Bend Treaty Date: August 9, 1814 Locale: Alabama Tribes involved: Creek Categories: Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: This agreement eliminated any possibility of an effective Creek alliance against U.S. expansion and thus facilitated the removal of the Creek people to the trans-Mississippi region during Andrew Jackson’s presidency. After his defeat of the Red Stick faction of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, General Andrew Jackson took full advantage of his authorization to secure a peace agreement. His purpose was twofold: to secure large tracts of land as compensation for the cost of his campaign and to eliminate Creek political power by isolating them. In the Treaty of Horseshoe Bend, also known as the Treaty of Fort Jackson, signed on August 9, 1814, Jackson received, on behalf of the United States, 22 million acres in south Georgia and central Alabama, or half of the Creek domain. Cessions in the west isolated the Creeks from the Choctaws and Chickasaws, while those in the south created a buffer against the Seminoles and
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the Spanish. Ironically, only one Red Stick signed the treaty; the remaining signatories were Creek allies of Jackson, who lost much of their own land. Each Creek ally was allowed to keep a square mile of land as long as they or their family used it, but the United States reserved the right to build forts, trading posts, and roads on Creek lands. See also: Creek War; Fort Mims, Battle of; Indian Removal Act; Indianwhite relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Trail of Tears. Richard B. McCaslin
Indian Date: Fifteenth century-present Locale: Americas and West Indies Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Terminology Significance: In its use to refer to the native peoples of the Americas, the term “Indian” is based on historical error. In the late fifteenth century, there was some disagreement over the size of the earth, although it had been accurately determined by the ancient Greeks many centuries earlier. Christopher Columbus and explorers who followed him believed the earth’s circumference to be roughly half what it is known to be today. The purpose of the early explorations of the Americas was to find a pathway to India by sailing west instead of east from Europe, primarily to avoid trouble with the Muslim nations that controlled the territory between Europe and India. Apparently, Columbus thought he had reached India when he landed on the island of Hispaniola (today occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), named the area the West Indies, and referred to the natives as indios (Spanish for Indians). While the later British and French explorers who landed in North America did not believe that Massachusetts and Quebec were India, the term was still used, translated into the appropriate languages. The term is still in wide use essentially because no better collective term has been widely accepted. Some native people find the term “Indian” deeply offensive, whereas others find it and “American Indian” acceptable and even preferable to such well-intentioned revisions as “Native American” or the less widely used “Amerind.” The most accurate—and most widely accepted—
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way to identify a person or tradition is simply to refer to the specific tribe or group to which the person or tradition belongs. See also: American Indian; Amerind; Federally recognized tribes; Native American; Tribe. Marc Goldstein
Indian Act of 1876 Date: 1876 Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: National government and legislation, Nineteenth century history Significance: The Indian Act of 1876 was the first comprehensive postConfederation law to establish Canadian policy toward Native Americans. The British North America Act of 1867, which created the Dominion of Canada, gave the federal government sole jurisdiction in all issues related to Canadian Indians. This long-held British colonial policy had been established initially in recognition that natives treated in an inconsistent and often unscrupulous manner posed a military threat to British colonies. Even after Indians ceased to be an obstacle to British settlement, the policy was continued with the twin goals of protection and the eventual assimilation of the natives. With the passage of the Act to Amend and Consolidate the Laws Respecting Indians, better known as the Indian Act of 1876, the government of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald continued the policies established during British colonial rule. As Canada’s first prime minister, Macdonald’s primary aim was nation-building—to which Canadian Indians, particularly those in the newly acquired prairies, presented an obstacle. With regard to the Indian Act, Macdonald was later quoted as saying, “the great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion.” Consequently, Canadian Indian policy under Macdonald placed less emphasis on protection and more on assimilation. Ironically, the goals worked at cross purposes. Paternalistic efforts to protect natives emphasized the distinctions between them and the European Canadians, there-
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fore discouraging assimilation. The Indian Act was amended nine times between 1914 and 1930. Nearly every change in the act placed greater restrictions on the activities of Native Canadians. Reserve System. The Indian Act set out a series of reserved lands that were to be laboratories for training Canadian Indians in the ways of the European settlers. The first reserves were established away from areas of white settlement in an effort to protect Indians from the unsavory elements of European Canadian society. When it became clear that this policy hindered assimilation, new reserves were created near towns populated by whites, in the hope that natives would learn from their European Canadian neighbors. Another element of the Indian Act provided for the establishment of elected band councils. While these had little power, they were meant to supplant traditional native leadership. The act permitted the superintendent general for Indian Affairs or his agent to remove any elected councilor deemed unfit to serve for reasons of “dishonesty, intemperance, or immorality.” The natives of British Columbia were forbidden from engaging in potlatches or any other giveaway feasts, in part because such ceremonies helped to perpetuate traditional leadership roles. This ban on ceremonies was quickly extended beyond the tribes of British Columbia and the Northwest Coast to nearly all expressions of traditional religion and culture. Canadian Indians also were prohibited from consuming alcohol. In order to protect tribal lands from sale to nonnatives, title to those lands was held by the Crown rather than by the tribes. Reserve lands were exempt from property and estate taxes, and income earned on reserves was exempted from taxation. While these provisions have protected Canadian Indian property from seizure, they also have hindered economic development on the reserves. Because Canadian Indians have been unable to mortgage their lands, it often has been difficult for them to raise capital for development projects. Indian agents, who retained power to make nearly all economic decisions with respect to tribal lands, often resorted to harsh measures (such as withholding relief rations) in efforts to force adoption of European Canadian beliefs and practices. While many of the provisions of the Indian Act were intended to ease Native Canadians into a European Canadian lifestyle, others were purely racist. In British Columbia, for example, natives had been denied the treaty rights and land tenure provisions afforded natives in much of the rest of Canada. In order to prevent court action to secure those rights, the Indian Act was amended to prohibit fund-raising for the purposes of pursuing land claims.
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Revision of 1951. The Indian Act was significantly revised in 1951 to eliminate much of the blatant discrimination resulting from amendments to the 1876 act. Some discrimination remained, however. One onerous aspect of the Indian Act that was retained codified the category “Indian” as a legal rather than a racial or cultural designation and gave the government the legal power to determine who qualified as an Indian. It also provided that a man could surrender Indian status for himself, his wife, and his children in exchange for Canadian citizenship and a plot of land. Very few natives chose to relinquish their Indian status voluntarily, however. An Indian woman who married a non-Indian or a nonstatus Indian involuntarily surrendered her own Indian status and benefits, and her children were precluded from claiming Indian status. Non-Indian women who married status Indians, however, became status Indians themselves. This provision of the Indian Act was challenged in 1973 by Jeannette Lavelle, an Ojibwa from Manitoulin Island who had lost her Indian status through marriage. Lavelle based her case on Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although Lavelle did not prevail in court, her case and others exposed Canada to condemnation by several international human rights organizations and led to the 1985 passage of Bill C-31, which restored to thousands of Native Canadian women (and their children) the Indian status they had lost through marriage to non-Indians. The issue of Indian status divides native people as well. While many acknowledge that maintaining a legal status distinct from that of other Canadians creates opportunities for discrimination, others believe that they have inherent aboriginal rights that must be recognized. Despite the flaws and failures of the Indian Act, there has been only one serious attempt to discard it. In 1969, Jean Chrétien, minister of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, proposed a repeal of the Indian Act. This initiative, which became known as the White Paper, proposed eliminating many of the legal distinctions between natives and nonnatives and requiring the provinces to provide the same services to Canadian Indians that they provide to other citizens. Fearing that the provinces would be even more likely to discriminate against natives and that the federal government would abandon its responsibilities for native welfare, many native groups fought the White Paper proposals. They were withdrawn in 1971. See also: Indian Act of 1951; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Reserve system of Canada. Pamela R. Stern Sources for Further Study Dickason, Olive Patricia. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
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Contains several lengthy discussions of the policies generated by the Indian Act. McMillan, Alan D. Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada: An Anthropological Overview. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988. Chapter 12 discusses both the Indian Act and issues related to the status of Canadian Indians. Satzewich, Vic, and Terry Wotherspoon. First Nations: Race, Class, and Gender Relations. Scarborough, Ont.: Nelson Canada, 1993. Contains a thoughtful discussion of the impact of the Indian Act on native women in Canada. Tennant, Paul. Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990. A thorough discussion of the history of Canadian Indian policy and relations between Canadian Indians and whites in the province of British Columbia. Several sections deal specifically with the Indian Act. Tobias, John L. “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy.” In Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, edited by J. R. Miller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. This article, reprinted from the Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology, provides a critical overview of legislation and policy making with regard to Canadian Indians.
Indian Act of 1951 Date: 1951 Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada, including status and nonstatus Indians, Metis, Inuit Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: The first major revision of the Indian Act in seventy-five years softened, but did not eliminate, the blatant discrimination against native peoples institutionalized by earlier legislation. Although the Indian Act of 1951 was the first comprehensive revision of Canada’s 1876 Indian Act, it did little to undo the paternalism of its predecessor. Like the previous law, it gave nearly absolute control of Indian activities to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Devel-
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opment (DIAND). This included the development of Indian lands and resources as well as oversight of band councils. The new act also retained the enfranchisement provisions of the earlier legislation, including those that denied Indian status to women who married non-Indians. In a wellknown sex discrimination suit brought by Jeannette Lavelle, an Ojibwa who was denied Indian status as a result of her marriage, the Supreme Court in 1973 upheld those provisions of the act. A Maliceet woman, Sandra Lovelace, took a similar case before the United Nations in 1981. Although Canada was found to have violated international human rights covenants, the enfranchisement provisions of the Indian Act were not repealed until 1985. The new act did, however, repeal the most blatant discrimination inherent in the Indian Act of 1876. It no longer prohibited Indian religious ceremonies, political fund-raising, or consumption of alcohol off reserve lands. Later amendments permitted the consumption of alcohol on reserves and gave Indians the right to vote in Canadian elections. The 1951 act continued a number of benefits of the earlier legislation including the exemption of Indian lands from property and estate taxes and exemption of income earned on reserves from taxation. Although these provisions have protected Indian property from seizure, they have also hindered economic development on the reserves. Because Indians have been unable to mortgage their lands, it has often been difficult for them to raise capital for development projects. Despite the restrictions imposed by the 1951 Indian Act, natives have fought efforts to discard it altogether. Fearing that the federal government would abandon its responsibilities to native welfare, many natives fought the 1969 White Paper proposal to repeal the Indian Act. The Indian Act was rewritten in 1985, but other than the repeal of enfranchisement provisions, it remained virtually unchanged. See also: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development; Indian Act of 1876; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Reserve system of Canada. Richard G. Condon
Indian Act of 1989 Date: 1989 Locale: Canada
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Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada, including status and nonstatus Indians, Metis, Inuit Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: The Indian Act of 1989 updated and standardized Indian and government rights and responsibilities in Canada. Because of the confusion created by a diversity of local laws in different provinces under the federal government in Canada, legislators have created certain acts that cannot vary according to locality. Such is the case of the Indian Act of 1989. In effect a compendium of earlier acts (of 1927 and 1951), it also added new laws more in keeping with contemporary conditions. The main divisions of the act provide for the designation of reserves (land vested in Her Majesty’s Crown, but “reserved for Indian use”), establishment of band councils and election of band leaders, and a comprehensive Indian Register. By the act, the sole authority of the band council to assign possession of specific reserve lands to individuals is recognized for the first time. This right of possession must be recognized by the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, who issues a Certificate of Possession. Possessors may transfer their land rights, but only to other members within their band, or back to the band council itself. Provisions respecting the security of reserves against government expropriation ended misunderstandings that had developed over many years. With the right of security went defined areas of band responsibility (to maintain roads, bridges, and so on) which, if unfulfilled, could lead to government charges against band councils. Common responsibility between councils and government for revenues accruing to bands (through royalties or sale of Indian produced goods) is spelled out, including the government right to use such funds to assure proper sanitary facilities and disease control. One use of government funds on reserves reflects benevolent subsidies under the 1989 act. Schools are to be provided to all bands on an equal basis, and attendance up to a minimum age is required of all Indian children. Provisions for tax-exempt status (lands, personal property, or salaries earned in reserve areas) and taxable income earned from contacts beyond the reserves are meant to protect both Indian and government interests. The act contains brief mention of individual rights. There is a right of testamentary wills for family security. Otherwise, where individual Indian rights might be jeopardized owing to band council inaction, government
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intervention is allowed (mainly to aid orphans or the mentally handicapped). See also: Indian Act of 1876; Indian Act of 1951; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Reserve system of Canada. Byron D. Cannon
Indian Appropriation Act Date: March 3, 1871 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: Congress unilaterally determines that Native Americans no longer belong to their own sovereign nations, ending treaty making between U.S. and tribal governments. In 1871, Congress voted to end treaty making with Native American peoples. Since the origins of the republic, the U.S. government had dealt with tribes by recognizing each one as an independent nation living within the United States. Hence, ambassadors were sent out from Washington, D.C., to negotiate treaties, and each agreement had to be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, as provided in the Constitution. Chief Justice John Marshall, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), had determined that this process had to be followed because each tribe was self-governing and sovereign in its own territory. The change took place because many people in the United States came to believe that the Native American nations no longer acted like sovereign states. They were too weak, post-Civil War whites believed, and many had become dependent on the federal government for their existence. Members of Congress expressed that view in a series of discussions on American Indian policy in 1870-1871. In the House of Representatives, the feeling also grew that the House was being ignored in the development of Indian policy. The only way the House could influence Native American relations would be by renouncing the treaty concept. The attack on treaty making gained strength during the debate over the money to be appropriated for the United States Board of Indian Commissioners. This agency had been created in 1869 to oversee money authorized to be spent on Indian programs.
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Policy Changes. The commissioners’ first report suggested major changes in Indian policy. It called for ending the treaty system and dealing with “uncivilized” native peoples as “wards of the government.” Board chair Felix R. Brunot echoed the views of many U.S. citizens when he declared that it was absurd to treat “a few thousand savages” as if they were equal with the people and government of the United States. President Ulysses S. Grant supported that view, as did his commissioner of Indian affairs, Ely S. Parker, a member of the Seneca nation. Parker believed that it was a cruel farce to deal with the tribes as equals; in his view, most were “helpless and ignorant wards” of the federal government. The resentment of members of the House of Representatives at their exclusion from Indian policy making became apparent during debates over treaties negotiated in 1868 and 1869. A May, 1868, an agreement with the Osage Nation in Kansas had ceded eight million acres of land to the government. The land then would be sold to a railroad company for twenty cents per acre. The House voted unanimously to recommend that the Senate not ratify the treaty because the land transfer had taken place outside the traditional methods of selling public property. The Senate responded to the House plea by rejecting the treaty. Later, however, the land was sold to the railroad company with the approval of the House. The House took up the issue of treaty making again in 1869 during a violent debate over the Indian appropriation for 1870. It provided money for food, clothes, and education for tribe members living on reservations. The House refused to accept an increase in funds voted by the Senate. Representatives also began to question whether native peoples were capable of signing official treaties with the United States. Most members attacked the traditional system, although three congressmen spoke in favor of the treaty process. Representative William Windom of Minnesota argued that changing the process would be a breach of faith with the tribes. Revoking the process would create great confusion among Native Americans and add to their distrust of the U.S. government. Representative John J. Logan, Republican of Illinois, responded for the majority, however, by declaring that “the idea of this Government making treaties with bands of wild and roving Indians is simply preposterous and ridiculous.” Amid loud cheers and laughter, Logan attacked the character of native peoples and suggested that they were an inferior race that should not be treated as equal in status to the people of the United States. The House refused to approve the appropriation, and the Senate refused to compromise; therefore, no Indian appropriation bill passed Congress in 1869. In the debate over the 1871 appropriation, both sides raised the same arguments. In the Senate, supporters of the treaty system argued that any
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change would severely injure any goodwill native peoples still held toward the U.S. government system. Senator Richard Yates reiterated the antitreaty sentiment, declaring that the tribes were not civilized and that making treaties with them had been a mistake. The Senate, however, passed an appropriation bill and sent it to the House. While the debate took place, many tribes were waiting for the money due to them under treaties negotiated in 1868 and 1869. Unless Congress agreed to an appropriation bill, they would receive nothing. In a compromise arranged between the two legislative branches, a sum of two million dollars was appropriated to pay off prior obligations. Debate over the appropriation for the next year bogged down in the House, however. Agitation Against Treaties. The Board of Indian Commissioners helped the House position by calling for an end to treaty making and for abrogating all existing agreements. Only Representative Eugene M. Wilson of Minnesota spoke in favor of continuing the historic policy. If Native Americans were not protected by treaties, they would be cheated out of their lands by white speculators and end up with nothing, he argued. Debate in the Senate and the House seemed far more concerned with constitutional technicalities than with the welfare of native peoples. Once more, no bill seemed possible. On the last day of the session, President Grant urged a compromise, or, he warned, a war with the tribes was sure to break out. Under this threat, Congress agreed to put aside its differences temporarily and passed a bill. When the new Congress opened on January 4, 1871, Representative Henry Dawes of Massachusetts led the call for change. Dawes, who in 1887 would author a major bill in the Senate drastically changing policy toward native peoples, called for a quick program of assimilation in this earlier debate. If natives were to become Americanized—a policy he supported—they should be treated as individuals rather than as members of foreign nations. Native peoples were not and never had been equal to the United States. The House passed a bill denouncing “so-called treaties.” In the Senate, an amendment to delete the words “so-called” before “treaties” led to a vigorous debate. Senator William Stewart of Nevada objected to the amendment. “The whole Indian policy of feeding drunken, worthless, vagabond Indians, giving them money to squander . . . has been a growing disgrace to our country for years.” Treaties with “irresponsible tribes” were no treaties at all. Only a few senators agreed with this amendment, however, and “so-called” was eliminated. This angered the House, which refused to accept the Senate version.
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Many congressmen and senators were tired of the endless debate and seemed willing to compromise. A conference committee of senators and representatives agreed that past treaties would be accepted or the integrity of the United States would be compromised. It agreed that no more treaties should be negotiated with Native Americans, however. Most conferees agreed that the tribes remaining hardly seemed like legitimate nations, as they were too small, weak, and miserable. The final compromise asserted the validity of prior agreements but provided that in the future, “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.” Both the Senate and the House accepted the compromise, and President Grant signed it into law on March 3, 1871. Treaties would no longer be negotiated with Native American peoples. Native Americans would, instead, become “wards of the state.” See also: Allotment system; General Allotment Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Treaties and agreements in the United States. Leslie V. Tischauser Sources for Further Study Cohen, Fay G. Treaties on Trial: The Continuing Controversy Over Northwest Indian Fishing Rights. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Shows the continuing importance of treaties and the bitterness still evoked by pre-1871 agreements. Heizer, Robert F. “Treaties.” In California. Vol. 8 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978. A brief description of treaty making before 1871. Jones, Dorothy V. License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Discusses abuses of the system and how native peoples failed to understand the process. Kvasnicka, Robert M. “United States Indian Treaties and Agreements.” In History of Indian-White Relations, edited by Wilcomb E. Washburn. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. A short discussion of the debate over treaties and how the process was ended. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. The full story of treaty making and how it was ended in 1871. Index and list of treaties.
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Indian Child Welfare Act Date: November 8, 1978 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: This act established minimum standards for placement of Indian children in foster or adoptive homes to prevent the breakup of Indian families. The Indian Child Welfare Act, passed into law in 1978, establishes minimum federal standards for the removal of Indian children from their families and the placement of these children in foster or adoptive homes. In essence, the act restricts the placement of Indian children in non-Indian homes and gives jurisdiction to tribal courts in deciding matters of child welfare involving adoptive or foster placement. The law removes state jurisdiction in most Indian child welfare cases, even when problems occur off the reservation.
Native American children praying beside their beds at Phoenix Indian School, c. 1900. (National Archives)
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The law affirms the continued existence and the integrity of Indian tribes and was specifically designed to end discriminatory practices of state and county welfare agencies which disregarded Indian extended family arrangements and placed large numbers of Indian children in non-Indian homes. Senate hearings conducted in 1974 documented evidence that as many as 25 percent of Indian children were being systematically removed from their natural families. This in turn was causing the breakup of the Indian family and a high degree of social disruption in Indian communities. The law provides that when foster care or adoption is necessary, the child’s extended family has first priority to assume custody. If no extended family member is available, a member of the child’s tribe or an Indian from another tribe has priority over non-Indians. See also: Carlisle Indian School; Tribal courts; Women of All Red Nations. Carole A. Barrett
Indian Citizenship Act Date: June 2, 1924 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: Confers citizenship on all American Indians born within territorial limits of the United States, thus encouraging the dissolution of tribal nations. American Indians hold a unique position in U.S. society and law, so the question of their citizenship was complicated. By the time of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), it was established practice for European colonial powers to negotiate treaties with American Indian tribes, as they were considered to be independent nations, and this policy was continued by the United States. The Constitution regards tribes as distinct political units separate and apart from the United States, although not foreign nations, so as long as American Indians were members of tribes or nations that negotiated treaties with the United States government as semi-independent political units, they could not be considered U.S. citizens. Two significant rul-
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ings made it clear that an act of Congress would be required in order to grant citizenship to American Indians. The issue of whether American Indians were citizens came into question when the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1868. The amendment stated that “All persons born or naturalized within the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the State wherein they reside.” This amendment was intended to grant citizenship to newly emancipated slaves; however, there was a question as to whether it covered American Indians as well. In 1868, Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin led the opposition to the extension of citizenship to American Indians under the Fourteenth Amendment. Many tribes were not yet settled on reservations, there were ongoing tribal wars in the Great Plains, and Doolittle felt strongly that the natives were not yet prepared for citizenship. There was considerable confusion in the Senate as to whether Indians living with tribal connections were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. It was decided that Fourteenth Amendment rights did not extend to American Indians, when the Senate Committee on the Judiciary ruled, in 1870, that tribal Indians were not granted citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment because they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in the sense meant by the amendment. Once this matter was settled, issues arose over the status of American Indians who voluntarily severed relationships with their tribe. John Elk, an American Indian who terminated relations with his tribe and lived and worked in Omaha, Nebraska, sought to register to vote in a local election. Elk met all the requirements to vote in the state of Nebraska, but he was refused the right to vote because election officials, and later the courts, ruled that as an American Indian, he was not a United States citizen. In 1884, the United States Supreme Court upheld the lower court decisions; it ruled, in Elk v. Wilkins, that an Indian born as a member of a tribe, although he disassociated himself from that tribe and lived among whites, was not a citizen and therefore was ineligible to vote. This ruling indicated it would take a specific act of Congress to naturalize American Indians. Ending Tribal Sovereignty. By the 1880’s, many persons in the United States sought to end tribal sovereignty, individualize Indians (end their status as tribal members), and grant citizenship to them so they eventually would be amalgamated into the general population. As a means toward this end, Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, a leader in reform legislation for American Indian issues, sponsored the General Allotment Act, which became law in 1887. This act carried provisions for citizenship as a reward for leaving the tribe and adopting “the habits of civilized life.” In
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part, this meant that American Indians had to accept small plots of land, successfully farm their lands, and learn the English language. Provisions in the General Allotment Act meant that eventually every American Indian could become a citizen, except members of tribes specifically excluded in legislation. Indians in Oklahoma were originally excluded from these provisions, but in 1901, a congressional act granted Indians in Oklahoma Territory citizenship. By 1917, through a variety of federal statutes, as many as two-thirds of all Native Americans were United States citizens. However, it was World War I that reopened the debate about citizenship for American Indians as a whole. American Indians actively supported the war effort through increased food production, purchase of war bonds, contributions to the Red Cross, and most dramatically, enlistment: Between six and ten thousand Indians, many of whom were not citizens, enlisted for military service. In return for their service to the country, Representative Homer P. Snyder of New York authored the Veterans Citizenship bill, which became law on November 6, 1919. This law granted any American Indian who had received an honorable discharge from military service during World War I the right to apply for citizenship with no restriction on the right to tribal property. Still, by 1920, some 125,000 American Indians were not citizens. Many people in the United States believed that all Indians should be rewarded for their patriotism in World War I. Therefore, Snyder introduced a bill in Congress proposing to declare all remaining noncitizen Indians born in the United States as citizens. Political maneuverings began at once. Citizenship with Sovereignty. Many people favored citizenship as a way to sever the legal relationship between the tribes and the federal government, and many American Indians were aware that citizenship could alter their tribal governments and possibly dissolve the reservation land base. In particular, full-bloods in many tribes were fearful that citizenship would end tribal sovereignty, bring them under state jurisdiction, and ultimately destroy tribal life and values. Compromise was required to resolve these conflicting views. In January, 1924, Congressman Snyder introduced House Resolution 6355, authorizing the secretary of the interior to grant citizenship to all American Indians, but ensuring that “the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.” The bill was approved by Congress, and the American Indian Citizenship Act, signed into law on June 2, 1924, by President Calvin Coolidge, made Native Americans both citizens of the United States and persons with tribal relations.
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Ultimately, citizenship had little impact on American Indian life. The Bureau of Indian Affairs continued its policy of treating tribal members as wards of the government and administering affairs for American Indian citizens. The right to vote was denied to many American Indians until the 1960’s, because the states had the power to determine voter eligibility and did not consider tribal members living on reservations to reside in the state. With federal protections in place, American Indians have been granted the right to vote in federal, state, and local elections, and as members of tribes, they also can vote in tribal elections. See also: Elk v. Wilkins; Indian Civil Rights Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; World wars. Carole A. Barrett Sources for Further Study Cohen, Felix. Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942. The most complete sourcebook for American Indian legal issues. Debo, Angie. A History of the Indians in the United States. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. A comprehensive, in-depth historical survey of Indians of the United States, emphasizing tribal relations with the U.S. government. Olson, James S., and Raymond Wilson. Native Americans in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. A good text for interpreting major trends, events, and attitudes affecting American Indian peoples, including the myriad issues involved in the citizenship debate. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. A seminal work for understanding federal-tribal relationships and the development of American Indian policy. Traces the controversies surrounding citizenship for Indians. Smith, Michael T. “The History of Indian Citizenship.” In The American Indian Past and Present. 2d ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1981. Traces the major factors that made it difficult for American Indians to obtain citizenship. Washburn, Wilcomb, ed. Indian-White Relations. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. Discusses the American Indian in the complex federal-tribal context and contains information on citizenship.
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Indian Civil Rights Act Date: April 11, 1968 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Civil rights, National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: A controversial but important measure is designed to guarantee Indians living under tribal governments the same rights as those of other U.S. citizens. A significant but controversial piece of legislation designed to guarantee the rights of individual American Indians came about in special Indian titles of the Civil Rights Act signed into law on April 11, 1968. The existence of tribal governments and tribal courts had raised the issue of protection of the individual rights of American Indians living in a tribal context. Tribal governments have been considered to be inherently sovereign, because they predate the Constitution and do not derive their power to exist or to govern from either federal or state governments. Federal recognition or regulation of tribes does not make them part of the United States government or guarantee constitutional protection for tribal members. An 1896 Supreme Court case, Talton v. Mayes, determined that the Bill of Rights of the Constitution does not apply to tribes, because tribes derive and retain their sovereignty from their aboriginal self-governing status. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which gave American Indians dual citizenship in their tribes and the United States, did not make the Bill of Rights applicable to situations involving tribal government. There was little interest in the lack of individual rights for American Indians living a tribal existence until the 1960’s, when national attention turned to civil rights. When the United States Senate began to investigate civil rights abuses throughout the nation, some attention was directed at tribal governments. In 1961, the Senate held hearings on civil rights issues on reservations, and investigators heard many examples of infringement on individual liberties and the lack of any way to redress grievances. Contributing to the problem was the fact that tribal societies emphasized the good of the group and were inclined to consider the good of the people as a whole more important than the preservation of individual rights. An 1886 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Kagama determined that Congress has authority to govern the internal affairs of tribes and to make laws that directly affect American Indians. Therefore, Congress
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could impose restrictions on tribal governments and move toward granting greater individual protections to American Indians living on reservations. The Civil Rights Movement. In 1968, when civil rights legislation was proposed to remedy the unequal protection of some groups in the United States, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina proposed bringing tribal governments under the constitutional framework of the United States. After a good deal of political maneuvering, Congressman Ben Reifel of South Dakota, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, rallied support for the bill, and Public Law 90-284, the Indian Civil Rights Act, became law. This act was a set of special titles within the Civil Rights Act. It was intended to protect the rights of individual American Indians; however, it was controversial for its emphasis on individuals rather than the tribal group. The act was intended to preserve tribal autonomy while protecting the rights of individual tribal members. Largely as a result of tribal protests that the full Bill of Rights would severely upset traditional governing practices, a blanket imposition of the Bill of Rights on tribal governments was replaced by a more selective and specific list of individual rights that were to be protected. Those parts of the Bill of Rights that seemed to infringe on the special character of tribal government were omitted. The Indian Civil Rights Act prohibits tribal governments from interfering with freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition for redress of grievances. It specifically authorizes a writ of habeas corpus for anyone detained by the tribe, and it grants due process. This bill also protects the right of privacy against search and seizure, using language identical to that of the Bill of Rights. The Indian Civil Rights Act does not guarantee persons free counsel in criminal proceedings nor the right of indictment by grand jury. In addition to protecting individual freedoms, the Indian Civil Rights Act contains some provisions that impact tribal governments directly. The Indian Civil Rights Act permits tribal governments to establish an official tribal religion in order to allow the continuation of the quasi theocracies that form the basis of government in some American Indian communities. However, the act does require that individual freedom of religion be protected. The secretary of the interior is charged with the responsibility of drawing up codes of justice to be used in courts trying American Indian offenders. Assault resulting in serious bodily injury was added to the offenses on reservations that are subject to federal jurisdiction under the Major Crimes Act. In an important victory for tribal autonomy, Section 7 of Public Law 83-280 was repealed. Public Law 83-280, passed by Congress in 1953 in an attempt to abridge the rights of tribal courts, had given states the
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authority to extend civil and criminal jurisdiction over reservations. The passage of the Indian Civil Rights Act authorized the retrocession of jurisdiction already assumed by a state. A provision in the bill guaranteed the automatic approval of tribal contracts if the secretary of the interior did not act on a tribal request within ninety days. Controversies and Challenges. The Indian Civil Rights Act was controversial when it was proposed and has remained so. Many American Indians view it as an attempt to impose non-Indian values on tribal societies and regard it as a violation of tribal sovereignty, because Congress unilaterally imposed the bill on tribal governments and people. This raised many questions regarding the meaning of “consent.” Tribes do not seek to be protected from misuse of power, but there are questions about both the legality and cultural implications of the Indian Civil Rights Act. The fact that Congress intended to bring tribal governments more within the constitutional framework of the United States caused a good deal of controversy. Tribes have questioned the legality of permitting Congress, which basically represents states, to have a direct role in the formulation and passage of a law for tribes. No mechanism was afforded for tribes to accept or reject this legislation, although tribal cultures and customs are directly impacted by this law because it emphasizes individualism. Many tribal leaders feel the Indian Civil Rights Act restricts tribes in the exercise of their inherent sovereignty. Since passage of the bill, numerous individual challenges to tribal authority have been litigated in federal courts, and many court decisions have favored the individual and weakened the concept of tribal sovereignty. More recent court decisions have tended to use tribal customs and traditions in interpreting the act. A landmark 1978 decision, Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, supported a tribe’s right to extend membership only to the children of male tribal members, as this was in keeping with tribal custom. The court ruled that it did not violate laws against sexual discrimination, because the Indian Civil Rights Act had a dual purpose of protecting individual rights as well as tribal autonomy. See also: American Indian Movement; Indian Citizenship Act; Indianwhite relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Major Crimes Act; Native American Rights Fund; Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez; Tribal courts; United States v. Kagama. Carole A. Barrett Sources for Further Study Clarkin, Thomas. Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. A groundbreaking study of federal Indian policy in the 1960’s.
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Deloria, Vine, Jr., ed. American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Several essays deal with the impact of the Indian Civil Rights Act on American Indian tribal governments. Also explores larger constitutional issues and tribal governments. Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. An important discussion of the impact of legal and legislative measures on tribal autonomy and self-rule. Olson, James S., and Raymond Wilson. Native Americans in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Examines the Indian Civil Rights Act and its assault on tribal sovereignty. Discusses numerous contemporary issues in a historical context. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Examines the relationship of the federal government and tribal governments from the formation of the United States to the 1980’s. Explores the Indian Civil Rights Act in this context. Wunder, John R. “Retained by the People”: A History of American Indians and the Bill of Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Chronicles the history of the relationship between American Indians and the Bill of Rights. Presents a detailed assessment of the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act.
Indian Claims Commission Date: Established 1946; expired 1978 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: The Indian Claims Commission (ICC) purported to resolve all pending Indian land claims in the United States. The Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was established by an act of Congress in 1946. Its mandate was to review all pending territorial claims by native peoples within the forty-eight contiguous states and, where these were found to be valid, to retire them through payment of appropriate compensation.
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American Indian leaders with President Harry Truman at the signing of the Indian Claims Commission bill in 1946. (Library of Congress)
Although the life of the commission was originally expected to be ten years, the sheer volume of the cases it encountered caused its duration to be repeatedly extended. When it was finally suspended on September 30, 1978, the ICC still had a docket of sixty-eight cases remaining to be heard (these were reassigned to the U.S. Court of Claims). In the interim, it had considered several hundred separate claims which, in aggregate, led it to reach some rather striking conclusions in its final report. As Russel Barsh summarized the ICC’s general findings, about half a country was purchased by treaty or agreement at an average price of less than a dollar an acre; another third of a [billion] acres were claimed by the United States without presence of a unilateral action extinguishing title.
Because the ICC was specifically precluded under its authorizing legislation from effecting transfers of land title where none had previously occurred, the clear implication of the last finding was that legal ownership of the land in question remained vested in American Indians. In effect, then, the United States was engaged in the illegal occupation of approximately one-third of its claimed “domestic” territoriality. There was, however, little
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the ICC could do to rectify the situation, even if it had been so inclined, because its authorizing legislation also prevented it from actually restoring property to its rightful owners. For this reason Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., observed: [T]he Claims Commission ultimately resolved nothing. Rather, it served the useful purpose of clearing away the underbrush of confusion about who really owns what in the United States and thereby paved the way for the resolution of property rights issues at some future point. In the meantime, it assigned some degree of compensation to Indians for the historic loss of use of land to which they never relinquished title.
See also: Allotment system; General Allotment Act; Indian Reorganization Act. Ward Churchill Sources for Further Study Barsh, Russel. “Indian Land Claims Policy in the United States.” North Dakota Law Review 58 (1982): 1-82. Clarkin, Thomas. Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Ross, Norman A., ed. Index to the Expert Testimony Before the Indian Claims Commission: The Written Reports. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Information Service, 2001. U.S. Indian Claims Commission. Indian Claims Commission, August 13, 1946-September 30, 1978: Final Report. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978. Vance, John T. “The Congressional Mandate and the Indian Claims Commission.” North Dakota Law Review 45 (1969): 325-336.
Indian Education Acts Date: 1972, 1978 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Education, National government and legislation, Twentieth century history
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Significance: These acts represent the first legislative victories for Native American peoples under the policy of Indian self-determination, announced by President Richard Nixon in 1970. The Indian Education Act of 1972, Public Law 92-318, was an attempt to remedy some of the problems in Indian education identified in the National Study of American Indian Education (carried out from 1967 to 1971) and in the hearings of the Special Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education that summarized its findings in 1969 under the title Indian Education: A National Tragedy, a National Challenge (also known as the Kennedy Report). Both studies found that Indian people wanted a better education for their children, wanted schools to pay more attention to Indian heritage, and wanted more say in how their children’s schools were run. The 1972 act pertained to public schools on and off reservations and provided supplemental funding for schools with ten or more Indian students in order to meet their special needs. All public schools with Indian students could get this quasi-entitlement funding and were required to involve Indian parents and communities in designing the supplemental programs. Grant money was also provided. Part A of the act required parental and community participation in impact-aid programs (programs that provided federal money to local school districts to make up for tax-exempt federal lands such as Indian reservations). Part B authorized a series of grant programs to stress culturally relevant and bilingual curriculum materials. Part C provided money for adulteducation projects. Part D established an Office of Indian Education within the U.S. Office of Education (now the Department of Education). Part E provided funds for training teachers for Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools, with preference to be given to Indians. The act also established the National Advisory Council on Indian Education. The Indian Education Amendments of 1978 (P.L. 95-561) established standards for BIA schools, institutionalized BIA school boards, required formula funding of BIA schools, and provided for increased Indian involvement in the spending of impact-aid funds. See also: American Indian Higher Education Consortium; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Carlisle Indian School; Indian New Deal; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; Kennedy Report; National Congress of American Indians; National Indian Youth Council; Reservation system of the United States. Jon Reyhner
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Indian Gaming Regulatory Act Date: October 17, 1988 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation; Native government; Reservations and relocation; Twentieth century history Significance: Congress regulates gaming on Indian lands by dividing it into three classes and authorizing compacts between tribes and states. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), Public Law 100-497, signed into law on October 17, 1988, by President George Bush, represents an amalgamation of ideas presented in various bills introduced in Congress from 1983 through 1987 and provides a system to permit and regulate gaming on American Indian lands. The IGRA divides gaming into three classes. Class I gaming includes social games of minimal value, as well as traditional games played as a part of tribal ceremonies or celebrations. Class I gaming is exclusively regulated by the tribes. Class II gaming includes bingo, and if played within the same location, pull tabs, lotto, tip jars, instant bingo, games similar to bingo, and certain card games. A tribe may engage in Class II games if the state in which the tribe is located permits such gaming for any purpose by any person, organization, or entity. Class III gaming includes all forms of gaming other than Class I or II, for example, banking card games like blackjack, baccarat and chemin de fer, slot machines, craps, parimutuel horse racing, and dog racing. Class III gaming is prohibited unless authorized by a tribal-state compact. In addition to classifying games, the IGRA established a three-member National Indian Gaming Commission within the Department of the Interior. The commission chairman is appointed by the president of the United States with Senate approval; the other two members are appointed by the secretary of the interior. At least two members must be enrolled members of an American Indian tribe. The commission has the power to approve all tribal gaming ordinances and resolutions, shut down gaming activities, levy and collect fines, and approve gaming management contracts for Class II and III gaming. The commission has broad power to monitor Class II gaming by inspecting gaming permits, conducting background investigations of personnel, and inspecting and auditing books and records. Regulation and jurisdiction of Class III gaming is more complicated. Class III gam-
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ing is lawful when it is authorized by a tribal ordinance, approved by the chairman of the commission, located in a state that permits such gaming (whether for charitable, commercial, or government purposes), and conducted in compliance with a tribal-state compact that is approved by the secretary of the interior. A tribe seeking to conduct Class III gaming must request that the state in which its lands are located negotiate a tribal-state compact governing the conduct of gaming activities. The compact may include provisions concerning the application of tribal or state criminal and civil laws directly related to gaming, the allocation of jurisdiction between the state and tribe, state assessments to defray the costs of regulation, standards for operation and maintenance of the gaming facility, and other subjects related to the gaming activity. The state is not authorized to impose a tax or assessment upon a tribe unless the tribe agrees. The state cannot refuse to negotiate a compact based on its inability to impose a tax, fee, or other assessment. Sovereignty and Economy. The question of gaming on American Indian reservations is one that involves both sovereignty and economic issues for tribes and states alike. The IGRA grants United States district courts jurisdiction over actions by tribes. Reasons for such action include failure of a state to negotiate with a tribe seeking to enter a compact; failure of the state to negotiate in good faith; or any violation of the tribal-state compact. The IGRA provides that a federal district court may order a tribe and state to reach a compact if the state fails to meet its burden of proving that it negotiated in good faith. If no compact is forthcoming, a court may appoint a mediator to recommend a compact. In March, 1996, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Seminole Tribe of Indians v. Florida that Congress cannot force states into federal court to settle disputes over gambling on reservations. Federal law, through the IGRA, still permits tribes to seek help from the secretary of the interior when state officials balk at tribal plans for gaming operations. The IGRA requires that all gaming facilities be tribally owned and that revenue from gaming operations be directed for specific tribal programs, such as education, elderly programs, or housing. Restriction of gaming to tribal governments ensures that American Indian gaming remains a government function rather than a personal endeavor. The most controversial aspect of the IGRA involves the tribal-state compacting required for Class III gaming. Tribal sovereignty is diminished by the IGRA, because it forces states and tribes into an agreement. Most laws recognize that tribes have a government-to-government relationship with
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the federal government and are not under state jurisdiction unless there is prior agreement (as in Public Law 280 states). The IGRA specifically requires negotiations between tribes and states, a relationship they do not normally have. States objected to the tribal-state compacting on the grounds that it violated their sovereignty under the Eleventh Amendment of the Constitution, which protects states from being sued in federal court against their will. In a 1996 Supreme Court decision, it was ruled that Congress cannot attempt to resolve stalled negotiations between states and tribes over on-reservation gambling by making states and their officials targets of federal lawsuits. The Eleventh Amendment rights of states were upheld. The IGRA has been embraced by many tribes in the United States as a way to bolster reservation economies. Some of the most poverty-stricken areas in the United States are American Indian reservations, and gaming revenues give tribes income to reinvest in other business ventures. The need to generate widespread support for ballot initiatives such as California’s Propositions 5 (1998) and 1A (2000), the California Indian Self-Reliance Initiative, helped Native American tribes develop more powerful political lobbies, with influence beyond issues of gambling. However, the compacting process can result in conflict of interest for some states that rely heavily on gaming revenues. In addition, the issue of untaxed revenues resulting from American Indian gaming operations is a factor in establishing compacts, and states in need of such revenue cannot act dispassionately with tribes when they negotiate those compacts. Gaming on American Indian reservations is fraught with issues of competing interests for both tribes and states. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002. Carole A. Barrett Sources for Further Study Canby, William C. American Indian Law in a Nutshell. Minneapolis: West, 1981. Provides simple explanations of complex legal issues that inhere in dealings between the federal government, states, and tribal nations. Eisler, Kim Isaac. The Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small Native American Tribe Created the World’s Most Profitable Casino. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. A journalistic account of the effect of IGRA on one tribe. MacFarlan, Allan A. Book of American Indian Games. New York: Associated Press, 1958. Discusses and describes various games, including gambling games, played by a variety of North American tribes.
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Pommersheim, Frank. “Economic Development in Indian Country: What Are the Questions?” American Indian Law Review 12 (1987): 195-217. Explains the need for revenue in American Indian country and the possibilities gaming provides tribes. Santoni, Roland J. “The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act: How Did We Get Here? Where Are We Going?” Creighton Law Review 26 (1993): 387-447. Provides a comprehensive chronology of the legislation, pertinent legal cases, suggested amendments, and a table of tribal-state compacts. Turner, Allen C. “Evolution, Assimilation, and State Control of Gambling in Indian Country: Is Cabazon v. California an Assimilationist Wolf in Preemptive Clothing?” Idaho Law Review 24, no. 2 (1987-1988): 317-338. Explores the seminal case that influenced involvement of states in the compacting process. Wilkinson, Charles F. American Indians, Time, and the Law: Native Societies in a Modern Constitutional Democracy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Discusses tribal sovereignty as a preconstitutional right and how this inherent right can be diminished. Wunder, John R. “Retained by the People”: A History of American Indians and the Bill of Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. A chronicle and comprehensive history of the relationship between American Indians and the federal government. Gives detailed analysis of the tribalfederal relationship.
Indian Health Service Date: Established 1954 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: Indian Health Service (IHS) provides a broad array of health-related care to American Indian populations in fulfillment of federal trust responsibilities. Many treaties negotiated between Indian tribes and the United States government contained provisions for health care in return for land. In part, these requests for health care during treaty negotiations came about because many tribal people had little resistance to European-American diseases. Indian populations were in decline after the earliest days of con-
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tact with non-Indians. Health care delivery to Indians by the United States was inadequate and inconsistent through all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, as evidenced by high disease rates and low life expectancy of tribal people. In order to carry out its trust obligation to provide health care for American Indians, the U.S. Congress created the Indian Health Service in 1954 and placed it in the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In that same year, management of Indian Health Service was transferred to what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. The mandate of Indian Health Service is to provide comprehensive health care, develop preventive medicine, and manage sanitation programs. Indian Health Service has clinics and hospitals located on some reservations and in urban areas where there is a significant Indian population. Poverty on reservations, coupled with inadequate Indian Health Service funding, contribute to major health care problems that persist in Indian country: lower life expectancy, substance abuse, high suicide rates, and disease. Carole A. Barrett See also: Bureau of Indian Affairs; Epidemics and diseases; Indianwhite relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Reservation system of the United States.
Indian New Deal Date: 1933-1945 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: Sweeping reforms of the Bureau of Indian Affairs instituted under the directorship of John Collier. The Indian New Deal refers to John Collier’s innovative years as director of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (1933-1945). Collier was an energetic and humane visionary who sought to revolutionize federal Indian policy. The keystone of New Deal Indian reform was the Indian Reorganization Act, which ended allotment, organized tribal self-government, established revolving loan programs for tribes, and provided a mechanism for tribes to buy back lost lands. Collier also targeted Indian education and health for
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improvement. Day schools began to replace boarding schools, and preventive health programs reduced the incidence of certain diseases. Religious freedoms also were extended to Indian people during this time, and bans on the practice of traditional ceremonies were lifted. Possibly the most lasting achievements in the New Deal era lay in the area of economic development. Tribes were aided in developing resources, preserving the reservation land base, and participating in a variety of public programs available to other Americans. Increasingly, Collier’s revolutionary ideas were attacked, in part, because they encouraged Indian traditions and respect for Indian culture rather than assimilation of Indian people into mainstream American life. Collier resigned in 1945 amid increasing criticism, but he left a definite mark on federal Indian policy. See also: Allotment system; General Allotment Act; Indian Reorganization Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Meriam Report. Carole A. Barrett
Indian Offenses Act Date: 1883 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history Significance: The federal government creates courts, located on reservations, run by Native Americans who were responsible for policing native cultural practices deemed offensive by European American society. Courts of Indian Offenses were created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1883. The judges of these courts were Indian men appointed by the federal agent on each reservation, and they heard only cases involving certain cultural practices, termed “Indian offenses,” which were banned on the reservations. All decisions of the court were subject to the approval of the Indian agent. Essentially, the Indian offenses were a list of common traditional practices that the government determined were “demoralizing and barbarous” and therefore should be discontinued so that Indians could become more
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assimilated into mainstream American culture and values. The list of Indian offenses included prohibitions against dancing, plural marriages, feasts, giveaways, and destroying the property of the dead (a funerary custom among some tribes). Additionally, and most devastating to many Indian people, traditional religious practices including sun dances, sweatlodge ceremonies, vision questing, and shamanism were strictly prohibited in the hope that Indian people would be more likely to convert to Christianity. In short, Indian offenses were an extensive body of religious and cultural practices that the federal government banned because they were deemed disruptive to the smooth functioning of reservations. When living within the reservation context, Indian people were not granted constitutional protections. See also: Major Crimes Act; Tribal courts; Reservation system of the United States. Carole A. Barrett
Indian preference Date: Established 1933-1945 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Civil rights, National government and legislation, Native government, Terminology, Twentieth century history Significance: Preference in hiring Native Americans in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal agencies, as well as in Indian organizations, skirts the provisions of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, color, or religion. However, this provision does not apply to Indians uniformly. During the period of reforms in the John Collier era, often referred to as the Indian New Deal (1933-1945), Indian preference in employment was instituted first in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and eventually in other federal agencies, such as the Public Health Service, which work closely with Indian people. Later, tribal governments, tribal colleges, and other Indian organizations were able to invoke Indian preference in making hiring decisions.
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Commonly tribes develop criteria that give first preference to members of their own tribe, next preference to an American Indian from any tribe, and last preference to a non-Indian. When Title VII provisions are dropped, there is no uniform protection against employment discrimination. Indian preference was permitted as a way to increase the numbers of Indian people working within agencies and organizations that deal primarily with American Indian populations. It was also viewed as a way to increase the number of Indian people in the workforce significantly and so address the chronic issue of Indian unemployment. See also: Bureau of Indian Affairs; Indian New Deal. Carole A. Barrett
Indian Removal Act Date: May 28, 1830 Locale: Georgia and other Southeastern states Tribes involved: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole Categories: National government and legislation, Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation Significance: The Indian Removal Act marked the beginning of forced resettlement of sixty thousand eastern Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Cherokees and other members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes— Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek—established independent republics with successful governments. Adapting to their white neighbors, they became farmers, miners, and cattle ranchers. Some had plantations, even owning slaves. They built schools and churches, wrote constitutions, and established independent governments. They learned a bitter lesson: Whites wanted their land, not their assimilation into EuroAmerican society. As a local militia leader and politician, Andrew Jackson negotiated the acquisition of fifty million acres of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi even before he became president of the United States in 1828. By then, the Cherokees had lost their land outside Georgia, and neighbors had grown increasingly jealous of Cherokee success. For generations, Cherokees had provided a textbook picture of Jefferson’s ideal nation of farmers. Sequoyah, a young man of Cherokee and white blood, invented a phonetic
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An 1836 map of Indian Territory (today, primarily the region of Oklahoma), to which the peoples of many Indian nations, named on the map, were removed after the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The tables on the right record numbers of acres assigned to tribes, numbers of Indians removed, and numbers of tribes resident east and west of the Mississippi River. (Library of Congress)
alphabet, or syllabary, that enabled almost every member of his nation to become literate within a few months. To hold their remaining land, Cherokees made the sale of any additional land to whites a capital offense. Yet violent conflicts between whites and natives became so common that many friends and enemies alike advocated removal to protect Cherokees from white citizens who routinely attacked them. In 1817, some Cherokees exchanged land in North Carolina for space in Arkansas. Within two years, six thousand had moved voluntarily, but the move only worsened Cherokee problems. By 1821, the Cherokees were at war with the Osages who had been in Arkansas Territory already, and both groups fought whites who continued to move onto their land. These early voluntary removals proved so disastrous that the Cherokees and Choctaws remaining in Georgia vowed to stay on their native land. Although President James Monroe proposed removal again in 1825, neither
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Monroe nor his successor, John Quincy Adams, could get the measure through Congress. Only the enthusiasm of President Jackson got removal approved on a close vote in 1830. In 1829, President Jackson admitted that the five republics had made “progress in the arts of civilized life,” but he said American Indians occupied land that whites could use. Beyond the Mississippi River lay enough land for Native Americans and their descendants to inhabit without interference “as long as grass grows or water runs in peace and plenty.” Meanwhile, the Georgia legislature extended its power over the Cherokee nation and stripped Native Americans of civil rights. These laws forbade anyone with American Indian blood to testify in court against a white man, annulled contracts between Native Americans and whites, and required an oath of allegiance to Georgia by white people living among American Indians. The laws also prevented Native Americans from holding meetings or digging for gold on their own land. Legal Challenges. Instead of going to war, the Cherokees hired two prominent Washington lawyers and went to the U.S. Supreme Court. They lost their first case, challenging Georgia for hanging a Cherokee man convicted under Cherokee law. The second case (Worcester v. Georgia) challenged the loyalty oath designed to remove teachers, missionaries, and other whites from the reservation. The Reverend Samuel Worcester and other missionaries among Cherokees refused to sign the loyalty oath, despite public humiliation, abuse, and imprisonment. Chief Justice John Marshall declared repressive Georgia laws unconstitutional. American Indian nations, Marshall said, were “domestic dependent nations” that could have independent political communities without state restrictions. President Jackson, who had fought American Indians in the South, suggested that Georgia could ignore the Court’s decision. The president, not the Court, controlled the army. Congress also took up Georgia’s cause. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 began a process of exchanging Indian lands in the twenty-four existing states for new lands west of the Mississippi River. In 1834, Congress established Indian Territory, now much of Oklahoma, as a permanent reservation. Major Ridge and his family had been among the strongest opponents of removal, and Cherokee lobbyists, including John Ridge, celebrated their Supreme Court victory in Worcester. However, they had thought Whigs in Congress would prevail against Jackson’s removal policy. The federal removal law did not say that Native Americans could be forced to move, but the Ridge family and Cherokee newspaper editor Elias Boudinot began to see the move as necessary to protect Cherokees from in-
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creasing violence. Principal Chief John Ross, however, still resisted removal. Believing it in their nation’s best interests, the Ridge family signed a removal treaty without approval of the tribal council. Resistance. Many natives resisted removal from their ancient homelands. The Alabama Creeks were forcibly removed, some of them in chains. Choctaws were forced out of Mississippi in winter, with no chance to bring provisions against the cold. Some were tricked into getting drunk and signing away their possessions. Others signed away their lands, believing the promises of government officials. Forced marches of Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees brought sickness, starvation, and death to thousands of people throughout the 1830’s. The Cherokees faced a special horror. Georgia’s repressive laws had created a climate of lawlessness. Whites could steal land, and Cherokees could not testify in court against them. In one notorious case, two white men enjoyed dinner in the home of a family whose father was part Cherokee. In the evening, the parents left temporarily and the guests forced the children and their nurse from the home and set it on fire, destroying the house and all of its contents. The men were arrested, but the judge dismissed the case because all the witnesses were part Cherokee. Only pure-blooded whites were allowed to testify in court. Finally, Jackson’s successor, President Martin Van Buren, ordered General Winfield Scott, with about seven thousand U.S. soldiers and state militia, to begin the forced removal on May 26, 1838. Soldiers quietly surrounded each house to surprise its occupants, according to James Mooney, a researcher who interviewed the participants years later. Under Scott’s orders, the troops built stockades to hold people while being prepared for the removal. “From these,” Mooney wrote, squads of troops were sent to search out with rifle and bayonet every small cabin hidden away in the coves or by the sides of mountain streams, to seize and bring in as prisoners all the occupants, however or wherever they might be found. Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade.
Men were taken from their fields, children from their play. “In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes in flames.” Some scavengers stole livestock and other valuables, even before the owners were out of sight of their homes. “Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead.” Some sympathetic soldiers
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Indian Territory, c. 1875 Quapaw Peoria Modoc Shawnee
KANSAS
Osage
Cheyenne, Arapaho
Greer County
Comanche Kiowa Apache of Oklahoma
Ottawa Wyandot Seneca Cherokee
Creek
Shawnee Seminole
Wichita
Potawatomi
Unassigned Lands
Sauk, Fox
Cheyenne, Arapaho
Pawnee
Chickasaw
MISSOURI
ARKANSAS
Kansa
PUBLIC LANDS
Choctaw
TEXAS
By 1875, Indian nations that had once ranged over large regions of the continent were largely confined to Indian Territory (later, Oklahoma).
allowed one family to feed their chickens one last time, and another to pray quietly in their own language before leaving their home. Within a week, the troops had rounded up more than seventeen thousand Cherokees and herded them into concentration camps. In June, the first group of about a thousand began the eight-hundred-mile journey. Steamboats took them on the first leg down the Tennessee River. The oppressive heat and cramped conditions fostered disease and caused many deaths. Then the Cherokees walked the last leg of the trip to beyond the western border of Arkansas. Because of the oppressive heat, Cherokee leader John Ross persuaded General Scott to permit them to delay the largest removal until fall. Thus, the largest procession—about thirteen thousand people—started on the long overland march in October, 1838. Most walked or rode horses; they drove 645 wagons. Trail of Tears. Dozens of people died of disease, starvation, or exposure on each day of the journey. More than four thousand Cherokees died on the journey that the survivors named the Trail of Tears. The procession reached
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the Mississippi River opposite Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in the middle of winter. Most had only a single blanket to protect themselves from the winter winds as they waited for the river ice to clear. In March, 1839, they reached their destination in Indian Territory. Many were buried along the road, including Chief John Ross’s wife, Quatie Ross, who died after giving up her blanket to a sick child in a sleet- and snowstorm. Her death left Ross to grieve both his wife and his nation. In his last message to Congress, President Jackson said he had settled the Native American problem to everyone’s satisfaction and saved the race from extinction by placing them “beyond the reach of injury or oppression.” Native Americans would now share in “the blessings of civilization” and “the General Government will hereafter watch over them and protect them.” Between 1778 and 1871, 370 treaties stipulated land cessions to whites. Jackson ridiculed the idea of making treaties with Native Americans and called the idea of treating American Indians as separate nations an absurd farce. By the end of June, 1838, Georgians could boast that no Cherokees remained on their soil, except in the stockade. Sixty thousand members of the five republics had been removed beyond the Mississippi River. As many as fifteen thousand men, women, and children died of starvation and disease. The Choctaw had moved in 1832; the Chickasaw in 1832-1834, the Seminole in 1836, and the Creek in 1836-1840. In June, 1839, members of the Ross faction, in revenge for the law that John Ridge signed into effect, murdered John Ridge, Major Ridge, and Elias Boudinot for their signing of a removal treaty selling Cherokee land. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Trail of Tears. William E. Huntzicker Sources for Further Study Foreman, Grant. Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. 2d ed., 1953. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. The classic and most comprehensive history of removal. Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Well-researched history of removal as it affected the Creek nation. Guttmann, Allen. States’ Rights and Indian Removal: “The Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia.” Boston: D. C. Heath, 1965. Brief documentary history of the Cherokees’ legal struggle to keep their land. Hoig, Stanley. Night of the Cruel Moon: Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears. New York: Facts on File, 1996. An account of Cherokee removal relying on first-person accounts.
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McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Cherokee history up through the removal crisis. ____________. Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. Thorough, well-documented history of missionary involvement among the Cherokees in the period leading up to their removal. Mooney, James. Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. Chicago: Aldine, 1975. A valuable study by a contemporary who interviewed people involved. Moulton, Gary E. John Ross, Cherokee Chief. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978. Biography of the Cherokee leader at the time of removal. Remini, Robert V. The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essays on Democracy, Indian Removal, and Slavery. Reprint. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. The leading biographer of Andrew Jackson reflects on his significance to these issues. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993. Brief overview of the removal policies, the Trail of Tears, and the implications of both for U.S. history. Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. Rev. ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Discusses the prominent family of Cherokee leaders.
Indian Reorganization Act Date: June 18, 1934 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: One of the most important pieces of legislation affecting Native Americans reverses policies of forced assimilation and promotes tribal self-government. The New Deal policy toward American Indians in the 1930’s and early 1940’s and its centerpiece, the Indian Reorganization Act, were a reaction to the controversies generated by past federal policies toward American Indians. From the 1870’s through the 1920’s, tribal peoples were confined to government-controlled reservations and subjected to a policy aimed at
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bringing them into the dominant society’s mainstream through forced assimilation. Government and church-run schools attempted to eradicate native languages and religion, customs and dress, tribalism and group loyalty, and replace them with Christian values, traditions, and institutions. To foster individualism and undermine tribalism, congressional legislation allotted the tribal communal domain to small individual holdings and opened surplus land for public sale. This ambitious social experiment did not work as its original reformminded advocates had intended. Under allotment, American Indians lost most of their lands to whites, while the educational experience undermined or destroyed indigenous people’s heritage and culture without providing a viable substitute. The common results were demoralization, loss of identity, abject poverty, poor health, and defective education. These conditions, documented by independent studies, sparked a high-level, decade-long debate in the 1920’s about American Indian policy. Congress, the Department of the Interior, and the authoritarian management style of the department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) came under sharp criticism. John Collier and the BIA. The political upheaval wrought by the Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 provided reformers with an opportunity to reshape American Indian policy. In 1933, John Collier, a persistent critic of the BIA, became commissioner of Indian Affairs and directed the bureau until 1945. Collier, a former social worker in New York City, had been introduced to the Pueblo cultures of the Southwest in 1920. Collier had experienced a native society that had maintained its communal and group traditions. Collier believed that he had discovered a “Red Atlantis,” whose communal life and harmonious relationship with the natural world contained lessons and hope for the regeneration of Western society through a cooperative commonwealth. After taking office, Collier began to reverse past government policy by initiating the Indian New Deal through executive orders and lobbying activities. In January, 1934, he forbade interference with traditional Native Americans’ religious practices, declared their culture equal to all others, and encouraged the revival of native languages. Next, Collier ended forced attendance at Christian religious exercises by American Indian children at boarding schools. The commissioner persuaded Congress to repeal espionage and gag rules that restricted free speech and other civil liberties on reservations. Collier also decreased BIA controls and interference with tribal courts and tribal law. Finally, he placed a moratorium on the further sale of tribal lands.
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Collier then sought to implement his goals of American Indian cultural freedom and political self-determination through legislation. He and his associates drew up a forty-eight-page document containing four sections aimed at replacing the agency’s authoritarian approach with a new bilateral relationship between the tribes and the federal government. Title I dealt with the restoration of tribal self-government and economic revitalization to make tribal society viable. Tribes would petition for home-rule elections, adopt constitutions, and charter a tax-exempt corporation to set up businesses, manage property, and borrow from a federal revolving loan program. Title II, which focused on education, promoted the study of American Indian civilization and traditional arts and crafts, provided scholarships, and appropriated funds for primary and secondary education. Title III, which concerned Indian lands, ended allotments, returned previously allotted lands to tribal ownership, and restored unsold surplus reservation lands to tribal control. The federal government also was authorized to provide tribes with funds to rebuild their lost land base. Title IV proposed setting up a federal Court of Indian Affairs that would have original jurisdiction in cases involving Native Americans. In Congress, Representative Edgar Howard of Nebraska and Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana agreed to sponsor this initial version of what was to become the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). The proposed legislation immediately encountered opposition from both Indian and non-Indian sources. Few American Indians were consulted when the proposal was drawn up, which gave rise to suspicion and concern about some provisions. Those Native Americans who were most affected by assimilation policies over the last half century saw the act’s provisions as taking a step backward. Some who held private allotments were concerned about losing them. Tribal leaders who viewed their sovereignty as inherent and some groups that already had constitutions or intact traditional political structures argued that the proposed BIA constitutional guidelines provided no new rights and, in fact, restricted tribal sovereignty. BIA constitutions resembled U.S. governmental bodies rather than traditional forms of tribal government. Some clergy and missionaries denounced the promotion of traditional culture as antiChristian and pagan. A growing conservative coalition in Congress did not share Collier’s radically progressive views on the restoration of traditional tribal cultures and the establishment of politically independent tribal nations. Compromise. In the end, Collier had to compromise. Getting the legislation out of the congressional committee in which it was stalled required
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the strong support of both President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. In the bill’s final version, which passed on June 18, 1934, Title II, concerning Native American culture, and Title IV, which provided for an American Indian court, were deleted. The amount of funding to assist the establishment of tribal governments was cut back significantly. Other modifications greatly reduced the number of tribal peoples to be covered under the act. Senator Wheeler insisted on subjecting tribal selfgovernment to the approval of the secretary of the interior and excluded from the act American Indians who were not members of tribes, as well as those tribes located in Oklahoma and Alaska. Another amendment by Howard required that each tribe hold a referendum to accept or reject the IRA. In referenda held between 1933 and 1945, 174 tribes accepted the act while 73 voted against ratification, including the largest American Indian nation, the Navajo. However, only 92 of the tribes that voted in favor adopted IRA constitutions, and 71 took the next step of incorporating for the purpose of obtaining federal economic development loans. American Indians living in Oklahoma and Alaska were placed under the IRA by legislation passed in 1936. Collier reluctantly accepted these changes, emphasizing the breakthrough represented by those parts of his original proposal that were retained. The commissioner also attempted to implement many of his goals through administrative actions and orders. The failure of Congress to appropriate the full amounts authorized in the IRA, continuing opposition to some of Collier’s goals, and the commissioner’s own misjudgments and administrative shortcomings were some of the factors that prevented his dream of a Red Atlantis from becoming reality. In the decade following the New Deal era, federal American Indian policy temporarily adopted an assimilationist and antitribal orientation. Nevertheless, the IRA was a landmark in federal American Indian policy, with some noteworthy results. Many scholars consider it the single most important piece of federal American Indian legislation. Accomplishments of the IRA and the Indian New Deal included halting the disappearance of the tribal land base and restoring several million acres to various reservations. The act permitted many tribes to assume a degree of economic and political control over their affairs. The restoration of religious freedom and traditional ceremonies were also important measures. With few exceptions, those tribes that received government loans used them to improve economic conditions on reservations and made repayment. American Indians were given preference for positions in the BIA. Many tribes have taken advantage of IRA provisions to defend sovereignty and
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survive. Most important, the reversal of past policies awakened hope and pride in being American Indian. See also: Bureau of Indian Affairs; Carlisle Indian School; Indian New Deal; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Meriam Report; Reservation system of the United States. David A. Crain Sources for Further Study Deloria, Vine, ed. The Indian Reorganization Act: Congresses and Bills. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. A collection of primary source documents assembled by the noted Native American legal scholar. Fey, Harold E., and D’Arcy McNickle. Indians and Other Americans: Two Ways of Life Meet. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Good account of the Collier years from a pro-IRA perspective. McNickle, a Montana Blackfoot, was a BIA employee during this era. Kelly, Lawrence C. “The Indian Reorganization Act: The Dream and the Reality.” Pacific Historical Review 44 (August, 1975): 291-312. Balanced look at what the IRA failed to achieve in contrast to the claims of some proponents. Discusses Collier’s strong points and shortcomings as American Indian commissioner during the New Deal era. Kelly, William H., ed. Indian Affairs and the Indian Reorganization Act: The Twenty Year Record. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1954. A collection of scholarly essays on this subject. Parman, Donald L. The Navajos and the New Deal. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. A study of the troubled relations between the American Indian policy reformers in the Roosevelt administration and the nation’s largest tribe. Philp, Kenneth R. John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. A detailed, objective account of Collier’s achievements and shortcomings as a policy critic, activist, reformer, and administrator. Taylor, Graham D. The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934-1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Argues that the IRA, although enlightened compared to previous policies, was weakened by its emphasis on tribal reorganization and its mistaken assumptions about contemporary American Indian societies.
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Indian Rights Association Date: Established 1882 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Native government, Nineteenth century history, Organizations, Religion and missionary activities, Twentieth century history Significance: An important and influential European American organization dedicated to assimilating Native Americans into mainstream American society is established. The Indian Rights Association was founded in Philadelphia in 1882 by Henry Panacoast and Herbert Welsh, and it became the most important of the humanitarian groups which formed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century to seek the assimilation of Indians into mainstream American society. Welsh and Panacoast viewed the federal reservation system as a cultural and economic failure and asserted that reservations were obstacles to the civilization of Indians. The Indian Rights Association diligently pursued its agenda to break up tribalism and bring Christian civilization to Indians by pressing for abolition of the reservation system through allotment of tribal lands, by supporting industrial education for Indians in order to encourage selfsufficiency, and by pressing for immediate citizenship for Indians so they would come under constitutional and state laws. The organization’s political goals were inextricably bound to a belief in the superiority of Christian civilization. In 1886, Welsh asserted that the organization was doing God’s will by guiding Indians “from the night of barbarism into the dawn of civilization.” The Indian Rights Association was successful because it was well organized and had dedicated members who pushed its agenda. The association hired a lobbyist in order to exert constant pressure on congressional committees, legislators, and Indian affairs officials. The organization also influenced public opinion by publishing pamphlets, news articles, and speeches that advanced its views. The association got much public and congressional support for its programs because it regularly sent representatives into Indian country to gather facts that gave such programs credibility. Additionally, the organization mirrored American society of the day by combining religious sentiment with patriotism in its proposals for reforming Indian policy. The association’s goal was to acculturate and assimilate Indi-
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ans fully into American society, and it viewed Indian culture and traditions as being un-American and pagan. The Indian Rights Association declined in power and influence after Welsh resigned as secretary in 1902 and as federal Indian policy gradually began to support tribalism in the 1920’s. The association continues to exist, although it now supports Indian self-determination and Indian groups seeking federal recognition. See also: Allotment system; Carlisle Indian School; Friends of the Indian organizations; General Allotment Act; Indian Citizenship Act; National Congress of American Indians; National Indian Association. Carole A. Barrett
Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act Date: 1975 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Education, National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: This act marked a significant swing away from the overt assimilationist policies of the federal government and supported the basic concepts of tribalism and Native American sovereignty. The 1970’s were marked by support of federal officials for broadening Indian participation in programs that affected them and lessening the paternalism that had guided federal Indian policy for so long. The Indian SelfDetermination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 marked a radical change in federal policy—the assimilationist philosophy of the federal government was replaced by policies favoring tribalism and Native American sovereignty. This law enabled and encouraged tribes to take over and run their own programs. The act clearly endorsed Indian decision making, and the preamble declared that the United States recognized its obligation “to respond to the strong expression of the Indian people for self-determination by assuring maximum participation in the direction of educational as well as other federal services to Indian communities so as to render such services more responsive to the needs and desires of those communities.” It also stated that
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Congress confirms its commitment to maintain “the Federal Government’s unique and continuing relationship with and responsibility to the Indian people through the establishment of a meaningful Indian self-determination policy.” The Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act consists of three major sections. In the first part, Congress outlines the basic federal policy toward native people, denounces federal paternalism, and affirms tribal rights to control their own affairs. Second, Congress asserts it will work for Indian self-determination particularly in education, while maintaining and preserving the trust relationship. Third, Indians will receive hiring preference in all federal government contracts affecting Indian tribes. The most significant drawback to the act is that, even though decision making and administrative authority seemed to pass to tribal councils, the Bureau of Indian Affairs maintained the power to decide which tribal contracts it would accept. This reserved power included determining budget allocations provided to tribes who seek to run their own programs. Yet despite limitations placed on tribal authority, many tribes throughout the United States contract and run many programs that were formerly run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The most dramatic impact of the act has been in the area of education. A majority of former Bureau of Indian Affairs schools are now run by tribes, and many higher education scholarship programs are tribally run. The act is important in that it supports the basic concept of tribal self-determination. See also: American Indian Higher Education Consortium; Carlisle Indian School; Indian Education Acts; Kennedy Report; National Congress of American Indians. Carole A. Barrett
Indian slave trade Date: 1671-1730 Locale: South Carolina Tribes involved: Tuscarora, Yamasee Categories: Colonial history Significance: British colonists use intertribal rivalries and natives’ desire for European goods to gain slaves and establish dominance over Spanish claims.
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The earliest known record of Carolina natives being captured and enslaved was in 1520, when Spanish explorers took them to provide slaves for sugar plantations in Santo Domingo. In 1663, William Hilton, an Englishman, also captured natives from the Carolina coast for Caribbean slave owners. In 1670, Charleston was settled by the English. In 1671, after the defeat of Kusso warriors and the taking of numerous captives, English colonists initiated the Indian slave trade when Henry Woodward was commissioned to open trade in Indian slaves with Indians of rival tribes. Carolina included what is now South Carolina and North Carolina until 1713, but between the 1670’s and 1730, almost all of Carolina’s American Indian trading was out of Charles Town, or Charleston, which was the hub of the area that became South Carolina. Agriculture and forest industries also were part of Carolina’s economy, but trading with the natives became the most lucrative aspect of the Carolina economy. Deerskins, leathers, and furs were the most important exports from this trading, but slavery also became an important part of the trade. Although American Indian slaves existed in other areas (Virginia, for example), only South Carolina developed Indian slavery as a major part of its commerce. As a result, South Carolina enslaved more natives than any other English colony. The Carolina traders had an advantage in developing a thriving trade with natives all the way to the Mississippi River for several reasons: The Carolina colony got an early start in the trade; there were no mountains blocking the westward expansion of Carolina trading; and Carolina traders could trade directly with American Indians rather than going through other natives as middlemen (in the northeastern United States, the Iroquois acted as middlemen between other American Indians and the Europeans). Opposition to Slavery. The enslavement of natives by Carolina traders did have some opposition. From 1680 until 1730, South Carolina was under the active or nominal leadership of eight Lord Proprietors (headquartered in London) who recognized the crucial financial importance of developing trade with the natives. The Lord Proprietors knew that the enslavement of natives ultimately would hurt their general trade with Indians by leading to uprisings. A few proprietors also owned stock in the Royal African Company (begun in 1672), which was bringing slaves from Africa, and did not want competition from American Indians. Some prominent local leaders also spoke against American Indian slavery. For example, Francis Le Jau, a French Huguenot minister, publicly criticized the slave trade. In 1720, sixteen prominent businessmen issued a statement against the enslavement of American Indians. As a group, Charleston’s Huguenot merchants were
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more opposed to native slavery, although a few did own Indian slaves. The proprietors were not opposed to slavery in principle, however, and they wavered in their opposition. Despite some opposition, major factors encouraged slavery. The selling of captives into slavery in order to pay volunteer soldiers was an old custom in Europe, with military commanders and pirates routinely enslaving people on ships they captured. For example, some Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition in the 1490’s were captured by pirates and sold into slavery. The idea that slavery was better than death, and that the natives would murder their captives if they did not have the option of selling them, was used as a moral justification for slavery. Although this rationale was accurate in some cases, it did not take into account the great increase in natives capturing other natives because a market existed for slaves—a market made by the Europeans. Prior to European contact, slavery had been practiced by some American Indians, who frequently sold captives as slaves, but not on a large scale and generally without the harsh treatment common to European slavery. In addition, the enslavement of both American Indians and Africans got strong support in Charleston because a large number of Charleston’s political and economic establishment were from the Caribbean and brought a strong tradition of slavery with them to South Carolina. Indian Interest in European Conflict. The trade in American Indian slaves became an important part of the national conflicts involving Great Britain, Spain, and France for control of the Americas. Indians were drawn into these conflicts, often allying with a European power against other natives allied with another European power. In 1680, for example, Indians allied with the British in Carolina began raids against Indians allied with the Spanish Catholic missions in Georgia and northern Florida. The British and Spanish had attempted attacks on each other, and the English feared that the natives in Georgia and Florida would ally with the Spanish to attack Carolina. At the same time, the availability of a large number of Indians who were easy to capture because of their sedentary village life was tempting to slave traders for nondefense reasons. In 1704 under James Moore, for example, fifty British soldiers and a thousand Indians from Carolina took large numbers of Indian slaves from the Spanish areas. The French settled on the Gulf coast in 1699, putting them in proximity with natives in the lower Mississippi River area who were being threatened by attack and enslavement from Carolinian slave traders or (more likely) their Indian allies. This opposition from the French increased the risk and cost of capturing lower Mississippi River natives and, by 1720, largely ended the English slave trading.
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Although the Europeans actually kidnapped or captured American Indians in the early years of the slave trade, mostly from coastal areas, they soon began to rely on other Indians to do the capturing as the slave trade increased and moved farther away from the coast. Encouraging native allies to capture other natives for slavery became a major part of the strategy of the slave dealers. In 1712, for example, the Tuscaroras of North Carolina killed some English and German settlers who had taken their land. The governor of North Carolina announced the availability of Indian slaves to induce South Carolina officials to send him military help. South Carolina expeditions—comprising mostly American Indians—killed more than a thousand Tuscaroras, mostly men, and more than seven hundred, mostly women and children, were sold into slavery. Peaceful natives along the route back to South Carolina also were captured and enslaved. Yamasees Revolt. In 1715, the Yamasees in South Carolina revolted against the Carolina traders because of the traders’ dishonest practices, such as cheating when weighing deerskins and furs. The Yamasees were defeated only because the Cherokees allied with the Carolina traders to capture Yamasees to sell as slaves, the proceeds from which they used to buy ammunition and clothing from the Carolinians. After that time, Carolina deliberately played off one tribe against another. The exposure of natives to European clothing, ammunition, rum, and other goods led to a rising desire for more European products, which further encouraged Indians to capture other Indians for exchange. Indians comprised one-fourth of the slaves in Carolina in 1708, numbering fourteen hundred out of fifty-five hundred slaves, but the percentage generally decreased after that, for several reasons. Natives were more likely than Africans to try to escape. Although Indians had to beware of other hostile Indians, they frequently were successful in their attempts because they were in the same country as their original homes. For this reason, and because of the heavy demand for slave labor on the Caribbean sugar plantations, native slaves usually were sold to Caribbean traders. Some were also sold to New England. In addition, native slaves were more susceptible to European diseases and hence had a greater death rate than African slaves. Early writers also described American Indian slaves as being more docile than African slaves, ascribing this alleged trait to the Indians’ sense of independence. For these reasons, native slaves usually were less desirable than, and cost much less than, African slaves. Because large numbers of native men were killed, a high percentage of American Indian slaves were women, partly explaining a significant mixture of African and Indian genealogies.
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Although some American Indian slavery continued for several more decades, the practice basically had ended by 1730 in Carolina, with the Carolina traders turning to other trades and the English turning their American Indian slavery concerns to central America. See also: Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Natchez Revolt; Pueblo Revolt; Seminole Wars; Tuscarora War; Yamasee War. Abraham D. Lavender Sources for Further Study Crane, Verner. The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1929. A classic work on relations between European settlers and American Indians in the South. Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. The first book to focus specifically on the Indian slave trade and its effects on the development of the plantation system in the American South. Rozema, Vicki. Footsteps of the Cherokees: A Guide to the Eastern Homelands of the Cherokee Nations. Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1995. Devotes several pages to American Indian slavery, helping to correct the previously small amount of attention given to this topic. Waddell, Gene. Indians of the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1562-1751. Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1980. Describes how enslavement was one of several major factors in the extinction of South Carolina’s lowcountry tribes. Weatherford, Jack. Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991. One chapter is devoted to American Indian slaves, with a section describing the important part played by Charleston merchants in Indian slavery. Wright, J. Leitch, Jr. “Brands and Slave Cords.” In The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South. New York: Free Press, 1981. Gives details on the Carolina slave trade in American Indians, with emphasis on historical details.
Indian trust fund lawsuits Date: Beginning 1996 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States
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Categories: Court cases, National government and legislation, Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: Beginning in 1996, class-action lawsuits by Native Americans against the Department of the Interior over land-use royalties held in trust for individual Indians attempted to hold the U.S. government accountable for more than a century of financial exploitation. As a result of the 1887 General Allotment Act, many Indian reservations were broken up into individual holdings, usually of about 160 acres. Indians were not allowed to sell their allotments, although the allotments could be inherited by their children, and the mineral, forestry, and other natural resource rights could be leased out. Since the individual holdings were relatively small, lessors would negotiate with the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the rights to large swaths of land, and the royalties were paid into trust funds that the government held for the individual landowners. The government, in turn, was supposed to forward the payments to the landowners yearly. Problems in the system developed early; in fact, serious flaws in the process of making trust fund payments to Indian tribes, rather than individuals, had been noted as early as 1828, nearly sixty years before the individual trust fund system was established. More complications arose as the original allotment owners died and their trust fund monies had to be divided among their heirs. The fact that many Indians did not leave wills meant that probate court hearings had to be held to determine the legal heirs. Furthermore, accounting for the trust fund monies was a low governmental priority, and record keeping was exceptionally lax. In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced that the accounting problem had become unfixable. A series of reports urging reform were issued over the next decade, culminating in the establishment of the Branch of Trust Fund Accounting in 1985 and the Office of Trust Fund Management in 1991 to oversee investment and accounting of trust funds. The American Indian Trust Reform Management Act of 1994 established a special trustee within the Department of the Interior to develop a management plan for the funds. Nonetheless, no real action took place. In 1996, Elouise Cobell, the treasurer of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana and a founder of the Blackfeet National Bank, filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of the Interior and then-secretary Bruce Babbitt demanding an accounting for all Indian trust funds dating back to 1887. Cobell v. Babbitt (which became Cobell v. Norton with the change of administration
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in 2001 and the appointment of Gale Norton as secretary of the interior) revealed not only the disgraceful state of government record keeping over the previous century but also that the government was destroying what records it had and making misrepresentations in court. In 1999, U.S. district judge Royce Lamberth found both Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Richard Rubin in contempt of court for failing to produce trust-related documents as ordered by the court. In 2002, Interior Secretary Gale Norton was also tried for contempt of court as the government continued to drag its feet on producing documents and setting up a system to account for the mismanaged funds. On December 21, 1999, Judge Lamberth ruled that the secretaries of the interior and treasury had breached their trust obligations to Native Americans, in phase one of the trial on reform of the trust fund system. As of spring, 2002, the trial for phase two, on accounting for the money paid into the trust funds since 1887, had not been scheduled. Some estimates placed the amount of royalties owed to over 500,000 Native Americans as in the range of $100 billion. In the meantime, the court would retain judicial oversight of the trust fund system through 2004. Leslie Ellen Jones See also: General Allotment Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 19342002; Treaties and agreements in the United States.
Indian-white relations: Canadian Date: 1500’s-present Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: Colonial history, National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Twentieth century history Significance: Canadian Indian-white relations, while less confrontational than relations in the United States, have focused on the same issues of land and self-determination. Whereas American Indian-white relations frequently focused on confrontation and hostility, Canadian relations focused predominantly on trade and legal cession of land. Though both countries followed policies of assimilation and cultural extermination at different points, Canada pro-
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gressed further in its attempts to treat its native population as participants in the political process. 1500’s-1700’s. When French and English explorers first arrived in lands now occupied by Canada, they remarked upon the settled natives they encountered. The tribes along the Hudson River lived in large villages around which they farmed and fished. When French sailors were deposited on the shores of Hudson Bay to start a colony in 1542, they found the Indians to be quite helpful. English sailors and explorers felt equally welcomed by the Indians. By the early 1600’s, as the French began to develop permanent outposts, a trading relationship had been established between the Indians and the French. The French placed their forts in places unwanted by the Indians and relied on the Indians for agricultural support as well as trade. They built their trading posts at traditional Indian trading spots. The French generally respected traditional trading patterns. They used tribes that had always been intermediaries for trade and did not attempt to replace them with Frenchmen. This inspired trust and confidence in the French; the English in the American colonies and the Spanish refused to honor such traditional patterns. In short, the French recognized the importance of the Indians within the region. The fur trade represented the most important aspect of European relations with the Indians. Originally based on beaver, the fur trade tied the French and English traders to the Indians, who not only trapped and killed the beaver but also treated it to be pelted. The French and English traded goods such as hatchets, cloth, and liquor for these treated pelts, while the Dutch traded muskets. These goods dramatically altered Indian life, changing everything from hunting and warfare to cooking. The Indians also introduced new technology to the English and French. The canoe helped the French and English establish themselves in Canada. The canoe provided them with the means to transport goods through the river and lake systems. Indians also taught white traders how to survive in the wilds of Canada, which increased the interaction and interdependence between the groups. Additionally, relations between Canadian Indians and the French remained friendly despite the arrival of Catholic missionaries in 1625. Though the French traders transported missionaries, the state did not support priests. Unlike the Spanish Catholic missionaries, they had no support from the military. While the acceptance of priests into an Indian community might be a condition for trade, the acceptance of Christianity was not a requirement for trade with the French.
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The French, unlike their English and Spanish counterparts, tended to allow intermarriage. Many traders discovered that intermarriage strengthened the trading ties between the French and an Indian tribe, increasing profit. Many early French trappers married Indian women, creating a Metis population. The French also encouraged alliances and peace between different tribes. They acted as intermediaries for settling disputes, which worked to their advantage. If the Iroquois refused to trade with the French because the Abenaki did, the French arranged for some sort of settlement so that both would trade with them. When the English began to establish a foothold in Canada in the early 1700’s, the calm relations between the French and the Indians forced the
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English to adopt similar methods. Unlike the American colonies, where traders were almost forbidden to marry Indian women, the Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, encouraged such relationships in the name of trade. An Indian or Metis wife offered a certain cachet to the rising trader. The Hudson’s Bay Company became an important definer of Indianwhite relations in Canada. Built on the fur trade, it relied heavily on cordial relations with the Indians. Until the French were forced out in 1760, it was necessary to encourage friendly relations with the Indians lest they switch trade to the French. The Hudson’s Bay Company also established forts at traditional trading points. Contact between the whites and the Indians during this period was not always peaceful. Whites in Canada spread disease just as they had in Mexico and the United States. Some groups, such as the Micmacs and the Hurons, suffered greatly from epidemics which destroyed their cultures. Additionally, international tensions spilled over into Canada. The AngloFrench War (French and Indian War) and the American Revolution brought European wars onto Indian soil. Indians had to choose sides, sometimes between enemies and sometimes between trading partners. Often Indian women and children from one tribe were mistaken for those from another by the Europeans and killed for wrongly assumed alliances. Period of Transition: 1800’s. The nineteenth century radically changed the path of Indian-white relations in Canada. The British now controlled Canada and ruled it as a colony. The Hudson’s Bay Company controlled the western regions of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Calgary, and British Columbia as well as the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. Protestant and Catholic missionaries began to spread across the country to previously “undiscovered” groups of Indians. Within a hundred short years, the missionaries would alter daily life for most Indians, the Hudson’s Bay Company would be gone, Canada would become an independent nation, treaties would cede much Indian land, and settlers would take much of the rest. In the early 1800’s, much remained the same in Canada as it had been for the previous three hundred years. The fur trade remained the main relation between Indians and whites. The Hudson’s Bay Company controlled Indian-white relations in the west as well as trade. Intermarriage and interdependence between the whites and Indians still remained. The nineteenth century, however, soon brought many changes to Indianwhite relations. The first big alteration came with an influx of Catholic and Protestant missionaries at the beginning of the century. By the 1830’s, mis-
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sionaries had worked their way into western Ontario and into contact with Plains groups in Manitoba. These missionaries sought to change the Indians into white people through assimilation, agrarianism, and cultural extermination. They built churches and schools. They translated Indian languages and produced Bibles in these languages. The Protestants tried to re-create English villages, while the Catholics absorbed parts of Indian religions into Catholicism to make it more acceptable. Both Protestants and Catholics were disappointed by the conversion rates. Canadian Indian societies tended to remain closed to Christianity; many Indian groups found it interesting but not inspiring. Tensions rose between Indians and white missionaries as missionaries pushed for total acceptance of Christianity and white “civilization.” In 1837, a report presented to the British Parliament stated that frontier development was harmful to the Indians. Parliament reacted by passing the Crown Lands Protection Acts, which placed Indian lands in Crown trust. This accomplished two things. It prevented whites from squatting on Crown lands. It also, however, denied Indians any political rights based on land ownership. This set the pattern for policy after confederation in 1867. In 1842, the Bagot Commission began to review the Indian Affairs office. It produced three recommendations for British policy regarding the Indians: First, the Indian Affairs office should develop an agricultural program for the Indians; second, schools should be created to assimilate Indian youths into Canadian society; and, finally, the state should help support religious instruction to the Indians to aid in assimilation. In 1850, the British government continued to encourage assimilation by offering citizenship to any Indians who abandoned their Indian status. Additional legislation blurred the lines between Indians and Canadian citizens. The government offered enfranchisement to any male Indian who was literate (meaning he possessed an understanding of the English language), over twenty-one, free of debt, and possessing a “good character.” Though the British/Canadian government did not actually remove Indians from their land in this period, they did attempt to remove land, status, and culture from the Indians. By the mid-1800’s, the railroads had expanded into western Ontario, bringing more whites to the area. The Hudson’s Bay Company remained firm in disallowing settlers within its territories. In 1867, confederation came to Canada. The Hudson’s Bay Company released the western territories to Canada, changing Indian-white relations. Indians were no longer protected by their trading relationship, and white settlers and developers wanted Indian land for farms and gold. The white Canadian-born popula-
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tion grew from three million to almost five million between confederation and the end of the century, placing new demands on land and natural resources. During the same period, the number of acres under production rose from eighteen million to thirty million, representing the treaties that removed promising farmland from the Indians. The newly formed Canadian government followed many of the same policies as the American government, emphasizing assimilation, agrarianism, and cultural extermination. With confederation, the government pushed for land settlements with the Indians, the creation of schools to teach them English and make them Canadian, and the introduction of farming as a means of survival. The reserve system demanded that Indians abandon traditional methods of survival and adopt “peasant” farming. Farming tied native groups to one area of land, making them available for conversion, assimilation, and government control while freeing the land for white farmers. The Canadian government did not seek to create large or profitable farms for the Indians. Instead, they sought to provide them with minimal survival with rudimentary tools and small plots. The new Canadian government also sought to remove Indian status from the Indians. In 1868 and 1869, the government passed the Indian Act and the Enfranchisement Acts, which created a legal division between “uncivilized Indians” and “civilized whites.” The Canadian government promised the same legal and political rights that whites had to any Indian who relinquished his status as an Indian. The Canadian government simply adopted the policies of the British government in erasing the Indian population, politically and legally. Most Indian groups were not happy with the transfer of power from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Canadian government. Many did not want to surrender their land and adopt farming. One group in particular felt slighted by the arrangements made by the government: the Metis. In 1870, alarmed by government surveyors, a group of Cree Indians and Metis banded together to fight the encroachment on their land. While defending their land, they executed a man from Ontario, which hardened white Canadians against them. The government ended this first rebellion, with leader Louis Riel escaping to the United States. He returned in 1884 to begin the Northwest Rebellion, which stalled the Canadian government for several months. Riel demanded that Metis also receive land settlements. Though they eventually received these rights through the Manitoba Act, Riel was executed for treason and murder in 1885, making him a hero of the Metis and many Indians. Between confederation and the end of the century, whites infiltrated the rest of Canada. Miners arrived in the Yukon Territory, bringing mis-
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sionaries and government officials as well as disease with them. Canadians began to “settle” British Columbia from the Pacific Coast inward. The railroad began to crisscross the country, dividing traditional lands and limiting movement. By 1885, all the major land treaties had been signed. The Plains Indians, who had resisted the longest, relinquished their land as the buffalo disappeared. Only the Indians of British Columbia avoided signing treaties, though whites usurped much of their land without the treaties. The nineteenth century ended with two notable incidents. First, the Canadian government outlawed the potlatch among the Northwest Pacific coast tribes. This law represented the last act in a war of attrition against Indian cultures. It became a battle cry in the first part of the twentieth century as Indian groups battled for political and legal rights. Second, a smallpox epidemic among the same tribes decimated them. Hundreds of lives were lost, breeding anger, distrust, and discontent among the survivors. Twentieth Century. The twentieth century did not begin auspiciously for the Indians of Canada. Most resided on reserves, their children sent to boarding schools run by missionaries, their cultures stripped from them, and their movement restricted by laws and pass systems. Many struggled to survive on farming plots that were too small to support families, with outdated tools and equipment. Change, however, eventually came. Beginning with World War II, Indians began to take back control of their lives. Many Canadian Indians served in World War II, gaining citizenship and political rights without losing their Indian status. This allowed them to challenge certain laws and stereotypes. Though many reserves remained mired in poverty, Indian leaders began to fight for the right to a proper education, for medical reform and access, and for representation. Indians also took control of their natural resources, including timber, oil, and other resources. Inspired by the actions of the American Indian Movement in the United States, several groups formed in Canada in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The most powerful of these today is the Assembly of First Nations, a coalition of recognized and unrecognized tribal groups. The Assembly of First Nations has focused on several things since the 1970’s. First, it provides political action and a political voice to various groups. Instead of every group fighting the same political and legal battles separately, the assembly helps unify and streamline these battles. Second, it supplies social support in health, business, and education. It organizes arts cooperatives, learning cooperatives and centers, and business cooperatives, centralizing these activities and making them more powerful than small individual groups could be. Finally, its leaders have sought to put In-
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dian concerns firmly on the agenda of the Canadian government. Some of the issues they have focused on in the past are the Great Whale Project on Cree land in Northern Quebec, the lack of treaties in British Columbia, the development of Indian land as tourist attractions, and access to education for Indian men and women. The Assembly of First Nations has been instrumental in helping make Indian rights an issue for the Canadian government. Indians today represent 5 percent of the Canadian population and are the fastest-growing segment of the population. Yet, until the 1990’s, they were not represented in the government. As Canada struggled to maintain its unity and keep Quebec in the Confederation, the Assembly of First Nations and Indian leaders sought to have their concerns included. In 1989, the Canadian government sought ratification of the Meech Lake Accord, which would have allowed Quebec to remain a “distinct society.” It made no mention of Indian rights as “distinct societies” or of self-determination. When the accord reached Manitoba for ratification, Elijah Harper, a Cree, stalled the vote in a traditional manner by raising one white feather and refusing comment. He effectively ended the Meech Lake Accord. By 1992, the Canadian government included the Assembly of First Nations in negotiations between provincial governors, finally allowing Indians a voice in their own destiny. Ironically, 1992 became the unofficial “year of the Indian” in Canada. As well as the assembly being included in the council of governors, the Canadian government returned a large land mass to the Indians of Northern Quebec. An area called Nunavut became available for Indian control, allowing them to regulate hunting, fishing, and development of the land. The area represents almost a complete province in Canada. Indian-white relations into the twenty-first century remained tense. Many contemporary Canadians see Indians as freeloaders on the government. Stereotypes of drunken Indians, Indians wealthy from annuities, and freeloading Indians abound still in Canada. Despite the more peaceful Canadian policy toward Indians, Canada and its Indian population still suffer from the same tensions as those in U.S. society. See also: Aboriginal Action Plan; American Indian Higher Education Consortium; Beaver Wars; Declaration of First Nations; Delgamuukw v. British Columbia; Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development; Fifteen Principles; Indian Act of 1876; Indian Act of 1951; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Indian-white relations: Norse; International Indian Treaty Council; Meech Lake Accord; Nisga’a Agreement in Principle; Nunavut Territory; Oka crisis; Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory:
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Northeast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Subarctic; Proclamation of 1763; Red River Raids; Reserve system of Canada; Riel Rebellions; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples; Thames, Battle of the; Treaties and agreements in Canada; Tribe (term); White Paper of Canada. C. L. Higham Sources for Further Study Carter, Sarah. Lost Harvest: Prairies Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. Critically exposes the agricultural policies of the Canadian government. Dickason, Olive. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. An unparalleled legal, political, and social history of Canadian Indians. Getty, Ian, and Antoine Lussier, eds. As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983. Includes essays on issues of self-determination, treaty negotiation, and use of natural resources. Grant, John Webster. Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter Since 1543. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Examines Indian-white contact through the eyes of missionaries and through their cultural legacy. Miller, J. R. Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada. 3d ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. An excellent study of Indians as politicians and cultural survivors. St. Germain, Jill. Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867-1877. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Explores and contrasts the “civilizing” efforts of the United States and Canada through their Indian treaty policies. Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Examines relations between white traders and Indian/Metis women.
Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial Date: 1600’s Locale: Hudson Valley Tribes involved: Lenni Lenape, Mahican, Mohawk
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Categories: Colonial history Significance: Dutch control of the Hudson Valley (1609-1664) paved the way for the takeover of the southern half of New York by European colonists. The creation of a Dutch colonial claim to the Hudson Valley through the exploration of the river by Henry Hudson, sailing under Dutch charter in 1609, laid the foundations for the creation of a Dutch colony, New Netherland, in the Hudson Valley. The arrival of the Dutch, first as traders and then as settlers, had a disastrous effect on the Indians of the area. The Fur Trade. Initially, the Dutch perceived the Hudson River Valley as the ideal approach to the rich fur trade of the interior. In this view, they were seeing things exactly as their rivals to the north, the French, did. Indeed, with the exception of the Pilgrims and others escaping hardship, oppression, or authorities in their homelands, the Europeans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries viewed the New World as primarily a source of wealth, to be gained by acquiring its resources and selling these on the European market. For the Spaniards to the south, the resource was gold bullion; for the French and the Dutch to the north (and even for some English traders) the resource was furs. These furs were gained by trading European goods—in the contemporary phrase, “trade goods”—to the Indians in return for their fur harvest. After the news of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river named for him, the earliest Dutch visitors were all seeking furs. In 1614 the New Netherland Company was chartered to exploit the fur trade; it was superseded in 1621 by the West India Company, which dominated affairs in New Netherland until the English conquest in 1664. Throughout the Dutch period, the hope of those who were interested in the area was that it would be a major source of wealth, because its location offered ready access to the Indians of the interior, principally the Mohawks, the easternmost tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy. Some of what the Dutch brought to trade with the Indians was of benefit to the Indians. From the Europeans the Indians acquired axes, hoes, and iron cooking pots, all of which enabled them more readily to secure their needs from nature. The Indians soon acquired a taste for coarse woven cloaks of a material known as “duffel.” These things were positive. At the same time, however, the Dutch readily supplied the Indians with two items that had negative effects on their culture: guns and liquor. Moreover, with the passage of time the Indian taste for trade goods grew to the point where they were essentially dependent on them.
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The focal point of the fur trade was Fort Orange, built near the present site of Albany in 1624. There the West India Company established its trading post, buying furs brought in by the Indians to the west. These Indians were the Mohawks; because of their access to large quantities of furs and their warlike reputation, the Dutch were always careful to maintain good relations with them. The guns furnished to them by the Dutch enabled the Mohawks to carry on vigorous warfare with the Hurons to the north and west. The Dutch were agreeable to that outcome, for it diverted to the Hudson River some of the furs that would otherwise have been sold to the French along the St. Lawrence River. At home in the United Provinces, however, there were others who had different objectives. A group of wealthy merchants, most notably Kiliaen van Rensselaer, succeeded in breaking the monopoly of the West India Company and opening up New Netherland both to other traders in fur and to settlers. As the English settlements to the north and to the south began to fill with colonists, the Dutch saw their position threatened if New Netherland consisted solely of a few trading posts. Under the leadership of van Rensselaer, a policy of encouraging settlement began in the 1630’s. Settlement and Impact. The earliest settlements were at New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island, purchased from the local Indians by Peter Minuit in 1626. As the number of settlers grew, frictions with the Indians grew too; many settlers allowed their livestock to roam free (fencing their cultivated fields); as the Indians did not fence theirs, the free-roaming livestock often destroyed Indian crops. As more settlers arrived, more land was needed; although the Dutch were always careful to purchase land from the Indians (sometimes the same land more than once), the Indians began to resent the Dutch presence. The Dutch authorities were also not able to control the actions of free traders, who often sought to defraud the Indians of their pelts. Conflict peaked in the 1650’s (in the Peach Wars), during which time the Dutch, through military action, effectively dispossessed the various tribal groups living around the lower Hudson. They continued to maintain good relations with the Mohawks, for they would have been unable to match the Mohawks militarily, especially after the latter were armed with European muskets. By the time the Dutch were forced to cede New Netherland to an invading British fleet in 1664, the local Algonquian tribes had been essentially wiped out. See also: Bacon’s Rebellion; Beaver Wars; Fur trade; Iroquois Confederacy; Manhattan Island purchase; Pavonia Massacre; Peach Wars; Pequot War. Nancy M. Gordon
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Sources for Further Study Bachman, Van Cleaf. Peltries or Plantations: The Economic Policies of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland, 1623-1639. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Donck, Adriaen van der. A Description of the New Netherlands. Translated by Jeremiah Johnson. 1841. Reprint. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968. Merwick, Donna. Possessing Albany, 1630-1710: The Dutch and English Experiences. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Rink, Oliver A. Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Trelease, Allen W. Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960.
Indian-white relations: English colonial Date: 1600’s-1700’s Locale: Eastern seaboard Tribes involved: Northeast and Southeast polities Categories: Colonial history Significance: Indian-English relations developed over the span of two centuries and were dominated by issues of trade, land, and religion; both sides borrowed from their adversary’s culture throughout the colonial period. Indian-English relations predate English attempts to colonize the American continent. In the Chesapeake Bay region, for example, groups such as the Powhatans had contact with Europeans in the 1580’s. The experience of Don Luis (a mamanatowick, or paramount chief, of the Algonquian confederacy) with the Spanish provided a model for his successor, Powhatan, to draw upon when the English established their Jamestown colony in 1607. The English encountered the confederacy further when they began colonizing the Chesapeake Bay region. In New England, Squanto’s ability to communicate with the Pilgrims illustrates that there was a familiarity with the English before actual colonization began. Policies and Preconceptions. When English colonists began establishing colonies on the North American continent, they hoped to coexist with
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their Indian neighbors. The English assumed that their indigenous neighbors would recognize the superiority of English civilization and would try to emulate the colonists. Unfortunately for the colonists, the Indians were unwilling to accommodate these hopes. Equally distressing to the colonists, more than a few of their own found Indian culture preferable to English society. This phenomenon frightened colonial leaders, and all colonies worked to prevent their citizens from adopting Indian lifestyles. Even when introduced to Indian culture unwillingly, as prisoners of war or other captives, English colonists often preferred to stay with their Indian captors. The treaty minutes between Native Americans and English delegates illustrate this problem. In these documents, colonial officials demand the return of English captives from the Indians. Inevitably, some of the captured colonists refused to return to colonial society. Their unwillingness to return challenged colonial attitudes of superiority throughout the colonial period. Complicating the relationship was Indian custom. Within the eastern woodlands, when two adversaries agreed to peace, they often exchanged community members, who served as visible reminders of goodwill. Once the colonists realized this, they demanded that Indian hostages remain
Contemporary depiction of a meeting between Ottawa leader Pontiac (right) and a British major named Rogers during the 1760’s. (Library of Congress)
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with them until the articles of peace were implemented. Some colonial officials proposed placing English orphans among the Indians. Archibald Kennedy, a member of New York’s Governor’s Council, argued that placing orphans among the Indians would help bind Anglo-Indian alliances. Indian-English relations went through various phases in the colonial period. Native Americans initially worked to establish peaceful and beneficial relations with the English colonists. Only when Native Americans had reasons to fear the colonists did relations become inhospitable. Each Indian polity welcomed English colonists for different reasons. Over the course of time, each side grew more familiar with the other; familiarity did not produce harmony. Cultural biases on both sides prevented satisfactory resolutions to problems with Anglo-Indian relations. Benjamin Franklin, in his Remarks Concerning the Savages, reports how Iroquois leaders rejected an English request to send Iroquoian youths to colonial schools. The Iroquois spokesman declined, stating that schooling made Indian youths unfit for any future work among the Indians. The second phase of the Anglo-Indian relationship was one of distrust and conflict. The English made it clear that they were not willing to play by traditional tribal rules. The timing of this second period of Anglo-Indian relations depended on local circumstance. In the Chesapeake and New England regions, hostilities broke out within a decade of colonial settlement. Both sides fought these wars within their traditional understandings of war. Colonists saw women and children as legitimate targets and often fought in formations better suited to European plains than American forests. Native Americans ambushed, fought skirmishes, raided, and captured women and children. As both sides learned about the other they adopted various strategies from their opponents. (From this cultural borrowing has emerged the polemical debate about which culture “invented” scalping.) Many architects of England’s early relationships with the Indians based their policy on their experiences in Ireland. Two of the first colonizers, Gilbert Humphreys and Walter Ralegh, fit this generalization. They and their families, like other Devon families, had gained their position in English society through their participation in the Irish wars. Later colonizers, such as John Winthrop and Roger Williams, brought with them the legacy of the struggles of the English Reformation. These sixteenth and seventeenth century settlers held certain convictions that contact with North America’s indigenous inhabitants could not alter. English settlers viewed Algonquian society from a European perspective. Algonquian males were “lazy and indolent.” Females were immodest and lived a life of drudgery. English settlers believed the Indians “uncivilized.” They were convinced
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that the Algonquian religion was an alliance with Satan. These attitudes provided the theoretical underpinnings of Anglo-Indian relations. Anglo-Indian relations had two specific spheres. The first sphere concerned official relations. This realm includes treaties, policy decisions, and trade negotiations. The second domain involved informal relations. This area included marriages, cultural borrowing, and cultural critiques. In addition to these spheres, four specific rubrics shaped Indian-English relations. These four areas were disease, trade, land, and religion. Although these areas are interrelated, each requires a separate examination. Disease. The role of disease in Anglo-Indian relations has, until recently, been a little understood aspect of interaction. Scholars now think that disease was the greatest killer of Native Americans in the colonial period. A series of epidemics known as “virgin soil epidemics” were particularly devastating to Indian communities because these epidemics killed people aged fifteen to forty. This age group was most responsible for the societal tasks of food gathering, making military decisions, and procreation. Native American social practices exacerbated the disease problem, since communities did not isolate the sick originally. Disease often predated significant Anglo-Indian contact and set the parameters for the Anglo-Indian relations that followed. On at least one occasion Englishmen used disease as a weapon of war: Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander of British forces in North America, ordered that blankets infected with smallpox be given to some Delaware Indians during Pontiac’s Rebellion. Disease transformed the Anglo-Indian relationship. For Native Americans, disease meant a declining population base from which to meet European aggression. The most lethal disease that Native Americans encountered was smallpox. Other diseases that swept eastern North America in the colonial period were measles, influenza, diphtheria, typhus, and perhaps bubonic plague. The presence of a devastating disease often called for a reassessment of traditional assumptions about the world. Sometimes this reassessment provided European missionaries with the opportunity necessary to gain a foothold in native communities. Most of the time the missionaries followed the trade routes west. Trade. From the beginning of contact, Indians and Englishmen traded. Arthur Barlow wrote of trading when he met with the Algonquians around Roanoke in 1584, and European fishermen exchanged items with Native Americans during the seasonal voyages to fishing banks off Newfoundland. From the Indians’ perspective, this trade reinforced a traditional manner of integrating foreigners into an existing worldview. While the En-
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glish saw trade as a simple economic exchange, it was something more complex for the Indians. They based trade on their notion of reciprocity, and reciprocity implied obligation. Both Powhatan and Squanto based their initial relationships with the colonists on the notion of reciprocity. Very quickly this reciprocal relationship became an interdependent one. Initially it was the colonists who depended on Indian trade items for survival. By the end of the colonial period, however, the Native Americans were dependent on the trade for survival. Trade flourished partly because it initially required little adjustment for either side. English and Indian traders tapped existing trade networks. In the early colonial period Indian expectations shaped the trade; they determined which goods were traded and at what price. English traders discovered the importance of adhering to Indian cultural expectations when doing business. Some traders found marriage with a native woman a beneficial custom. It opened doors previously closed within the native community. For many native polities, a trader’s marriage transformed the trader from a stranger to a family member. The trader now had special obligations to fulfill. As the colonial period progressed, English traders tried to transform such relationships to fit English expectations. They were never truly successful. One reason that trade predated colonization is that the items both sides exchanged required little change within each cultural tradition. Algonquian males traditionally hunted for beaver in the winter, and winter pelts were what Europeans wanted when they began trading. Native peoples had processed deerskins for internal consumption before the arrival of Europeans. For their part, the Englishmen who did the trading did so at first in conjunction with their fishing expeditions. The furs were tangential to the primary purpose. Nevertheless, the trade in pelts and goods produced change. For some Native American groups, trade with the English stimulated the process of political centralization. Even if trade did not produce political changes for Native Americans, it forced fundamental changes in labor. For the Cherokees, the processing of such large numbers of skins produced a cottage industry. This industry required more labor from the women of the community, which placed strains on Cherokee communities. Other groups experienced increased conflict as neighboring Indian polities attempted to obtain access to the English market. Interior polities sought their own relationships with the English. Various groups tried to force their way onto rivals’ territories in the quest for more pelts and skins; the Beaver Wars are perhaps the most famous example of this. Other polities positioned themselves as intermediaries within the growing trade. Whatever
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the reason, the fur trade produced an increasing level of violence, which made peaceful Anglo-Indian relations even more difficult. For the Indians, the increasing violence made any attempt to unite against the English difficult. As a result, most Indian polities stood alone against the English when colonists sought Indian land for their own occupation. Land. Perhaps the greatest strain on Native American-English relations concerned land. English colonists had an insatiable appetite for Indian lands. To justify their taking of Indian land, English officials and colonists relied on three specific arguments. First, they claimed land by right of discovery. Second, they claimed land by right of conquest. Third, they asserted their right to the land because they could better utilize the land than the Indians. Land was probably the single most important irritant to AngloIndian relations in the colonial period. In some areas, however, disputes over land were not a major factor. A smallpox epidemic had wiped out large numbers of Massachusetts Indians on the eve of Boston’s founding by the English, for example; it was only when the colonists sought more than the original land ceded them by the Indians that land became an issue. Within two decades of colonization, land was the source of Anglo-Indian conflict. The Pequot War (1636-1637), Metacom’s (King Philip’s) War (1675-1676), Bacon’s Rebellion (1675-1676), Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-1764), and Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) were some of the wars that involved, at least tangentially, English-Indian disagreements about land. So important were land issues to Indian-English relations that various attempts to restrict colonial encroachments on Indian land were tried; none of them worked. Nevertheless, the Albany Congress (1754), the creation of the Indian superintendent system, the Proclamation of 1763, and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) illustrate attempts to alleviate the problems that land created in Anglo-Indian relations. Religion. English missionaries found their greatest success among Native American polities that had reached the nadir of their cultural existence. In New England, those Indian polities decimated by disease often turned to Christianity because traditional religion no longer explained what was happening to them. Other groups turned to Christianity after they could no longer defend themselves culturally because of lost territory. The “praying Indians” of New England processed the missionaries’ message within an Algonquian framework. The songs and rituals associated with Christianity, not the message, were what primarily drew the Algonquians’ attention. By the end of the colonial period, Christian Indians acted as missionaries to other Indian groups. Samson Occom, for example, a Mohegan
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Indian, became a missionary to the Brothertown Indians living among the Iroquois. The missionaries and their message often divided Indian communities. The result was an increasing level of factionalism within native politics. This factionalism further hindered the Indians’ ability to withstand English pressures. The Iroquois Confederacy offers an example of how this factionalism influenced Indian-English relations. Initial Christian factions emerged in Iroquoia with the arrival of French Jesuit missionaries. They arrived at a time when the Iroquois were on the defensive in their struggles against the French and their western Indian allies. In the following years, pro-Christian Iroquois came to dominate confederacy councils. When the Iroquois turned the tables on the French, new traditionalist leaders emerged to lead the confederacy until new troubles appeared and the tide turned once again. This factional ebb and flow continued until the end of the colonial period, when Samuel Kirkland and his Oneida followers challenged the leadership position of Sir William Johnson and the Mohawks. Kirkland had converted a number of Oneida warriors to his New Light Congregationalism. Johnson was a supporter of Anglican attempts to Christianize the Indians. This religious struggle had political overtones because it became part of the colonial-imperial struggles of the 1760’s and 1770’s. When the American Revolution broke out, the league extinguished its council fire at Onondaga and let each nation determine which side to support: Christianity had helped splinter the Six Nations Confederacy. Gift-Giving. One area of English-Indian interaction that has received extensive coverage is gift-giving. The use of gifts in Indian society was well established before English colonization. When the English arrived, they found they had to adapt to Indian protocol if they hoped to establish peaceful relations with their Indian neighbors. Indian gifts involved large expenditures on the part of colonial governments. New governors to New York were often presented an allowance of six hundred pounds for the purchase of gifts. Officials in South Carolina spent more than twenty-six thousand pounds on Indian affairs between 1732 and 1755, when the Crown officially took control of Indian relations. A significant portion of South Carolina’s Indian expenses went to Indian gifts. These expenditures suggest that colonial and imperial officials understood the importance of gifts to Anglo-Indian relations. Intermarriage. One area often overlooked in discussions of Indian-English relations is gender. While all European nations were concerned with blood purity, the English were perhaps the most prudish on the matter. Neverthe-
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less, there were many cross-cultural relationships. In 1615 John Rolfe married Pocahontas. In Algonquian terms this marriage served to cement the peace. In the eighteenth century the British Indian superintendent for the northern colonies, Sir William Johnson, married an Iroquoian woman, Molly Brant. Johnson’s marriage to Brant gave him an opportunity to operate within Iroquoia that he would not have had otherwise. In the southern colonies the trader Lachland McGillivray married a Creek woman, and his son Alexander became a leading figure in the Anglo-Indian dialogue. Johnson’s and McGillivray’s marriages provided each man with entry into his wife’s community in a manner no outsider could hope to achieve. Equally important, these men were now obligated to meet certain familial and kinship expectations on the part of their wives’ families. In examining Indian-English relations it is important to remember that neither side spoke with a single voice. While scholars have repeatedly mentioned the problems Native Americans had in uniting to oppose English objectives, there has been a tendency to downplay the difficulties the colonists also had in presenting a united front to the Indians. The ramifications of the lack of unity on both sides give the study of Indian-English relations its unique character. The diversity of opinion and actions among British colonial and Indian leaders made that relationship a complex one. See also: Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Indian-white relations: Norse; Indian-white relations: Russian colonial; Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Indianwhite relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002. Michael J. Mullin Sources for Further Study Axtell, James. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1981. Many of the essays in this book were previously published; together they provide a good introduction to the study of ethnohistory and AngloIndian relations in the colonial period. Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America.” William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 33 (1976): 289-299. This essay is considered a classic examination of the effect of disease on Indian populations in North America. Jacobs, Wilbur R. “British Indian Policies to 1783.” In History of IndianWhite Relations, edited by Wilcomb E. Washburn. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians, edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington,
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D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. As the title indicates, this essay details British policy toward the Indians. It covers the formal relations between Indians and colonists and is particularly good at examining the role of land in the Indian-English experience. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. A highly readable account of the evolutions of Indian-English relations along the East Coast of North America. Oberg, Michael Leroy. Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Focuses on English interactions with Algonquian groups in the Chesapeake Bay area. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Presents early American history from an Indian perspective, focusing on the figures of Pocohontas, Blessed Catherine Tekawitha, and Metacom, a.k.a. King Philip. ____________. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, this study of the Iroquois League demonstrates the influence of factionalism on an Indian people as they dealt with the Europeans. It synthesizes much scholarship on the Six Nations and their relationship with the French, Dutch, and English. It is particularly strong on seventeenth century relations. Rountree, Helen C., ed. Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500-1722. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. A series of articles written by leading scholars. The book details Powhatan relations not only with the English but also with other Indian groups in the region. The articles emphasize the complexity and difficulty of thinking about Native Americans as single-culture polities.
Indian-white relations: French colonial Date: 1400’s-1700’s Locale: Northern and eastern North America Tribes involved: Huron, Iroquois Confederacy, Lenni Lenape, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee
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Categories: Colonial history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: French colonial relations with Indian tribes displayed mutual interest in trading, useful political and military alliances, missionary schooling, and protection. France’s colonial claim on major portions of North America dates from the reign of the Valois king François I. It was François who protested the assumptions of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which claimed to divide the newly discovered Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal solely. Soon France would be engaged, well before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, in exploring North American lands that were inhabited only by Indian tribes. The French labeled this new territory Gallia Nova, or New France. Early Contacts. Historians date the earliest trading contact between French explorers and American Indians to Jacques Cartier’s entry into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534. The French exchanged knives and trinkets for furs offered by Micmac tribesmen. The next year Cartier sailed farther up the St. Lawrence River, first encountering Iroquois at the point where Quebec would later be established and then penetrating as far as the Indian village of Hochelaga (later Montreal). The sequel to these earliest encounters in the area that would become known as New France was not promising for future relations. After Cartier captured Indians and transported them to France (where they died from exposure to European diseases), returning French parties were not welcome in the St. Lawrence area. Attempts by Cartier’s successor, Sieur de Roberval, to found a colony failed after only three years. The contributions made by Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec City in 1608, were more lasting. Champlain was very curious to know more about the origins of the St. Lawrence River, questioning Hurons who came to trade at Quebec concerning their homelands. The Hurons spoke of great interlocking expanses of water—those yet to be discovered by the Europeans and named Great Lakes. Champlain tried in vain in 1613 to journey to the Great Lakes by ascending the Ottawa River, the most direct path being blocked by hostile Iroquois tribesmen. It was only several years later, after Champlain became a direct lieutenant of the French Viceroy and founder of what was known as Champlain’s Company (composed of traders from Normandie), that a real French colony would develop. Champlain’s Company was granted a monopoly of trade with the Indians of the St. Lawrence as far westward as they could succeed. Built into the organization of the chartered trading company was
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The greatest French explorer of North America, Samuel de Champlain, spent half his lifetime making numerous voyages to the regions surrounding the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River. He founded the city of Quebec, traversed the rapids near Montreal that had barred the way to the Great Lakes, and spent months with Algonquian and Huron Indians during his explorations of the lands near Lakes Huron and Ontario.
a mandate to support the work of French missionary friars called the Recollects, who represented a reformed branch of the Franciscan Order. The Recollects claimed that they were the first to hold a formal ceremony of the Mass in Canada in June, 1615. It was a Recollect missionary, not the explorer Champlain himself, who was the first European to set foot on the easternmost shores of the Great Lakes. Not much success was registered by the French in the Great Lakes area in this early period, partially because a decision was made to choose Huron peace and trade offers rather than to struggle to win over Iroquois friendship. This meant that the Champlain Company based in Quebec carried on more trade in the rather bleak areas to the north, rather than penetrating the more fertile regions of what would become New York and Pennsylvania, eventually areas where British colonial claims, together with complex relations with the Iroquois, would expand. During the second half of the sixteenth century a few other French expeditions came into contact with Indian groupings, but in general they decided not to insist on fixed colonization, which inevitably involved a need
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for military defense and possibly sustained warfare. French expeditions preferred to develop mobile trading networks instead. The lucrative attractions of the fur trade would leave a characteristic stamp on the actions of the coureurs de bois (“woods runners,” or trappers), who would cover vast inland areas and develop particular relations with several tribes. The nature of traders’ alliances with Indians would change significantly in the eighteenth century colonial period, when military considerations in dealing with British enemies in colonial North America came to the forefront. From Exploration to Conquest. One of the most famous coureurs was Nicholas Perrot, who, after beginning but then abandoning training to enter the Jesuit Order and work among tribes as a missionary, began his career at twenty-six as the interpreter for the 1670 Daumont de St. Lusson (copper exploration) expedition into the Miami tribal area around Green Bay (now Wisconsin). Eventually Perrot mastered not only Algonquian but also a dozen other Indian dialects. The most far-seeing governors-general in Quebec, notably Louis de Baude, count of Frontenac, tended to place great confidence in the judgment of coureurs such as Perrot and sometimes even countered instructions from Paris in favor of “commonsense” counsel offered to them by those who knew the Indians best. When French colonial policy toward the Indians came under the influence of aggressive governors-general such as the marquis de Denonville, however, relations could worsen overnight. By the mid-1680’s de Denonville was convinced that his British colonial neighbors in New York (then under the governorate of Thomas Dongan) were stirring up Iroquois hostility against the French. When clumsy efforts to deal with the problem through hostage-taking and physical duress failed, de Denonville resorted to massive armed action in 1687, mainly against the Senecas near the present site of Rochester, New York. His force of French soldiers, accompanied by Indian Christian converts and tribesmen who had more interest in fighting Seneca enemies than in Christianity, numbered almost three thousand—nearly ten times the size of any previous military expedition. Although de Denonville’s battle tactics were not strikingly successful, his remarks revealed the psychological distance already growing between official colonizers of his ilk and the commonsense “forest runner” emissaries of New France who knew the manners and customs of the Indians and how to use them to obtain desired ends without violence. When his Indian allies fell ill from overeating (booty and animals taken from the Senecas), de Denonville observed with disgust that “it is a miserable business to command savages who, as soon as they have knocked the enemy on the head, ask for nothing but to go home and carry . . . scalps they have taken
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off like a skullcap” (quoted in Joseph Rutledge, Century of Conflict, New York, 1956, p. 58). Contributions by French Christian Missionaries. The second main thrust of French influence into American Indian homelands before 1700 was religiously motivated. Among the earliest French Jesuit missions to establish relations with the broad tribal area they called Huronia was Father Bressani. The so-called Black Robes took on special status in dealing with the Hurons not with guns (and not even by formal conversion to Christianity) but by taking on the honorific function of tribal medicine men. Tensions mounted among various factions of Indians, however, when “converts” only, not those who rejected missionary overtures, received firearms from French suppliers (not from the missionaries themselves). By 1649, deteriorating conditions between Hurons and the Five Nations of the Iroquois led to defeat of the former by Seneca and Mohawk nations of the latter. Within five years of their Huron ally’s loss, however, the French Jesuits received a request from the Onondaga middle tribe of the Iroquois for the establishment of a trading and missionary post to teach converts in their midst. This new French-Indian alliance was accompanied by arms supplies to aid the Onondagas not only in their war with the Eries but also in defending themselves against hostile attacks from their fellow Iroquois, the Mohawks. The policy would prove a failure when Mohawks destroyed the Onondaga mission in 1658. This act brought a special military force from France under the marquis de Tracy, who, after burning many villages, forced the Mohawks to accept the presence of missionaries in their midst. Thereafter, Black Robe policy toward Indian converts in the region changed. To avoid intertribal warfare, the French sent individual converts away from their tribal homelands to mission reservations near the emergent French colonial center at Montreal. Descendants of these mixed Indian Christian communities, who came to form the most reliable allies of French colonists, were called Caughnawaga Mohawks (still identifiable in late twentieth century Canada as “Kahnawake” people, who live on a reservation bearing the same name). Missionary-Explorers. Some seventeenth century French missionaries combined two callings—that of explorer and that of bearer of Christianity for people who were often considered outright savages—when they entered Indian territories beyond established colonies. One of the best-known French missionaries was Gabriel Sagard, a lay brother (not an ordained priest) in the Recollect Order. Sagard’s famous 1632 account of his journey into Huronia contained numerous suggestions that the “savage” life of the
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Indians contained many positive elements that could benefit European society, including simplicity of relations and rejection of selfish hoarding of material goods. Sagard’s 1632 account of the minute details of Indian habits, including their modes of preparing various foods, their dress, and their recreations, became the first widely read popular treatise on Gallia Nova. It would be greatly expanded in a second printing only four years after it first appeared. A second widely read account of French and Indian missionary encounters would appear exactly fifty years after Sagard’s famous volume. The later work, by another Recollect, Louis Hennepin, was called “Description of Louisiana,” a title that suggests how far westward and southward the French had explored since Sagard’s experience among the Hurons. Much credit for this wider exploration went to the Recollects’ missionary “rivals,” the French Jesuits. Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette, for example, together with Louis Jolliet, a former seminarian turned fur trader, were among the first white people to explore the Mississippi River Valley in the 1670’s. It was they who opened the way for the extension of New France into the vast area that would be known as Louisiana (named for King Louis XIV). Jolliet’s initial interest in proceeding farther west and south of the territory under Quebec’s administrative control was to establish a settlement on the Illinois River. Unsuccessful in getting support for this, Jolliet took on the commissioned task of discovering the upper Mississippi itself. A wealth of information tracing Jolliet’s progress is preserved in Father Marquette’s journals, which begin when the party received aid from the Mascouten Indian people, whose territory in the Fox River Valley and the Meskousing (later “Wisconsin”) River zone held the key to rapid canoe transit toward confluents of the Mississippi. One of these, then called the Pekitonoui River, passed through the territory of the Illinois tribes. There Marquette would later found, on his return north after their long journey down the Mississippi to the point where it is joined by the Arkansas River, the Mission of the Conception in the tiny Indian village of Kaskaskia. He died there in 1675, only to be succeeded by generations of French missionaries and fur traders who would open the Mississippi to extensive exploration and settlement far beyond the new “capital” of St. Louis. By 1700, when Father Jacques Gravier had taken charge of Marquette’s Indian mission program among the Kaskaskia of Illinois, he decided to establish a network of communications to link the Illinois mission to new French settlements as far south as Biloxi (the future state of Mississippi, settled from the New Orleans delta northward). Gravier’s 1700 contacts with the Akansa (Quapaw) Indians (who had seen Marquette in 1674) were already tinged with hints of possible hostile reactions by Mississippi Valley Indians to
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what they feared would be increased takeover of their lands by French settlements. By 1711 and 1712, all the way back north in the Fox River Valley, where Marquette had begun among friends in the 1670’s, the hostilities later known as the Fox Wars began, and the safety of the French in a great number of previously peaceful areas would be placed in jeopardy. The French fur traders, called voyageurs (“travelers”) as well as coureurs de bois, in order to survive in relative isolation among the Indians far from colonial military forts or missionary zones, consciously chose to develop close personal ties with the tribes. They often established networks of what amounted to political as well as trading relationships with different groups by marrying Indian women and adopting many aspects of the Indian way of life. Fur trader knowledge of Indian customs, as well as the configurations of tribal alliances, would serve the needs of more official political pol-
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icies of administrative authorities of New France when the latter faced military challenges from their main colonial rivals, the British. Relations During the Seven Years’ War. Historians often refer to the French and Indian War (1754-1763) between France and England as the North American manifestation of the Seven Years’ War (the war between Frederick the Great of Prussia, aided by England, and France, aided by Austria and Russia) because of the importance of English and French alliances with Indian tribes in Canada and several of the thirteen American colonies. For the French, many of these alliances predated the formal period of war by more than half a century. One of France’s long-established goals in what would become the United States was to hold the limit of British colonization to east of the Appalachian Mountains. Because so few actual French fighting units were present in the vast territories it wished to defend against British occupation, French emissaries in essence “recruited” Indian groups to fight for them against the British. The appointment in 1752 of Marquis Ange Duquesne de Menneville as France’s governor-general in Quebec came with instructions to block all British attempts to penetrate the Ohio Territory, a move that could cut off north-south contact between France’s Canadian and “Louisianan” colonies. As the much more serious declaration of war in Europe approached, Duquesne soon followed the example of one of his agents, Charles Langlade, who had led Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwa Indian allies in attacks against other Indians who had joined the Iroquois Covenant Chain (including the Delawares, or Lenni Lenape) and were being courted as potential allies of the British cause. When it came to struggles over control of the famous Fort Duquesne, the French attempted to rely on support from so-called Three Fires Indians, who came from points far to the west, where Indian sensitivity to threats of seizure of their lands was not yet as highly developed as it was in the Ohio Territory. As the terms of war became even more serious, the French strategy of allying with Indians who thought they might regain lands lost to British colonizers seemed to be succeeding. Not only the Lenni Lenapes but also the Shawnees and even some Iroquois broke away from British support to help the French in their attempts to expel English colonizers from Iroquoia (New York). British General John Forbes and a Quaker colonist leader named Israel Pemberton finally succeeded in turning the tide of French and Indian superiority in 1758, when a treaty with the Delawares signed at Easton, Pennsylvania, promised to establish a firm boundary between British and Indian territory after the war. When the struggle finally ended in 1763, the French essentially lost their entire Canadian and Northeast North American colonial empire. For many of their former Indian allies, this de-
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feat meant an unclear future. At Fort Niagara, for example, Seneca Indians were expelled from a stronghold they had held for the French. British control, although it would last only another twenty years in the thirteen colonies, rapidly brought quite different conditions for the Indian people of North America. See also: French and Indian War; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: Norse; Indian-white relations: Russian colonial; Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002. Byron D. Cannon Sources for Further Study Douville, Raymond, and Jacques Casanova. Daily Life in Early Canada. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Although this carefully documented study concentrates on various conditions affecting French colonial life in Gallia Nova (transportation, religious life, trapping, and trading), each chapter includes useful information on relations with Indian populations. Hamilton, Raphael N. Marquette’s Explorations: The Narratives Reexamined. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. This scholarly monograph not only describes the experiences of Father Marquette before and during his famous exploration of the 1670’s but also provides a critical analysis of the authenticity of manuscript sources ascribed to Marquette. Jennings, Francis. The Founders of America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. An excellent general history of the Indian population of all regions of North America from precolonial to contemporary times. The colonial section contains essential facts of French and Indian relations. Rutledge, Joseph Lister. Century of Conflict. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. A comprehensive account of American Indian relations with both French and British colonial regimes from the early to the late eighteenth century, including the key Seven Years’ War period. Sagard, Gabriel. The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons. Translated by Hugh H. Langton. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1939. This is a translation of the French explorer’s original travel logs, published in 1632. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Considers the effect of Indian women married to French men upon the early colonial fur trade.
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Indian-white relations: Norse Date: 1000’s-1500’s Locale: Greenland, eastern Canada, eastern seaboard Tribes involved: Algonquian, Inugsuk, Iroquois, possibly Mandan, Thule Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: For five hundred years before Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Caribbean islands in 1492, people from Scandinavia interacted with the indigenous population of North America; the Norse traded with, influenced, and were influenced by American Indians. Until relatively recently, most historians considered the enduring folktales concerning pre-Columbian Norse colonization of North America and contacts with its aboriginal population to be nothing more than romantic fiction. The few scholars who did take seriously the Icelandic sagas, on which the folktales were based, assumed that the alleged Norse-Indian contacts had little or no historical significance. Despite the disinterest of the academic community, many amateur historians and archaeologists pursued the story of the pre-Columbian Norse in North America with an enthusiasm often bordering on fanaticism. Since at least the seventeenth century, sincere but often ignorant proponents of the Norse presence in North America before Columbus have put forth evidence for their claims in the form of maps, runestones, and purportedly Norse-made artifacts. Some of this supposed evidence proved to be the product of hoaxes, which cast doubt on the entire thesis of an early Norse presence in North America. Archaeological discoveries during the last third of the twentieth century, however, showed conclusively that the Norse established permanent colonies on the North American continent. At L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, archaeologists have excavated an entire Norse village, dated by radiocarbon methods to around 1000 c.e. or a little earlier. Other archaeologists have recovered indisputably Norse artifacts from dozens of Eskimos (Inuit) sites throughout northern Canada. These discoveries have caused historians to begin reexamining the original Icelandic sources that told of the Norse movement into the area west of Greenland and other evidence of Norse-Indian interaction. Background. Three Icelandic sagas, probably composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Eirik’s Saga, Karlsefni Saga, and the Graenlendinga Saga),
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constitute the primary historical source material for a pre-Columbian Norse presence in North America. Other sagas contain numerous references to the subject but give little detail. The Icelandic sagas began as oral history— stories about people and events passed along orally from generation to generation. Icelandic scribes probably wrote down the stories dealing with what the Greenland Norse called “Vinland the Good” (which many scholars today believe was the coast of New England) in the late fourteenth century. These sagas tell first of the Norse colonization of Greenland in 985986 c.e. by Eric the Red. Shortly afterward, according to the sagas, Bjarni Herjolfsson accidentally sighted what must have been the coast of North America when a storm blew his ship off course. After hearing Herjolfsson’s story, Leif Eriksson, known as Leif the Lucky, Eric’s son, bought Herjolfsson’s ship some years later (around the year 1000) and sailed west from Greenland searching for the land his predecessor had seen. He found several islands or promontories and gave them names during this voyage: Helluland (which many historians now believe was Baffin Island), Markland (often identified with Labrador), and finally Vinland. The sagas relate that Vinland abounded with wild grape vines (thus the name), game of all types, and fertile soil; the rivers teemed with fish. Leif and the thirty-five men who sailed with him built permanent dwellings and explored the surrounding area for almost a year. The next spring, Leif sailed back to Greenland with a cargo of timber, grapes, and grape vines. The Norse and the Indians. Eric the Red died during the winter following Leif’s return from Vinland. Leif became too engrossed in his duties as chieftain of the Greenland colony to follow up his voyage of discovery. The sagas record three more expeditions from the Greenland colony to Vinland during subsequent years. According to the sagas, the Norse encountered aborigines they called Skraelings (literally “wretches”) in Vinland and interacted with them on several occasions. If the sagas are correct, the Norse both exploited the Skraelings in trade and killed them in battle and by treachery. The sagas give no details about any subsequent Norse exploits in Vinland. Despite the anecdotal and undoubtedly embellished nature of the sagas, they have a ring of truth about them. After the archaeological discoveries at L’Anse aux Meadows, many historians have come to regard the sagas as valuable sources (although ones to be used with caution) about the first European contacts with American Indians. From the accounts in the sagas it must be concluded that the Norse exploited the Indians in trade as callously as did the Spanish, Dutch, English, and French after Columbus.
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The Norse of the sagas had no more compunction about killing the Indians than did the later European explorers. Other evidence, however, suggests that contacts between the Norse and the Indians were not always as hostile, or trade so one-sided, as portrayed in the sagas. Since 1960, archaeologists have discovered numerous artifacts in Eskimo sites throughout northern and central Canada of undoubted Norse manufacture. These objects include wrought-iron axes, iron spearheads, and carved figurines. Such finds suggest extensive trade between the Norse and American Indians. The game of lacrosse, taught by the Algonquian Indians to French and British colonists, resembles an ancient Norse game so closely that several historians are convinced it is the same game. The Norse introduced it in Vinland, they argue, and from there it spread throughout the pre-Columbian American northeast. If this theory is correct, it suggests amiable relations between the Norse and Indians over a considerable period of time. One linguist has compiled a large collection of Northeast Indian (especially Iroquois) words that are pronounced similarly and have meanings similar to those of words in the old Norse language. The language similarity again suggests long and continued contact between the two peoples. Many anthropologists also believe that the Norse left their genes among American Indians, especially several groups of Eskimos and tribes of the interior such as the Mandans. These groups display or displayed a number of European characteristics when first encountered by post-Columbian colonists, including fair hair, light-colored eyes, exceptionally tall stature, and luxuriant beards. If this assessment is accurate, the Norse did not launch a war of extermination against the Indians, as did later waves of colonists, but rather merged their culture with those of the aborigines. See also: Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Indian-white relations: Russian colonial; Indianwhite relations: Spanish colonial; Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002. Paul Madden Sources for Further Study Enterline, James Robert. Viking America: The Norse Crossings and Their Legacy. Epilogue by Thor Heyerdahl. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Magnusson, Magnus, and Hermann Palsson, eds. and trans. The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America. New York: Penguin Books, 1980.
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Mowat, Farley. Westviking: The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Reman, Edward. The Norse Discoveries and Explorations in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949. Wahlgren, Erik. The Vikings and America. London: Thames & Hudson, 1986.
Indian-white relations: Russian colonial Date: 1741-1867 Locale: Alaska Tribes involved: Aleut, Inuit, Yupik, other western Subarctic and Northwest Coast tribes Categories: Colonial history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: Russia first encountered New World indigenous people while trading furs and missionizing in the area of present-day Alaska. Russian traders made contact with many Indian tribes along the western Canadian and northwestern American coasts, from Alaska south to northern California. Their strongest influence, however, was felt in the Arctic and Subarctic areas by the Eskimos and Aleuts. There were very few early contacts between Eskimos and Europeans because of the remoteness of the Arctic region. Soon after the first encounters, which began with the Russians, the fur trade drew most European powers into the area. This led to a radical change in the nature of indigenous Arctic culture. Historical Background. Cossacks first heard of the Aleuts when they arrived in Siberia in 1650. The Russians were continuing a policy of eastward expansion and exploration in search of pelts. The indigenous people in Siberia told of their trading with groups in the Aleutian Islands. The desire for sea otter furs, a maritime product, pushed the Russian traders farther to the east into the “Great Land.” Knowledge of Europeans and their culture, therefore, reached the Aleuts more than a century before actual European contact. Alaskan Eskimos first came into contact with Europeans in 1741, at the time of Vitus Bering’s expedition on behalf of Russia. Bering was a Danish explorer whose task was to extend the fur trade that had started in Siberia. Sea otter fur obtained on the second Bering expedition precipitated the arrival of many traders in the Aleutian Islands, as they left Siberia for this lu-
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crative fur trade. Eskimos were hospitable to the Russian explorers, providing their guests with music, dancing, and feasting. They were also, however, skillful traders who drove hard bargains for pelts in order to obtain metal and enamel buttons, Siberian sabers, blue glass beads, and knives. In exchange, the Russians received skins of river otter, red fox, marten, and wolverine. Traders moving from island to island through the Aleutian chain had reached the Alaska peninsula by 1762. The Aleuts were often brutalized in the process. Aleut laborers were required to pay a tax (yasak). In an effort to help stem the cruel treatment by traders, the Russian government made the Aleuts Russian subjects in 1766. The yasak payment was revoked in 1788. Between 1743 and 1797, dozens of Russian companies made numerous voyages along the Aleutians. These companies obtained almost 200,000 pelts worth almost eight million rubles. Colonization. In Southern Alaska, Grigory Shelekhov and Ivan Golikov founded the first colony at Three Saints Bay, Kodiak Island. Shelekhov was granted a charter in 1799 to form the Russian-American Company as a twenty-year monopoly, although the Imperial Navy undertook an independent expedition in search of a northern path to the Atlantic. More charters were made in 1821 and 1844. The first company chief decreed that the natives must labor for the company. Natives hunted sea otter under
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dangerous conditions including the possibility of attack by the Tlingit Indians and the threat of bad weather. Official government policy sought to treat the Eskimos and Aleuts fairly, but local exploitation of laborers by traders was common. Each year, sea otter pelts and seal skins were shipped through Siberia to Moscow and then on to China. There was much intermarriage between Russian hunters and native women. The children of these unions were recognized by a charter of 1821 as Russian subjects. Neither they nor their mothers could leave the colony. Intermarriage was a key factor in the radical cultural changes that took place among the natives of the Arctic region. With the establishment of St. Michael in 1833, commercial trade became of major importance. A few years later, however, the first of a series of devastating epidemics attacked the area of Norton Sound and southern Alaska. In some parts of the south, up to 50 percent of the population perished. The Aleut population dropped from about seven thousand in 1836 to about four thousand in 1840, the year the epidemic ended. The Russians were able to contain the epidemic through a rigorous vaccination program which began in 1838. Russian Orthodox Church. The missionaries of the Russian Orthodox church altered Aleut culture as much as the commercialization process. Virtually all Aleuts were converted to Christianity, but the more numerous Tlingits resisted missionization and commercialization. The RussianAmerican Company and the Russian Orthodox Church were often at odds with each other over the control of the region. Father Ivan Veniaminov was the first priest concerned with indigenous people in the northern areas; he arrived in 1829. From a mission on the Yukon River, established in 1844, priests visited the surrounding villages. After the U.S. purchase of Alaska in 1867, most clergy personnel were withdrawn, but a school in St. Michael remained active. Much of the Aleut culture underwent radical transformation. The new form of religion was markedly different from the former traditional practice. Both the new modes of labor and the amount of intermarriage with Russians had profound effects on social organization. Disease, resettlement, and other effects of contact followed the well-known destructive pattern experienced by the indigenous peoples of the New World. See also: Bering Strait migrations; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Indian-white relations: Norse; Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indian-white relations:
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U.S., 1831-1870; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: Subarctic. William H. Green Sources for Further Study Chevigny, Hector. Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741-1867. New York: Viking Press, 1965. Gibson, James R. Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America, 1784-1867. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Kan, Sergei. Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity Through Two Centuries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Mangusso, Mary Childers, and Stephen W. Haycox, eds. Interpreting Alaska’s History: An Anthology. Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press, 1989. Oswalt, Wendell H. Mission of Change in Alaska. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1963. Ray, Dorothy Jean. The Eskimos of Bering Strait, 1650-1898. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. Sherwood, Morgan B., ed. Alaska and Its History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967. ____________. Exploration of Alaska, 1865-1900. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965.
Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial Date: 1492-1820’s Locale: Southern, western, and southwestern North America Tribes involved: Apache, Apalachee, Chumash, Pueblo, Timucua, Yuma Categories: Colonial history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: The Spanish Empire imposed a heavy cost on the Indian peoples of North America from the 1570’s until its collapse in the 1820’s, in spite of Native Americans’ valiant efforts to deal with its demands peacefully. The Indians of North America escaped the violence and disruption of the early Spanish conquest only to encounter later imperial thrusts that contained the seeds of conflict. From the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 to Hernán Cortés’s victory over the Aztecs in 1521, the Spanish estab-
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lished their control of the Caribbean area. The riches of the Aztecs inspired expeditions southward to conquer the Inca Empire, but probings into North America failed to locate concentrations of gold or large urban centers. Yet the 3,000-mile stretch of territory from Florida to California became a vital but vulnerable frontier for the Spanish. They wanted to defend the lifeline of their New World empire, which stretched from Mexico to Hispaniola and on to Spain, by the establishment of settlements along the southern fringe of what is now the United States. Relations between the Indians of North America and the colonists and institutions of the empire were characterized by periods of tentative harmony under Spanish domination followed by the growth of tension and distrust among the natives, which often resulted in alienation, rejection, and, in a few cases, open rebellion. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Native American peoples along the southern rim of North America had evolved a large variety of languages and cultures that, while lacking the urbanization and centralization of the Aztecs, had internal strengths of their own. From the Apalachees of what is now northern Florida to the Chumash along the California coast, life usually centered on the extended family and villages with various combinations of hunting, gathering, and small-scale agriculture to supply material needs. All was not harmony in pre-conquest North America, however, as the strained relationship between the Pueblos and Apaches revealed. The Pueblos of the upper Rio Grande Valley lived a sedentary existence in their multistory stone and adobe houses. Their agricultural practices gave them a fairly stable source of food in contrast to their neighbors, the Apaches, who were wandering hunter-gatherers. When the Apaches’ supplies ran short, they would sometimes raid the villages of the more prosperous Pueblos. Spanish Institutions. These Apache-Pueblo conflicts were of limited duration, but the arrival of the Spanish brought major disruptions that would permanently change the lives of the Indians. The Spanish transplanted institutions previously established in Mexico, Peru, and other imperial centers. The encomienda, a type of land grant, was for many years their chief method of commanding Indian labor. The encomendero (holder of the encomienda) controlled Indian workers in exchange for a commitment to protect and to provide for them. A second system of labor supervision was the repartimiento, in which colonial officials assigned native workers to a particular settler for a certain amount of time. Although in theory these situations were regulated by colonial officials, in practice encomenderos and settlers took advantage of their Indian charges by requiring them to
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work beyond the original agreements. In addition to the encomienda and repartimiento, the Spanish enslaved natives as personal servants or as laborers in their agricultural or trading enterprises. These labor practices, often harsh and exploitative, drew the protests of Catholic missionaries. The priests assigned to frontier areas from Florida to California brought with them an awareness of the ideals of Bartolomé de Las Casas, who, from the 1520’s until his death in 1566, campaigned against the mistreatment of Native Americans. These missionaries, usually members of the Franciscan order along the North American frontier, attempted to convert the Indians to Christianity. Their missions often served the natives as havens from the demands of encomenderos, settlers, and even government officials. The presidio, a small fort manned by a detachment of soldiers, generally accompanied the mission. The original purpose of these frontier forts was to protect the missionaries, settlers, and friendly natives from attacks by European rivals such as the British and the French and their Indian allies. As internal institutional and political disputes arose, however, these soldiers were sometimes deployed against the mission Indians to serve the demands of settlers and officials for additional land or native laborers. Historical records of the interaction of the Indians and the Spanish tend to emphasize institutions such as the mission and the presidio, but the native response to the arrival of the Spanish was much more subtle than early studies limited to archives reveal. Spanish friars reported massive conversions of Indians to Christianity in remarkably short periods of time, but these apparent conversions may have been simply the natives’ way of attempting to develop good relations with the Europeans rather than the profoundly religious experiences often described in the reports. The Indians did not passively accept Spanish dominance but rather found ways to accommodate demands for conversion and for labor while, at the same time, preserving much of their own autonomy and tradition. Florida. The Franciscans began their work in Florida in 1573 and within eighty years had erected more than thirty missions extending northward and westward in two chains from their base in St. Augustine. The Franciscans used music, paintings, and colorful ceremonies to attract the natives’ attention. They claimed that twenty-six thousand converts had accepted Christianity by 1655 (this claim is disputed by many historians). The Apalachees, Timucuas, and other nearby tribes were receptive to the missionaries in the early years in part as a response to the Franciscan appeals; however, the Indians also saw strategic advantages in an alliance with the missionaries for protection against Spanish settlers and soldiers. The na-
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Nineteenth century painter Frederic Remington’s fanciful depiction of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s march through Colorado in 1541 in search of a kingdom known to him as Gran Quivira. Much of what drove the early Spanish explorers was a search for gold and other riches. (Library of Congress)
tives’ selective acceptance of Catholicism was indicated by their placement of Christian images among their traditional religious symbols. The tensions in the Indian-Spanish relationships exploded in the early 1700’s under additional pressures from British settlements to the north. The British founded Charleston in 1670 and began to push to the interior, thereby posing a threat to the mission-presidio system stretching out from St. Augustine. The Charlestonians recruited nonmission Indians and welcomed the alienated natives who left the Spanish. The Indians, caught in the struggle between the two European powers, found it necessary to take sides or abandon the area. One Apalachee chief, Patricio de Hinachuba, urged Spanish officials to end their abusive policies in order to hold the support of his people and other nearby tribes. Patricio, a perceptive leader, attempted to represent the interests of the Apalachee while remaining within the Spanish orbit. Through personal diplomacy with the British in 1706, he managed to spare his village from attack and then led his followers toward St. Augustine for sanctuary. His hopes were dashed, however, when a group of pro-British Indians attacked his band just outside the large stone fortifications of St. Augustine. Patricio de Hinachuba perished along with his Apalachee community.
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The defeat of the Spanish in the early 1700’s was a symptom of the decline of the missions. The British military attacks were important factors in the Spanish loss, but the defection of many of the mission Indians in this time of crisis was also important. As Patricio de Hinachuba attempted to explain to the Spanish, the onerous burdens of repartimiento and slavery weighed heavily on many Native American communities. Apparently many Indians joined the British as an act of rebellion against the Spanish. Only a few Indians remained with the missions at the stronghold of St. Augustine and a handful of sites scattered across the northern part of Florida. These defections, however, brought few if any improvements for the Indians: The British also resorted to enslavement of the able-bodied natives and proved as aggressive as the Spanish in usurping land. New Mexico. While different in many details, the Spanish colonial effort along the upper Rio Grande in what is now New Mexico and western Texas bore a resemblance to the rise and fall of the mission-presidio system in Florida. Although the New Mexico project may appear to have been a logical extension of Spanish settlements in northern Mexico, the expedition of explorer of Juan de Oñate in 1598 marked a significant leap for the Spanish across rugged deserts and through hostile Indian territory. New Mexico, like Florida, was isolated from the core areas of the empire and constituted not only an effort to bring Christianity and European civilization to the Native Americans but also a barrier to the occupation of the region by European rivals. Oñate’s settlements took hold, and by the 1620’s New Mexico seemed to be a healthy and prosperous colony; particularly impressive was the work of the Franciscan missionaries. By 1629 they had established fifty missions that on a map formed the pattern of a cross running northward up the Rio Grande to the settlement in Taos; the arms of the cross extended westward to the Zuñi and Hopi pueblos and eastward to Pecos. Father Alonso de Benavides’ report that the Franciscans had baptized eighty-six thousand Indians circulated not only in Mexico City but also in Madrid and Rome. The actual relationship between the Pueblo Indians and the Franciscans was less dramatic than these early reports indicated. The Pueblos probably turned to the missionaries and the accompanying Spanish soldiers for security against their long-time neighbors and periodic adversaries, the Apaches. The Pueblos were impressed by the church’s religious ceremonies, the support that the clerics received from military and government officials, and the Franciscans’ presentation of Christian doctrine. The Pueblos, however, much like the Apalachees and Timucuas of Florida, accepted por-
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tions of the missionaries’ messages while retaining significant components of their own beliefs and customs. Inevitably, the arrival of the Spanish took a toll on the natives. The initial excitement gave way to the more practical problems of work, food, and clothing. Oñate secured imperial approval for encomiendas for himself and a few of the prominent early settlers. These grants placed certain Indian villages under a legal obligation to pay tribute (a tax) to the encomenderos. Soon colonial officials established the repartimiento as a means of supplying young Indians to work for settlers. Colonial governors of New Mexico often used the repartimiento—and even illegal slave labor—in agricultural and commercial enterprises to augment their salaries. Pueblo communities, with this loss of the labor of many of their vigorous males and females, experienced not only an indignity but also a growing difficulty in feeding themselves. The natives’ frustrations with these conditions erupted in small rebellions as early as 1632 at Zuñi and 1639-1640 at Taos, but the Spanish seemed to ignore these ominous signs. Crop losses from bad weather in the 1660’s and 1670’s and intensified Apache raids added to the Pueblos’ difficulties. A leader capable of unifying Indian resistance appeared in the person of Popé, a Pueblo religious mystic punished by the Spanish for alleged sorcery. In August and September of 1680, Popé led a large portion of the seventeen thousand Pueblos in an uprising that killed more than four hundred of New Mexico’s twenty-five hundred Spanish settlers and sent the survivors fleeing down the Rio Grande to El Paso. After the expulsion of the Spanish, the native leadership openly rejected Christianity and discouraged the use of the Spanish language. Although the Spanish returned to New Mexico in the early 1690’s, the growth of the colony was slow, and its reputation as a center for peaceful conversion was discredited. Frontier Struggles of the Eighteenth Century. The Indians’ defections and rebellions in Florida and New Mexico did not force the Spanish to abandon the northern edge of their American empire, but these events dramatized the need for new approaches in their relations with American Indians. Also, the 1763 acquisition of the vast territory of Louisiana placed new pressures on Indian-Spanish relations. Imperial defense policy called for control of the Apaches and other mobile tribes of Texas because they threatened access to Louisiana by land from northern Mexico. The Apaches roamed the large area between New Mexico and the small group of missions precariously planted around San Antonio in eastern Texas. The basic unit of Apache social organization was the extended family, and for their material existence, they relied on hunting and gathering,
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limited agriculture, and, when shortages developed, raids on nearby sedentary Pueblos. In their small, migratory groups, the Apaches confused the confounded Spanish officials, who, in spite of the efforts of missionaries and soldiers, found it impossible to bring them into the colonial system. The most intensive effort to deal with the Apaches came in the initiatives of José de Gálvez, a powerful colonial official in the 1770’s and 1780’s. Gálvez continued military actions against the Apaches but also incorporated the French and British strategies of stimulating trade with the natives along the northern frontier to undermine tribal autonomy. Gálvez authorized the sale of alcohol and poorly made firearms to the Apaches. The alcohol was intended to create a dependency among the natives on their merchant-suppliers, and the firearms would require frequent repair and replacement. Historian David J. Weber summarized the new policies as the adoption of “tried and true English and French practices to destroy the basis of native culture” in order to achieve with “the iron fist and the velvet glove what missionaries had been unable to do through less violent and cynical means.” Gálvez’s changes came too late for the Spanish Empire, however; within a generation, the expansion of the United States and the independence of Mexico would remove Spanish control from the borderlands area. California. Gálvez also pushed Spanish settlements into Alta California (the present state of California) in response to the rumored encroachments of the Russians moving down the Pacific coast from Alaska. Gálvez did not like the flawed mission-presidio system, but financial problems forced him to implant a variation of this approach in California in 1769. Franciscans led by Junípero Serra recaptured some of the enthusiasm of the first generations of missionaries in Florida and New Mexico. Within five years they had nearly five thousand Indians living on their missions. Mission life for the Chumash and other tribes, while pleasant at first, became another disastrous encounter with Europeans. Epidemic diseases and crowded living quarters brought high infant mortality rates and a rapid decline in the Indian population of California, from about 300,000 in 1769 to perhaps 200,000 in 1821. Many natives eventually fled the missions, but except for the Yumas’ attack on the settlements along the California side of the lower Colorado River in 1781, Indian violence against the Spanish was rare. Although these desertions and the decline of the native population strained the Indian-Spanish relationship, the missions enjoyed some prosperity and were among Spain’s most viable settlements in California in 1821 when Mexican independence brought an end to the empire in the borderlands.
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While Indian-Spanish relations were generally dominated by the Europeans, the natives were resourceful in many of their earlier efforts to limit foreign influences. They had their greatest successes with subtle, diplomatic adjustments to the peaceful methods of the missionaries. The influence of these missionaries, however, survived for only a few decades. Eventually the trauma of epidemic diseases and the burdens of forced labor, tribute payment, and cultural-religious impositions kindled hostile reactions among many native groups. In the borderlands areas, the Spanish were often motivated by strategic factors in response to the expansive actions of their European rivals. These strategic concerns frequently placed military policies at the forefront in Indian-Spanish relations, especially in response to native unrest and rebellion. The ultimate outcome of the clash between Native Americans and the Spanish favored the latter; Native Americans paid an immense price in terms of life, culture, and property. See also: Acoma, Battle of; California missions; Epidemics and diseases; Gadsden Purchase; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Indian-white relations: Russian colonial; Pima uprisings; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Southwest; Pueblo Revolt; Taos Rebellion; Zuñi Rebellion. John A. Britton Sources for Further Study Hanke, Lewis. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Historical study of the Spanish debate concerning the treatment of Indians, with emphasis on the work of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Hann, John. Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1988. An in-depth synthesis of a crucial area in Indian-Spanish relations based on thorough research and thoughtful analysis. Jackson, Robert H., and Edward Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. An ethnohistory of Indian life under the mission system. John, Elizabeth A. H. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of the Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1975. Readable overview of the confrontations involving the Indians, Spanish, and French in the American Southwest from 1540 to 1795. Heavy emphasis on the Native Americans’ responses.
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McAlister, Lyle. Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Includes a clearly written account of Spain’s general imperial policies such as the encomienda and the repartimiento. Sandos, James. “Junípero Serra’s Canonization and the Historical Record.” American Historical Review 93 (December, 1988): 1253-1269. An important article on the controversies surrounding the early California missions. Spicer, Edward H. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1553-1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962. Broad study of the impact of several generations of outside cultural, economic, and military invasions on the Indian peoples. Somewhat dated by more recent research but contains much useful material. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Translated by Richard Howard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Investigates the cultural clash between Spanish and Native American mentalities and explores the European conquest of North America as a semiotic process. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Excellent detailed synthesis of Spanish imperial efforts from Florida to California based on a comprehensive survey of the research in the field. Includes historical, ethnographic, and archaeological sources to provide a balance of European and Native American points of view. Extensive footnotes and lengthy bibliography provide the reader with valuable citations for further research.
Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial Date: 1600’s Locale: Delaware River Valley Tribes involved: Asseteque, Lenni Lenape, Mingo, Nanticoke Categories: Colonial history Significance: Swedish colonial ventures to the Delaware River Valley during the seventeenth century had a lasting impact on the American Indians who inhabited the region, particularly the Lenni Lenape and the Mingo; Swedish occupation, although relatively peaceful, caused the Indians’ removal from the area.
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Contact between American Indians and Europeans in North America during the seventeenth century embodied a wide range of experiences. One component often overlooked is the Swedish venture into the Middle Atlantic region. Although their official occupation was relatively brief—1638 to 1655—they had a lasting impact on the area and the Indians that they encountered. Their officials set the stage for later English negotiations with the Indians of the area, and their colonists contributed to the ethnic diversity of the region. The Swedes and their Dutch allies concentrated their colonial ventures in the region south of the Susquehanna River and north of the Potomac. These endeavors stretched from 1638 through the middle of the century and established the pattern of colonial contact in the area. Prehistoric Background. Prior to European contact in the late 1630’s, the Indians of the Delaware Valley represented two major linguistic and ethnographic groups. The first, the Lenni Lenape, were Algonquian speakers and were closely related to the Asseteque and the Nanticoke that surrounded them. This group, whom the English later referred to as the Delaware, were subdivided into three contingents: the Munsi, the Unami, and the Unalachtigo. According to the oral tradition of the Lenni Lenape, the Walam Olum, this tribe migrated into the region from the northwest to cross the Mississippi River and then east over the Appalachian Mountains. The other component consisted of Iroquoian speakers, the Mingo (or Minqua), who were loosely affiliated with the Iroquois Confederacy. The Mingo were later arrivals to the region and were an invasive force aligned with the powerful Iroquois tribes to the north and the west. Both groups were fairly typical of the Northeast Woodlands culture zone which they inhabited. They tended toward political decentralization, with the greatest emphasis placed on tribal integrity. Leadership generally resided with a chief or sachem. Economically these peoples depended on agriculture, supplemented by hunting and gathering. They also engaged in extensive trade networking. Colonial Contact. Swedish colonial enterprise resulted from the monarchy’s interest and trade in the Netherlands during the early seventeenth century. Swedish settlement in the Delaware Valley during the 1630’s occurred as an extension of the already established Dutch interests in the New Netherlands to the north. In March, 1638, with the aid of the Dutch envoy, Peter Minuit, the Swedish negotiated with local natives for the land that became the Swedish settlement Christina (present-day Wilmington). These settlements then expanded to Passayung (Philadelphia) in the north
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Nineteenth century depiction of Peter Minuit helping Swedish colonists buy Indian land for New Sweden in 1638. (Library of Congress)
and to Fort Casmir (New Castle). The Swedes, some three to four hundred strong, concentrated their settlement on the west side of the Delaware River and lived on individual farms in log houses of the sort they inhabited in Sweden. This association focused primarily on the trade of European manufactured goods for animal pelts obtained by Indians and was conducted by representatives of the Swedish government. In the 1640’s the Swedish power and influence in the region reached its peak, and the relationships between the settlers and their native counterparts remained relatively peaceful. Officials suggested that the colonists learned from the Indians methods of adapting to their “primitive existences” in New Sweden. By 1650, when the Dutch had attempted to reassert their control over the region, approximately one thousand Swedes and ethnic Finns resided under the protection of the Swedish crown in the Delaware Valley. During that decade, the interests of the Swedish monarchy and the Dutch traders in the region faded, and support for the venture declined. The colonists found themselves in increasingly marginal situations; their abilities to trade and to defend themselves waned. Indian Relations. When the Swedes entered the region in 1638 they approached peoples, the Lenni Lenape and the Mingo, already at odds with
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each other. The Swedish presence exaggerated each group’s concerns about the access to land and the local balance of power. Initial negotiations treated the various tribes generically. Later Swedish discussions, however, resulted in a trade alliance that favored the Mingo, whom the Swedes described as “special friends.” According to Johan Rising, Swedish governor, by 1655 the situation in the colony had grown ominous, with the “Renappi [sic] threatening not only to kill our people in the land . . . but also to destroy even trade with the Minques [sic] and the other savage nations.” The trade with the Mingo persisted until Swedish trade goods ran out and the beaver trapped by the Indians disappeared. By the end of the 1660’s the official Dutch and Swedish presences in the region disappeared, and the English replaced them. The Lenni Lenape had begun a forced retreat to the west. The combination of encroachment on the land by the Swedes, the impact of European disease, and the predations of the hostile Mingo forced them from the valley. The Mingo survived the Swedish occupation but not that of the English who succeeded them. See also: Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Indian-white relations: Norse; Prehistory: Northeast. Martha I. Pallante Sources for Further Study Acrelius, Israel. A History of New Sweden, 1759. Reprint. Translated by William M. Reynolds. Philadelphia: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1874. Cochran, Thomas C. Pennsylvania: A Bicentennial History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Munroe, John A. History of Delaware. 2d ed. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984. Sachese, Julius F. History of the German Role in the Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement of the New World. Reprint. Germany and America, 1450-1700. Edited by Don H. Tolzman. New York: Heritage Books, 1991. Weslager, C. A. Delaware’s Buried Past: A Study of Archaeological Adventure. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1968. Wuorinen, John H. The Finns on the Delaware, 1638-1655: An Essay in Colonial American History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938.
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Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830 Date: 1775-1830 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Eighteenth century history, National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Treaties, Wars and battles Significance: Following the Declaration of Independence, the fledgling United States was confronted with designing an Indian policy that combined two contradictory objectives: protecting Indians while aiding westward movement of white settlers. During the two centuries of colonization prior to American independence, Indians had been ineffectual in halting the encroachment of white settlers on tribal lands. Disease, demoralization, alcohol addiction, and wars had tragically diminished native populations. Moreover, Indians lost their principal ally as the French suffered defeat in the French and Indian War (1754-1763), thereafter subjecting Indians to their British enemies as well as to the virtually unchecked and seemingly relentless land hunger of English settlers. American Revolution. Both the Americans and the British initially sought to ensure Indian neutrality during the American Revolution, for both sides claimed to fear Indian “savagery” in battle. Their policies of neutrality were quickly abandoned, however, as both the Americans and the British sought aid from the powerful Indians still remaining on their eastern tribal lands. The turning point occurred in 1776 as the Cherokees, angered by incessant American intrusions, launched a series of raids on American settlements. Believing them to have been armed by the British, Congress accordingly authorized General Griffith Rutherford to undertake a retaliatory strike against the Cherokees. Rutherford and his troops subsequently rampaged through Cherokee land, razing thirty-six Indian villages, including their crops and stores. The Cherokee War served as a deterrent against further southern Indian involvement in the revolution, as other tribes feared similar retribution would be visited upon them should they elect to participate. A similar fate befell the powerful Iroquois of New York, whose alliance was courted by both the Americans and the British. A majority of the Iroquois Confederacy joined the British, who sponsored a series of Iroquois
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attacks intending to sever American supply lines through New York’s Mohawk Valley. In response, American commander-in-chief George Washington authorized General John Sullivan to lead a sizable punitive expedition against the Iroquois in 1779. Sullivan’s troops mercilessly burned and pillaged, destroying twenty-eight Iroquois villages, along with their stores and crops. Economically the Iroquois never recovered from the Sullivan campaign. In addition, the centuries-old Iroquois Confederacy was destroyed when some Tuscaroras and Oneidas, encouraged by the influential missionaries Eleazar Wheelock and Samuel Kirkland, joined the Patriot cause against the British. During the revolution most Indians ultimately allied themselves with the British, and at war’s end they were once again at the mercy of their enemies; this time, however, their enemies were the Americans. Indian Rebellions. From the initial Powhatan rebellion in Virginia in 1622 through the pantribal alliance of Pontiac in 1763, Indian tribes had endeavored to safeguard their land rights as the white population advanced at an alarming rate. After the American Revolution, aided by government policy which treated Indian lands as forfeit because of the Indian and British alliance, European Americans viewed their victory as license for uninhibited westward expansion. In the north, Americans made no distinction between
An illustration from Lewis and Clark’s journal (published in 1812) provides insight into the attitudes of at least some Euro-American settlers who were encroaching upon Native American lands in the trans-Mississippi West. (Library of Congress)
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Patriot and Loyalist Indians; all Indian land was subject to confiscation. Thus, during the Confederation period (in which the U.S. government was operating under the Articles of Confederation), Indians were forced to sign treaties which forfeited their land titles. The Confederation government proved incapable of enforcing treaties that failed when challenged by Indian resistance. In the south, federal treaties were negotiated for Indian protection. Those treaties were not upheld either. One problem was that some southern states, notably Georgia, repudiated Confederation authority. As American settlers vigorously resumed their unremitting westward drive, Indians responded with rebellions. With British defeat in 1783, steadily increasing numbers of settlers moved into the Old Northwest territory (around the Great Lakes). United by a war chief, Little Turtle, Indians of that region participated in numerous raids on white settlers between 1783 and 1790. Although President George Washington in 1790 ordered armed resistance, Indian raids continued nearly unimpeded. In 1794, a force of three thousand rigorously drilled and highly disciplined troops under the command of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne earned a decisive victory against Little Turtle at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The following year, Indians signed the Treaty of Fort Greenville, ceding virtually all of their lands in the Northwest Territory. The spirit of rebellion persisted, however; in the early 1800’s, the visionary Shawnee leader Tecumseh organized a pan-Indian alliance and sought to create a united Indian confederation. He traveled from north to south (from New York to Florida) and westward to present-day Iowa seeking allies among Indian tribes. His resistance was aborted, however, when his brother, spiritual leader Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee Prophet), led a premature, ill-fated attack on November 11, 1811, against the forces of William Henry Harrison at Tippecanoe. His warriors were defeated, resulting in disillusionment and then defections from the alliance. Many tribes pursued rebellions in their own territories, but Tecumseh was thereafter unable to organize a united Indian front. During the War of 1812, he joined forces with the British, proving himself a capable ally. Several other tribes that Tecumseh had courted, however, chose to ally with the Americans. In the south, Indians invoked Spanish aid against American encroachments. With General Andrew Jackson’s victory against the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, March 27, 1814, however, expectations of an ultimate Indian victory were extinguished. Trade. In the aftermath of Little Turtle’s War, President Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, both principled men, sought a policy to en-
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sure peace between Indians and the federal government. To that end, on April 18, 1796, Congress established the “factory system” for the regulation of Indian trade. It was designed to make peace rather than to generate profit. Government trading posts, known as factories, were designated across the frontier as centers for Indian trade. At the government-regulated factories, Indians were assured equitable trade. The factory system persisted until 1822 but failed to withstand the machinations of independent and frequently dishonest American and British Canadian traders. After the War of 1812, additional measures known as the Trade and Intercourse Acts were enacted to regulate trade and establish a licensing system. These laws were designed to safeguard Indian lands and to provide for the extradition of criminals and the punishment of crimes committed by whites on Indian land. They formed the basis for the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834. Civilization. By 1819, through the efforts of the humanitarian reformer Thomas L. McKenney, aided by missionaries’ lobbying of the federal government, a new federal Indian policy was initiated. The goal, which was to be accomplished through education, was the assimilation of Indians through Christianization and introduction to white agricultural techniques. Under the Civilization Fund Act, passed in 1819, which allocated ten thousand dollars for establishing schools on Indian tribal lands, Indians were to be taught American culture. Theoretically, civilization would result in the assimilation of Indians into white America, thereby eliminating threats of violence as well as freeing Indian land for white usage. Most Indians, however, continued to resist white culture, preferring to retain their tribal traditions. The minority who were indoctrinated as youths faced racial prejudice if they attempted to live as members of white society. In the 1820’s American encroachment on Indian lands was virtually uninhibited, and regulation of Indian trade, despite the best intentions embodied in the factory system and the Trade and Intercourse Acts, was largely ineffectual. Furthermore, many, including state officials, found assimilation through acculturation intolerably slow. Consequently, federal Indian policy evolved toward a final resolution to the “Indian problem” in the form of relocation of Indians to the newly created Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Removal. Indian removal, or the exchange by treaty of eastern land for lands west of the Mississippi, had several proponents, including humanitarian reformers concerned with safeguarding Indian culture through resettlement beyond the pale of white America, thereby relieving pressures
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on Indian tribal lands. Others were motivated by the base expectation of settlement on rich Indian lands. Georgia, coveting the sizable territory of the Cherokee Nation, eventually forced the issue to resolution. Ironically, the Cherokee Nation had become the most “civilized” of the Indian tribes, having adopted sedentary agriculture, a Cherokee syllabary, a written constitution, and a legal system patterned after that of the United States. The spread of cotton agriculture and the discovery of gold on Cherokee lands, as well as the specter of a foreign nation within the state’s boundaries, lent impetus to Georgia’s eagerness to annex Indian lands. After the passage of Georgia’s statutes extending the state’s laws to the Cherokee Nation and disallowing Cherokee land claims, the Cherokee Nation appealed to the United States Congress. Meantime, President Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, proved unsympathetic to Indian protests. He initiated, and saw to fruition, plans for Indian removal. On May 28, 1830, Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act, by which all eastern Indians were to exchange their ancestral lands for land in the new trans-Mississippi Indian territory. Land exchanges were intended to be peaceably negotiated with Indian tribes. In practice, however, removal was frequently enforced against protesting Indians through both legal and illegal methods. Although 90 percent of the Cherokees resisted removal, for example, the intractable Jackson negotiated a removal treaty with a friendly minority faction. The Cherokee Nation, although disavowing this patently spurious document, was nevertheless bound to it and forced to move westward. Indian removal eliminated the last obstacles to white expansion east of the Mississippi River. While the benefits to the states were obvious, removal for the eastern Indians was disastrous. Their new lands, often marginal and geographically dissimilar to their homelands, rendered their hunting and agricultural practices obsolete. A number of tribes were moved several times before their final settlement; others were located on land already inhabited by hostile tribes. Moreover, relentless white pressures for Indian lands continued as American settlers pushed their settlements ever farther westward. The process of dispossession begun early in the seventeenth century continued unabated until the end of the nineteenth century. See also: Bureau of Indian Affairs; Cherokee Phoenix; Creek War; Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of; Epidemics and diseases; Fallen Timbers, Battle of; Fort Greenville Treaty; Fort Mims, Battle of; Fort Stanwix Treaty; Fort Wayne Treaty; Horseshoe Bend Treaty; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-
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white relations: French colonial; Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting; Kickapoo Resistance; Lewis and Clark expedition; Little Turtle’s War; Lord Dunmore’s War; Northwest Ordinance; Seminole Wars; Tecumseh’s Rebellion; Thames, Battle of the; Tippecanoe, Battle of; Trail of Tears; Treaties and agreements in the United States; Tuscarora War; Wabash, Battle of the; Winnebago Uprising. Mary E. Virginia Sources for Further Study Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972. An excellent, highly detailed account of the Iroquois during the American Revolution. O’Donnell, James H. Southern Indians in the American Revolution. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973. Focusing on the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Choctaws, O’Donnell describes the attitudes of both the British and the Americans toward their Indian allies and Indian enemies. Indexed, annotated, with bibliography. Prucha, Francis Paul. “Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy: A Reassessment.” Journal of American History 56, no. 3 (1969): 527-539. A discussion of Jackson’s Indian policy from a sympathetic viewpoint, describing the pressures leading to Indian removal. ____________. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. An extensive, fully annotated, indexed, and illustrated history of Indianwhite relations from the founding of the United States to the 1980’s by one of the premier authorities on Indian-white relations. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking, 2001. An acclaimed biography of Jackson in the context of his ideas about and policies toward Indians. Attempts to show the underlying motives for Indian removal. Satz, Ronald N. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. A thorough treatment of Andrew Jackson and Indian removal. Annotated, indexed, with bibliography. Tyler, S. Lyman. A History of Indian Policy. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973. A brief chronological guide to Indian policy. Illustrated, containing maps, time lines, and bibliography. Utley, Robert Marshall, and Wilcomb E. Washburn. Indian Wars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. A comprehensive survey of the wars, battles, and conflicts between European Americans and Indians, written by two well-respected historians.
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Viola, Herman J. Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816-1830. Chicago: Sage Books, 1974. Informative biography of McKenney, superintendent of Indian trade and the first director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and description of his Indian policy under the administrations of presidents James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson. Illustrated and indexed. Bibliography. Washburn, Wilcomb E., ed. History of Indian-White Relations. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. An invaluable reference source containing articles on all aspects of Indian-white relations. Includes biographical dictionary. Fully annotated. Bibliography and illustrations.
Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870 Date: 1831-1870 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Treaties, Wars and battles Significance: In the 1830’s, U.S. policy toward Native Americans changed from treating tribes as “separate nations” to forcing integration into white society. The nineteenth century represents a pivotal point in Indian-white relations. Indian tribes went from being independent nations to being treated as wards of the United States. The U.S. government reduced Indian rights and freedoms until they almost disappeared. 1830’s. During the 1830’s, the U.S. government and its citizens generally viewed Indians as a disposable nuisance. Despite the acculturation of the Five Civilized Tribes, many whites viewed them as dispensable “savages” who failed to utilize “properly” the land under their control. Many Indian groups suffered from white misconceptions. Where whites once searched for the “noble savage” or the Indian with whom they could discuss politics and religion, now whites viewed Indians as “wretched” and as an annoyance. U.S. policy reflected these changes in attitudes. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, and soon thereafter the U.S. government forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes of the southeast (Cherokee, Chickasaw,
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Western Indian-White Conflicts, 1831-1870 Four Lakes (1858)
Kildeer Mountain (1864)
Big Mound (1863)
Hayfield (1867) Bear River (1863) Pyramid Lake (1860)
Whitestone Hill Birch Coulee (1862) (1863) New Ulm (1862) Wood Lake Fetterman Defeat (1866) (1862) Fort Ridgely (1862)
Platte Bridge (1865)
Bluewater (1855)
Beecher’s Island (1868) Sand Creek (1864) Canyon de Chelly (1864)
Apache Pass (1862)
Adobe Walls (1864)
Washita (1868) Soldier Spring (1868)
Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole). The government no longer treated tribes as independent foreign nations; they became “domestic, dependent nations.” This meant that treaties could be made with them but that the government treated the land as being held in escrow for the Indians. The Five Civilized Tribes were moved to Oklahoma (then known as Indian Territory) and made to live in a different climate from the one they knew. Forced to leave behind their farms, tools, and buildings, they faced death and disease in their new homes. The U.S. government considered removal the best policy for settling disputes between whites and Indians. During the 1830’s, the U.S. government removed the Winnebagos from Wisconsin, the Potawatomi from Indiana, and the Sauk and Fox from Wisconsin, as well as removing the Five Civilized Tribes from the Southeast. Removed Indians lost their land, their ways of life, and their political freedoms. Tribal factions erupted over whether to accept removal. Tensions arose again after removal over how to cope with the change. Removal attacked Indian autonomy. Removal also increased intertribal tensions. Tribes from the east were moved into lands already occupied by western tribes. This meant that more
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tribes vied for the same resources. Removal upset the tribal balance of power that had existed in the Plains. Eventually, whites joined the fray over the land in the west. Americans aggressively pursued the policy of manifest destiny, taking the Oregon Territory from the British in the 1830’s. Missionary Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and the H. H. Spauldings accomplished this by leading settlers into Oregon Territory with congressional approval. Though originally sent to Christianize the Cayuse Indians, they focused instead on populating the region so that it could be claimed by the United States. The Cayuse and other groups in the area resented this intrusion by settlers. The British had simply traded with the Indians; they had not brought settlers. Clashes over land and animals erupted constantly as the two groups tried to live together. Tensions rose steadily throughout the 1830’s. 1840’s and 1850’s. Attitudes toward the Indians changed dramatically during the 1840’s. Indians were considered a threat and an impediment to American development of the west. Two incidents particularly influenced this change in attitude: the Whitman Massacre and the Mexican-American War.
The Arapaho Ghost Dance as depicted by artist Mary Irvin c. 1910, based on photographs by James Mooney. The Ghost Dance religion was begun by the prophet Wovoka, who preached a vision of Indian resurgence and resurrection. Such movements were a response to white oppression. (National Archives)
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By 1845, five thousand settlers a year were moving into the Oregon Territory. The Indians in this region watched as whites subdivided the land with fences and houses. In 1847, frustrated with the tide of white settlers and disease, the Cayuse rose up and massacred the Whitmans and several other whites. Spaulding, who missed the attack, became an opponent of the Indians. The massacre shocked and horrified Americans in the East. It brought back colonial period images of the Indians as bloodthirsty savages. All Indians west of the Mississippi suffered from this characterization. After the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the western border of the United States jumped from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast. It destroyed what the government considered the “Indian barrier” of the Mississippi, opening the western half of the U.S. to white “civilization” and settlement. This altered Indian-white relations on the Plains, in the Southwest, and on the Pacific coast. Until the end of the Mexican-American War, most of the Indian groups west of the Mississippi had avoided subjugation to the Spanish and had traded with the French. They did not expect to be subjugated by the Americans. The introduction of whites interested in settlement into western territory increased tensions between Indians and whites. During the 1840’s and 1850’s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) shared the responsibility of defining policy with the military. The BIA represented one of the most mismanaged of government offices. It was a favorite spot for placing beneficiaries of the spoils system—newly elected senators and congressmen placed their political allies in the BIA as a reward for service. Graft and corruption existed at every level, from the agents in the field to the commissioners in Washington. Additionally, these administrators turned over with every new election. Yet the U.S. government placed the BIA in charge of defining long-term Indian policy. To aid westward expansion, the BIA sought to extinguish Indian land titles during this period. As whites took over more and more western land, it became apparent that removing Indians to unoccupied land would no longer be feasible. The BIA considered treaties and annuity payments to be the fastest and most efficient way to end titles. Often BIA negotiators lied to Indian representatives to get them to sign the treaties. They withheld annuities from previous treaties to force Indian leaders to sign new treaties. In addition, Congress changed the treaties before ratifying them. Such deceptions led to poor relations between whites and Indians. The paying of annuities for relinquished land created more tension. Many agents embezzled parts of the annuity payments. Moreover, there was often confusion about who was to receive the payments, a specific
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chief or each individual Indian in that tribe. Agents also sometimes acted as traders, overcharging for goods so that the goods always equaled the annuity payments. These policies increased the tension between Indians and whites. As more whites moved west, the “taming of the Indian” became an integral part of manifest destiny. To enforce this concept, the military became the second executor of Indian policy. Military protection had to be provided for white citizens moving west. Despite friendly or indifferent receptions by Indians on most parts of the trail, the few incidents of Indian attack appeared in newspapers and books everywhere. Many westward settlers considered the trail to be full of “bloodthirsty savages” looking for scalps and white women. The settlers demanded protection. The U.S. government established forts across the frontier to be able to control and eliminate the perceived Indian menace. Civil War. The Civil War (1861-1865) changed Indian-white relations. First, the U.S. government withdrew the army regulars from the frontier and replaced them with volunteers who resented serving on the “Indian frontier.” President Lincoln kept these troops in the West to protect the gold routes and the whites moving westward. Many tribes saw the Civil War as a sign of weakness in the American government. The Sioux, the Five Civilized Tribes, and others chased missionaries and Indian agents from their territory. Two incidents during this period damaged Indian-white relations for the next several years: the decision by the Five Civilized Tribes to join the Confederacy and the Sioux Uprising of 1862. The Five Civilized Tribes sided with the Confederacy after being convinced that it would treat them as equals after the war. Some leaders, such as John Ross of the Cherokee, feared Northern reprisals if the South lost. Unfortunately, the Indian units were accused of committing savage atrocities during battles such as that at Pea Ridge, which reinforced negative attitudes toward them. The Sioux Uprising of 1862 frightened western settlers, as newspapers portrayed it as an unprovoked massacre of innocent women and children. (In reality, BIA politics and poor management ignited the conflict.) The aftermath influenced generations of western settlers who remembered only the women and children murdered by Indians. Tensions between whites and Indians increased during the Civil War. White settlers distrusted the volunteers who had replaced the army regulars and expected the Indians to take advantage of the lack of men and muscle on the frontier to chase the settlers out. Indians also distrusted the volunteers, who were unprepared for conflict on the Plains. They were unused
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to guerrilla warfare. Between the lack of trust of the army and the reinforced fear of the “savage Indians,” tensions increased on the frontier. Post-Civil War. After the Civil War, the War Department and the military fought to gain control of the BIA in order to exterminate the Indians, but the cost of a military solution deterred Congress from this policy. Reformers, including missionaries, moved in to try to take control of the policy and to pacify the Indians. In 1867, a Senate report changed policy for one year. The report stated that the Indian population was declining rapidly because of disease, war, and malnutrition. Additionally, it accused the military of starting most conflicts with the Indians, thereby reinforcing the idea that military officers were inadequate as agents of peace. The report suggested that the reservation system was the only humane policy. It would allow the Indians to become integrated into American society by teaching them farming and the rules of white society. It would also protect them from the military and from each other. As punishment for siding with the Confederacy, the U.S. government forced the Five Civilized Tribes to surrender their westernmost lands, abolish slavery, grant the railroads rights-of-way through their territory (which would inevitably bring whites into the territory), establish U.S. military posts, and allow the creation of U.S. territorial governments within their territory. Exhausted after the war, the tribes accepted the terms of surrender. In 1868, as new battles between Indians and the military raged in the West, the Indian Commission announced that it was no longer necessary to recognize tribes as “domestic dependent nations.” This effectively meant the end of treaty negotiations. Additionally, the BIA was transferred back to the War Department, temporarily giving the military more control of policy. These policy changes resulted from the violence that existed on the Plains both during and after the Civil War. The government now considered all tribes untrustworthy and limited their rights accordingly. As the 1870’s approached, Indian policy and Indian-white relations entered a new and dangerous phase: war and open extermination. See also: Adobe Walls, Battles of; Apache Wars; Bear River Campaign; Black Hawk War; Bozeman Trail War; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Cayuse War; Cherokee legal cases; Cherokee Phoenix; Fort Atkinson Treaty; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868; Gadsden Purchase; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Keetoowah Society; Kickapoo Resistance; Kickapoo uprisings; Long Walk; Medicine
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Lodge Creek Treaty; Minnesota Uprising; Navajo War; Reservation system of the United States; Sand Creek Massacre; Seminole Wars; Sioux War; Snake War; Taos Rebellion; Trade and Intercourse Acts; Trail of Tears; Treaties and agreements in the United States; Walla Walla Council; Washita River Massacre; Yakima War. C. L. Higham Sources for Further Study Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. Salvation and the Savage. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1965. This work focuses on how missionaries portrayed white culture to the Indians and on the policy behind these presentations. Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Henry Holt, 1970. This work represents the Indian perception of Indian-white relations in the nineteenth century. Dippie, Brian. The Vanishing American. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. Dippie examines the concept of the extinction of the Indian in the nineteenth century. Hoxie, Frederick E., James Merrell, and Peter C. Mancall, eds. American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, 1850-Present. New York: Routledge, 2001. A series of essays on aspects of Indian-U.S. relations and cultural encounters. Kelley, Robert. American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Discusses how Protestant reformers influenced Indian policy and Indian-white relations. Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Examines, through vignettes and traditional narrative, Indian-white relations on the military and political frontiers. Utley, Robert Marshall, and Wilcomb E. Washburn. Indian Wars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. A comprehensive survey of the wars, battles, and conflicts between European Americans and Indians, written by two well-respected historians.
Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933 Date: 1871-1933 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States
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Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Treaties, Twentieth century history, Wars and battles Significance: This period saw the last of the Indian wars, significant changes in white attitudes toward Native Americans, and important attempts to regularize the legal status of American Indians by new acts of law. In the period between 1871 and 1933, the last of the tragic Indian wars were fought, and several attempts were made by the federal government to reform Indian policy. The attempts at reform were often wrongheaded, and they ultimately had to be reversed, but they demonstrate the popular perception that the existing policy could not be sustained indefinitely. Indian Wars. A series of serious Indian wars characterized the period between 1871 and 1890. Some of these were precipitated by the desire of whites for Indian lands or by the desire of white settlers to eliminate the Indians be-
Western Indian-White Conflicts, 1871-1890
Clearwater Bear Paw (1877) (1877) Big Hole (1877) Little Bighorn (1876)
Lost River (1872)
Whitebird Creek (1877)
Rosebud (1876)
Dull Knife (1876)
Lava Beds (1873)
Powder River (1878)
Wolf Mountain (1877)
Wounded Knee (1890) War Bonnet Creek (1876)
Milk Creek (1879)
Big Dry Wash (1882) Skull Cave (1872)
Cibicu Creek (1881) Camp Grant (1871)
Adobe Walls (1874) Palo Duro Canyon (1874)
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cause of prejudice or fears of attack. Others seem primarily to have been the result of the inability of many tribes and tribal leaders to accept confinement on reservations, which were often composed of extremely poor land. Confinement also flew in the face of traditional patterns of Indian life. In 1871, the Kiowas rose up in Texas under Satanta, Satank, Big Tree, Eagle Heart, and Big Bow, engaging in a campaign that included the ambush of a wagon train on Salt Creek Prairie. In the period 1872-1873, the Modoc War erupted as the Modocs, a Northern California tribe, resisted resettlement in Indian Territory. The war ended with the trial and execution of Captain Jack, the Modoc leader. The years 1874-1875 saw the outbreak of the so-called Red River War, with the U.S. Cavalry under General Philip Sheridan and Nelson A. Miles and the Texas Rangers battling an alliance of Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa warriors under Big Tree, Lone Wolf, and Satanta. The war ended with the surrender of Quanah Parker, the feared Comanche chief. The famous campaign known as the pursuit of the Nez Perce occurred in 1877. It began when young braves resisting a forced march to reservation land led a substantial group of the tribe in flight, with General Oliver O. Howard in pursuit. Led by Chiefs Joseph the Younger and Looking Glass, the Nez Perce evaded army pursuit across Idaho and Wyoming, fighting battles at White Bird Canyon, Clearwater, Big Hole River, Camas Meadows, Billings, and Bear Paw Mountain. They reached a point only 100 miles from their goal of Canadian sanctuary before surrendering. In 1878-1879, the campaign of the pursuit of the Northern Cheyenne followed the pattern of the Nez Perce campaign, but in less spectacular form. Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf led three hundred braves off the reservation, pursued by regular army troops and civilian volunteers. Dull Knife’s faction surrendered at Camp Robinson but then refused to proceed to the reservation. In a fight with the troops, half of Dull Knife’s followers were killed. Little Wolf’s band surrendered later. The Bannock War commenced in 1878. Bannocks, under Chief Buffalo Horn, began raiding in southern Idaho and Oregon. Paiutes under Chief Egan and the medicine man Oytes broke out from the Malheur Reservation and joined the Bannocks, pursued by General Howard. The Indian confederates were defeated at the Battle of Birch Creek, and during their subsequent flight Chief Egan was killed by Umatilla warriors through a trick involving a war council with the Umatillas to discuss an alliance. The year 1879 contained two complete Indian wars. The Sheepeaters War involved a band of renegade Shoshones and Bannocks who raided throughout Idaho and neighboring areas. The Ute War occurred in Colorado when Indian agent Nathan Meeker telegraphed for aid against restive
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Utes. Relieving forces were put under siege after the Battle of Milk Creek, and additional forces were required to subdue the Utes. Less confined in time were the Sioux and Apache wars, which stretched out over many years. In 1872, a band of Yavapais Apaches died at the Battle of Skull Cave in Salt River Canyon; after the subsequent Battle of Turret Peak, many Apaches returned to the reservation. When the Apaches were ordered to the hated San Carlos Reservation in Arizona in 1876, however, the war reignited. There followed several years when Geronimo and Victorio broke from their reservations, raided, and crisscrossed the Mexican border at will. For a decade, until 1886, Geronimo would be a constant problem for the army and for the government. Finally, in 1876, the Sioux reacted against orders to move from the Black Hills to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona. Battles included Sitting Bull’s attack on General Crook’s column at Rosebud Creek, the defeat of Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Battle of Slim Buttes, the Battle of Wolf Mountains, and the Battle of Sitting Bull in 1885, nine years after Rosebud Muddy Creek. Sitting Bull fled Creek, probably about the time he partici- into Canada with his warriors pated in William Cody’s wild west shows. His but returned to surrender to death at the hands of reservation police during the Wounded Knee Massacre and the U.S. forces in 1881. In the latter days of 1890, a subsequent surrender of the Sioux signaled the end of the Indian Wars. (Library of Con- sad sequel to the Sioux wars gress) was enacted. The Ghost Dance
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Uprising and the Battle of Wounded Knee (the Wounded Knee Massacre) ended the era of the Indian wars. The prophet Wovoka preached a vision of Indian resurgence and resurrection based on the use of the magical Ghost Dance. Sitting Bull was killed by reservation police at the Standing Rock Reservation. At the camp of Chief Big Foot at Wounded Knee, three hundred Indians were slaughtered in what has become known as the Wounded Knee Massacre. The surrender of the Sioux the next year at White Clay Creek ended the era of direct warfare between the whites and Indians. Legal Status and Governmental Policy. When Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1869, a new “peace policy” was adopted in U.S. relations with the Indian tribes. Under the new policy, new appointments of Indian agents would be made from among the religious groups who sent missionaries among the tribes, and extraordinary efforts would be made to get the Indians to adopt white ways—living in houses, practicing agriculture, and so on. Many other developments in Indian affairs filled the Grant years. In 1871, in the Cherokee Tobacco case, the Supreme Court upheld the principle that new acts of Congress supersede prior treaties, including those with the Indian nations, when they contradict. The next year saw the complete abandonment of treaty making in regard to the tribes, with all future agreements replaced by statutes and executive orders. Partly this represented the desire of the House of Representatives to have a say in such agreements, and partly it represented a reaction to the fact that treaties, after the Cherokee Tobacco case, offered no enhancement of protection over simple statute. Some reservations were established by treaty, others by statute, but beginning in the 1870’s, executive orders were also employed. In 1874, the Report of the Indian Commissioner proposed major changes in the status of the Indians and their way of life. Citizenship was proposed for any Indian who desired it. It was also proposed that the protection and obligations of white law be extended to Indian Territory and that reservation land be held in individual plots—called “allotments in severalty”— rather than communally by tribes. This would promote agriculture and the improvement of land. In 1879, the case Standing Bear v. Crook, decided by Judge Elmer S. Dundy of the U.S. Circuit Court, District of Nebraska, declared Indians to be “persons” under the Constitution and extended the writ of habeas corpus to them to protect their liberty. In 1883, Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller instigated “courts of Indian affairs” (after the Indian Offenses Act was passed in 1883) on reserva-
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tions to create a rule of law on tribal lands. The drive to bring Indians under white law suffered a major setback in the 1883 Supreme Court case Ex parte Crow Dog, wherein the Brule Sioux Chief Crow Dog’s conviction and death sentence for the murder of Spotted Tail was overturned on the grounds that there was no federal jurisdiction over the crime of an Indian against another Indian on Indian land. Further separating Indians from white governance was the 1884 Supreme Court case Elk v. Wilkins, whereby the Court refused to enforce a franchise right for the plaintiff, who had severed his ties to his tribe and lived among whites. These moves away from white law began to be reversed in 1885 with Congress’s passage of the Major Crimes Act, which placed seven serious felonies under federal law if committed on reservations or other Indian territory in order to avoid situations such as that in the Crow Dog decision. In 1886 in United States v. Kagama, the high Court upheld the constitutionality of the act. Assimilation of the Indians into white society became the stated solution to all problems in white-Indian relations, and indeed, to all problems of Indian society. Politicians rushed to embrace this solution, as did many of those who regarded themselves as friends and defenders of the “red man.” In 1884, the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian issued a program which called for assimilation by bringing the Indians under territorial law, private individual ownership of land, and other forms of white civilization. Groups such as this were torn between their recognition of the potential loss of Indian culture and the need to prevent further depredations by white society. In 1887, the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) provided for allotments in severalty for reservation Indians, providing citizenship for Indians on such allotments. In that year as well, Commissioner J. D. C. Atkins ordered that, in all schools on reservations, all instruction was to be in the English language to aid in assimilation. Two years later, the government moved to establish a system of government-run Indian schools. By 1889, Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan was calling for the conscious destruction of the tribes as the ultimate means of assimilation of the Indians into the dominant culture. In 1892, Indian courts were authorized to punish as offenses such Indian practices as traditional dances, polygamy, and the practices of medicine men as well as standard criminal offenses such as destruction of property, fornication, and drunkenness. Truancy of children enrolled in government schools was also an offense. The inclusion of several Indian cultural and religious practices as “offenses” struck sharply at the Indian way of life.
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In 1898, upon the failure of the Dawes Commission to achieve agreement with the Five Civilized Tribes and the other tribes of the Indian Territory, Congress imposed the Curtis Act, which essentially applied the provisions of the Dawes Act to that territory, destroying tribal government. The Supreme Court upheld the act in Stephens v. Cherokee Nation (1899). Twentieth Century. In Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), the Supreme Court upheld the plenary power of Congress over Indian affairs and established the right of Congress to abrogate treaties. By 1905, however, the government was having second thoughts about its wholesale reforms. Commissioner Francis E. Leupp issued a report to Congress which endorsed attempts to institute Indian self-sufficiency and called for presentation of aspects of Indian culture. In 1906, the Burke Act provided for discretion in the length of trust periods for allotments and provided that citizenship should come at the end rather than at the beginning of such periods. The Lacey Act (1907) further struck at the tribal system by providing for allotment of tribal funds to individuals under specified conditions. In 1919, as an acknowledgment of its gratitude for war service, Congress passed an act providing U.S. citizenship to Indian veterans of World War I upon request. In 1928, the Institute for Government Research issued the Meriam Report, which dealt systematically with the general problems facing Indians in the nation and was critical of U.S. government policies. It would lead to milestone legislation in 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act. See also: Adobe Walls, Battles of; Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood; All-Pueblo Council; Allotment system; American Indian Defense Association; Apache Wars; Bannock War; Bison slaughter; Burke Act; Carlisle Indian School; Cherokee Tobacco case; Elk v. Wilkins; Ex parte Crow Dog; Friends of the Indian organizations; General Allotment Act; Indian Appropriation Act; Indian Citizenship Act; Indian Offenses Act; Indian Rights Association; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Kickapoo uprisings; Little Bighorn, Battle of the; Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock; Major Crimes Act; Meriam Report; Modoc War; National Indian Association; Nez Perce War; Red River War; Reservation system of the United States; Rosebud Creek, Battle of; Society of American Indians; Standing Bear v. Crook; Treaties and agreements in the United States; Tribal courts; United States v. Kagama; Wild west shows; Wolf Mountains, Battle of; World wars; Wounded Knee Massacre. Patrick M. O’Neil
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Sources for Further Study Axelrod, Alan. Chronicle of the Indian Wars: From Colonial Times to Wounded Knee. New York: Prentice Hall General Reference, 1993. This work provides a useful and detailed overview of the armed struggles of the Indians and the whites. Faulk, Odie B. Crimson Desert: Indian Wars of the American Southwest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Faulk presents a fine and detailed description of the campaigns of this region. Hoxie, Frederick E., James Merrell, and Peter C. Mancall, eds. American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, 1850-Present. New York: Routledge, 2001. A series of essays on aspects of Indian-U.S. relations and cultural encounters. Jackson, Helen. A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. 1880. Reprint. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993. This volume is a reprint of an 1880 history of Indian-white relations from earliest colonial times through 1871, with many excellent quotations from official documents. Marshall, Samuel L. A. Crimsoned Prairie. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Details the Indian campaigns of the West. The author is an excellent military historian, although slightly biased in the direction of preserving the honor of the military. Prucha, Francis Paul, ed. Documents of United States Indian Policy. 3d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Reprints major documents in the history of U.S. policy toward native peoples. St. Germain, Jill. Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867-1877. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Explores and contrasts the “civilizing” efforts of the United States and Canada through their Indian treaty policies. Shattuck, Petra T., and Jill Norgren. Partial Justice: Federal Indian Law in a Liberal Constitutional System. New York: Berg, 1991. This study carefully analyzes the relationship of U.S. Indian law and policy to the U.S. constitutional order and governmental administrative policy. Tyler, Lyman S. A History of Indian Policy. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973. This work sets out accurately and in great detail the development of the Indian policy of the United States. Utley, Robert Marshall, and Wilcomb E. Washburn. Indian Wars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. A comprehensive survey of the wars, battles, and conflicts between European Americans and Indians, written by two well-respected historians. Wilkinson, Charles F. American Indians, Time, and the Law: Native Societies in a Modern Constitutional Democracy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
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Press, 1987. This treatise traces Indian law and rights through court cases, primarily U.S. Supreme Court cases. Williams, Robert A., Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. This book deals with earlier times in white-Indian relations but is vital reading for anyone who wishes to understand the philosophical and traditional bases of American Indian law.
Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002 Date: 1934-2002 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation; Native government; Twentieth century history Significance: During the period since 1934, three stages led from open displacement of Indian rights to self-determination policies. The landmark Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which remained the legislative model for relations between the U.S. government and Indian tribes until the mid-1950’s, was based on a massive 1928 report entitled The Problem of Indian Administration, commonly called the Meriam Report. This report had been requested by Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work. It was intended to reexamine the effects of the General Allotment Act of 1887. Briefly stated, the 1887 act had provided for allotment to each Indian family a specific plot of land within their tribe’s “traditional” holdings. Under this law, after titles had been held for twenty-five years, families would gain full property rights, including the right to sell their land. Any tribal land that was left after plot allotment to families was to be sold to the government for homesteading. It is estimated that, when the Indian Reorganization Act came into effect in 1934, Indians held legal rights to only onethird of the land they had had before the General Allotment Act. This fact, coupled with a number of other critical factors pointed out in the Meriam Report (including inferior conditions in the areas of health care and education), led to the policy changes embodied in 1934’s Indian Reorganization Act. Most of the responsibility for implementing these changes rested with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointee to the post of commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier.
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Indian Reorganization Act. In addition to slowing the loss of Indian lands, the 1934 act brought a new philosophy to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). It proclaimed a need to reverse a long-standing policy of forced assimilation of Indians into “mainstream” America and to build stronger bases for the retention of local Indian cultures. In Collier’s words, it aimed at “both the economic and spiritual rehabilitation of the Indian race.” In the first domain, plans were laid to appropriate funds to buy back for the tribes Indian land that had been lost since 1887. The BIA also initiated a program to spread knowledge of land and timber conservation technology to receptive tribes and began steps to provide local development loans. Although the deepening of the Great Depression soon made special appropriations impossible, much surplus government land that had not gone to homesteading was returned. In its bid to encourage a greater sense of local tribal identity, the 1934 act also offered aid for drawing up and implementing tribal constitutions as the basis for their own local government. World War II. In the period between 1934 and the next major redefinition of BIA policy in 1953, many domestic policy factors intervened to affect what Roosevelt’s policymakers had seen as the long-term goals of the BIA. The greatest single factor affecting tens of thousands of Indian lives during the decade of the 1940’s, however, was initially set in play by forces far beyond the reservations: This factor was military service in the U.S. forces during World War II. More than twenty-five thousand Native Americans served between 1941 and 1945. Many thousands more left reservations to work in war-related industrial factories. Indian women were also welcomed as volunteers in the army nurses’ corps and the Red Cross. Whatever their experiences in the ranks of the armed forces, still strictly segregated along racial lines, clear problems confronted thousands of returning Indian veterans at the end of the war. Part of the dilemma stemmed from continuing economic underdevelopment on the reservations they left. Equally debilitating, thousands of returning American Indian veterans felt alienated from their own people after experiencing life off the reservation. Problems such as these impelled U.S. lawmakers to consider once again whether assimilation, rather than “protected separation,” was the best policy to pursue in Indian affairs. Parties supporting the former, including outspoken conservative Republican senator Arthur Watkins from Utah, introduced what became, in House Concurrent Resolution 108, the policy of “termination and relocation.”
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Native American relocatees standing in front of their low-cost home in Winner, South Dakota. (National Archives)
Termination Act of 1953. When HCR 108 became law in mid-1953, it pledged to make Indians . . . subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as . . . other citizens . . . and to end their status as wards of the United States.
Even as HCR 108 was about to become law, a number of Indian spokespersons for the first tribes scheduled for termination (which meant stopping various forms of federal government “protective” intervention in their affairs) openly questioned Senator Watkins’s claims that, since there were multiple sources to develop potential wealth on their reservations, the tribes should be able to “go it better alone.” Menominee leader Gordon Keshena was not alone in expressing worries that, if BIA supervision over local Indian affairs ended, the tribes’ lack of experience would produce deterioration of many Indian material inter-
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ests. Some congressional supporters of the general principles behind HCR 108 also admitted that the government might find itself spending large amounts of money trying to prepare the weakest and poorest Indian groups to know what forms of local autonomy might suit them best. In fact, just as local termination bills began to appear in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed prepared to increase budgetary allocations to encourage the establishment of new industries in or near tribal areas. For example, by 1956, $300,000 of tribal funds formerly held in trust were earmarked to induce industrial plant owners to locate on the fringes of Navaho territory. Two companies constructed factories, one manufacturing baby furniture, the other making electronic equipment, near Flagstaff, Arizona. In 1957 the Indian Vocational Training Act was intended to provide job skills needed for Indian applicants to be attractive to potential employers, even if such jobs meant relocating off reservations. More than a hundred different occupations were included in the curriculum of free schools located in twenty-six states. This ambitious program continued to expand even as economic recession worsened in 1956 and 1957. Indian policymakers seemed convinced that the overall objectives of the 1953 termination laws would be best served if Indians who could not expect to gain employment on economically backward reservations relocated in off-reservation towns. Ideally, such a movement of families would also ease pressures on the limited economic means of their respective homelands. Relocation. A separate budget for relocation came by the mid-1950’s, to avoid negative consequences for Indians who left the reservations without adequate security. Statistics showed that, of the nearly 100,000 Indians who left reservations between 1945 to 1958, some 75,000 had relocated without federal assistance, sometimes causing familial disasters. Thus, job training and relocation funds expended in 1957 doubled in one year, reaching $3.5 million. In the same year, seven thousand Indians moved from their reservations. Controversy soon developed over shortcomings in the relocation program. Realistic prospects for employment fell short of demands; moreover, job layoffs left many Indians “stranded” and unemployed in unsympathetic white-dominated environments. At the same time, there were very high dropout rates in BIA-sponsored vocational schools. Nurse’s aide programs for women registered the lowest percentage of dropouts (21 percent), while rates for less challenging factory-type programs for men were very high (a 50 percent dropout rate for sawmill workers and a rate as high as 62 percent among furniture factory trainees).
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As the 1960’s approached, critics of the effects of termination and relocation, including Sophie Aberle, formerly responsible for the United Pueblos Agency, warned Indian Commissioner Glenn Emmons of trouble ahead. Emmons tried to defend his office by reiterating a philosophy that was not accepted by all—that whatever successes were occurring usually stemmed from individual initiative, whereas groups that fell back on the security of “communal lifestyle” tended to accept status quo conditions. Emmons cited gains that were not so easily measured in paychecks, such as advances in tribal health programs and in education. The number of Indians going beyond high school by this date (the 1958-1959 school year) showed an increase of more than 65 percent in only three years. Toward Self-Determination: 1960’s and 1970’s. Despite the fact that the Eisenhower administration’s last BIA budget (for fiscal year 1960) was the largest ever ($115,467,000), it was during the 1960 presidential campaign that controversy over Indian policy began to come to public attention. Party platform committees actually heard testimony from tribal leaders such as Frank George, a Nez Perce who asked not for abandonment of termination but for improvement in its procedures for aiding needy tribes. Other claims, such as the Miccosukee Seminole demand for all of Florida to reconstitute their sovereignty, received less sympathy. The new tide that was coming was best expressed by La Verne Madigan of the Association on American Indian Affairs, who stated that Indians should have the right to choose freely between assimilation and “life in cultural communities of their own people.” In general, the Kennedy-Johnson Democratic years (1960-1968) witnessed a continuation of termination actions despite the views of Lyndon Johnson’s interior secretary, Stewart Udall. It was Udall’s insistence that the BIA should do more to secure better conditions of relocation that led to the replacement of Commissioner Philleo Nash by Wisconsin Oneida Indian Robert Bennett in 1966. Under Bennett’s influence, the president began, in the troubled political climate of 1967, to declare the nation’s need to end the termination policy. Soon thereafter, Johnson urged passage of the Indian Civil Rights Act (1968). The 1970’s, under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, brought what has been described as the “self-determination” policy, emphasizing the development of tribal resources on restored reservations. Perhaps the most dramatic example of reversal of what many perceived to be the harmful effects of termination occurred in 1973, when the Menominee tribe was told that (as the tribe had requested) its twenty-year experience of termination was over and that its entire reservation was to be
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restored to it as “unencumbered Menominee property.” Yet despite pronouncements of “better intentions” coming from Washington and the BIA, the cumulative effects of decades of misunderstanding were not to be dispelled easily. In the same year that the Menominees regained tribal control over their own destiny, a breakdown in relations between federal troops and Lakota Sioux during a seventy-one-day siege on the Pine Ridge Reservation ended in an assault that the Lakotas call “Wounded Knee II.” Similar confrontations with threats of violence came in different regions, pressing government authorities to review its Indian policy yet again. In May, 1977, the congressional American Indian Policy Review Commission, which included five Indian members for the first time, made more than two hundred recommendations, most of which aimed at confirming all tribes’ power to enact laws within the confines of their own reservations. On the heels of this symbol of intended reform, the U.S. Congress passed the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which guaranteed freedom for tribes to practice their own traditional religions. This act ended the mixed legacy of several centuries of insistence that missionary conversion and education following Christian principles were vital aspects of Indian-white relations in the United States. 1980’s Through 2001. During the Ronald Reagan and George Bush (Sr.) Republican presidencies (1980-1992), budgetary cuts seriously affected the continuity of existing programs of assistance to Indian tribes. In 1981 alone, one-half of the prior budget for health services was cut, while funding for Indian higher education was reduced from 282 million to 200 million dollars. By the mid-1980’s, the education budget had been cut further, to 169 million dollars. Despite alarming cutbacks in BIA funding and looming questions of Indian demands for restoration of their sovereignty, the Republican administration of George Herbert Walker Bush made one major contribution by enacting the Native American Languages Act, which allowed tribal use of (formerly banned) traditional languages in BIA schools. The issue of Indian land claims was prominent throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court (in United States v. Sioux Nation) upheld a $122 million judgment against the United States for having taken the Black Hills from the Sioux illegally. In 1986, a federal court awarded each member of the White Earth Chippewa group compensation for land lost under the 1887 General Allotment Act. A significant piece of legislation regarding land claims was the 1982 Indian Claims Limitation Act, which limited the time period during which land claims could be filed against the U.S. government.
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The issue of Indian sovereignty and the related issue of gambling on Indian lands created considerable controversy among Indians and nonIndians in the early 1990’s. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act legalized certain types of gambling on reservations, and the vast amounts of income that could be generated appealed to many tribes struggling with widespread poverty. Gambling engendered protests by some non-Indians, however, and created tribal divisions that occasionally turned violent; in 1990, violence between gambling and antigambling contingents on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation caused state and federal authorities to intervene. In California, Indian efforts in 1999 to pass Proposition 5, the California Indian Self Reliance Initiative (which promoted casinos as a source of independent income) had the side effect of creating an increasingly powerful political interest group—powerful enough to be accused of having undue influence on President Bill Clinton in the series of scandals attending his last months in office. An important court decision involving another aspect of sovereignty was handed down in 1990: The U.S. Supreme Court decided in Duro v. Reina that tribes do not have criminal jurisdiction over nonIndians living on reservation lands. In 1992, a number of American Indian groups protested the celebrations planned for the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Two events in 1994 symbolized both an increasing respect for, and the continuing problems of, American Indians. The first facility of the National Museum of the American Indian, a new part of the Smithsonian Institution, opened in New York (funding had been approved by Congress in 1989). On the other hand, the National Congress of American Indians and the National Black Caucus announced an alliance, stating that American Indians and African Americans continued to face similar forces of political and economic oppression. Over a century of mismanagement of Indian trust funds was brought to public attention with the filing of a class-action lawsuit against the Department of the Interior by Elouise Cobell, treasurer of the Blackfeet in Montana, Cobell v. Babbitt, in 1996. (The lawsuit changed to Cobell v. Norton with the appointment of Gale Norton as interior secretary in 2001.) The suit charged that $100 billion of trust funds for land-use royalties, administered by the Department of the Interior since the break-up of reservations under the Dawes Act of 1887, was missing and the paperwork that would track the funds was in shambles. By 2002, three cabinet members from two administrations had been found in contempt of court for blocking or delaying the turning over of records. See also: Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act; Alcatraz Island occupation; American Indian Higher Education Consortium; American Indian
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Movement; American Indian Policy Review Commission; American Indian Religious Freedom Act; Colliflower v. Garland; Council of Energy Resource Tribes; Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty; Duro v. Reina; Employment Division, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith; Federally recognized tribes; Fish-ins; Indian Child Welfare Act; Indian Citizenship Act; Indian Civil Rights Act; Indian Claims Commission; Indian Education Acts; Indian Gaming Regulatory Act; Indian Health Service; Indian New Deal; Indian preference; Indian Reorganization Act; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; International Indian Treaty Council; Keeler Commission; Kennedy Report; Longest Walk; Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association; Maine Indian Claims Act; Menominee Restoration Act; National Congress of American Indians; National Indian Education Association; National Indian Youth Council; Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; Native American Rights Fund; Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act; Navajo Rehabilitation Act; Nisga’a Agreement in Principle; Nunavut Territory; Oka crisis; Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act; Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe; Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings; Public Law 280; Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez; Termination Resolution; Trail of Broken Treaties; Treaties and agreements in the United States; United States v. Washington; Winters v. United States; Women of All Red Nations; World wars; Wounded Knee occupation. Byron D. Cannon Sources for Further Study Chamberlain, Kathleen P. Under Sacred Ground: A History of Navajo Oil, 1922-1982. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. An ethnography and history of the effect of oil production on the formation and expansion of Navajo tribal government. Clarkin, Thomas. Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. A groundbreaking study of federal Indian policy in the 1960’s. Falkowski, James E. Indian Law/Race Law: A Five-Hundred-Year History. New York: Praeger, 1922. Places the subject of U.S. government policy toward Indians in a wider context both of historical and contemporary international legal models. Fixico, Donald L. Termination and Relocation: Federal Policy, 1945-1966. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. This is a study of the phase of BIA policy that existed from 1953 to 1960, involving presumed “self-help,” including working away from home reservations.
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____________. The Urban Indian Experience in America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. An ethnography of the urban Indian experience, especially in third- and fourth-generation urban dwellers who are increasingly distanced from the reservation experience. Hoxie, Frederick E., James Merrell, and Peter C. Mancall, eds. American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, 1850-Present. New York: Routledge, 2001. A series of essays on aspects of Indian-U.S. relations and cultural encounters. Peroff, Nicholas C. Menominee Drums. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. A case study of one of the most important examples of tribal termination actions. Prucha, Francis Paul, ed. Documents of United States Indian Policy. 3d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. General policy and issues for specific tribes.
International Indian Treaty Council Date: Established 1974 Locale: United States and Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Native government, Organizations, Treaties, Twentieth century history Significance: Promoted international rights of indigenous peoples; established indigenous presence at the United Nations. The International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) was founded during a conference convened on the Standing Rock Reservation (North Dakota) during July, 1974. Its initial mandate, conveyed by the Lakota elders, was to “take the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and place it before the community of nations.” AIM leader Russell Means, asked to assume responsibility for IITC, accepted by agreeing to serve as “Permanent Trustee.” Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee AIM member, became IITC’s founding director. By 1975, Means and Durham had established an office in New York and expanded the mission of the “international diplomatic arm of AIM” to include advocacy of the rights of all indigenous peoples, worldwide. Durham then set about organizing the first major forum on indigenous rights in the history of the United Nations.
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This resulted in the “Indian Summer in Geneva,” an assembly of delegates from ninety-eight indigenous nations throughout the Western Hemisphere at the Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, during July, 1977. As the coordinating entity, IITC became the first indigenous Non-Governing Organization (NGO; Type-II, Consultative) ever recognized by the United Nations. The assembly stimulated the U.N. to establish a formal body, the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, under its Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) for purposes of receiving annual reports on the grievances of the world’s native peoples. The Working Group’s broader charge was to make the studies necessary to prepare a Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for ratification by the U.N. General Assembly as international law. With this established, Durham resigned in 1981 to pursue a career as an artist. He was replaced by Russell Means’s younger brother, Bill, who proved a far less appropriate director. Almost immediately, the younger Means initiated a policy of aligning IITC with a range of leftist governments, many of them oppressing indigenous peoples within their borders. The result was a steady erosion of native support for IITC. By 1986, disputes over IITC’s support of Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime in its drive to subordinate the Miskito, Sumu, and Rama peoples of the country’s Atlantic coast led to a purge. “Indigenists,” such as Harvardtrained Shawnee attorney Glenn Morris, were summarily expelled from IITC. The Lakota elders’ original mandate was negated, Russell Means was displaced from his permanent trusteeship, and IITC was structurally separated from AIM by its incorporation under U.S. law. Thereafter, although Bill Means continued to speak of “representing more than a hundred indigenous nations,” IITC’s isolation and decline accelerated. By the early 1990’s, it was increasingly encumbered by the fundraising requirements of supporting its staff. Fortunately, many of the peoples whose rights it had once championed had by then learned to represent themselves internationally. See also: American Indian Movement; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Ward Churchill Sources for Further Study Deloria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Morris, Glenn T., and Ward Churchill. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Left-Wing Revolution, Right-Wing Reaction, and the Destruction of Indigenous People.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1987): 17-24.
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Weyler, Rex. Blood of the Land: The U.S. Government and Corporate War Against the First Nations. 2d ed. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992.
Irish Potato Famine Date: 1847 Locale: Oklahoma, Ireland Tribes involved: Choctaw Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: The Irish people commemorate the Choctaw people of Oklahoma for raising funds for Irish famine relief in 1847, only a few years after the Choctaw Trail of Tears. The Choctaw Indian nation originated and lived in Mississippi and Alabama. In 1819, the United States government, following up on Thomas Jefferson’s policy of the Americanization of native peoples, began seeking the removal of the Choctaw from their rich Mississippi territory to the largely inhospitable lands of Oklahoma. On September 15, 1830, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek dictated that the move become a reality. Between 1830 and 1834, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the Choctaw made the five-hundred-mile journey from Mississippi to Oklahoma. The trek was made by three successive groups in three successive years, each in the middle of winter. The Choctaw were ordered to leave their possessions and livestock behind and were not provided with tents, supplies, or medical assistance on the journey. Army guides unfamiliar with the terrain became lost. Temperatures dropped below freezing, and many of the people died of disease and starvation. Since the cold winter precluded digging graves, the dead were burned by the roadside. Some fourteen thousand Choctaws perished along what has come to be known in Choctaw lore as the Trail of Tears. Halfway around the world the Irish people would likewise experience starvation and removal only a dozen or so years later, in the tragedy now known as the Irish Potato Famine. Famine in Ireland. Ireland of the mid-nineteenth century was a bleak place. The famine, caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans, ravaged the Irish
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potato crop for five years. The fungus that caused the blight had found its way into Ireland from North America. The blight was a particular disaster for laborers in Ireland, who dependended on the potato for daily sustenance. It was also a catastrophe for the British government, which was illprepared to cope with the challenge of administering relief to a population of approximately eight million people. At its first appearance in September of 1845, local newspapers mentioned the blight, but public reaction was divided by political difference or allegiance, and the looming disaster was denied proper attention. While politicians and others bickered over which group—medical, commercial, or administrative—was most competent or obliged to deal with it, famine swept across Ireland and devastated its people. In the long run, between 1.1 and 1.5 million persons died of starvation; at least 500,000 had been evicted from their homes by landlords; some 3 million people (about 40 percent of the population) were on some form of official relief; more than 1 million were crammed into poorhouses; and between 1845 and 1855, more than 2.1 million Irish (about 25 percent of the population prior to the famine) emigrated overseas, nearly 1.9 million of them to North America. Naturally, the immigrants shared their story with their neighbors in the new country. Some of these were the Choctaw. The Choctaw-Ireland Connection. Following up on Irish appeals for international relief from famine and starvation, a great meeting of the Choctaw nation was held near Skullyville, Oklahoma, in 1847 to consider the merits of the cause. In the long run, the Choctaw, in conjunction with traders, missionaries, and Indian agency officials, contributed $170 (some sources indicate $710) to buy food for Irish famine relief. The lesser sum is estimated at around the equivalent of $10,000 in 2002 dollars. Among the distributors of relief would have been the Belfast Ladies’ Association, the Society of Friends (Quakers), and the British Relief Association. The Irish never forgot the Choctaw gift, and in May, 1995, Mary Robinson, then president of Ireland, formally thanked the Choctaw nation from the steps of the Tribal Complex building for its act of generosity some 150 years prior. In Choctaw, President Robinson said: Chohta i yakne ala li kut na sa yukpa. (“I am glad to have come to Choctaw country.”) Chief Hollis E. Roberts thanked her for recognizing the Choctaw Nation for what was done in the past and looked forward to what could be done in the future. The Ties That Bind. Like the Irish diaspora in America, the modern Choctaw have grown strong in numbers and resolve. Today, the Oklahoma and Mississippi tribal networks offer community, social, medical, and educational assistance to members. They sponsor an annual walk along the Trail
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of Tears to honor the memory of the ancestors. Likewise, a group of Irish activists from the Dublin-based Action From Ireland completed a commemorative five-hundred-mile walk from Oklahoma to Mississippi, the Trail of Tears in reverse, to raise famine funds for Somalia. In September, 1997, an intertribal group from North America landed in Ireland to do its Irish leg of a “sacred run,” with 58,000 miles completed since 1978. Once again, as in 1847, hands and hearts have reached across the ocean in solidarity. Arthur Gribben Sources for Further Study Angie, Debo. The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic. 2d ed. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. The history and cultural development of the Choctaw from earliest times. Carson, James T., ed. Searching for the Bright Path. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Mississippi Choctaws from prehistory to removal. Fitzpatrick, Marie-Louise. The Long March. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1999. For younger audiences, tells the story of Choona, a young Choctaw who must make his own decision about answering the Irish people’s plea for help. Gribben, Arthur, ed. The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Interdisciplinary collection of essays on the consequences of the famine from perspectives of anthropology, ethnomusicology, political science, and more. See also: Trail of Tears.
Iroquois Confederacy Date: c. 1500-1777 Locale: Hudson River west to Lake Michigan and St. Lawrence River south to the Cumberland Gap and the Ohio River Tribes involved: Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora) Categories: Colonial history, Native government Significance: The Haudenosaunee, or People of the Longhouse, controlled northeastern North America for three centuries. The Iroquois are the prime example of the level of cultural evolution that American Indian tribes attained when they stayed in one place for a long
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time. Archaeologic evidence places the predecessors of the Iroquois in New York State for one thousand to fifteen hundred years prior to the emergence of the Iroquois Confederacy. A subsistence culture called Owasco preceded the Iroquois, which in turn was preceded by the Hopewell culture. Both cultures left traceable influences in Iroquois culture. By 1400, contemporary-style Iroquoian villages existed; by 1600, all the units of the confederacy were calling the larger group Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse. The Haudenosaunee lived in fortified, stockade villages, were agrarian and matrilineal (that is, passed property from mother to daughters), and banded together through a strong political and religious system, in which ultimate power was vested in the hands of the oldest “sensible” woman of each clan. The foundation of the culture was called the fireplace, or hearth. Each hearth—a mother and her children—was part of a larger extended family, or owachira. Two or more owachiras made a clan; eight clans made a tribe. The purposes of the Iroquois Confederacy, League of the Iroquois, or League of Five Nations, which was established as early as 1500, were to unite and pacify the infighting Iroquois and to gain strength in numbers in order to resist the opposition of Huron- and Algonquian-speaking neighbors. (The word iroquois, as spelled by the French, is probably from the Algonquian enemy name iriokiu or “spitting snake.”) The confederacy, if later dates of its inception are accepted, may have formed as a response to the fur trade. Before the consolidation of the confederacy, wars, primarily revenge feuds, were constant among the Iroquois, who had no mechanism to bring the strife to an end. The consolidation of the confederacy was primarily a result of the efforts of the Mohawk chief Hiawatha and the Onondaga chief Atotarho, historical figures who based the religious and political principles of the confederacy on the teachings of Deganawida (the Peacemaker), whose historical authenticity is contested. The political rules and regulations, the cultural model, and the spiritual teachings and religious model all attributed to Deganawida were later qualified and codified by Handsome Lake, a Seneca visionary prophet responding to the pressures of Christianity after the Revolutionary War. Social Organization. The League of the Iroquois included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca (the Five Nations), and, after 1722, the Tuscarora (the Six Nations). The league was based on a carefully crafted constitution. The “faithkeeper,” or central religious leader, called a yearly council to recite the constitution and its laws and resolve differences. The council retained the roles of the leaders, which were defined from ancient
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Native Peoples of Eastern North America c. 1600 Cree Montagnais
Chippewa
Passamaquoddy Algonquin
Ottawa
Penobscot IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY Abnaki Mohawk Oneida Onondaga Massachusett Cayuga Narragansett Seneca Mohican Wampanoag Pequot
Menominee Sauk Fox Winnebago
Pottawatomi
Huron Erie
Kickapoo Miami
Montauk
Susquehannock Honiason
Illinois
Moneton
Pamunkey
Shawnee
Yuchi Chickasaw Choctaw
Natchez
Tutelo Tuscarora
Biloxi
Powhatan
Pamlico
Cherokee Catawba
CREEK CONFEDERACY Alabama
Delaware
Monacan
Santee
Yamasee Apalachee Timucua
Seminole
times by clan system relationships. Fifty chiefs made up the council and served for life but could be removed from office by the clan mothers if they violated moral or ethical codes. Religious life was organized according to the teaching of the Peacemaker. Three men and three women supervised the keeping of the ceremo-
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nies. The cosmology was well defined, and the origin stories are detailed and sophisticated. Curing illnesses was a central part of daily religious life. The Iroquois had a profound sense of the psychology of the soul and understood dreams and divinations to be communications between one’s personality and one’s soul. At the time of the arrival of the Europeans, the coastal regions of the Northeast were occupied by Algonquian-speaking peoples and the inland waterways were occupied by Iroquoian-speaking people. The entire area was crisscrossed by the trails of a vast trading network that reached to the Subarctic. Storable foods were traded for furs, nuts, obsidian, shells, flints, and other items. Wampum belts of shells and, later, beads described symbolically and mnemonically almost all dealings politically among and within tribes. Impact of the Fur Trade. The fur trade and European economics changed the lives of the Iroquois drastically. Acquisition, exploitation, and competition became normal for Northeastern tribes. The confederacy created a combined military force of more than a thousand men that, in the midseventeenth century, effectively destroyed the Huron, Erie, Petun, and Illinois tribes as players in the fur trade. The ever-increasing encroachment of the French and the British presented the Iroquois with three options: compromise; adoption of the ways of the Europeans, including their economics and religion; or use of violence to reject the wave of invaders. The Iroquois drew from all three options: They compromised whenever necessary to keep their neutrality and the peace; adopted the religions and much of the trade economy (thus becoming dependent upon metal items), but not the political and societal structures, of the Europeans; and chose to fight violently against the French and the tribal allies of the French. The nations of the confederacy had a crucial role in U.S. history. After 1609, when a war party of Mohawks met a group of French and Huron soldiers under Samuel de Champlain and lost six Mohawk warriors to the muskets of the French, the Mohawks carried a dogged hatred of the French forward into alliances—first with the Dutch, from whom they obtained their firearms, and then with the British, from whom they obtained all forms of trade items and by whom they were converted to the Anglican version of Christianity. Thus the Hudson and Mohawk River Valleys were opened to the British, and the French were locked out. The subsequent British dominance of the New World was made much easier by Iroquois control of the waterways from the east coast into the interior of the continent.
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The Iroquois Constitution. In 1677, the Five Nations of the Confederacy met in Albany and wrote into history their memorized, mnemonically cued Great Law, best described as a constitution. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois had mastered the artful politics of their pivotal position. They played the various European traders one against the other, kept their neutrality with level-headed diplomacy, and maintained their control of the riverine system and the Great Lakes with intimidating success. Their hegemony included the territory from Maine to the Mississippi River, and from the Ottawa River in Canada to Kentucky and the Chesapeake Bay region. In the eighteenth century, the Iroquois had more power than any other native nation in North America. Colonial delegates from all the states of the Americas traveled to Albany to learn about governing from the Iroquois. The longhouse sachems urged the colonists to form assemblies and to meet and discuss common interests. In 1754, the first intercolonial conference was held at Albany, and Iroquois delegates were in attendance. The Iroquois maintained their power in spite of the assault of European culture and religion during the eighteenth century. Until about the end of the French and Indian War, the Iroquois were united in their resolve to stay neutral and not be drawn into the imperial wars between the French and the English. By the time of the American Revolution, however, the league’s ability to stay neutral and to influence its members had lessened. During the Revolutionary War, the Seneca, Cayuga, and Mohawk fought with the British; the Onondaga tried to remain aloof; the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans. The American Revolution ended the power of the Iroquois. By 1800, only two thousand survived on tiny reservations in western New York. Another six thousand had fled to Canada. Despite the conflicts and contacts with European cultures, the Iroquois have retained their society and many of their cultural practices, including kinship and ceremonial ties. See also: Albany Congress; Beaver Wars; Code of Handsome Lake; Fort Greenville Treaty; Fort Stanwix Treaty; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting; Northwest Ordinance; Paxton Boys’ Massacres; Prehistory: Northeast; Prophetstown; Tecumseh’s Rebellion; Walking Purchase. Glenn Schiffman Sources for Further Study Fenton, William Nelson. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. A massive work—over eight hundred pages—on the history and culture of the Iroquois Confederacy.
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Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois. New York: Chelsea House Press, 1988. Graymont is an expert on the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois; this precise, concise text is essential for scholars of the Longhouse culture. Henry, Thomas R. Wilderness Messiah: The Story of Hiawatha and the Iroquois. New York: W. Sloane, 1955. Defines the line between legend and history in the founding of the Iroquois league, and in the stories of Hiawatha, Deganawida, and Atotarho. Jennings, Francis. The Founders of America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. An accurate history of special value to high school teachers. Lyons, Oren, et al. Exiled in the Land of the Free. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Clear Light Publishers, 1992. Lyons, faithkeeper of the Six Nations Confederacy, is distinctive in his understanding of the role of the American Indian in U.S. history. Taylor, Colin F., ed. The Native Americans: The Indigenous People of North America. New York: Smithmark, 1991. Companion book to a 1990’s televised series on Native Americans.
Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting Date: May 24 and June 11, 1776 Locale: Finger Lakes Region, Mohawk River Valley, Albany, Boston, Philadelphia Tribes involved: Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora) Categories: Eighteenth century history, National government and legislation, Native government Significance: The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy attempt to secure neutrality during the Revolutionary War but ultimately dissolve, losing control of the Northeast riverine trade. The withdrawal of the French in 1763 from the New World was a watershed event for the Six Nations (the Iroquois Confederacy). Between 1640, when the Iroquois established their hegemony over the fur trade, and the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the Iroquois were profoundly involved in the imperial rivalries between the English and the French and were pivotal in the balance of power in the New World. When the French left, the Iroquois lost the fulcrum on which they kept the balance.
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The British government’s Proclamation of 1763 provided that all territory between the crest of the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River and from Florida to 50° north latitude were closed to settlers and land speculators and reserved “for the present” to American Indians. This proclamation, however, served the British agenda, not the needs of either natives or settlers. Britain wished to protect the valuable furbearing animals’ habitat from encroaching colonists. Guaranteeing boundaries, moreover, did not guarantee sovereignty. In fact, the British were less accommodating of the Indians than the French had been. Native resistance flared with Pontiac’s Resistance (17631766), in which the Six Nation Senecas fought on the side of Pontiac, while the Mohawks supported the British. When that rebellion failed, the Senecas were punished by William Johnson and were forced to cede some of their land to the British. In 1775, the Senecas successfully negotiated with the Americans at Pittsburgh to remain neutral in the frontier battles and the impending Revolutionary War, as long as the Americans stayed out of Iroquois territory. This negotiation was approved by the full governing council of the Six Nations. It was the last significant action that exhibited that the council still had control of its warriors. In that Pittsburgh agreement, American settlers who encroached on Mohawk territory were supposed to be punished by Americans. However, encroachment of the farmers and frontiersmen called the Albany Group near the Mohawk River Valley never abated; thus the Mohawks, led by Joseph Brant, grew more dependent on the British to help defend against American encroachment. English Agreements During the Revolution. During 1775 and into the spring of 1776, the British expended considerable effort to create military allegiances with all the tribes of the Six Nations. So great was their influence among the Mohawks that Joseph Brant and several other warrior chiefs sailed to England in November, 1775, professedly to secure Iroquois sovereignty in exchange for allegiance to the British during the war. By 1776, the American Congress wanted desperately for the Iroquois to join the fight on the side of the colonies, but they did not have the financial ability to dispense the gifts of food, ammunition, clothing, and other necessities that the Iroquois expected when asked to fight as mercenaries. The American alternative was a proclamation of friendship and the stated desire that the Six Nations remain neutral. In England, King George III guaranteed Joseph Brant the boundaries of the Iroquois homelands, but this was no concession to the key word, “sovereignty.” It is believed that Joseph Brant misunderstood the British atti-
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tude toward territorial sovereignty and territorial occupancy. It is known that Brant believed the Americans’ goal was to overrun the continent at the expense of all American Indians. Brant decided the Iroquois’ future lay with the British. In England, Joseph Brant was commissioned a colonel in the British colonial militia. Up to this time, the Americans had done no violence to the Iroquois and, with the exception of the Albany Group, were careful to avoid trespassing on Iroquois territory. After acting Indian Commissioner John Johnson attempted to arrest the patriot missionary Samuel Kirkland at Oriskany, the Oneida stronghold, the Albany Group entered Mohawk territory to arrest Johnson. Both actions failed in their objectives, although Kirkland was momentarily muzzled and Johnson had to flee to Canada with a significant force of Mohawk warriors. The Americans Court the Iroquois. With this backdrop, an Iroquois delegation of twenty-one members representing four of the Six Nations traveled to Philadelphia to be presented to Congress on May 24 and again on June 11. Brant was still in England. The delegates were presented to “the great warrior chief” George Washington on May 24 and to the full Congress on June 11. While in Philadelphia, they boarded in a room directly above the meeting room of the Congress. Washington had spent the previous two weeks persuading the Continental Congress to break the Pittsburgh agreement and allow him to recruit an Indian militia. On May 25, the Congress resolved that it would be expedient to engage American Indians in the service of the colonies. The significance of this was twofold: Congress was ignoring or nullifying the sovereignty of the Council of the Confederacy that had approved the Pittsburgh agreement, and Congress was ignoring the purpose of the Iroquois delegation, which was to assure the sincere and serious effort by the Iroquois to hold fast to the neutrality agreement. George Washington knew the path to either a British or American victory led through Iroquois land. The strategic importance of that land could not be ignored. Congress did not tell the Iroquois delegates that Washington was about to recruit Iroquois as soldiers; as the minutes of June 11 show, We shall order our warriors not to hurt any of your kindred, and we hope you will not allow any of your young brothers to join with the enemy . . . we desire you accept these few necessaries as tokens of our good-will . . . we hope the friendship between us will be firm as long as the sun shall shine and the waters run, that we be as one people.
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While saying these words, Congress did not understand the disastrous implications of their efforts to recruit American Indians. The word to recruit was passed through patriot channels to the Reverend Kirkland and the Oneida and Tuscarora, and also to General Philip Schuyler of the Albany Group. Schuyler was asked to recruit two thousand Iroquois to be paid a reward of one hundred dollars for every British officer killed or taken prisoner and thirty dollars for every enlisted man. Schuyler was dubious not only of the policy but also of the numbers—there were not two thousand Iroquois men available, much less warriors, who were not already aiding the British. The Oneida, however, decided to send five hundred warriors to help protect the American Fort Stanwix near Utica, New York. This action would breach the Iroquois Confederacy. The Revolutionary War brought what was thought to be impossible to the Iroquois nations: Their Covenant Chain broke. In 1777, the league chiefs “covered their fire.” For the first time within living memory, Iroquois fought and killed Iroquois, and their league shattered. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 said nothing about the American Indians. Those who allied with Britain were abandoned to the care of the Americans. Joseph Brant’s pledge to the king in exchange for Brant’s understanding of a pledge of sovereignty was particularly bitter when he discovered that the British had ceded all Mohawk land to the Americans. That the Mohawks were given a reserve in Canada was little consolation. See also: Albany Congress; Beaver Wars; Code of Handsome Lake; Fort Greenville Treaty; Fort Stanwix Treaty; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Iroquois Confederacy; Northwest Ordinance; Paxton Boys’ Massacres; Prehistory: Northeast; Prophetstown; Tecumseh’s Rebellion; Walking Purchase. Glenn Schiffman Sources for Further Study Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. A useful book by a recognized expert on the subject. ____________. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972. The author is considered to be the foremost authority on the subject matter of this work. Jennings, Francis. The Founders of America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. This exceptional history of the events around the American Revolution is accessible to both casual readers and scholars. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Five Hundred Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Companion book to the CBS television series Five Hundred Nations, written by one of Amer-
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ica’s foremost authorities on American Indian culture. Stone, William L. Life of Joseph Brant. Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell, 1864. A source for quotations of early colonial documents. Contains some historical inaccuracies; for example, this is the source of the erroneous information that Brant was in North America at the time of the Philadelphia meeting. Wise, Jennings C. The Red Man in the New World Drama, edited by Vine Deloria, Jr. New York: Macmillan, 1971. The key words “new world drama” provide a clue to the American Indian perspective of this author and editor.
Jay’s Treaty Date: November 19, 1794 Locale: Canada, United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Colonial history, Eighteenth century history, National government and legislation, Treaties Significance: Jay’s Treaty, signed between Great Britain and the United States, was concerned with trade and issues of peace; among other provisions, it permitted Native American people to travel freely across the border between Canada and the United States. The Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the American Revolutionary War and made peace between Britain and the United States, contained no mention of Indians and totally ignored questions about the status of their lands. Many eastern tribal groups were fragmented during the revolution. Some pledged loyalty to the British, who, in return for that loyalty, promised to support the tribe’s land claims and continue generous trading provisions. Other tribes favored the colonists. In the end, all tribal groups were disregarded in the peace negotiations. Prior to the American Revolution, many tribes had negotiated treaties with Great Britain and these contained provisions for reserved land bases. The Americans generally disregarded those treaties because they were made with Britain, and further, the Americans rejected a proposal to establish an aboriginal state. Serious problems arose in the Old Northwest as American settlers pushed farther west. Hostilities escalated to the point that the newly formed American government realized it was necessary to begin negotiat-
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ing treaties with Indians as well as to protect their lands. Nonetheless, fierce attacks between frontiersmen and Indians persisted. Compounding problems in the Northwest was the fact that the British refused to evacuate western military forts as provided in the Treaty of Paris. Indians continued to seek refuge with the British, who, in turn, encouraged Indian attacks on American settlers. Pressure on the U.S. government to address these issues was increased when Indians won a stunning victory on November 4, 1791, over General Arthur St. Clair’s troops near the headwaters of the Wabash River. Quelling Hostilities. Hostilities with the British escalated on all fronts and the United States requested American statesman John Jay to negotiate an agreement between the United States and Great Britain. Once ratified, this agreement became known as Jay’s Treaty. Among other provisions which related to shipping and trade, the British agreed to evacuate Northwestern posts by June 1, 1796, and to grant free trade between Canada and the United States. The provisions of the treaty meant that Indians faced increasing American settlement in their lands. Controversy swirled around the provision that permitted traders from Canada to operate unrestricted in American territory, because there was fear these traders, who always enjoyed a close relationship with the Indians, would encourage the Indians to continue hostilities against the American frontiersmen. To add to these fears, the treaty permitted Indians to travel freely between Canada and the United States. This guarantee is still in effect, and though no longer a threat to American security, restrictions imposed by both Canada and the United States have caused Indians to protest them as a breach of the treaty. Carole A. Barrett See also: Fallen Timbers, Battle of; Fort Wayne Treaty; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Little Turtle’s War; Northwest Ordinance; Proclamation of 1763; Treaties and agreements in Canada; Treaties and agreements in the United States.
Keeler Commission Date: Established 1961 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States
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Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: This commission’s report helped end the termination policy that began in 1953. The intent of federal Indian policy from 1953 to 1962, as set forth in the Termination Resolution of 1953, was to dissolve government obligations and responsibilities toward Native Americans in order to bring about assimilation. This disastrous program was called “termination.” It undermined tribal governments and resources, eroded ethnic identities, and impoverished groups such as the Klamath of Oregon and Menominee of Wisconsin. By the end of the decade, so much criticism had been generated by these developments that a new political consciousness concerning Indian problems began to emerge. John F. Kennedy, elected president in 1960, affirmed that Indian land would be protected, that self-determination would be promoted, and that steps would be taken to avoid undermining the cultural heritage of any group. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall appointed a special task force on Indian affairs in February of 1961 with an eye toward reorganizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in order to carry out this mandate. William Wayne Keeler, a top-level executive with Phillips Petroleum Company and principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, was appointed chairman of the task force. Other members included Philleo Nash, an anthropologist and former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin who had participated in the Menominee termination plans; James Officer, a University of Arizona anthropologist; William Zimmerman, Jr., assistant commissioner of the BIA from 1933 to 1950; and consultant John Crow. After hearings and field trips to western reservations, the commission filed its seventy-sevenpage report on July 10, 1961. Nash also included a summary of the report in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1961. The commission’s main finding was that future BIA policy should emphasize development rather than termination. Recommendations included the attraction of industries to reservations, along with job training and placement services. Loan programs were encouraged, rapid settlement of Indian Claims Commission cases was urged, and increased efforts to educate the general public about Indian culture were promoted. The commission report also stressed the need for Indian participation in government programs. In the 1960’s, Congress granted authorization for Indian loans, tribal resources increased, and development of reservation resources replaced the focus on assimilating Indians through relocation to the cities. The Keeler
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Commission played a small but noticeable role in the shift away from the termination policy. See also: Bureau of Indian Affairs; Termination Resolution. Gary A. Olson
Keetoowah Society Date: Established 1859 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Cherokee Categories: Nineteenth century history, Organizations Significance: The Keetoowah Society was founded in an effort to advance the interests of full-blooded Cherokees. The Keetoowah Society was founded by two white clergymen in 1859. The men were abolitionists, and their goal, ostensibly, was to organize Cherokee opposition to slavery. Members of the order were full-bloods, and some called themselves “Pin Indians,” wearing crossed pins on their left lapels. The Keetoowah Society evolved from simple support of abolition to a group whose purpose was the protection of Cherokee interests. Society goals were taken from the ancient Anti-Kutani, designed to oppose adoption of European American ways. “Pin Indians” were Christians who wished to syncretize their religion with ancient tribal rites. The Keetoowah Society was popular and at one time had a membership of more than two thousand men. It was fiercely loyal to the Union during the Civil War (1861-1865). That fact threatened the Confederacy, which impressed society members into military service. Stories abound of men who were forced to serve the South and deserted at the first opportunity. Following the Civil War, the Keetoowah Society remained active in Cherokee political and social life. It opposed the Dawes Commission in the 1890’s, insisting on the observance of treaty obligations, a guarantee of selfgovernment, and freedom from territorial organization. When the Cherokee delegation reached agreement with the Dawes Commission in 1900, the full-blood Keetoowah Society urged its members to boycott the agreement. In 1906, the Dawes Commission agreement prevailed. The society then functioned as a political party (the Union Party) and fraternal lodge. The Keetoowah Society is viable to this day and is the only fraternal lodge in the United States whose principal emblem is the United States flag.
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See also: Cherokee legal cases; Cherokee Phoenix; Cherokee Tobacco case; Cherokee War. David N. Mielke
Kennedy Report Date: 1967 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Education, National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: The result of a Senate Subcommittee investigation into Native American education, which led to the Indian Education Act of 1972. In 1967, the United States Senate created the Special Subcommittee on Indian Education. Senator Robert F. Kennedy chaired the committee, which held hearings and authorized studies of educational programs for Native Americans. His brother Edward “Ted” Kennedy was the chair when the subcommittee released its final report in November, 1969. Entitled Indian Education: A National Tragedy, a National Challenge, but more commonly called the Kennedy Report, the study concluded that “national policies for educating American Indians are a failure of major proportions.” The report blamed efforts to force Indian children to accept cultural values other than their own as one of the major flaws in Indian education and as a leading cause of high dropout rates. The subcommittee offered sixty recommendations for improving Indian education, which included emphasizing Indian culture and history and increasing funding for existing programs. Although government officials responsible for Indian education rushed to defend their programs, the Kennedy Report raised serious questions in the minds of many Americans concerning the government’s management of Indian affairs. The report’s findings helped promote passage of the Indian Education Act of 1972, which implemented some of its recommendations. See also: American Indian Higher Education Consortium; Carlisle Indian School; Indian Education Acts; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; National Congress of American Indians. Thomas Clarkin
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Kennewick Man controversy Date: Beginning July 28, 1996 Locale: Washington State Tribes involved: Colville, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Wanapum, Yakima Categories: Court cases, National government and legislation, PreColumbian history, Twentieth century history Significance: The debate over the ancient skeletal remains known as Kennewick Man raised a number of historical and contemporary questions about Native American identity and about conflicts between tribal traditions and modern scientific activities. The people who lived in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century are commonly identified as Native Americans or American Indians. Most scientists maintain that Native Americans are descended from groups of people who crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia. Some Native Americans believe that their first ancestors came into existence on the American continents. Claims that Kennewick Man resembled Europeans more than contemporary Native Americans therefore challenged both standard scientific views and Native American traditions. In addition, the discovery revived long-standing disagreements between Native Americans and parts of the American scientific establishment. For most of American history, the remains of the Native American dead were frequently deposited in museums and laboratories. This was resented by living Native Americans, whose traditions taught that their dead should be treated with respect. In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which recognized the rights of Native American groups to the remains of their ancestors. When some anthropologists and archaeologists attempted to claim the right to keep and study the Kennewick bones, Native Americans saw this as disrespect for their dead and as another attack on Native American culture. Those who were against handing the remains over to contemporary Native Americans argued that scientific values required studying the remains and that it was not clear which tribe or nation, if any, could claim Kennewick Man as an ancestor. The Discovery. The Kennewick Man controversy began when two young men attending annual hydroplane races found a skull in the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, on July 28, 1996. The discoverers
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turned the skull over to local police authorities, who investigated and found more skeletal remains. The county coroner recognized that the remains were too old to be the result of a recent crime and he asked an anthropologist, James C. Chatters, to examine them. On July 29, Dr. Chatters had the bones X-rayed and CAT-scanned. Chatters came to two conclusions that would create both publicity and controversy. First, he decided that some of the features of the skull were not those of contemporary Native Americans. He maintained that the skull had “Caucasoid” characteristics, or characteristics usually associated with people whose ancestors were from the area of Europe. Second, with further investigation, he came to the conclusion that the bones were more than eight thousand years old. After the initial discovery, the area of the find was carefully examined, and investigators found more bones during August, 1996. Since the remains had been found on land owned by the federal government, Chatters informed the Army Corps of Engineers of the discovery. One of the bone fragments was sent to the University of California, Riverside, where a test that involved destroying part of the bone indicated that the remains were about 8,400 years old. Publicity and Controversy. On July 30, 1996, The Tri-City Herald, an eastern Washington newspaper, reported that the newly discovered skull apparently belonged to someone of European descent, possibly an early pioneer settler. A month later, on August 28, the Tri-City Herald gave a more detailed and more intriguing account, based on a more complete examination of the fragments, on scientific tests, and on speculation. The newspaper reported that the skeleton was taller and thinner than the skeletons of most Native Americans and that the skull was not flattened by boards in infancy, as was commonly the practice among ancient American Indians in the region. In the right hip of the skeleton, found after the skull, there was a spear point of the type used between five thousand and nine thousand years earlier. The newspaper observed that the University of California test supported the view that Kennewick Man lived in very early times. These newspaper reports drew widespread attention. Representatives of Native American groups became concerned with the treatment of the pre-Columbian skeleton. In the August 28 article of the Tri-City Herald, Jerry Meninick, the vice chairman of the Yakima Nation’s tribal council, said that Native Americans would regard Kennewick Man’s remains as sacred and as deserving burial. Other Native American leaders and activists also began to object to Chatters’s possession of Native American remains.
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Jeff Van Pelt and other representatives of the Umatilla Reservation, Alan Slickpoo of the Nez Perce, and Bobby Tomanowash of the Wanapum opposed Chatters’s work with the remains and voiced their concerns to the Army Corps of Engineers. On September 2, 1996, the Army Corps of Engineers took control of the bones. Soon afterward, the five Native American tribal groups in the area claimed the bones under NAGPRA. In response, the Corps recognized the claims of the these groups and, on September 17, published the “Notice of Intent to Repatriate” required by the act. The publicity surrounding the discovery and scientific interest in it made it impossible for the Army Corps of Engineers to quietly hand over the remains to representatives of any tribe or set of tribes. A Portland, Oregon, attorney named Alan Schneider wrote the Corps at the end of September, offering his view that since Kennewick Man was apparently not an ancestor of any existing tribe, the remains were not covered by NAGPRA. On October 16, Robson Bonnichsen and seven other anthropologists represented by attorney Schneider filed suit in the U.S. Magistrate Court in Portland. In their suit, the anthropologists maintained that they would be deprived of their rights to study the remains if these were given to the Native American groups. The controversy drew other interested parties. Not long after the anthropologists filed their suit, another Portland attorney filed a suit asking that the remains be turned over to his clients, the Asatru Folk Assembly. The group consisted of Americans of European descent who had revived the worship of the old Norse gods Odin and Thor. According to the Asatru Folk Assembly, if the skeleton could be shown to be more similar to Europeans than to Native Americans, then the remains should legally belong to the worshipers of the Norse gods. The members of the Asatru Folk Assembly dropped their claim to Kennewick Man in January, 2000, asserting that the legal system was biased against them. Still, the ancient man continued to find others claiming descent from him. In July, 2001, a man of Samoan ancestry, Joseph P. Siofele, filed suit for custody of the remains, claiming that Kennewick Man was a relative of the ancient Polynesians. Movements and Status of the Remains. The status of Kennewick Man under NAGPRA was unclear in the eyes of many people. In 1997, Doc Hastings, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Washington, drafted a bill intended to clarify NAGPRA and to permit scientists to continue with their studies of the bones. However, the administration of President Bill Clinton joined with Native American groups in opposing the bill. The U.S. government told the court that the remains would have been automatically
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handed over to a Native American tribe if the discovery had occurred in territory that was recognized as American Indian land by the Indian Claims Commission. Since the place of discovery was not recognized as tribal land, though, right of possession was open to question. At the end of October, 1998, the bones of Kennewick Man were moved to the Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle. At the Burke Museum, scientists would be allowed to continue some studies until the court reached a final legal decision, but the remains would have to be treated in a respectful manner. The case took on a new twist in late 1998, when an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution who examined the remains reported that several major pieces of the bones had disappeared. The mystery of these missing bone fragments was never solved. To complicate matters, in late 1999 scientists appointed by the U.S. Department of the Interior to study the remains concluded that Kennewick Man was not similar to either modern Native Americans or modern European Americans. Instead, the Interior Department scientists reported, the remains showed resemblances to natives of southeastern Asia, such as the Ainu of Japan and the Polynesians. On July 13, 2000, Frank McManamon, consulting archaeologist of the U.S. Department of the Interior and chief archaeologist of the National Park Service, announced that Kennewick Man was between 9,320 and 9,510 years old. McManamon indicated that this age, along with some skeletal evidence, meant that the remains should be regarded as Native American and should be dealt with according to NAGPRA. If researchers had been able to obtain deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) from the remains, this would have enabled them to establish any relationship with possible modern descendants. However, laboratories failed at obtaining DNA. In September, 2000, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt announced that the location of the discovery and the oral traditions of Native Americans were enough to establish a link between Kennewick Man and contemporary Native Americans. Therefore, Secretary Babbitt stated, the bones should be handed over to the Native American groups that were claiming them. The announcement by the Interior Department did not resolve the controversy. Dr. Bonnichsen and his associates vowed to fight on in court. Representative Hastings said that he hoped the Department of the Interior’s announcement would lead to reconsideration of his bill to make NAGPRA friendlier to science. Many concerned Native Americans continued to feel that their dead and their traditions had been treated with a lack of respect.
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See also: Bering Strait migrations; Indian-white relations: U.S., 19342002; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; Prehistory: Northwest Coast. Carl L. Bankston III Sources for Further Study Bonnichsen, Robson, and Alan L. Schneider. “Battle of the Bones.” The Sciences 40, no. 4 (July/August, 2000): 40-46. An article by one of the anthropologists involved in the Kennewick Man litigation and by a lawyer who presents the controversy as a conflict between tradition and science. Chatters, James C. Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. The anthropologist who was one of the central actors in the controversy tells the story of the discovery of the remains, the legal quarrels over them, and the evidence and theories regarding prehistoric North Americans. Downey, Roger. Riddle of the Bones: Politics, Science, Race and the Story of Kennewick Man. New York: Copernicus, 2000. A history of the Kennewick discovery and controversy that is critical of Dr. Chatters and other anthropologists. Garrett, Kenneth. “Hunt for the First Americans.” National Geographic 198, no. 6 (December, 2000). A description of how recent discoveries, including that of Kennewick Man, have changed scientific theories about the earliest Americans. Owsley, Douglas W., and Richard L. Jantz. “Archaeological Politics and Public Interest in Paleoamerican Studies: Lessons from Gordon Creek Woman and Kennewick Man.” American Antiquity 66, no. 4 (2001): 565575. Discusses legal and social issues surrounding Kennewick Man and other remains and argues that discussions of biological connections to present-day populations are relevant to the treatment of archaeological remains. Thomas, David Hurst. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books, 2000. A history of American archaeology that looks at the changing relationship between Native Americans and archaeology and places the Kennewick Man controversy in the context of this changing relationship.
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Kickapoo Resistance Date: 1819-1834 Locale: Illinois Tribes involved: Kickapoo Categories: Nineteenth century history, Treaties, Wars and battles Significance: Two separate bands of Kickapoo repudiated treaties of 1819 calling for all Kickapoo to move west; not until 1834 did the last band finally do so. The 1819 Treaties of Edwardsville and Fort Harrison required the Kickapoo to vacate their lands in Illinois and move west. Two renegade bands of about 250 Indians each repudiated the treaties and remained, but by very different means. The band led by Chief Mecina resisted by looting, rustling, shooting livestock, and terrorizing settlers. William Clark, area superintendent of Indian affairs, used persuasion rather than force, and in 1829 Mecina and about 150 tribal members left. About a hundred members joined Black Hawk’s band of Sauk and Fox Indians in their ultimately unsuccessful efforts to recover tribal lands by force. Black Hawk was defeated in 1832, after which his supporters also moved west. The band led by the warrior Kennekuk enjoyed friendly and peaceful relations with whites. Consequently, Kennekuk was able to resist passively and delay leaving. In 1833, however, Clark lost patience and gave Kennekuk an ultimatum to leave or be considered an enemy. In spring of 1834 Kennekuk finally left, leaving the Kickapoo wholly removed from their original lands. See also: Black Hawk War; Kickapoo uprisings. A Kickapoo warrior thought to be Babeshikit in Laurence Miller 1894. (National Archives)
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Kickapoo uprisings Date: 1865-1873 Locale: Southern Texas Tribes involved: Kickapoo Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Wars and battles Significance: This war of retribution against southern Texans wreaked havoc, caused bitter controversy with Mexico over the sanctity of borders, and marked the beginning of reservation life for some Southern Kickapoos. During a migration of seven hundred Southern Kickapoos from Kansas to Mexico, the Indians were attacked by four hundred soldiers of the Texas Confederate Army on January 1, 1865. The Kickapoos won a decisive victory at the Battle of Dove Creek, but they lost fifteen dead and numerous supplies. Enraged by this unwarranted attack and considering it an act of war, the Kickapoos unleashed a relentless, merciless, and highly effective campaign of terror, vengeance, and destruction against Texans and their property along the Rio Grande over the next decade. Unable to persuade the Southern Kickapoos to cease hostilities and return to the United States, the government resorted to force and crossed the border into Mexico without permission in 1873. On May 18, the U.S. Fourth Cavalry killed and captured many women and children at Nacimiento. Desiring to be reunited with their families, 317 Kickapoos agreed to return to Indian Territory in the United States in 1873, with the rest (about 280) remaining in Mexico. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Kickapoo resistance. Laurence Miller
Lewis and Clark expedition Date: May 14, 1804-September 23, 1806 Locale: Trans-Mississippi West Tribes involved: Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Chinook, Crow, Flathead, Klatsop, Mandan, Minnataree, Nez Perce, Osage, Pawnee, Shoshone, Sioux, Spokane, Tillamook, Yakima
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Categories: Nineteenth century history Significance: The westward expedition of Lewis and Clark not only expanded European American knowledge of the North American continent, but also was the first contact many Native American groups had with Europeans and had long-lasting reverberations for their traditional ways of life. Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their companions were the first Europeans to cross the western half of North America within the present limits of the United States. During their journeys, they traveled through the future states of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Their exploration was the concluding act in the long and fruitless search for a water route through the continent—a Northwest Passage—that had begun soon after Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. The instigator of the exploration was Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. He had first thought of such an undertaking about the time the United States achieved independence in 1783, and during the succeeding decade he twice tried unsuccessfully to launch a transcontinental exploring party. Not until he assumed the presidency in 1801, however, was Jefferson in a position to have his plan implemented. On January 18, 1803, the president asked Congress for authorization and for an appropriation of twenty-five hundred dollars to send a military expedition to explore along the Missouri River to its source in the Rocky Mountains, and then down the nearest westward-flowing streams to the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson gave two reasons for the proposed mission: to prepare the way for the extension of the American fur trade to the tribes throughout the area to be explored, and to advance geographical knowledge of the continent. When he sent his message to Congress, none of the territory Jefferson wanted to be explored lay within the United States. The area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, called Louisiana, belonged to France, while the Pacific Northwest was claimed by Great Britain, Spain, and Russia, as well as by the United States. While he was developing his plans for the transcontinental exploring expedition, however, the president also was conducting negotiations with the French government of Napoleon Bonaparte, which resulted in the purchase of the Louisiana territory from France—not the region of the modern state of Louisiana but rather a huge area that spanned nearly half of the trans-Mississippi West and effectively doubled the size of the United States. A treaty was signed on May 2, although antedated to April 30, 1803. Thus, in ascending the Mis-
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souri River, the expedition would be exploring new U.S. territory, while by completing the journey to the Pacific Ocean, it would be strengthening the United States’ claim to the region beyond the mountains. To command the expedition, Jefferson chose his private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis. With the president’s concurrence, Lewis then invited his longtime friend William Clark to be his co-leader. After making initial preparations in the East, Lewis traveled to Wood River, Illinois, opposite the mouth of the Missouri River. Clark and several recruits joined him on the way down the Ohio River. Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1803-1804 at Camp Wood River recruiting and training their men, gathering additional supplies and equipment (including fourteen bales of trade goods), and collecting information about the Missouri River from traders and boatmen. The permanent party that was organized included twenty-seven young, unmarried soldiers; a mixed-blood hunter and interpreter named George Drouillard; Clark’s black slave, York; and Lewis’s big Newfoundland dog, Scammon. In addition, a corporal, five privates, and several French boatmen were to accompany the expedition during the first season and then return downriver with its records, sketches, and scientific specimens. The Expedition Sets Forth. The Corps of Discovery began its historic journey on May 14, 1804. It started up the Missouri River in a fifty-five-foot keelboat and two pirogues, or dugout canoes. Averaging about fifteen miles a day, by the end of October, the corps had reached the villages of the Mandans and Minnatarees near the mouth of the Knife River in the future state of North Dakota.
A statue of Sacagawea in Portland, Oregon, commemorates the Shoshone who carried her two-month-old son with her as she guided the Lewis and Clark expedition. For her services, she received less than 0.01 percent of the total cost of the expedition. (Library of Congress)
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After ending their sixteen-hundred-mile trek, the explorers built a log stronghold called Fort Mandan and went into winter quarters. During the long, frigid winter, Lewis and Clark made copious notes in their journals, drew maps of their route, and counseled with numerous Native American visitors. From the Minnatarees, especially, they obtained invaluable information about the course of the Missouri River and the country through which it ran. The contributions of these and other Native Americans to the success of the exploration cannot be exaggerated. On April 7, 1805, the expedition resumed its journey. The party now numbered only thirty-three persons. It included, besides the permanent detachment, interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau, his young Shoshone wife Sacagawea, and her two-month-old son Jean Baptiste, nicknamed Pompey. On August 17, after passing through country never before visited by Europeans, the expedition reached the navigable limits of the Missouri River. With Sacagawea’s help, Lewis and Clark purchased horses from her brother Cameahwai of the Shoshone tribe and began their journey through the Rocky Mountains. Sacagawea had been captured three years before by a Minnataree raiding party and carried back east to the prairies, where Charbonneau had purchased her for his wife. The chance meeting of Sacagawea and her brother, who had become the chief of their clan, was a convenient opportunity for the expedition. Along with the horses, Lewis and Clark were given travel instructions and lent a guide, called Toby, to assist them through the mountains. After crossing the mountains, the explorers descended the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific, where they arrived in mid-November. The Road Home. After a dreary winter at Fort Clatsop (named for a neighboring tribe) south of the Columbia River, the explorers started for home on March 23, 1806. Other than fighting to keep warm and searching for food, the highlight of their stay was a visit to the remains of a dead beached whale, from which they obtained three hundred pounds of blubber and oil. They were anxious to start back east, as they had seen the sun only six days during their stay at Fort Clatsop. En route, they divided temporarily; Lewis and a small party explored the Marias River, while Clark and the rest of the men descended the Yellowstone River. Reuniting below the mouth of the Yellowstone, they hurried on down the Missouri and arrived in St. Louis on September 23, 1806. The Lewis and Clark expedition had accomplished its mission with remarkable success. In only twenty-eight months, it had covered more than eight thousand miles. On the entire journey, only one member of the expe-
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A new era in westward exploration and expansion of the United States followed the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. President Thomas Jefferson charged his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to undertake a northwestern reconnaissance expedition to explore the new lands. At about the same time, Zebulon Pike of the Western Army of the United States conducted several expeditions that led him deep into Spanish territory in the Southwest. Such expeditions opened the door to white settlers and devastating incursions into Native American homelands.
dition, Sergeant Charles Floyd, lost his life, probably because of a ruptured appendix. Although they met thousands of Native Americans, the explorers had only one violent encounter with them. This violence occurred while Lewis was high up the Marias River, and it resulted in the death of two Piegans, members of the Blackfoot Confederacy. The total expense of the undertaking, including the special congressional appropriation of $2,500, was $38,722.25. Charbonneau collected $500.33 for his and Sacagawea’s
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services. At this small cost Lewis and Clark and their companions took the first giant step in opening the West to the American people. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plateau. John L. Loos, updated by Russell Hively Sources for Further Study Bakeless, John. Lewis and Clark: Partners in Discovery. New York: William Morrow, 1947. One of the most reliable sources on Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Based on both of their journals. Biddle, Nicholas, and Paul Allen, eds. History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1961. Prepared by Biddle, a young Philadelphia lawyer, between 1810 and 1814, this work is based on both Lewis’s and Clark’s journals. De Voto, Bernard. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. A one-volume condensation of the Original Journals of Lewis and Clark Expedition. Includes maps. Dillon, Richard. Meriwether Lewis: A Biography. New York: Coward-McCann, 1965. A full-length study of Meriwether Lewis’s life. McGrath, Patrick. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Morristown, N.J.: Silver Burdett, 1985. A simple but complete telling of the Lewis and Clark adventure for younger readers. Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark Among the Indians. Bicentennial edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. A detailed look at the Indian cultures encountered by the Lewis and Clark expedition. Salisbury, Albert, and Jane Salisbury. Two Captains West. Seattle: Superior Publishing, 1950. Descriptions of the Lewis and Clark trail, with maps and photographs. Designed for the lay reader. Tourtelott, Jonathan B., ed. “Meriwether Lewis/William Clark.” In Into the Unknown: The Story of Exploration. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1987. A thirty-four-page chapter devoted to the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Little Bighorn, Battle of the Date: June 25-26, 1876 Locale: Little Bighorn River, Montana Tribes involved: Arapaho, Arikara, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Sioux
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Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The stunning defeat of the Seventh Cavalry unleashed relentless pursuit of the victorious Indians, culminating in their surrender, their exile to reservation life, and the end of traditional Plains culture. The Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) guaranteed the Sioux a permanent reservation that encompassed all of present South Dakota west of the Missouri River and from which encroaching white settlers were forbidden. The Sioux were also guaranteed the right to hunt in a larger unceded territory, also closed to whites. About three thousand free-roaming Sioux lived on these lands and despised the thought of reservation life. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were the most famous of these Sioux. Background to the Battle. The terms of the treaty, however, were blatantly violated. From 1871 to 1874, surveying parties with army escort trespassed on both the reservation and unceded territory, charting routes and finding gold in the sacred Black Hills. By mid-1875 hordes of white prospectors and adventurers were poised to invade Sioux territory, held back only by the army. The government tried through persuasion and threats to induce the Sioux to sell the Black Hills but were unequivocally rebuffed. This led President Ulysses S. Grant to devise a plan to justify a war against the Sioux. Their defeat would remove the free-roaming Sioux from the unceded territory and place them on the reservation. The Black Hills and unceded territory would be opened for settlement and prospecting. The plan began with a decision not to enforce the ban on prospectors entering the Black Hills. Lies about Sioux misdeeds and crimes were publicly circulated. Then in December, 1875, the government gave an ultimatum to the free-roaming Northern Cheyenne and Sioux to surrender at their agencies by January 31, 1876, or be forced there by military action. The Indians bitterly resented this ultimatum. It violated the 1868 treaty, and the free-roaming groups were determined to maintain their traditional way of life and not go to reservations. Resentment was further fueled by a famine on the reservation caused largely by negligence and graft in the distribution of guaranteed rations. In addition, the sale of firearms to hunt needed food was prohibited. The Platte Sioux had been arbitrarily removed from their reservation to save on freight charges for their rations. Annihilation of Custer’s Forces. The Indians ignored the ultimatum, and the army was ordered to capture or disperse them. On June 24 the Sev-
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enth Cavalry, under the command of General George Armstrong Custer, found an Indian camp (predominantly Sioux but including some Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho) on the south bank of the Little Bighorn River. In the afternoon of June 25, 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn commenced. Major Marcus Reno and his three companies of 175 soldiers and Indian scouts attacked the southern end of the camp. Reno aborted the attack, however, when he realized the number of Indians he would engage. He took cover in timber along the river but was forced to withdraw to a more defensible hillRain in the Face, one of the Sioux leaders at top on the bluffs across the Little Bighorn, is believed to have dealt the river when set upon by an overdeathblow to General Custer in the Battle of whelming force of Indians. The Little Bighorn. (National Archives) withdrawal turned into a panic and a rout. Seven officers and 84 men made it to the hill. Forty were killed, 13 were wounded, and several were missing. Custer observed Reno’s charge from Weir Point, a high bluff. He searched for an opening that would permit him and his 210 troops to join the battle as soon as possible. Custer made contact with the Indians at around 3:45 p.m., near the river. What then happened is not exactly clear, but Custer moved away from the river and ended up on Custer Hill, about four miles from Reno’s hill. Almost two thousand Indians attacked Custer’s force and completely surrounded it. Within about an hour Custer and all his men were annihilated. The third unit of Custer’s force, 5 officers and 110 soldiers, was commanded by Captain Frederick Benteen. Benteen was under orders to search for hostiles to the left of Custer’s force and then hurry back and join Custer. Benteen, however, contrary to orders, dawdled behind, probably in the belief that there were no Indian warriors in the area. Benteen did not get to the battlefield in time to help Custer. The fourth unit of Custer’s force, the pack
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train carrying supplies, was manned by 2 officers and 134 soldiers. It languished in the rear and could not be of assistance when Custer was attacked. When Benteen and the pack train arrived at the Little Bighorn, they joined Reno on Reno Hill. This total force of 367 was able to withstand Indian attacks on the morning of June 26, with a loss of 7 killed and 40 men wounded. The Indians were gone by June 27, and the battle was over. Total army casualties numbered 263 killed and 59 wounded. The army’s defeat was the result of several factors. Inadequate intelligence led Custer to underestimate the strength and temper of his foe: Two thousand battle-tested warriors resolved to defend their way of life against 597 cavalry. Custer’s troops were divided into four units, only two of which fought, and then at different times and places and against overwhelming odds. Another factor was the strength of the Indians’ leadership; Crazy Horse, Gall, and Rain in the Face were all actively involved in the fighting. The Indians’ victory was short-lived. An angry American public, Congress, and military demanded revenge. The Indians were relentlessly pursued in 1877, and by the end of the 1870’s nearly all Plains Indians had been killed or confined to reservations; the traditional Plains culture passed into history. See also: Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868; Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933; National Indian Association; Rosebud Creek, Battle of; Sioux War; Washita River Massacre. Laurence Miller Sources for Further Study Dillon, Richard H. North American Indian Wars. New York: Facts on File, 1983. Gray, John S. Centennial Campaign. Ft. Collins, Colo.: Old Army Press, 1976. Green, Jerome A., ed. Lakota and Cheyenne: Indian Views of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Rosenberg, Bruce A. Custer and the Epic of Defeat. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. Russell, Don. Custer’s Last. Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1968. Vaughn, Jesse W. Indian Fights. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966.
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Little Turtle’s War Date: October 18, 1790-July, 1794 Locale: Ohio Valley Tribes involved: Chippewa, Lenni Lenape, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Wyandot Categories: Eighteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Native Americans inflict the worst battlefield defeat on U.S. Army troops during the Indian wars. On November 4, 1791, Little Turtle was one of the principal chiefs among a coalition of Shawnees, Miamis, Lenni Lenapes (Delawares), Potawatomis, Ottawas, Chippewas, and Wyandots in the Old Northwest (Ohio Country) that defeated an army of 1,400 soldiers under General Arthur St. Clair. About 1,200 warriors rallied by Little Turtle, aided by the element of surprise, killed or wounded nearly 950 of St. Clair’s force, the largest single battlefield victory by an American Indian force in U.S. history. The victory was short-lived, however; in 1794, “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s forces defeated Little Turtle and his allies at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. On August 3, 1795, the American Indians gave up most of their hunting grounds west of the Ohio River, by signing the Treaty of Greenville. Little Turtle was known as a master of battlefield strategy. Born to a Miami chief and a Mahican (or Mohican) mother, Little Turtle became a war chief of the Miamis because of his extraordinary personal abilities; under ordinary circumstances, the matriarchal nature of the culture would have prohibited a leadership role for him. In 1787, the hunting grounds of the Miamis and their allies had been guaranteed in perpetuity by the U.S. Congress. The act did not stop an invasion of settlers, and by the early 1790’s, Little Turtle had cemented an alliance that foreshadowed later efforts by Tecumseh, who assembled an alliance of several native nations a generation later. Little Turtle’s principal allies in this effort were the Shawnee Blue Jacket and the Lenni Lenape Buckongahelas. This alliance first defeated a force of a thousand troops under Josiah Harmar during October, 1790. Harmar dispatched an advance force of 180 men, who were drawn into a trap and annihilated on October 18. On October 19, Harmar dispatched 360 more troops to punish the natives, but the Americans were drawn into a similar trap, in which about 100 of them were killed. The remainder of Harmar’s force then retreated to Fort Washington, on the present-day site of Cincinnati.
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Indian Successes. Harmar’s defeat stunned the Army, whose commanders knew that the Old Northwest would remain closed to settlement as long as Little Turtle’s alliance held. General Arthur St. Clair, who had served as president of the Continental Congress in the mid-1780’s, gathered an army of two thousand troops during the summer of 1791 and marched into the Ohio Country. About a quarter of the troops deserted en route; to keep the others happy, St. Clair permitted about two hundred soldiers’ wives to travel with the army. On November 4, 1791, Little Turtle and his allies lured St. Clair’s forces into the same sort of trap that had defeated Harmar’s smaller army near St. Mary’s Creek, a tributary of the Wabash River. Thirty-eight officers and 598 enlisted men died in the battle; 242 others were wounded, many of whom later died. Fifty-six wives also lost their lives, bringing casualties close to 950—nearly four times the number killed at Little Bighorn in 1876 and the largest defeat of a U.S. Army force in all of the Indian wars. After the battle, St. Clair resigned his commission in disgrace. Dealing from strength, Little Turtle’s alliance refused to cede land to the United States. In 1794, General “Mad” Anthony Wayne was dispatched with a fresh army, which visited the scene of St. Clair’s debacle. According to Wayne, Five hundred skull bones lay in the space of 350 yards. From thence, five miles on, the woods were strewn with skeletons, knapsacks, and other debris.
Little Turtle had more respect for Wayne than he had had for Harmar or St. Clair, calling Wayne “the chief who never sleeps.” Aware that Wayne was unlikely to be defeated by his surprise tactics, Little Turtle proposed that the Indian alliance talk peace. A majority of the warriors rebuffed Little Turtle, so in late June or early July he relinquished his command to a Shawnee, Blue Jacket (although some scholars say it was Turkey Foot). In April, 1790, Blue Jacket had refused to attend treaty councils that he feared would cost his people their lands. His forces were defeated by Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Afterward, Blue Jacket signed the Treaty of Greenville (1795) and the Treaty of Fort Industry (1805), ceding millions of acres of native land. Aftermath. Stripped of their lands, many of Little Turtle’s people sank into alcoholic despair. The aging chief continued to lead them as best he could. In 1802, Little Turtle addressed the legislatures of Ohio and Kentucky, urging members to pass laws forbidding traders to supply natives with whiskey. He said that whiskey traders had “stripped the poor Indian of skins, guns, blankets, everything—while his squaw and the children dependent
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on him lay starving and shivering in his wigwam.” Neither state did anything to stop the flow of whiskey, some of which was adulterated with other substances, such as chili peppers and arsenic. Little Turtle died July 14, 1812, at his lodge near the junction of the St. Joseph River and St. Mary Creek. He was buried with full military honors by Army officers who knew his genius. William Henry Harrison, who had been an aide to Wayne and who later defeated Tecumseh in the same general area, paid Little Turtle this tribute: “A safe leader is better than a bold one.” This maxim was a great favorite of [the Roman] Caesar Augustus . . . who . . . was, I believe, inferior to the warrior Little Turtle.
For almost two centuries, local historians placed the site of the Battle of Fallen Timbers along the Maumee River floodplain near U.S. Highway 24, near present-day Toledo, Ohio. A monument was erected at the site, even as Native Americans contended that the battle had really occurred a mile away, in what had become a soybean field. In 1995, to settle the issue, G. Michael Pratt, an anthropology professor in Ohio, organized an archaeological dig in the soybean field. Teams of as many as 150 people excavated the site, which yielded large numbers of battlefield artifacts, indicating conclusively that the Native American account of the site was correct. See also: Fallen Timbers, Battle of; Fort Greenville Treaty; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830. Bruce E. Johansen Sources for Further Study Carter, Harvey Lewis. The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Includes a detailed description of the battle with St. Clair’s troops from Little Turtle’s perspective. Hamilton, Charles, ed. Cry of the Thunderbird. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Extensive quotations from some of Little Turtle’s speeches. Porter, C. Fayne. Our Indian Heritage: Profiles of Twelve Great Leaders. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964. Little Turtle is one of the twelve leaders discussed. Sword, Wiley. President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Discusses the battles that the U.S. Army fought with Little Turtle’s alliance, in the context of United States politics of the time.
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Winger, Otho. Last of the Miamis: Little Turtle. North Manchester, Ind.: O. Winger, 1935. Concise sketch of Little Turtle’s life and his attempts to forge a Native American confederation in the Ohio Valley. Young, Calvin M. Little Turtle. 1917. Reprint. Fort Wayne, Ind.: Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, 1956. A sketch of Little Turtle’s life, including the St. Clair battle.
Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock Date: January 5, 1903 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Court cases, Twentieth century history Significance: The U.S. Supreme Court decides that Congress has plenary power over Native American property and may dispose of it at its discretion. In 1887, after years of agitation and controversy, Congress passed the General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Act or Dawes Severalty Act). Under the terms of the legislation, the president was authorized to allot all tribal land in the United States to individual Native Americans. The standard share was 160 acres to each head of a family, with smaller amounts to unmarried men and children. Negotiations were to be carried on with Native American tribes for the sale to the federal government of the land remaining after the allotments were made and for its opening to European American settlement. The allotment policy, dominating United States-Native American relations for more than fifty years, proved to be disastrous for Native Americans. It transformed Native American landownership from collective to individual holdings, thus severing the Indians’ connection with communal tribal organizations, exposed them to wholesale exploitation by land speculators, pushed them onto land that was often arid and unproductive, and led ultimately to a loss of control over two-thirds of their lands. Deceit, duplicity, and coercion undermined the honest, but naïve, objectives of the U.S. reformers who espoused allotment prior to its enactment. Tribal sovereignty, the allotment policy, and Native American treaty rights came before the United States Supreme Court in Lone Wolf v. Hitch-
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cock in 1902. In 1867, the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty had been signed with the Kiowas and Comanches, whereby the two tribes relinquished claims to 90 million acres in exchange for 2.9-million-acre reservations in Western Oklahoma. A separate treaty placed the plains Apaches on the same reservation. Article XII of the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty provided that no further cession of any part of the new reservation could be made without the written consent of three-quarters of the adult male members of the three tribes. The commitment to Article XII of the Medicine Lodge treaty lasted twenty-five years. In 1892, the Jerome Commission, composed of a former governor of Michigan and two judges, was able— through fraud and counterfeit signatures—to secure the necessary threequarters consent to an agreement for the allotment of land to individual tribesmen and for the purchase of 2.15 million acres of what was denominated as surplus land at a price of approximately ninety-three cents per acre. Almost immediately after the signing of the new agreement, representatives of the Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches claimed that assent had been obtained by fraudulent misrepresentation of its terms by the interpreters, and that three-quarters of the adult males had not consented to the cession. Their argument was ignored by the United States House of Representatives, which voted to execute the agreement, but was more sympathetically received by the Senate, which defeated the bill in January, 1899. In July, 1900, however, Congress passed an act that allowed the United States to take title to 2,991,933 acres of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Plains Apache reservation. After 480,000 acres were set aside as common grazing lands, 445,000 acres allotted to individual members of the three tribes, and 10,000 acres committed to agency, schools, and religious purposes, 2 million acres were left to be purchased by the federal government and opened to white settlement. The Kiowa Challenge. Although some Native Americans approved of the act, Lone Wolf, a Kiowa chief, and others were intent upon challenging the act’s constitutionality. They retained William McKendree Springer, formerly chief justice of the Court of Appeals for the Indian Territory, to litigate their case before the federal courts. Springer argued that the congressional act violated the property rights of the three tribes and was, therefore, repugnant to the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. After losing in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia and in the Court of Appeals for the district, Springer appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
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Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock was argued in the Supreme Court in October, 1901, and reargued the following year. The decision was handed down in January, 1903. In the Court, Springer was joined by Hampton L. Carson, a prominent member of the Indian Rights Association; the Department of the Interior was represented by Willis Van Devanter of Wyoming, who later became a Supreme Court justice. The unanimous decision of the Supreme Court, written by Associate Justice Edward White of Louisiana, was characterized by a later commentator as the “Indian’s Dred Scott decision,” and January 5, 1903, as “one of the blackest days in the history of the American Indians.” Justice White spoke in condescending terms. He called Native Americans an “ignorant and dependent race,” “weak and diminishing in number,” and “wards of the nation.” These contemptuous phrases were not original to White; they were epithets that had long been used in the opinions of Supreme Court justices in relation to Native Americans. More important, White ruled that Congress possessed a paramount authority over Native American property “by reason of its exercise of guardianship over their interests.” In exercising such power, Congress could abrogate provisions of a treaty with a Native American tribe. Justice White then went on to argue that the congressional act of 1900 represented only “a mere change in the form of investment of Indian tribal property from land to money” even though the price paid was below the market value. White held that Congress had made a good-faith effort to compensate the Kiowas for their lands; therefore, there was no violation of the Fifth Amendment. “If injury was occasioned,” White concluded, “which we do not wish to be understood to imply by the use made by Congress of its power, relief must be sought by an appeal to that body for redress and not to the courts.” Even before the Supreme Court had ruled in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, President William McKinley issued a proclamation opening the Kiowa lands to white settlement on August 6, 1901. Lone Wolf watched with chagrin as thousands of potential settlers camped on Kiowa lands near Fort Sill, waiting to register for a lottery; during a two-month period, 11,638 homestead entries were made at the land office. Legitimating Broken Promises. The importance of the Supreme Court decision in Lone Wolf should not be underestimated. Justice White’s opinion legitimized the long history of broken promises, of treaties made and treaties ignored, and of Congress’s assertion of plenary authority over Indian lands. The opinion justified the alienation, between 1887 and 1934, of eighty-six million acres of Native American property; it also denied to Na-
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tive Americans recourse to the courts to seek redress for the coerced separation from their lands and its purchase at bargain prices. In Lone Wolf, Justice White told the Kiowas and associated tribes that they would have to seek relief for their alleged injuries in Congress, and the Kiowas had no alternative but to go to the federal legislature to secure redress. It was not until 1955 that the Indian Claims Commission awarded the Kiowas, Comanches, and plains Apaches $2,067,166 in compensation for the lands taken under the congressional act of 1900. It was not until 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation, that Justice Harry Blackmun, in a majority opinion, held that the Lone Wolf doctrine was “discredited” and “had little to commend it as an enduring principle.” See also: Allotment system; General Allotment Act; Indian Rights Association; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Treaties and agreements in the United States. David L. Sterling Sources for Further Study Clark, Blue. “Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock”: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. A short but comprehensive study of the background and implications of the most significant turn-of-the-century Native American court case. Hagan, William T. The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882-1904. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. An account of the organization that participated in the litigation of the Lone Wolf case. Highsaw, Robert B. Edward Douglass White: Defender of the Conservative Faith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. An analysis of the judicial record of the writer of the Supreme Court opinion in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. Legters, Lyman, and Fremont J. Lyden, eds. American Indian Policy: SelfGovernance and Economic Development. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. A series of articles detailing current trends in Native American life and law. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. An exhaustive examination of the legal relationship between Native American tribes and the United States, from the American Revolution to the present. Wilkins, David E. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Close analysis of legal cases that Wilkins argues “mask questionable federal and administrative activities against tribes and individual Indians.”
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Long Walk Date: August, 1863-September, 1866 Locale: Arizona and New Mexico Tribes involved: Navajo Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation Significance: Forced to walk from their ancestral lands to an arid reservation three hundred miles away, the Navajo lose their home and many of their people. Perhaps the most significant event in Navajo history occurred during and immediately after the U.S. Civil War, when U.S. Army troops, under the authority of Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson, methodically raided and subdued the various bands of Navajos who lived between the three rivers (the Colorado, Rio Grande, and San Juan) that encircled the Dinetah, Navajo ancestral lands in present-day Arizona and New Mexico. This event is significant in U.S. history, because it is one of the last major episodes in Carson’s public life, one of the earliest federal attempts to pilot an American Indian reservation policy, and the final military conflict between the Navajo people and the U.S. Army. After Civil War hostilities began in April, 1861, the West was drained of most of its U.S. Army regulars. During the same month, Kit Carson, serving as the Ute Indian agent in Taos, raised the Stars and Stripes in the town plaza, signifying his allegiance to the Union. Carson was commissioned as a colonel in the First New Mexican Volunteers, and there is every indication that he intended to fight against the Confederate Army. However, Colorado volunteers, in the Battle of Valverde on February 21, 1862, drove Confederate forces back from the Rio Grande, and there were no further Confederate incursions in the New Mexico Territory for the balance of the war. Meanwhile, Brigadier General James H. Carleton, who had assumed the position of commander of the Department of New Mexico in 1861, was obsessed with the idea of resettling the natives of the New Mexico Territory. As U.S. settlers had entered the region in greater numbers after 1846, relations deteriorated as a result of thievery and cultural misunderstanding. Among the Navajo, the ladrones (poor in sheep and possessions) usually perpetrated the raids on the settlers, while the ricos (comparatively wealthy) suffered the reprisals. Initially, most ladrones were of the war party, while the ricos were peace-seeking. However, years of suffering from counter-raids and reprisals drew even the rico Navajos into accepting the inevitability of armed conflict with New Mexican settlers.
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As late as December, 1862, eighteen Navajo ricos traveled to Santa Fe to seek peace with General Carleton. Carleton rebuffed them, preoccupied at the time with exiling the Mescalero Apache to a barren stretch of the Pecos River Valley in eastern New Mexico known as Bosque Redondo (“round grove of trees”). This strategy was the beginning of Carleton’s dream of a “Fair Carletonia,” peopled with American Indians who would forgo their pagan habits and accept Christianity and a European American lifestyle. Carleton’s Ultimatum. Once the Apaches were resettled, Carleton, in April, 1863, was willing to talk peace with Navajo chiefs Barboncito and Delgadito, but only on his terms: removal to Bosque Redondo or a fight to the death. The Navajo chiefs apparently tried to explain to Carleton that voluntarily leaving their land would violate their deepest religious beliefs, but Carleton would not relent. In June, 1863, Carleton set July 20, 1863, as a deadline: All Navajos should present themselves at Fort Canby or Fort Wingate; those Navajos remaining at large would be considered as hostiles. Only a handful of Navajos complied with this ultimatum, and Carleton responded by authorizing Colonel Carson to begin scouting expeditions in August, 1863, to capture or kill Navajos, plunder their crops, and seize their livestock. Carson led a number of scouting expeditions and authorized a number of his officers to do the same. Carson also employed Utes as both guides and warriors in hunting the Navajo. Actual military skirmishes between the First New Mexican Volunteers and the Navajo were rare throughout the remainder of 1863. By the end of the year, Carson reported seventy-eight Navajos killed and forty wounded. Perhaps more significant was that more than five thousand sheep, goats, and mules belonging to the Navajo had been confiscated, and more than seventy-five thousand pounds of wheat were destroyed or seized. The Navajo could hide from the scouting expeditions of volunteers, but they left behind their hogans and rancheros for the troops to plunder and seize. While the Navajo tribe was not decimated by war, Carson’s scorched-earth policy laid the foundation for the threat of mass starvation and, therefore, the likelihood of ultimate surrender. In January, 1864, two scouting parties, one led by Carson and the other by Captain Albert Pfeiffer, left Fort Canby, taking parallel routes through the Canyon de Chelly area north of the fort. Each party exchanged gunshots for the Navajo arrows that rained down on them from the upper reaches of the sheer red sandstone walls and ancient Anasazi ruins where the Navajo ensconced themselves. The entire joint expedition resulted in only twenty-three Navajos being killed, but two hundred Navajos surren-
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Long Walk of the Navajos UTAH
COLORADO
Fort Union
Fort Defiance
Gran
de
Canyon de Chelly
Santa Fe
Rio
NEW MEXICO
Las Vegas
ARIZONA
Fort Wingate
Albuquerque
Laguna
Tijeras
Los Pinos
Anton Chico Puerto de Luna
Peco s R iv er
Fort Sumner (Bosque Redondo)
dered, and at least two hundred head of livestock were seized. The peach orchards along the canyon floor were also destroyed. Once the troops returned to Fort Canby, great numbers of surrendering Navajos followed. They were starving, freezing, and dying from exposure. Carson’s march along the length of the floor of Canyon de Chelly seems to have proven that the Navajo could remain in relative safety along its ledges, but that the troops could destroy their crops and orchards and seize their livestock, thereby leaving them to starve or surrender. The Long Walk Commences. By March, 1864, there were six thousand Navajos at Forts Canby and Wingate, several thousand more than even Carleton had expected. The first of a series of Long Walks commenced at this time. Although the U.S. Army provided a limited number of carts and horses, those conveyances generally carried blankets and provisions rather than people. Most of the Navajo walked the entire three hundred miles, a journey that took anywhere from eighteen to forty days, while Carleton’s plans provided for only eight days of government rations for the journey. There was actually a series of Long Walks from Fort Canby to Fort Sumner (Bosque Redondo), although the first, in March, 1864, was the largest. Al-
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though there is no Army record of such deeds, many stories in Navajo oral tradition recount atrocities whereby the old or infirm or pregnant who could not keep up were summarily shot by soldiers. The Navajo never received the full promise of ample food, clothing, and shelter at Bosque Redondo. Carleton planned to make farmers of the hunter-gatherer Navajo, but there was not enough tillable land in arid eastern New Mexico to support more than eight thousand Navajos and the Mescalero Apaches who were already at Fort Sumner. There was not enough grass for the herds of sheep and goats, leading to frequent raids of the government stock by Kiowas and Comanches. The few crops that were raised were attacked by insects and suffered from flood, drought, and hail. Government rations were meager and of poor quality—the flour the Navajo received often was full of bugs—and the food was foreign to the Navajo, who did not consider bacon a satisfactory substitute for beef. In addition, the Navajo had to live in close quarters with the Mescalero Apaches, their old enemies, and there was a bureaucratic war between the War Department and the Department of the Interior. Indian Agent Lorenzo Labadie was ordered not to take charge of the Navajo under the aegis of the Department of the Interior, since technically, they were prisoners of war and should be quartered by the War Department. The Navajo suffered from hunger and cold, while bureaucrats bickered. Carleton sent Carson to Bosque Redondo later in 1864 to serve as supervisor there, but Carson left in disgust after three months, disappointed and embarrassed at the failure of the federal government to provide the stipulated terms of surrender. Carson resigned his commission and returned to Taos, where he died in 1868. Individual bands of the Navajo remained in the Dinetah, most notably one led by Manuelito, withstanding famine, military attack, bad weather, and Navajo treachery. Finally, after repeated attacks by Utes and Hopis deputized by the U.S. Army, Manuelito and twenty-three followers surrendered at Fort Wingate on September 1, 1866. It soon became evident that Carleton’s dream of a “Fair Carletonia” was an abject failure. Carleton was relieved of his command in April, 1867, although it was not until April, 1868, that Manuelito, Barboncito, and other Navajo headmen traveled to Washington, D.C., to ask President Andrew Johnson for permission to return to their ancestral lands. Johnson agreed only to establish a peace commission. The Taylor Peace Commission arrived at Bosque Redondo in May, 1868, with the expectation of offering the Navajo land in Indian territory (now Oklahoma) to the east. Ironically, General William T. Sherman, the architect of his own scorched-earth policy in Georgia several years earlier, was the
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Taylor Commission member who first became convinced that the Navajo should be allowed instead to return home. On June 1, 1868, the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Navajo Tribe of Indians was signed, and the westward Long Walk began by the middle of the month. The initial treaty stipulated only 3.5 million acres for the Navajo (the present-day size of the reservation is 15 million acres) but consecrated Canyon de Chelly as sacred ground to be administered solely by the Navajo tribe. Thus, the Navajo returned to their once and future home, after four years in exile. They never again engaged in military conflict with the U.S. Army. See also: Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council; Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act; Navajo Rehabilitation Act; Navajo War; Pueblo Revolt; Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez. Richard Sax Sources for Further Study Amsden, Charles. “The Navajo Exile at Bosque Redondo.” New Mexico Historical Review 8 (1933): 31-50. A dated but still significant article concerning the Navajo on the Bosque Redondo reservation. Frink, Maurice. Fort Defiance and the Navajos. Boulder, Colo.: Pruett, 1968. This text is directed toward a middle school or high school audience. Chapter 7, “Lost Cause, Long Walk,” covers the relocations. Kelly, Lawrence C. Navajo Roundup: Selected Correspondence of Kit Carson’s Expedition Against the Navajo, 1863-1865. Boulder, Colo.: Pruett, 1970. A collection of personal letters and U.S. Army general orders, especially those of General E. R. S. Canby, Brigadier General James Carleton, and Colonel Kit Carson. McPherson, Robert S. The Northern Navajo Frontier, 1860-1900: Expansion Through Adversity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. A well-documented study of the clash of cultures in the Four Corners area. Trafzer, Clifford. The Kit Carson Campaign: The Last Great Navajo War. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. The definitive text on the Long Walk of the Navajos. Well researched and thoroughly annotated, although with some turgid language, especially when describing landscape. Three maps and sixty-eight illustrations. Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Chapter 3 includes a good partial discussion of the events leading to the Long Walk.
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Longest Walk Date: February 11-July 15, 1978 Locale: From San Francisco, California, to Washington, D.C. Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Native government, Protest movements, Twentieth century history Significance: The Longest Walk, one of the several major Indian protest movements of the 1970’s, was an attempt to persuade the U.S. government to recognize and protect Indian treaty rights and Indian sovereignty. The Longest Walk was a five-month cross-country demonstration by Indian people to protest federal bills in Congress that were seen as destructive of the Indians’ very existence. About two hundred Native Americans began the walk from the once Indian-occupied Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay. Thousands of Indians participated along the way, ultimately arriving in the nation’s capital on July 15, 1978. One of the demonstrators was Russell Means of the American Indian Movement. The protesters set
A modern manifestation of pantribal solidarity was the Longest Walk—a protest march that began in San Francisco in 1978 and ended in Washington, D.C., where Indian leaders lobbied the federal government to recognize its existing treaty obligations. (Library of Congress)
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up a camp at the National Mall, hoping to convince lawmakers not to pass the bills. The pending legislation would have weakened Indian rights to land, resources, and self-government. For example, one bill proposed to limit Indian water rights, while others threatened to cancel Indian hunting and fishing rights and terminate all treaties between the United States and Indian tribes. Congressional supporters and others assured the Indians that the antiIndian bills would not pass. Nevertheless, they agreed with the Indian demonstrators that Congress and the American public should be aware that such legislation had been proposed. The Longest Walk was a symbolic victory for Indian people. It also demonstrated a solidarity among Indians. See also: American Indian Movement; Trail of Broken Treaties. Raymond Wilson
Lord Dunmore’s War Date: April 27-October 10, 1774 Locale: Ohio River region Tribes involved: Shawnee Categories: Colonial history, Eighteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Frontier Virginians and Marylanders battle Shawnees, resulting in relocation of the latter as settlers moved into Kentucky. Lord Dunmore’s War (named for John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, governor of Virginia) was a struggle between the Shawnees and Virginians in the spring and summer of 1774. It represents the culmination of events dating back to Pontiac’s Resistance (1763-1766). For both the American Indians and the colonists, the war carried important ramifications. The victor would control what is now Kentucky. In order to understand how the conflict arose, one must understand the unsettled state of Anglo-Indian relations after 1763. Following Pontiac’s Resistance, British officials had tried to create an alliance with the natives of the Ohio and Illinois region. Using the French model, Britain’s Indian superintendent for the northern colonies, Sir William Johnson, tried to create a mutually intelligible world that would allow colonists and American Indians to conduct diplomatic and economic activities. Two problems undermined the superintendent’s efforts. The first
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problem confronting the relationship was the emergence of colonial communities west of the Appalachian Mountains. Colonists had settled the region in direct violation of the Proclamation of 1763. Although British soldiers often drove them back across the mountains, the settlers often returned. Outside the range of governmental control, these settlers caused tensions with the native communities of the region. The second problem was the British government’s desire to curtail expenditures relating to Indian affairs. The Crown first tried to reduce its commitment by passing some of the costs off on the colonies, but these attempts did not work. As a result, Johnson’s office was unable to meet even the basic necessities for conducting Indian affairs after 1770. Taken together, colonial settlement along the frontier and reduced expenditures meant a worsening of AngloIndian relations in the years preceding Lord Dunmore’s War. The Shawnees’ relationship with the British reached its nadir with the completion of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768. As a result of this treaty, the Six Nations of the Iroquois ceded much of the territory south and east of the Ohio River to land speculators. The ceded land had belonged to the Shawnees, Lenni Lenapes (Delawares), Cherokees, and Mingos, not the Six Nations. The treaty resulted in a series of confrontations between the Shawnees, who rejected the treaty, and the British. Beginning in 1769, skirmishes between the tribes and the frontier colonists became commonplace. These skirmishes continued not only because of reduced expenditures on American Indian affairs but also because of the withdrawal of British soldiers from the colonial frontier. By 1774, British soldiers were stationed at only Kaskaskia, Detroit, and Michilimackinac. Without British soldiers or Indian agents, the Ohio region became a battleground. As tensions between the two sides escalated, Sir William Johnson worked to isolate the Shawnees from their allies. By the spring of 1774, he had isolated the Shawnees from their previous confederates, the Hurons, Miamis, and Potawatomis. His activities broke the Shawnee league. Colonists appreciated the importance of Johnson’s actions when war broke out in April, 1774. For his part, British commander Thomas Gage expressed no surprise when Dunmore’s War began. He had long suspected Virginia’s colonial elites of supporting the frontiersmen in their move west. The Yellow Creek Massacre. The war began on April 27, 1774. On this date, Daniel Greathouse and his followers lured an Iroquois hunting party into a trap at the mouth of the Yellow Creek. Greathouse and his men killed nine people. Those killed at Yellow Creek were followers of the Mingo war chief Tachnechdorus, also called John Logan, the Great Mingo. Logan recruited supporters and retaliated. By July, he and his followers had claimed
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thirteen scalps and the Great Mingo proclaimed himself avenged. Because Virginians were settling on Shawnee lands, Logan focused his reprisals on Virginians in particular rather than colonists (such as Pennsylvanians) in general. If Logan’s actions had been only an isolated response to a massacre, it is doubtful that war would have erupted. However, Logan’s actions were not unique. Further down the Ohio River, Michael Cresap and his associates— who were trying to develop land for future settlers—received a message from John Connolly, Virginia’s resident administrator for the Monongahela region. Connolly’s message implied that a colonial war with the Indians had begun. Situated hundreds of miles beyond colonial settlements, Cresap and his men acted as if war were a reality. They attacked a canoe carrying Lenni Lenape and Shawnee traders. After scalping the Indians, Cresap and his men sought protection in the community of Wheeling. Following the Yellow Creek Massacre, and while Cresap and his men were seeking the shelter of Wheeling, Connolly participated in a condolence ceremony for the victims of Greathouse’s attack. Held at Pittsburgh, the ceremony mollified the Indians’ civil leadership. It did not, however, appease the warriors on either side of the cultural divide. Logan continued his attacks against squatters, and Cresap tried to raise a volunteer unit for military service against the natives. Their actions illustrated how young men on both sides of the cultural divide often dictated the actions of their elders. Attacks Against the Shawnees. As late as June, 1774, it was still possible to avert full-scale war. In July, however, Virginia’s militia moved westward. Their aims were to destroy the Shawnees and open Kentucky for Virginian settlement. Virginian major Angus McDonald led four hundred Virginians across the Ohio River and destroyed five Shawnee villages, including Wakatomica, in early August. Later that month, Dunmore arrived at Pittsburgh. When Shawnee warriors refused his request to meet with him, Dunmore decided to lead an expedition against the Shawnees located along the Scioto River. While marching to its new base of operations at Camp Charlotte, a militia detachment burned the Mingo town at the Salt Licks. In order to prevent the Virginians from invading the Scioto region, nine hundred Shawnees and their allies attacked twelve hundred Virginians at their fortifications at the mouth of the Kanawha River on October 10, 1774. This attack—the Battle of Point Pleasant—resulted in the Shawnees’ defeat. Before the battle at Point Pleasant took place, the traditional leaders of the Shawnee and Lenni Lenape had sought a negotiated settlement with
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Governor Dunmore. He refused to deal with the Shawnee representative, Cornstalk. Dunmore did meet with Cornstalk’s Lenni Lenape counterparts, Captain Pipe and George WhiteEyes, who tried to mediate the problem. Their efforts resulted only in limiting the war, not preventing it. After the Battle of Point Pleasant, however, Cornstalk again tried to negotiate a settlement with Dunmore. The result was the Camp Charlotte Agreement of 1774. The Camp Charlotte Agreement. Governor Dunmore dictated the terms of this agreement. He required the Shawnees to accept Virginia’s interpretation of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. He also required that the Shawnees and Mingos give him hostages as a promise of future good behavior. He demanded that the natives give up their right to hunt on the south side of the Ohio River. In exchange for their promise, Dunmore promised to prohibit Virginians from intruding on Indian lands north of the Ohio River. While Dunmore and Cornstalk discussed peace terms, Logan refused to attend the council. He did, however, send a statement to the council through the trader John Gibson. “Logan’s Lament,” as it came to be known after Thomas Jefferson included it years later in his Notes on the State of Virginia, justified Logan’s actions in the preceding months: Col. Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan. . . . There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. . . . Who is there to mourn for Logan?—Not one.
In response to Logan’s speech, Dunmore ordered a detachment of troops to attack the Mingos at Salt Lick Town. The attack resulted in the death of five Indians and the capture of fourteen prisoners. Following the Virginians’ attack, Lord Dunmore’s War became fused with the American Revolution. American patriots believed Dunmore really was not interested in claiming Kentucky for settlement; they concluded that Dunmore’s real intent was the formation of an army for use against them. By 1775, colonists had turned against Governor Dunmore. As a result, the final treaty ending Lord Dunmore’s War, the Treaty of Pittsburgh, was delayed until October, 1775. Following Lord Dunmore’s War, Shawnee population centers in the Ohio Valley began to change. Most Shawnees left the Muskingum region and moved southwest toward the Scioto and Mad River areas. See also: Indian-white relations: English colonial; Pontiac’s Resistance; Proclamation of 1763. Michael J. Mullin
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Sources for Further Study Jacob, John J. A Biographical Sketch of the Life of the Late Captain Michael Cresap. Cincinnati: J. F. Uhlhorn, 1866. John Jacob worked for Michael Cresap and later married Cresap’s widow. His book challenges the notion that Cresap was responsible for the Yellow Creek Massacre. McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Discusses colonial expansion from the eighteenth century Native American perspective. McConnell sees the Treaty of Fort Stanwix as a deciding factor in the coming of Lord Dunmore’s War. Mayer, Brantz. Tah-Gah-Jute, or Logan and Cresap, an Historical Essay. Albany: Munsell, 1867. The most famous study of the Cresap-Logan controversy written in the nineteenth century. Tanner, Helen Hornbeck, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. This monograph traces Shawnee history through cartographic evidence. Contains a discussion of Lord Dunmore’s War. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Discusses how both Europeans and American Indians sought accommodation and common meaning. Places Lord Dunmore’s War within this context in his analysis of the event.
Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association Date: 1987 Locale: California Tribes involved: Karok, Tolowa, Yurok Categories: Court cases, Twentieth century history, Religion and missionary activities Significance: A U.S. Supreme Court decision raises questions about the enforceability of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. In 1982, the United States Forest Service prepared an environmental impact report for construction of a paved road through federal lands in the Six Rivers National Forest in California. The study reported a section of this land was historically used for religious purposes by Yurok, Karok, and
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Tolowa Indians, and because the site was integral to the religious practices of these people, it recommended the road not be completed. That same year, despite its own report, the Forest Service decided to build the road. After exhausting administrative remedies, a coalition of Indian organizations filed suit in federal court, challenging the decision based on the right to free exercise of religion under the First Amendment and on similar guarantees in the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Indian coalition even though the Court admitted the road would severely affect tribal religious practices. The Court declared that although the free exercise clause affords individual protections, it does not afford an individual right “to dictate the conduct of the government’s internal procedures.” Additionally, it ruled that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act has no enforcement mechanisms that could compel the government to halt construction on the road. This case severely reduced both the intent of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the protections it afforded Indian people, and it raised questions about basic protections afforded American Indian citizens of the United States. See also: American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Carole A. Barrett
Maine Indian Claims Act Date: October 10, 1980 Locale: Maine Tribes involved: Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot Categories: National government and legislation, Reservations and relocation, Treaties, Twentieth century history Significance: Beginning in the 1960’s, tribes in the eastern United States alleged that state governments had illegally taken their lands; the Maine Indian Claims Act prompted a number of eastern tribes to settle similar claims rather than go through the courts. In 1964, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, recognized by the state of Maine but not the federal government, sought protection from what it determined were illegal incursions on their lands. Both state and federal governments refused to assist the tribe. The Passamaquoddy, joined by the Penobscots, initiated a lawsuit in which they asserted protection under the Trade
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and Intercourse Act of 1790, which prevented tribes from selling lands unless approved by Congress. The basis of the lawsuit was that their land transfers never received such approval. The tribes won a series of lower court cases, and so the United States was obliged to bring suit against Maine for illegal purchase of Indian land. The court decisions left 1.25 million acres, two-thirds of Maine, under clouded land titles. The Maliseet Tribe also joined the lawsuit. Maine agreed to settle out of court rather than face complicated, expensive legal negotiations. The settlement extinguished all Indian claims to land. In return, the United States provided $27 million in a trust fund for the tribes, and another $54.5 million was set aside for the tribes to purchase land. The tribes also received federal recognition. Carole A. Barrett See also: Indian Claims Commission; Reservation system of the United States; Trade and Intercourse Acts; Treaties and agreements in the United States.
Major Crimes Act Date: 1885 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Court cases, National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation Significance: The Major Crimes Act gave the U.S. government, rather than tribal courts, criminal jurisdiction to prosecute fourteen major crimes committed by one reservation Indian against another. The Major Crimes Act gave the U.S. government jurisdiction over serious crimes committed by Indians on tribal lands. Congress reacted strongly to the Ex parte Crow Dog (1883) decision, in which an Indian who killed another Indian was released by the federal government because it lacked federal jurisdiction in Indian country. Two years after the Crow Dog incident, Congress passed the Major Crimes Act, which gave the United States the right to prosecute Indians for seven crimes: murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary, and larceny. This law applied to any Indian who committed a crime against another Indian on a reservation.
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Over the years, the list of criminal offenses expanded to include kidnapping, maiming, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault resulting in bodily injury, incest, theft, and sexual abuse. Indians accused of lesser crimes are tried in tribal court. However, federal court decisions narrowed the act so it covers only enrolled Indians who commit crimes on their own reservations. This act transformed the relationship between tribes and the federal government by limiting tribal sovereignty and the power of tribal courts and making it nearly impossible for tribes to deal with serious crimes committed on their reservations. Carole A. Barrett See also: Duro v. Reina; Ex parte Crow Dog; Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe; Public Law 280; Tribal courts; United States v. Kagama.
Manhattan Island purchase Date: May 6, 1626 Locale: Manhattan Island, New Netherland Tribes involved: Algonquian Categories: Colonial history Significance: The Dutch gain a stronghold in North America that they will relinquish to the British four decades later. In the early seventeenth century, the Netherlands, like other nations of northern Europe, sent out explorers to search for a sea route around North America to the riches of eastern Asia. The principal explorer for the Dutch was Henry Hudson, an Englishman, who, in 1609, explored the river that bears his name. When Hudson and other navigators failed to find the Northwest Passage, the Dutch, like other Europeans, decided to claim the lands that they had found in the Americas and exploit their resources. While hoping to discover gold and silver, as the Spanish had done to the south, the Dutch soon found that furs were the most readily exploitable resource of the middle Atlantic coastal region that they claimed. The Dutch could obtain these furs by trading with the Native Americans, who would do most of the trapping in exchange for European goods. The demand for pelts was so great in Europe that one shipload could make its investors wealthy. In the interests of further discovery and to stimulate trade, the Dutch legislative body, the States-General, granted to its traders and explorers the
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exclusive right to make four voyages to any new lands that they might explore. Under this grant, in 1614, five ships visited the Hudson River, which the Dutch then called Mauritius. Later that same year, these traders combined as the United New Netherland Company and received a monopoly on the trade of the Hudson Valley from the States-General. Ignoring Manhattan Island, these early traders sailed up the Hudson River to the site of present-day Albany, where they erected Fort Nassau on Castle Island as a base of operations. There they exchanged their goods for furs with the Mohican tribal peoples. Following the expiration of the charter of the United New Netherland Company in 1618, a succession of different companies plied the Hudson River fur trade. Dutch Colonization Begins. In 1621, a number of influential merchants obtained from the States-General a charter for the Dutch West India Company with the sole right to trade on the Atlantic coasts of Africa and North and South America for twenty-four years. Although the new company organized primarily to challenge Spanish control of Latin America, it also was interested in the Hudson River area. In 1624, the company dispatched Captain Cornelius May with a shipload of thirty families to settle in North America. Opposite Castle Island, the group founded a trading post they named Fort Orange; to the south, they formed a settlement on the Delaware
“New Amsterdam” at the southern end of Manhattan Island, in an erroneously reversed engraving from a Dutch book of 1651. (Library of Congress)
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River. They also may have established a trading house on Governor’s Island, in what would become New York City’s harbor. Coastal Algonquian tribes probably were in the process of forming a coalition when the Dutch arrived and disrupted that maneuver. The first two governors of New Netherland, Cornelius May and Willem Verhulst, lived at the Delaware River site and administered the colony from there. Peter Minuit, the third governor and first director-general of New Netherland, shifted his center of operations to Manhattan Island. A native of Wesel, then in the Duchy of Cleves, he was probably of French or Walloon descent. He impressed many as a shrewd and somewhat unscrupulous man. One of his first acts after arriving on Manhattan Island early in 1626 was to buy the rights to the island from an Algonquian tribe, the Canarsee, for trinkets worth about sixty guilders, or about twenty-four dollars. There is some debate whether Minuit actually arranged the purchase himself or if his predecessor, Verhulst, did, but a May, 1626, letter revealed Minuit’s intentions to buy it. Controversy also surrounds the morality of the purchase. Tradition commonly calls the sale an unconscionable steal or a tremendous bargain. However, some historians suggest that the conversion to twenty-four dollars is too low and that, refiguring the payment in 1986 dollars, the Dutch paid $31 billion. Moreover, the Canarsee certainly placed a different value on the beads, other trade goods, and land than did the Europeans; the concept of land “ownership” did not exist among most indigenous people or, at least, it had a meaning completely different from that of Europeans. Because the Manhattan tribe, whose name the island reflected, had a better claim to it than did the Canarsee, Minuit later apparently also bought the island from them. Through this, their first major land purchase from the Native Americans, the Dutch secured a semblance of a legal title to Manhattan. At the time of the purchase, it was a beautiful island, covered with a great forest and abounding with wildlife and wild fruits. Minuit made New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of Manhattan, the nucleus of Dutch activity in the area. A large fort, pentagonal in shape, surrounded on three sides by a great moat and fronting on the bay, was one of the first structures built. When it was complete, Minuit brought several families from Fort Orange to settle in the town. He also ordered the evacuation of Fort Nassau on the South River, near present-day Gloucester, New Jersey, and transferred the garrison to New Amsterdam. Despite his vigorous administration of the colony, the parent country recalled him for examination in 1632 and dismissed him from the Dutch West India Company’s service.
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Land Grants and Native Relations. In the meantime, in 1629, the directorate of the company, with the approval of the States-General, had issued a Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions that provided for the grant of large estates, called patroonships, to those members of the company who would recruit at least fifty settlers more than fifteen years of age to settle their lands within four years. These grants ostensibly were to promote farming in New Netherland, but their primary intention was to encourage settlers to go up the Hudson River to settle and make additional contacts with the Native Americans and thereby extend the fur trade. Traders presumably would ship the furs down the river to New Amsterdam, from where the Dutch West India Company had the sole right to export them. With one exception, Rensselaerwyck, these patroonships never measured up to Dutch expectations. Relations with the Native Americans remained mostly harmonious and the fur trade continued to prosper until 1641, when hostilities broke out. The fighting, called Kieft’s War after Governor Willem Kieft, resulted from his attempt to collect taxes from the Algonquian tribes for Dutch “protection.” The conflict ended with a treaty on August 29, 1645, but it had already disrupted the fur trade and forced Kieft to relinquish some of his arbitrary power to advisory bodies to obtain popular support for the prosecution of the war. In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant succeeded Kieft and became the last Dutch governor or director-general of New Netherland. It was he who surrendered the colony to the British in 1664. The brightness of the early promise of New Netherland, lustrous with the purchase of Manhattan in 1626, faded within the half century. Although the Dutch would retain significant economic and cultural influence in the renamed New York, the English would benefit even more from one of the world’s best harbors. See also: Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial. William L. Richter, updated by Thomas L. Altherr Sources for Further Study Brasser, Ted J. “The Coastal New York Indians in the Early Contact Period.” In Neighbors and Intruders: An Ethnohistorical Exploration of the Indians of Hudson’s River, edited by Laurence M. Hauptman and Jack Campisi. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1978. Argues that the coastal Algonquians were probably in the process of forming a coalition when the Dutch purchased Manhattan. Condon, Thomas J. New York Beginnings: The Commercial Origins of New Netherland. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Monograph examining the Dutch purchase decision as part of a wider commercial policy.
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Francis, Peter, Jr. “The Beads That Did Not Buy Manhattan Island.” New York History 67, no. 1 (January, 1986): 4-22. Asserts that the trinkets the Dutch paid for the island were much more valuable than common assumptions hold. Gehring, Charles. “Peter Minuit’s Purchase of Manhattan Island: New Evidence.” De Halve Maen 54 (Spring, 1980): 6ff. Discusses a letter from Minuit suggesting his intention to buy Manhattan Island. Rink, Oliver A. Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Argues strongly for Minuit’s mastery in establishing New Amsterdam. Trelease, Allen W. Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960. Places the Dutch purchase in the context of other relations with Native Americans around New Netherland. Argues that the money paid was worth more to the Canarsee tribal people than usually is presumed. Weslager, C. A. “Did Minuit Buy Manhattan Island from the Indians?” De Halve Maen 43 (October, 1968): 5-6. Questions whether Minuit actually purchased the island and suggests that Verhulst did instead.
Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty Date: October 21, 1867 Locale: Southwestern Kansas, Texas Tribes involved: Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Southern Cheyenne Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Treaties Significance: Tribes of the Great Plains enter an agreement that ultimately results in total submission to the U.S. government. For many years, five Native American tribes—the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Kiowa-Apache, the Southern Cheyenne, and the Arapaho—roamed the vast area of the southern Great Plains, following huge buffalo herds. This area became parts of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. Northern Cheyenne, Sioux, and other tribes lived a similar life on the northern Great Plains. Warfare was a part of the daily life of these tribes, generally as a result of intertribal rivalries and disputes concerning control of certain sections of the plains. This traditional life began to change when
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the first Europeans began to arrive on the Great Plains in the sixteenth century. Until the early nineteenth century, however, the changes were limited to the acquisition of steel knives, guns, and other products from European traders. The tribes soon became dependent on these items, but their dayby-day life changed very little. The dominant leaders of the region were the Comanches, called the Lords of the Southern Plains. Joined by the Kiowas, with whom they established friendly relations about 1790, they controlled the smaller KiowaApache tribe and all land south of the Arkansas River. Their chief rivals north of the Arkansas River were the southern Cheyenne. In 1840, the Comanches and Cheyennes established a fragile peace that also included the Arapaho, the less numerous allies of the Cheyenne. This peace came at the beginning of a decade that would change forever the face of the southern Great Plains. In 1846, the United States annexed Texas. The end of the Mexican War in 1848 added New Mexico, Arizona, and other areas of the Southwest to the United States. For the next half century, the fragile Native American peace of 1840 became a strong bond of brotherhood for the southern plains tribes as they fought to defend themselves and their land against European American settlers, railroads, buffalo hunters, soldiers, and other intruders. With the acquisition of Texas, the United States inherited a long and bloody conflict between Texans and Comanches, who were described by some as the best light cavalry in the world. The Comanches had long hunted from the Arkansas River to the Rio Grande. In 1821, the government of Mexico began giving land grants in west Texas to settlers from the United States. These settlers immediately challenged the Comanches for control of the area. Comanche Reservations. The first attempt to confine the Comanches to reservations was a May, 1846, treaty that created two small reservations on the Brazos River. The few Comanches who settled on them soon yearned for the free-spirited life on the vast plains. By 1850, discoveries of precious metals from the southern Rocky Mountains to California were drawing numerous wagon and pack trains through the southern plains. These were soon followed by stagecoach lines and, later, railroads. The increase in traffic was paralleled by increased confrontation with the tribes, who were accustomed to unhindered pursuit of the buffalo. Between 1846 and 1865, several treaties were signed between the Native Americans of the southern plains and the government of the United States. Lack of confidence, sarcasm, and open contempt on both sides doomed these treaties to failure. The frustration felt by the Native Americans in-
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Arapaho and Comanche council at Medicine Lodge Creek in 1867, where the tribes’ leaders signed a treaty with the U.S. government designed to end wars on the southern Plains. (Library of Congress)
creased when cholera and other diseases carried by Europeans began rapidly decreasing the native populations. In March of 1863, a party of Native American chiefs from the southern plains went to Washington, D.C., and met with President Abraham Lincoln. Returning home loaded with gifts, these leaders were convinced that coexistence with European Americans was possible. This confidence was hard to maintain after the bloody and unprovoked massacre of Cheyennes at Sand Creek, in Colorado, the following year. Nevertheless, Ten Bears of the Comanche, who had met President Lincoln, Black Kettle of the Cheyenne, who had escaped from Sand Creek, and other chiefs still felt that peace was their best protection and was possible to achieve. Treaties and Peace Commissions. The next effort toward peace was the Little Arkansas Treaty in October, 1865. Representatives of the five southern plains tribes met with U.S. commissioners at the mouth of the Little Arkansas River near Wichita, Kansas. The government wanted to end native American hindrances to movements in and through the plains. The treaty, little more than a stopgap measure, committed the tribes to reservations— the Cheyenne and Arapaho in northern Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and
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the Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa-Apache in western Texas and southwestern Indian Territory. These boundaries were impossible to enforce and did not end the violence, but the treaty set the stage for a more important meeting two years later. In July, 1867, Congress created a peace commission to establish permanent settlements of grievances between Native Americans and European Americans on the Great Plains. The commission was led by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel Taylor and included a senator and three generals. The group chose to meet representatives of the southern plains tribes on the banks of Medicine Lodge Creek in southwestern Kansas. Joining them there were more than four thousand Native Americans representing all five tribes, but not all bands of the tribes. Noticeably absent was the Quahadi, a Comanche band that wanted no peace with the United States government. The council opened on October 19, 1867, with Senator John B. Henderson giving the opening remarks. Under a large brush arbor, he referred to reservation homes, rich farmland, livestock, churches, and schools for all Native Americans. Although most tribal leaders accepted the promises as positive, the idea of being restricted to reservations covering only a fraction of their beloved Great Plains was sickening. The Kiowa chief Satanta, or White Bear, lamented, “I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die.” The Yamparika Comanche chief Ten Bears gave one of the most eloquent statements, declaring, I was born where there were no inclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. . . . when I see [soldiers cutting trees and killing buffalo] my heart feels like bursting with sorrow.
In spite of such emotional appeals, Ten Bears and other Comanche chiefs signed the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek on October 21, 1867, thereby committing their people to life on the reservation. Black Kettle, with the horrors of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre fresh in his mind, represented the Cheyenne at the council. He would not sign the treaty until other Cheyenne chiefs arrived on October 26. Although less happy with the treaty than the Comanche and Kiowa leaders, the Cheyenne chiefs signed, primarily to get ammunition for their fall buffalo hunt. The Arapaho chiefs soon did likewise. At the end of the council meeting, Satank rode alone to bid farewell to the Peace Commission. He expressed his desire for peace and declared that the Comanche and the Kiowa no longer wanted to shed the blood of the white man.
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The Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek restricted the five southern Plains tribes to reservations in the western half of Indian Territory. However, vague terminology and unwritten promises made the treaty impossible to understand or to enforce. Violence soon erupted on the southern plains. One year after Medicine Lodge Creek, Black Kettle was killed in a confrontation similar to the Sand Creek Massacre, this time on the Washita River in Indian Territory. The violence escalated for several years, then dwindled to isolated incidents before ending at Wounded Knee in 1890. A poignant illustration of the ultimate effect of the treaty occurred on June 8, 1871, when the seventy-year-old Satank—who along with Satanta and a young war chief named Big Tree had been arrested for attacking a mule train carrying food that the ration-deprived Indians sorely needed— was being transported to Texas to stand trial for murder. Chewing his own wrists in order to slip out of his manacles, Satank then attacked a guard and was shot dead, fulfilling a prophecy that he had uttered only minutes before to fellow prisoners: “Tell them I am dead. . . . I shall never go beyond that tree.” See also: Sand Creek Massacre; Washita River Massacre; Wounded Knee Massacre. Glenn L. Swygart Sources for Further Study Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Places the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek in the context of Native American history in the western United States. Grinnell, George Bird. The Fighting Cheyennes. 1915. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956. An author who observed the Cheyenne at first hand presents their history up to 1890. Hagan, William T. United States-Comanche Relations. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. The most complete coverage of the council and treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Five Hundred Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. A well-illustrated history of North America from its original inhabitants’ viewpoint; pages 371-374 cover the treaty, including direct quotations from Indian leaders. Mooney, James. Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians. 1898. Reprint. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979. Provides a chronology of the tribe. Rollings, Willard H. The Comanche. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Describes the change in Comanche life after the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty.
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Meech Lake Accord Date: Proposed 1987; defeated June, 1990 Locale: Quebec Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Treaties, Twentieth century history Significance: A coalition of native organizations rallied support around an Indian politician and successfully prevented the passage of a constitutional provision that failed to recognize aboriginal rights. Fears that Quebec might break away from the rest of Canada led Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and the ten provincial premiers in 1987 to propose a set of amendments to the 1982 Constitution Act. The proposal, known as the Meech Lake Accord after the site of the meeting, recognized French-speaking Quebec as one of the founding nations of Canada and as a distinct society with its own language and culture. The accord, however, granted no such courtesy to the aboriginal peoples of Canada. In order for the accord to become law, it required ratification by all ten provinces before June 23, 1990. An additional provision of the Meech Lake Accord dealt with admission of a new province to the Confederation. That provision required the unanimous consent of the ten existing provinces in order to establish a new province. Since many of the provinces have territorial desires to extend their borders north, this virtually ensured that the Yukon and Northwest territories, as well as the proposed Nunavut Territory, would be precluded from ever achieving provincial status. Unlike the rest of Canada, the two regions have overwhelmingly native populations. Native organizations fought bitterly against ratification of the accord. Their leaders insisted that native cultures were no less distinct than Quebec’s and that aboriginal rights also deserved formal recognition in the body of the Constitution. Since the courts had held that despite the addition of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the Constitution, aboriginal rights were not assured, the natives’ concerns were well justified. The leaders further demanded guarantees that they would be given a role in all future First Ministers’ conferences affecting natives. George Erasmus, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, was especially vocal. Thinking that a looming deadline would help assure passage, Prime Minister Mulroney delayed pushing for ratification of the accord until the very end of the ratification period. That delay proved fatal to the proposal.
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It allowed Elijah Harper, Manitoba’s only native legislator, to prevent consideration of the Meech Lake Accord by the Manitoba Legislative Assembly. Supported by native organizations, Harper exploited a procedural error made by Manitoba premier Gary Filmon. Manitoba law required unanimous consent of the legislators to begin public hearings on any issue with less than a forty-eight-hour notice. Harper withheld his consent, and the deadline for ratification passed without the Meech Lake Accord ever being considered by the Manitoba Legislative Assembly. See also: Indian-white relations: Canadian; Nunavut Territory. Richard G. Condon
Menominee Restoration Act Date: December 22, 1973 Locale: Wisconsin Tribes involved: Menominee Categories: National government and legislation, Protest movements, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: The federal policy of termination, which sought to dissolve the government’s special legal relationship with tribes, was effectively destroyed when the Menominee tribe was restored to full federal status. In June, 1954, the United States terminated its relationship with the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin, in part because the tribe was so successful in managing its resources. The Menominee owned their own sawmill and operated a hospital and utility company on their reservation. The government decided the Menominee could be self-sufficient. Termination caused an abrupt change of fortune for the tribe. The reservation became Menominee County. Property taxes were high, unemployment rose, and the hospital and utility companies closed. Most devastating, while the tribal lands, assets, and sawmill were formed into a corporation composed of all former tribal members, non-Indian shareholders, who managed the shares of minors and incompetents, dominated the corporation.The corporation began to sell valuable Menominee lakefront property and mismanaged the sawmill operation, and soon Menominee County became the poorest county in Wisconsin. In 1969, Menominee activists organized DRUMS, Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders,
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to prevent further land sales and to seek restoration of federal recognition. Both the State of Wisconsin and Congress supported restoration. In 1973, Congress passed Public Law 93-197, which repealed termination, granted federal status to the Menominee, and returned their lands to full trust status. Carole A. Barrett See also: Federally recognized tribes; Public Law 280; Termination Resolution; Trail of Broken Treaties; Tribe.
Meriam Report Date: 1928 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Education, National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: This report documented the failures of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help Indian people and thus helped lead to the 1930’s reforms of John Collier’s Indian New Deal. In 1926, Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work asked the Institute for Government Research (Brookings Institution) at The Johns Hopkins University to conduct a nonpolitical investigation of Indian affairs. Work’s goal was to counter the harsh criticisms of John Collier and other Indian Office critics. The results of the Brookings study were published in 1928 as The Problem of Indian Administration, popularly known as the Meriam Report after Lewis Meriam, who headed the investigation. The report condemned the allotment policy that had been instituted with the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887, as well as the poor quality of services provided Indian people by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). It urged protection for Indian property and recommended that Indians be allowed more freedom to manage their own affairs. The Meriam Report emphasized the BIA’s educational role and called for higher academic standards in BIA schools. W. Carson Ryan, Jr., a prominent figure in the progressive education movement, wrote most of the education section of the Meriam Report, with help from Henry Roe Cloud (a Winnebago). The education section was influenced by the teachings of John Dewey and other progressive educators.
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In 1921, all Indian schools had their appropriations for food and clothing cut 25 percent. These cuts were a result of government debts from World War I. This underfunding of BIA schools continued through the 1920’s. In one extreme case, a Red Cross investigator found students to be subsisting on a diet of bread, black coffee, and syrup for breakfast; bread and boiled potatoes for dinner and supper; and a quarter cup of milk with each meal. In general, the Meriam Report found the food in boarding schools to be “deficient in quantity, quality and variety.” The poor food made Indian students more susceptible to tuberculosis and trachoma, which were endemic in Indian communities. Half-day student labor allowed the government to save even more money educating Indians, and the Meriam Report noted that some of the work required of students violated state child labor laws. Among other activities, students raised crops, worked in dairies, made and mended their own clothes, and cleaned their schools. Flogging and other severe forms of punishment existed at some schools. The Meriam Report found that most BIA schools had locked rooms or isolated buildings used as “jails”; in some schools, children were forced to “maintain a pathetic degree of quietness.” To quell the growing criticism of the government’s Indian policy, President Herbert Hoover in 1929 appointed a fellow Quaker and president of the Indian Rights Association, Charles J. Rhoads, to be commissioner of Indian affairs. Rhoads got Ryan to become director of Indian education. Rhoads and Ryan began to implement the recommendations of the Meriam Report, including an end to a uniform BIA curriculum that stressed only white cultural values. See also: Allotment system; American Indian Higher Education Consortium; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Carlisle Indian School; General Allotment Act; Indian Education Acts; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; Kennedy Report; National Congress of American Indians. Jon Reyhner
Metacom’s War Date: June 20, 1675 Locale: New England colonies Tribes involved: Narragansett, Nipmuck, Pocasset, Sakonnet, Wampanoag
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Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: The first large-scale conflict between New England colonists and Native Americans. Metacom’s War, also known as King Philip’s War, began on June 20, 1675, when Wampanoag, or Pokanoket, warriors began looting English houses in southern Plymouth Colony (now Massachusetts) on the edge of Wampanoag country. Serious fighting began at Swansea on June 24. The causes of the conflict were both economic and cultural. Through a series of treaties, much native land had passed into the hands of English settlers, and the remaining Wampanoag homeland, Mount Hope Peninsula on Narragansett Bay, was in danger of being completely surrounded by English settlements. This expansion of English-controlled territory had brought many Indians under English political control, with the imposition of alien social mores. English courts, for example, sometimes sentenced tribesmen to fines or whippings for violating the Sabbath by such activities as firing a gun on Sunday. There also was growing pressure on Native Americans to convert to Christianity. Tribal chiefs (called sachems in New
An engraver’s depiction of Wampanoag chief Massasoit meeting settlers of Plymouth Colony in 1621. Increasing numbers of colonists caused goodwill between English and Wampanoags to deteriorate to the point of war in 1675, led by Massasoit’s son Metacom. (Library of Congress)
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England) and religious leaders (powwows) strongly opposed conversion, because it tended to weaken their traditional influence. Massasoit (renamed Ousamequin late in life), the paramount sachem of the Wampanoags and an ally and friend of the English since 1621, had died about 1661, and after his death, tensions rapidly mounted. Massasoit’s eldest son, Wamsutta, called Alexander by the English, became sachem on his father’s death. Wamsutta died in 1661, shortly after being required by English authorities to explain rumors that he was considering an uprising. Then another son, Metacom or Metacomet, known to the English as King Philip, became sachem, and the next few years witnessed a series of disputes. By 1671, friendly Native Americans were warning Puritan authorities that Philip was organizing an alliance of tribes to join with the Wampanoags in a war of extermination against the English. War Breaks Out. While the evidence for such a conspiracy is strong, war, sparked by the trial and execution at Plymouth of three Wampanoags for murder, seems to have broken out before Metacom’s alliance was perfected. In January, 1675, a Christian Wampanoag named John Sassamon, who had just warned Plymouth of Metacom’s plans, was found murdered. On the testimony of an Indian who claimed to have witnessed the deed, three Wampanoags, including an important counselor of Metacom, were convicted and hanged on June 8. Metacom apparently was unable to restrain the rage of his warriors, and violence broke out before he was ready. The war quickly spread to Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and later to Rhode Island, as other tribal groups, drawn in by Metacom’s diplomacy or angered by threats from colonial authorities, went on the attack. The Wampanoags were joined by the related Sakonnet and Pocasset bands to the east of Narragansett Bay, by Nipmucks from the interior of Massachusetts, by the Narragansetts of present-day Rhode Island, and by smaller groups such as the river tribes of the Connecticut Valley. The English colonists were supported by American Indians who often were the traditional enemies of tribes in Metacom’s alliance, so Indian New England was not united in Metacom’s War. The Mohegans and Pequots of southern Connecticut served with the English, as did hundreds of Christian Indians from the “praying towns” of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Niantics of southern Rhode Island remained neutral. Metacom sought the assistance of the Mohawks of New York Colony to the west, but the Mohawks aided the English by attacking their old Wampanoag enemies. Ambush Warfare. In the early months, the Wampanoags and their allies, well armed with trade muskets, were too skillful and aggressive for the En-
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glish. They repeatedly ambushed parties of colonial militiamen and assaulted and burned outlying English towns. Unskilled in forest warfare and distrustful of friendly tribesmen, the colonists were unable to pin down the enemy. The English usually had no inkling of the town chosen for attack, so hostile chiefs concentrated their forces and often greatly outnumbered the defending garrison. By using Indian allies as scouts, English militia officers learned to avoid ambush and to operate more effectively in the forest. Eventually, special colonial units that could remain in the field for weeks were used to pursue American Indian bands; disease, cold, and starvation aided the colonists in wearing down the tribes. The most effective such unit was a small, mixed force of English militia and Indian allies commanded by Captain Benjamin Church of Plymouth Colony. It was Church’s company that eventually ran down Metacom and the handful of Wampanoags still with him, directed by a surrendered Wampanoag to a swamp where they had taken refuge. Metacom was killed, shot by an Indian while trying to slip away once more, on August 12, 1676. By this time, as starving groups of Indians straggled in to surrender, the war was dragging to a close. The much larger population and economic resources of the English had won out. In spite of the warriors’ initial successes, it had become clear that there was no real prospect of driving the English into the sea. To the northeast in New Hampshire and Maine, where the Abenaki peoples had risen against the English, the war continued into 1678. Both sides used ruthless methods, often killing women, children, and the elderly. Indian attackers regularly attempted to burn colonists’ houses with the inhabitants inside them, and sometimes tortured prisoners. Perhaps the most strikingly ruthless act committed by the English took place in the Great Swamp Fight, December 19, 1676. A force of a thousand militiamen marched into a frozen swamp deep in the Rhode Island forest, led there by a Narragansett turncoat, and attacked perhaps a thousand Narragansetts sheltered in a log-walled fort. Forcing their way inside, the English set the fort afire. As many as six hundred Narragansetts, many of them women and children, perished in the blaze. Some eighty Englishmen were killed or died of wounds. Metacom’s War has been called the bloodiest war, proportionally, in the nation’s history, with some nine thousand of the eighty thousand people in New England killed. Of these, one-third were English and two-thirds Indians. Of New England’s ninety towns, fifty-two were attacked and seventeen completely burned. The frontier of settlement was pushed back many miles. The military power and the independence of the tribal people of southern New England had been crushed forever. Hundreds of Native American captives, including Metacom’s wife and small son, were sold
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into slavery by the colonial governments to help defray the war’s cost. Other captives, considered to be important war chiefs or those responsible for particular atrocities, were tried and publicly executed. See also: Bacon’s Rebellion; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Pequot War; Pontiac’s Resistance; Powhatan Wars; Prehistory: Northeast. Bert M. Mutersbaugh Sources for Further Study Bourne, Russell. The Red King’s Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675-1678. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A detailed treatment of the war that is especially critical of the motives and acts of the colonists. Maps, illustrations, and index. Leach, Douglas Edward. Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War. New York: Norton Library Edition, 1966. This elegantly written study, long considered the standard modern account of the war, indicts English land hunger as a cause of the war. Maps, illustrations, and index. Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Random House, 1999. A very well-received history of Metacom’s war, arguing that the conflict between Europeans and Indians served to crystallize a sense of American self-identity on the part of the colonists. Lincoln, Charles A., ed. Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699. New York: Scribner’s, 1913. Reprint. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1941. Contains a number of contemporaneous accounts of the war, including The Soveraignty & Goodness of God . . . the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson, Rowlandson’s account of her capture in the attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1676. Her often reprinted classic is the earliest American captivity narrative. Rowlandson reports firsthand exchanges with Metacom, who at times traveled with the mixed band that held her prisoner. Malone, Patrick M. The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Study of Native American military tactics and their evolution under the influence of European weapons and methods. Argues that New England’s natives adopted the more ruthless methods of total war through English influence and example. Map, illustrations, and index. Schulz, Eric, and Michael Tougias. King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict. Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman, 1999. A detailed history of Metacom’s war, as well as a guide to the sites of conflict.
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Slotkin, Richard, and James K. Folsom, eds. So Dreadful a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676-1677. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. Six contemporaneous accounts, including Rowlandson’s narrative and the liveliest, best contemporary description of the fighting, Thomas Church’s Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War (1716), based on the recollections of his father, Captain Benjamin Church.
Minnesota Uprising Date: August-December, 1862 Locale: Minnesota Valley, Minnesota Tribes involved: Eastern (Santee) Sioux Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Wars and battles Significance: The Minnesota Uprising was a result of the reservation policies forced upon the Eastern Sioux by the U.S. government. Deprived of their annual distribution of annuities during the summer of 1862, the Eastern (Santee) Sioux—Mdewakanton, Wahpekute, Wahpeton, and Sisseton—grew angry and indignant. Warehouses were full of food and other supplies, but Thomas Galbraith, the Indian agent, refused to give it to the Indians until the cash annuities arrived. The agent feared he would not receive his customary monetary kickback. Once an independent, self-sufficient group, the Eastern Sioux had become dependent on annuities for their survival. When Minnesota became a territory, a census indicated that Eastern Sioux outnumbered the six thousand white settlers by more than two to one. When Minnesota became a state in 1858 and the number of white settlers increased, Indians ceded much of their land. The treaties of 1851 and 1858 saw the Sioux cede 28 million acres to the whites in exchange for annuities and reservation life. Faced with the starvation of his people, Little Crow—an unusually articulate leader—tried to persuade Galbraith to distribute the food to his hungry people. His arguments fell on deaf ears. The attitude of the white trader Andrew Myrick typifies the lack of concern toward the Indians’ condition: If the Indians were hungry, let them eat grass or dung. The Indians’ anger over Galbraith’s decision, years of mistreatment by white officials, and the threat of starvation came to a head when four young
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warriors murdered five white settlers on August 17, 1862. As a result of these actions, militant Mdewakanton and Wahpekute chiefs persuaded Little Crow to lead an assault on the whites. On August 18, 1862, they attacked the Redwood Agency, killing twenty men and taking twelve women captive. Among the dead was Myrick, his body mutilated and his mouth stuffed with grass as an answer to his callous remark. After this attack, the Indians swept throughout the countryside plundering, looting, killing, and raping. The white settlement at New Ulm, for one, suffered staggering losses but repelled the attackers. The Indians were decisively defeated by General Henry Sibley’s troops at the Battle of Wood Lake on September 23. This battle virtually ended Sioux resistance. On December 26 of 1862, 38 out of 303 Sioux were tried and convicted of rape and murder. They were sentenced to death by mass hanging. Little Crow, who fled west, was killed during the summer of 1863 by a Minnesota farmer. As a result of the uprising, between four hundred and eight hundred whites were killed. In addition, the Eastern Sioux were forced to relocate to reservations in present-day South Dakota. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Sioux War. Raymond Wilson and Sharon K. Wilson
An 1863 engraving of the mass execution at Monkato of participants in the Minnesota Sioux uprising of 1862. (Library of Congress)
372 / Modoc War
Modoc War Date: November 29, 1872-June 1, 1873 Locale: Boundary of Northern California and southern Oregon Tribes involved: Klamath, Modoc Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Wars and battles Significance: The Modoc War was another example of attempted Indian resistance to the loss of their homelands. In 1864, the Modocs signed a treaty in which they agreed to leave the Lost River Valley, in Northern California and southern Oregon, and live on a reservation with the Klamaths. By 1872, Kintpuash, called Captain Jack by the whites, and other Modocs found reservation life and policies unacceptable. They missed their homeland and could no longer endure sharing a reservation with the Klamaths, who outnumbered them and made life extremely difficult for them. Kintpuash and a group of Modocs decided to return south to the ceded lands at Lost River. White settlers, whose numbers had continued to increase, refused to accept them and demanded that the Modocs return to the reservation. Government officials tried in vain to persuade the Modocs to do so. On November 29, 1872, troops attacked Kintpuash’s camp at Lost River. The Indians fled, crossed Tule Lake, and strategically entrenched themselves in the Lava Beds, a natural fortress on the lake’s southern shore. For four months, Kintpuash skillfully defended the area with about sixty men against forces that numbered nearly a thousand. The government again tried negotiation, creating a peace commission headed by General Edward R. S. Canby, a Civil War hero. Kintpuash favored negotiating for a settlement, but other Modoc leaders such as Hooker Jim and Curley-Headed Doctor forced Kintpuash to accept a plan to kill the peace commissioners at a meeting that was to take place on Good Friday, April 11, 1873. At this meeting, Kintpuash and other Modocs drew their hidden weapons and attacked. Two of the four commissioners were killed, including General Canby, who thus became the only regular army general killed in the Indian wars. This rash action provoked a national outcry for revenge. More troops and officers were sent. Meanwhile, factionalism intensified among the Modocs. In May of 1873 the army defeated a Modoc band, and some of the defeated Modocs agreed to help the army catch Kintpuash. He was finally
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Late nineteenth century sketch of an 1873 skirmish in the Modoc War. (Library of Congress)
captured on June 1. All the Modoc prisoners were taken to Fort Klamath, Oregon. Kintpuash and several other Modocs were tried and found guilty of the murders of the two peace commissioners. Kintpuash and three others were hanged on October 3, 1873, with two other Modocs receiving life sentences at Alcatraz. The executed Modocs’ heads were severed and sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C. The other Modocs were removed to the Quapaw Agency in Oklahoma; in 1909, they were allowed to return to the Klamath Reservation. The Modoc War lasted seven months and cost more than $500,000. The war seriously weakened the Indian Peace Policy, a program under the Grant administration that attempted to use reservations as a panacea for the “Indian Problem.” See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933. Raymond Wilson
374 / Natchez Revolt
Natchez Revolt Date: 1729 Locale: Natchez, Mississippi Tribes involved: Natchez Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: The Natchez Revolt gave rise to the French policy of encouraging enmity among the different Indian groups in order to forestall future uprisings. The Natchez Revolt occurred on November 28, 1729. The main factor underlying this event was the ineptness of French colonial rule, which controlled this region from the late seventeenth century. The Natchez were first encountered by the French on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River, at the location of the modern town of Natchez, Mississippi. In 1713, the French built a trading post there, evidence of their desire to control the region. Skirmishes between the Natchez and the French resulted in the 1716 construction of Fort Rosalie and in colonial settlement in its vicinity. After the fort was built, there were two additional small Natchez uprisings, although each was swiftly quelled. Commandant de Chepart, placed in control of Fort Rosalie in 1728, marred his command with drunkenness and other abuses as well as with his insensitivity toward the Natchez. Within a year, de Chepart antagonized the Indian community with his proposal to establish his own plantation on fertile lands of the Natchez White Apple village. He proposed the use of force to assist in the relocation of the aboriginal inhabitants. In response, the Natchez planned war; their ceremonial preparations lasted for several months, culminating in a November attack on the French. They killed more than two hundred settlers, and they captured approximately fifty colonists and three hundred slaves. On January 27, 1730, Sieur Jean-Paul Le Seur led a five-hundred-strong Choctaw force against the Natchez in retaliation. They managed to rescue most of the surviving women and children, plus approximately a hundred slaves; in the process they killed about the same number of Natchez. A week later, the French force received reinforcements from New Orleans, and they laid siege to the Natchez, who agreed to surrender on February 25. In punishment, approximately four hundred Natchez were enslaved by the French and shipped to the West Indies. An indeterminate number escaped and sought refuge with the Chickasaw. This ensured Chickasaw ani-
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mosity toward both the French and their powerful Choctaw allies. The Natchez never recovered, and their culture was soon lost. See also: Indian-white relations: French colonial. Susan J. Wurtzburg
National Congress of American Indians Date: Established 1944 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Civil rights, Education, Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: The National Congress of American Indians was formed to fight for the rights of Native Americans, including education and preservation of traditional values. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) is a coalition of sovereign nations recognized by the United States through treaty and executive agreement. Its purpose is to protect the rights of American Indians as citizens of nations and tribes within the boundaries of the United States. It is supported through annual membership dues and special fundraising endeavors. It is organized as a congress, with American Indian governments voting to participate and selecting delegates and alternates to represent them in the NCAI convention and executive council, where they have blocks of votes. The NCAI was organized in 1944. American Indian delegates representing fifty tribes with homes in twenty-seven western states met in Denver, Colorado. Its initial stated goals included pursuit of American Indian rights within the United States, expansion and improvement of Indian education, preservation of Indian values, and equitable settlement of Indian claims. During the 1950’s, it aided in the struggle against termination and relocation. It has been in the forefront of the struggle for Native American cultural rights legislation, which has brought on more reasonable approaches to repatriation of Indian remains and artifacts. See also: American Indian Defense Association; American Indian Higher Education Consortium; American Indian Movement; Indian Civil Rights Act; Indian Rights Association; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-
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2002; National Council of American Indians; National Indian Association; National Indian Education Association; National Indian Youth Council; Society of American Indians; Termination Resolution. Howard Meredith
National Council of American Indians Date: Established 1926 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: The National Council of American Indians was important in the 1920’s and 1930’s as a Red Progressive movement and in developing Indian voting and supporting John Collier’s “Indian New Deal” reforms. In the early part of the twentieth century, a movement known as the Red Progressive movement called for American Indians to assimilate to the general American lifestyle. It was led by Indians who were well-educated and had achieved success in mainstream American society. Among its leaders were Henry Roe Cloud, Thomas L. Sloan, Arthur C. Parker, physicians Charles Eastman and Carlos Montezuma, and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, a Sioux writer and musician. The Red Progressives united at first under the Society of American Indians (SAI), but by the early 1920’s that organization had split into several rancorous factions. A number of new organizations appeared, including the National Council of American Indians, founded in 1926 by Gertrude Bonnin and her husband. The organization was closely aligned with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, a mostly white and black organization of successful women. Bonnin had served as secretary of the Society of American Indians and in 1924 had coauthored Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery, a muckraking expose of graft and greed involving Oklahoma lawyers, judges, and politicians. The slogan of the National Council of American Indians was “Help the Indians help themselves in protecting their rights and properties.” Its major early emphasis was promoting voting and participation in politics after the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. It was most successful in
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these efforts in Oklahoma and South Dakota. The organization also advocated banning peyote use and the Native American Church; it took a moderate stance toward the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In January, 1934, representatives of several organizations were called together in Washington, D.C., to confer with Franklin Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, on reforms needed to ameliorate the living conditions of Indians. The Bonnins represented both the National Council of American Indians and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. They strongly supported the Indian Reorganization Act, which was adopted by Congress the same year. The council successfully pushed for a requirement for majority rule elections for tribal offices. The National Council of American Indians, like its predecessors, was torn by factionalism; the Bonnins were its major support. With the coming of World War II, the counAn 1899 photograph of Gertrude Bonnin, cil faded from existence, but it founder of the National Council of American left behind a strong heritage of Indians, in traditional Sioux attire. (National Indian political participation. Archives) See also: Bureau of Indian Affairs; Indian Citizenship Act; Indian New Deal; Indian Reorganization Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Society of American Indians. Fred S. Rolater
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National Indian Association Date: Established 1879 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Nineteenth century history, Organizations Significance: The National Indian Association was one of several organizations that composed the Friends of the Indian lobbying group, seeking to ameliorate Indian living conditions and help Indians assimilate into American society. After the Civil War (1861-1865), a series of groups devoted to Indian “reform” arose in the eastern United States. Events leading up to and during the culminating period of 1876-1878, including the defeat of General George Armstrong Custer in 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Nez Perce escape attempt of 1877, and the Bannock War and the tragic Cheyenne escape attempt in 1878, led to the establishment of several influential organizations. Five of these became the core of the Friends of the Indian movement. One was the U.S. government’s Board of Indian Commissioners, founded in 1869 and consisting of private citizens who served without pay. Two others, established in 1879, were the Boston Indian Citizenship Commission and the National Indian Association (also known as the Women’s National Indian Association), established by a group of Protestant churchwomen in Philadelphia. The Indian Rights Association and the National Indian Defense Association followed in the early 1880’s. Between 1879 and 1886, the National Indian Association established eighty-three branches in cities across the nation. It published a monthly periodical, The Indian’s Friend, often presented petitions to Congress and the president protesting the mistreatment of Indians, stridently pushed for reform of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and—more than any other group— demanded that the U.S. government follow the provisions of its treaties with the Indians with “scrupulous fidelity.” Its other major issues included improving delivery of education for Indians (with regard to the number and quality of schools), extending citizenship to all Indians, and dividing Indian lands into private homesteads for each family. The association participated yearly in the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian and the annual meeting of the Board of Indian Commissioners. These agencies shared responsibility for helping persuade the government to pass the General Allotment Act (Dawes Severalty Act),
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enacted in 1887, which subdivided the majority of Indian reservations into individual allotments. This act was ultimately disastrous for Indians, as the National Indian Defense Association had feared. The National Indian Association failed to influence the government’s honoring of treaties. The association’s other major success was increasing the number of schools available to Indians. See also: Allotment system; Bannock War; Friends of the Indian organizations; General Allotment Act; Indian Rights Association; Little Bighorn, Battle of the; Nez Perce War; Rosebud Creed, Battle of; Treaties and agreements in the United States. Fred S. Rolater
National Indian Education Association Date: Established November, 1969 Locale: Minneapolis, Minnesota Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Education, National government and legislation, Organizations, Religion and missionary activities, Twentieth century history Significance: The National Indian Education Association (NIEA) was organized in Minnesota with the broad goal of improving Indian education to enable Native learners to become contributing members of their communities. During the 1960’s, United States federal Indian policy increasingly focused on correcting the poor quality of education and low student achievement that existed in most reservation schools. As federal controls on the schools loosened, Indian parents and educators sought ways to participate more fully in the development of new initiatives in Indian education and to develop curriculum that reflected tribal languages and histories. In order to promote and achieve these goals, Indian educators formed the National Indian Education Association in Minneapolis in 1969. The organization supports traditional Native cultures and values, advocates for Native control of educational institutions, and provides technical assistance to educators in the field. NIEA actively monitors legislation affecting Indian education and, in order to advocate more effectively, now has its offices to the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The organization sponsors an annual national conference to showcase effective educational programs, honor tribal
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traditions, and encourage innovative teaching and improved resources for American Indian students. Native Hawaiians, who also seek preservation and education about their indigenous culture, began participating as board members in the 1990’s. Carole A. Barrett See also: American Indian Higher Education Consortium; Boarding and residential schools; Carlisle Indian School; Indian Education Acts; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; Kennedy Report; Meriam Report.
National Indian Youth Council Date: Established 1961 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: Provides Native American youth with knowledge about tribal communities and traditions; develops leadership, employment, and civil liberties. Ten Native American college students gathered to form the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in August, 1961, at Gallup, New Mexico. Two months earlier, these students had met at the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) conference at the University of Chicago. After hearing the discussions encouraging self-determination and denouncing termination, the students decided to start their own group. The foundation for the NIYC had been laid in 1953 when Herbert Blatchford (Navajo) initiated the first intertribal student group, the Kiva Club, at the University of New Mexico. In expanding his visions for native youth, Blatchford was the founding director of the NIYC. At the August meeting, Mel Thom (Paiute) was elected the chairperson; Clyde Warrior (Ponca), president; Shirley Witt (Mohawk), vice president. The NIYC’s founding group came from different tribes and interests, but they had a common bond: a spirit to recover native rights and respect. Differing from the NCAI, the NIYC focused on the voices of the youth and employed strategies that were more aggressive and activist. During its first decade, NIYC targeted problems with Native American education and discrimination. Members editorialized their opinions
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through NIYC’s first publication, American Aborigine, edited by Blatchford. In 1963 the NIYC began publishing its long-running newspaper, ABC: Americans Before Columbus. The following year, the NIYC took its first step of direct action by going to Washington State to hold a series of “fish-ins.” Members defied state law by fishing in rivers that had been closed to native fishing even though treaty language had reserved for the tribes permanent fishing rights. During this time of national unrest, other activist groups banded together to assist NIYC’s “Washington Project.” With national support, NIYC members stepped into the political arena. Mel Thom encouraged a 1964 Washington, D.C., audience to stand up for self-determination. At a Memphis, Tennessee, poverty conference in 1967, Clyde Warrior delivered his passionate speech, “We Are Not Free.” When Warrior died the following year, the NIYC initiated the education-based Clyde Warrior Institute in American Indian Studies. Another educational project was a 1967 Carnegie Foundation program that researched educational methodology and addressed acculturation. With this growth, the NIYC in 1970 had opened chapters on several college campuses and reservations to serve more than two thousand members. In expanding its political involvement, the NIYC then undertook lawsuits against irresponsible mining companies on reservation lands and instituted native employment and training programs. Other NIYC projects range from conducting voting surveys to creating an all-native film company, Circle Film. To help preserve native sacred lands and to protect native rituals, the group appealed to the United Nations and was granted recognition as an “official and non-governmental organization.” From its headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the NIYC hosts international native conferences that create strong networks of indigenous views. See also: Fish-ins; National Congress of American Indians. Tanya M. Backinger
Native American Date: Twentieth century Locale: North America Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Terminology Significance: One of many terms used to refer to the peoples of North America whose cultures predate European colonization.
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The term “Native American” is commonly used to refer to the many peoples of North America whose cultures existed on the continent when Europeans first arrived. It does not eliminate the possibility of foreign origin in an earlier era. It was coined as a collective name for the native peoples of the Americas (primarily North America) that would not carry the obvious falseness and the historically racist overtones of such terms as “American Indian” and “Indian.” Yet, as is the case with virtually any collective term suggested, there are problems inherent in the term; for example, literally speaking, anyone of any ethnicity born in the Americas could be considered a “native American.” Beginning in the 1970’s, the term Native American lost favor among activist groups and many others concerned with American Indian politics. Nevertheless, the term is still widely used, and some still prefer it to American Indian (although by the 1990’s, the latter had become more common or at least more widely accepted). Some American Indians find the offensiveness of all such collective terms to be about the same. All are generalizations that deny the unique, tribal-specific cultural heritage and political legacy of the many original inhabitants of the Americas. At the same time, the names of many pantribal organizations—such as the American Indian Movement or the National Congress of American Indians—attest to the convenience of such collective terms. See also: American Indian; Amerind; Federally recognized tribes; Indian; Tribe. M. W. Simpson
Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council Date: 1959 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Navajo Categories: Civil rights, Court cases, Religion and missionary activities, Twentieth century history Significance: A U.S. Supreme Court decision finds that since Native American tribal governments predate the U.S. Constitution, they are not bound to uphold its guarantees.
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In 1958, the Navajo Tribal Council, in an effort to limit activities of the Native American Church on its reservation, enacted an ordinance making it illegal to bring peyote onto the Navajo Reservation. Navajo members of the Native American Church filed a suit against the tribe in federal court charging the ordinance violated their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. They claimed their rights to freedom of religion and to protection against arbitrary and oppressive ordinances were totally disregarded. In 1959, the United States Court of Appeals heard the case and sided with the Navajo tribe, ruling that tribal councils existed prior to the establishment of the United States and so were not bound to uphold the United States Constitution unless “they have expressly been required to surrender [their sovereign powers] by the superior sovereign, the United States.” The decision upheld tribal sovereignty and the right of tribes to manage their own internal affairs without interference. However, the decision also caused many in Congress to perceive a need to lessen tribal authority and extend certain basic constitutional protections to individuals living under tribal governments. Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council influenced passage of the Indian Civil Rights Act (1968) by Congress, which, in part, requires tribes to guarantee an individual’s freedom of religion when living under tribal governance. See also: American Indian Religious Freedom Act; Employment Division, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith; Indian Civil Rights Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; National Council of American Indians. Carole A. Barrett
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Date: November 16, 1990 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: This act changed the relationship between American Indians and mainstream museums and academic institutions by insisting
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that rights of scientific inquiry do not supersede basic human rights with respect for the dead. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans were fascinated with the science of phrenology, a process of measuring skulls to determine intelligence. The so-called science operated on the premise that racial minority groups, including American Indians, were inferior to Europeans, and that this inferiority was detectable in their physical appearance. Indian graves were looted to provide skulls for study. Later in the nineteenth century, the U.S. surgeon general allowed Indian remains to be collected from battlefields and other areas, and these were shipped to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., for study. Eventually, the remains were transferred to the Smithsonian Institution for exhibit and study. By the 1880’s, Indians were considered a vanishing race and there was a rush to collect Indian remains and artifacts. Many graves were looted to build museum collections. In 1906, Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which made it illegal to excavate Indian grave sites on public lands without a permit. However, Indian remains and funeral objects were categorized as “natural resources,” and universities and museums readily obtained permits. In the 1930’s, Indian artifacts became popular art collectibles and looting became a major way of supplying the market. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Indian activists began to seek return of remains and artifacts, but their requests were ignored. In the mid-1980’s, Indian people sought congressional support to draft legislation for return of skeletal remains and funeral objects. In Indian belief, the remains of the dead should be returned to Mother Earth to complete their journey into the spirit world. However, the museum and scientific communities opposed return of any remains or grave items, stating these were necessary objects for study. Indians countered that all other Americans were protected against grave robbing and human remains were not property to be taken and studied at will. In 1990, Indian groups and the scientific and museum communities worked to craft compromise legislation known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This law states that all agencies who receive federal funds must notify tribes of all human remains, funeral artifacts, and sacred objects in their collections, including objects of cultural patrimony, or objects that have ongoing importance to the tribe. Indian graves on federal lands are protected, and the sale of human remains and funeral objects is forbidden. NAGPRA permits tribes to negotiate for return of artifacts. Human remains are to be returned to the proper tribe for burial. A review committee appointed by the secretary of
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the interior mediates disputes; however, dissatisfied parties can go to court. The Smithsonian Institution is exempt from NAGPRA regulations, but the national museum does work closely with tribes on return of human remains. NAGPRA, though it has some loopholes, is an important piece of legislation, because it recognizes the sanctity of tribal religious teachings and honors the rights of American Indians to oversee and maintain cultural continuity from generation to generation. Carole A. Barrett See also: Kennewick Man controversy.
Native American Rights Fund Date: Established 1970 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Native government, Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: NARF, established to represent Native American legal interests, has become a well-known and respected, if sometimes criticized, organization in the arena of American Indian rights and politics. The Native American Rights Fund (NARF) is a nonprofit, public-interest legal organization that was founded in 1970. It was established to represent tribal clients in litigation in state and federal courts and to strengthen tribal governments. Operations are supported by federal funds as well as by private and corporate contributions. Its attorneys are mostly Native Americans; the group’s headquarters are in Boulder, Colorado, with satellite offices in Washington, D.C., and Anchorage, Alaska. One of the organization’s primary activities is to handle cases involving “federally recognized tribes” that cannot afford the full financial burden of litigation in U.S. courts. A staff of sixteen attorneys (in the early 1990’s) handles about fifty cases at any given time. NARF also acts as a consultant in the drafting of federal Indian policy. NARF’s objectives include preservation of tribal existence and independence, protection of tribal resources, promotion of human rights such as education and the equitable treatment of Indian prisoners, and development of Indian law to improve tribal legal resources. The Indian Law Sup-
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port Center and the Carnegie-sponsored National Indian Law Library are components of NARF, working in conjunction with its Legal Services Corporation. The law library houses a collection of more than six hundred tribal codes. NARF has taken on a number of well-known cases involving tribal land and water interests. The group gained national notice and respect for its handling of the 1982 land rights case brought by the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy against the state of Maine. The tribes were awarded $27,000 plus the money to purchase 300,000 acres of land. (An important footnote is that, although the case was regarded as a success story, the money did not go very far for some recipients. In addition, many such cases, even when legally successful, become bogged down by governmental bureaucracy.) NARF has been involved in litigation to strengthen aspects of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act dealing with the repatriation of ancestral bones and archaeological artifacts. NARF also assists nonfederally recognized tribes in attempts to gain official tribal recognition, which may involve the restoration of at least some tribal homelands. It has litigated successfully for the Menominee of Wisconsin and the Siletz of Oregon. NARF has not been without its critics. Some have argued that, because the organization is not self-sufficient and must rely on federal funding, it cannot truly be an effective advocacy group. From this perspective it may appear to be an extension of the federal system. Another criticism leveled against the group is that it has never attempted to challenge the European American legal paradigm by insisting on complete internal sovereignty for a client; rather, its negotiations seek negotiation, consensus, and settlement. See also: American Indian Religious Freedom Act; Federally recognized tribes. M. A. Jaimes Sources for Further Study Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. American Indians, American Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. ____________. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Native American Rights Fund. Annual Report. Boulder, Colo.: Author, 1993. ____________. Legal Review 19, no. 1 (Winter/Spring, 1994).
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Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act Date: December 22, 1974 Locale: Arizona Tribes involved: Hopi, Navajo, San Juan Southern Paiute Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: This act was designed to settle land disputes between the Hopi and Navajo; it triggered tremendous controversy surrounding the removal and relocation of several thousand Navajos. The Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act was enacted by Congress in 1974 primarily to clarify rights of the Navajo and Hopi tribes in the 1882 “Executive Order Reservation” established by President Chester A. Arthur. This executive order set aside 2,472,095 acres “for the use and occupancy of the Moqui [Hopi] and such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle thereon.” At the time, both Hopis and Navajos were living in the set-aside area. Disputes increased as the Navajo population in the area expanded. In 1934 Congress consolidated the boundaries of the Navajo Reservation without altering the 1882 Executive Order Reservation. The Bureau of Indian Affairs then established grazing districts on both reservations. District 6, exclusively for Hopi use, consisted of about 25 percent of the 1882 reservation. The remainder was occupied largely by Navajo stock raisers. Disputes between members of the two tribes continued. In 1958 Congress authorized a lawsuit to settle conflicting claims to the 1882 reservation. In 1962 a federal court, in Healing v. Jones, held that for the area outside District 6, the Hopi and Navajo had “joint, undivided and equal interests.” Because the Navajos occupied most of the area, however, they controlled the most surface resources in the Joint Use Area (JUA). Negotiations between the two tribes concerning management of the JUA were unsuccessful. In the early 1970’s the Hopis sought and obtained a court order for livestock reduction in the area. The continuing controversy stimulated congressional interest, and the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act was enacted in 1974. The act was comprehensive. It directed that a mediator make recommendations to the district court, which would then partition the surface rights of the JUA. In 1977 each tribe received half of the JUA. Money was appropriated for livestock reduction and boundary fencing. The act, and a 1980 amendment, allowed for the transfer of some federal lands
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to the Navajos to help offset lost JUA land. In 1983 about 370,000 acres of “new lands” along the southern edge of the Navajo Reservation were selected. The act required the removal of members of one tribe living on lands transferred to the other tribe. This involved a relatively small number of Hopis but thousands of Navajos. An independent commission was created to administer the relocation program, but it was inept, contributing to the hardships of relocatees. The $52,000,000 initial appropriation was inadequate. Congress belatedly responded in the 1980’s, amending the act to restructure the commission and authorizing hundreds of millions of additional dollars for relocation. As a final touch of irony, one section of this legislation, designed to resolve controversy over the 1882 reservation, allowed the tribes the right to sue to settle rights in lands within the 1934 Navajo Reservation. In 1992 a federal district court decided that the Hopis and San Juan Southern Paiutes (who had intervened in the lawsuit) had rights in portions of the Navajo Reservation long used by tribal members. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Navajo Rehabilitation Act. Eric Henderson
Navajo Rehabilitation Act Date: April 19, 1950 Locale: Arizona and New Mexico Tribes involved: Hopi, Navajo Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: In an attempt to improve conditions in one of the most impoverished areas of the United States, this act funded the construction of roads, schools, and other developments on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. The Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Act of 1950 (Public Law 81474) was passed by Congress to construct basic facilities on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. Passed in response to more than twenty years of deteriorating economic conditions on the Navajo Reservation, the act authorized funding for school construction, roads, and other projects.
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In the 1930’s the federal government had initiated a range-management program on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. Central to the program was reducing the amount of livestock on the range. This devastated the Navajo sheep-based pastoral economy. The full effects of stock reduction were partially obscured during World War II, when thousands of Navajos joined the service or worked in war-related industries. When these people returned home, however, livestock regulations and insufficient resources prevented a renewal of the pastoral economy. Unusually harsh winters added to the distress and drew national attention to the impoverished conditions among the more than sixty thousand Navajos residing in Navajo country. Reservation schools could accommodate only about 25 percent of the student-age population. All-weather roads were practically nonexistent on the reservations. Inadequate roads contributed to health, education, and economic problems. Infant mortality was high and school enrollments low. After passing minor emergency relief measures, Congress considered a more comprehensive approach. A 1949 bill to fund improvements on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, reflecting a resurgent congressional interest in limiting tribal sovereignty, also included a provision that extended the jurisdiction of state law over the two reservations. Citing this provision, President Harry Truman vetoed the bill. In 1950 the president signed the Navajo Rehabilitation Act, which emerged from Congress without the offending jurisdictional provision. This version also provided expanded opportunities for Hopi participation in projects. The act appropriated $88,570,000. The largest portion, $25 million, was for school construction, followed by $20 million for roads and $19 million for rangelands and irrigation projects. Lesser amounts were appropriated for health and water facilities, industrial development, and other projects. More than $9 million was allocated for relocating and resettling individuals away from the two reservations. There were also provisions for loans and leases. Finally, one provision (ignored for more than thirty years) authorized the Navajo tribe to adopt a tribal constitution. In 1958, Public Law 85-740 provided an additional $20 million to complete road construction. By 1962, more than 80 percent of the total appropriation had been expended, including nearly all the dollars targeted for roads and schools. The major benefit of the act was the substantial improvement in roads and schools on the reservation. All-weather roads have provided greater access to job locations and markets. School attendance increased dramatically through the 1950’s and 1960’s, as did the overall educational attainment of the population.
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See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act. Eric Henderson
Navajo War Date: September, 1863-November, 1866 Locale: New Mexico Tribes involved: Navajo Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Disputed grazing lands helped lead to this conflict, which resulted in Navajo relocation to the barren Bosque Redondo. Disputed grazing lands near Fort Defiance were a major factor leading to the 1863-1866 war. The site was favored for rendezvous by Navajo medicine men who collected herbs there. For generations, these lands were also used as pasture for Navajo livestock. Shortly after the establishment of Fort Defiance on September 18, 1851, soldiers who wanted to pasture their horses on these lands shot the Navajoowned horses. Revenge was swift: Navajos raided army herds to replace their losses. Through the decade, the raids continued and the army retaliated until, in 1859, army troops attacked and destroyed the home, crops, and livestock of the Navajo clan leader, Manuelito. In 1860, Manuelito—aided by leaders of other clans—assaulted Fort Defiance and nearly captured it, but was driven back. The army pursued the attackers into the Manuelito, leader of his people in the NaChuska mountains but was de- vajo War, as depicted by artist E. A. Burbank. moralized by the hit-and-run (National Archives)
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tactics of the Navajos. In January of 1861, the Navajos met with army representatives and agreed to work for peace. The uneasy truce was broken when, in September of 1861, a riot broke out over a horse race. Artillery was used to quell the disturbance, killing ten Navajos. Raids for plunder and revenge increased, and the army responded. On September 6, 1863, Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson was chosen to lead a campaign of “pacification.” In the following months, Carson’s scorchedearth offensive burned Navajo corn fields, orchards, and hogans; livestock was confiscated and destroyed. Tribes unfriendly to the Navajos were encouraged to attack and harass them. Navajo tribe members surrendered or were rounded up and relocated to Bosque Redondo (Round Forest) in the barren plains of eastern New Mexico. Some clan leaders and their followers held out as long as possible, but by the end of 1864 about 8,000 halfstarving Navajos surrendered and were marched to Bosque Redondo. Some two hundred people died on the grueling three-hundred-mile march known as the Long Walk. Manuelito and twenty-six followers surrendered in September of 1866. When another clan leader, Barboncito, surrendered in November of 1866 with twenty-one followers, the Navajo War of 18631866 was over. See also: Long Walk; Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council; Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act; Navajo Rehabilitation Act; Pueblo Revolt; Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez. Moises Roizen
Nez Perce War Date: June 15-October 5, 1877 Locale: Oregon, Idaho, and Montana Tribes involved: Nez Perce Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Wars and battles Significance: Chief Joseph, leader of the Wallamwatkins (Nez Perce tribe), led his people in retreat through Oregon, Idaho, and Montana almost 1,500 miles on one of the most remarkable and respected Indian war campaigns in U.S. history. During the nineteenth century the Nez Perce occupied various areas of the Northwest, including Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. There were five
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separate groups, each under the leadership of an autonomous chief. One group occupied Oregon Territory in the Imnaha and Wallowa Valleys and was under the leadership Old Chief Joseph. In 1855, Governor Isaac Stevens of the Oregon Territory signed a celebrated treaty with Old Chief Joseph and numerous other Nez Perce leaders, allowing the Indians ownership of all the land in the Imnaha and Wallowa Valleys. The treaty was ratified by the United States Senate. The treaty of 1855 proved short-lived, however, as the Civil War and discovery of gold at Orofino, Idaho, in 1860 led to an ever-increasing surge of immigration of white settlers into the valleys and territories claimed by the Nez Perce. Because of increasing tensions between the whites and Indians, in 1863 a new treaty was negotiated. The new terms excluded the Imnaha and Wallowa Valleys as well as other vast areas of land that had been dedi-
Frederic Remington’s depiction of Nez Perce chief Joseph surrendering in northern Montana in 1877. After fighting U.S. cavalry troops for months and leading his people in a retreat across and Continental Divide from their relentless pursuit, Joseph vowed, “I will fight no more forever.” (Library of Congress)
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cated to the Indians in 1855. The revised treaty was signed by James Reuben and Chief Lawyer, but chiefs Old Joseph, White Bird, and Looking Glass refused to ratify it. Thus the Nez Perce became recognized as having “treaty Indians” and “non-treaty Indians.” In 1871, Old Chief Joseph died, leaving the leadership of his band (the Wallamwatkins) to Young Joseph (Chief Joseph). The continuing influx of white immigrants into the Nez Perce lands caused increasing problems between Indians and whites. In 1876, a commission was appointed to investigate complaints, and it was decided that the non-treaty Nez Perces had no standing and that all groups should go to designated reservations. In 1877, the U.S. Department of the Interior issued instructions to carry out the recommendations of the assigned commission. Preparing for the transition, a council was arranged to meet with Indian leaders and U.S. government officials on May 3, 1877. Chief Joseph and his brother, Alokut, represented the Nez Perce, while General Oliver O. Howard represented the U.S. government. The final understanding was that the non-treaty Indians would be on the designated reservations by June 14, 1877. The Wallamwatkins Attack. On June 15, 1877, word was received at Fort Lapwai, Idaho, that the Wallamwatkins had attacked and killed several settlers around Mount Idaho, Idaho. U.S. Army troops were sent from Fort Lapwai under the command of Captain David Perry to counterattack. The Wallamwatkins, aware of the soldiers coming, moved their camp approximately 8 miles to Whitebird Creek. The next day, troops began pursuit into Whitebird Canyon and engaged in a terrifying encounter with the Wallamwatkins. The U.S. Army suffered resounding losses, losing thirty-four troops and numerous horses. The Nez Perce, numbering only seventy warriors, suffered only four wounded in the battle. General Howard assembled troops at Fort Lapwai and hurried to reinforce the remaining troops at Mount Idaho. The battle was joined—Chief Joseph and his entire tribe (including women and children), totaling approximately four hundred, against the U.S. Army. By July 13, after numerous skirmishes with Captain Perry’s and General Howard’s troops, Chief Joseph led his people eastward toward the Lolo Trail in the Bitterroot Mountains and began a remarkable retreat march into Montana. Chief Joseph kept track of Howard’s position and was able to stall and frustrate Howard’s advancement. As a result, Chief Joseph led the Wallamwatkins through Lolo Trail and into the Missoula area. General Howard subsequently contacted Colonel John Gibbon at Fort Shaw, Montana, and instructed him to take up the pursuit. Gibbon was able to muster 146 men of the Seventh Infantry and 34 civilians.
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Route of the Nez Perce, June 15-October 5, 1877 CANADA Bear Paw Mountains
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Cow Island Fort Shaw
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Big Hole Canyon Creek
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Retreat and Surrender. Chief Joseph crossed the Continental Divide and camped his weary followers in the Big Hole Valley, unaware of Colonel Gibbon’s pursuit and position. On August 9, Gibbon’s troops made a surprise attack on Chief Joseph’s camp and engaged in a long and difficult battle. Losses on both sides were substantial, but Chief Joseph was able to gather his warriors, recover lost ground, recapture his large herd of ponies, and make good his retreat. By August 27, Chief Joseph had led the Wallamwatkins into Yellowstone Park, with General Howard and his troops in continuing pursuit. By September 6, Chief Joseph made his retreat through the northeast corner of Yellowstone Park. Continuing north, Chief Joseph led his people up through the Snowy Mountains and finally into the northern foothills of the Bear Paw Mountains, an easy day’s ride to the Canadian border. Unknown to Chief Joseph, however, Colonel Nelson A. Miles, having been notified by General Howard, was in pursuit from Fort Keogh and was paralleling Chief Joseph’s trail. On September 30, Colonel Miles’s troops made a surprise attack on the Wallamwatkins’ camp. The fighting was intense, the army losing fifty-three men and the Indians eighteen warriors. On the night of October 4, General Howard rode into Miles’s camp and provided the reinforcements that would ensure a final surrender from Chief Joseph. On October 5, at 2:20 p.m., all firing ceased. At 4:00 p.m., Chief Joseph offered one of the most famous surrendering speeches ever documented. Turning to the interpreter, Chief Joseph said:
Nisga’a Agreement in Principle / 395 Tell General Howard I know what is in his heart. What he told me before, I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking-Glass is dead. Tulhulhutsut is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He [Alokut] who led on the young men is dead. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more, forever.
Thus ended the Nez Perce War, one of the most remarkable and respected Indian war campaigns of U.S. history. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Prehistory: Plateau; Walla Walla Council. John L. Farbo Sources for Further Study Adkison, Norman B. Indian Braves and Battles with More Nez Perce Lore. Grangeville: Idaho County Free Press, 1967. ____________. Nez Perce Indian War and Original Stories. Grangeville: Idaho County Free Press, 1966. Beal, Merrill D. I Will Fight No More Forever: Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963. Chalmers, Harvey, II. The Last Stand of the Nez Perce. New York: Twayne, 1962. Fisher, Don C. The Nez Perce War. Thesis. Moscow: University of Idaho, Department of History, 1925. Thompson, Scott. I Will Tell My Story: A Pictorial Account of the Nez Perce War. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
Nisga’a Agreement in Principle Date: 1996 Locale: Canadian Pacific Northwest Tribes involved: Nisga’a Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: This agreement, dealing with an aboriginal group from the Pacific coast of Canada, covered many areas, including land and
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reserves, access to the land, fisheries, wildlife, environmental assessment and protection, Nisga’a government, fiscal matters including taxation, and cultural heritage protection. The Nisga’a Agreement in Principle, published in February, 1996, attempted to lead to the “full and final settlement of Nisga’a aboriginal title, rights, and interests.” Under the agreement, the Nisga’a were defined as an aboriginal people under the constitution with all the charter rights, benefits, and obligations of other Canadians; they did not by this agreement acquire any special rights or privileges. The criminal code of Canada continued to govern them, and they continued to pay taxes. In time, the taxexempt status for Nisga’a citizens was to be eliminated as the Nisga’a began to assume more power for taxation. The agreement stipulated that the Nisga’a govern themselves in a democratic manner with four village governments and an overall Nisga’a government with its own constitution. This government was empowered to make laws governing cultural, linguistic, social, educational, vocational, environmental, and related matters. In addition, this government, with provincial approval, administered justice through provision of police services and a Nisga’a court with jurisdiction over its own lands. The agreement made the Nisga’a the owners of about nineteen hundred square kilometers of land in the area of the lower Nass River, including the four villages of New Aiyansh, Canyon City, Greenville, and Kincolith. These lands, however, were to remain accessible to the general public for recreation, hunting, and fishing. All existing legal interests on the lands were to be maintained, and the roads in them were to be governed and maintained by the province. The agreement stipulated that a financial transfer of $190 million, in addition to $11.5 million for the purchase of commercial fishing vessels and licenses, was to be paid over a period of years. The Nisga’a would receive an annual quota of salmon and other fish to be caught and were expected to conserve the stocks. Overall management was shared between the Nisga’a and the federal and provincial governments. The Nisga’a received permission to hunt wildlife subject to existing restrictions and laws of conservation. The Nisga’a were made responsible for overall environmental protection and were required to meet or exceed existing federal and provincial requirements. See also: Indian-white relations: Canadian; Nunavut Territory; Treaties and agreements in Canada. Gregory Walters
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Northwest Ordinance Date: July 13, 1787 Locale: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin Tribes involved: Chippewa, Fox, Iroquois, Lenni Lenape, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Sauk, Shawnee, Winnebago, Wyandot (Huron) Categories: Eighteenth century history, National government and legislation Significance: Although it was considered the greatest achievement of the Confederation Congress because it provided terms for the creation of new states in the Old Northwest, the ordinance set a tragic precedent by denying Indian rights. By the Peace of Paris with Britain (1783), the United States acquired a vast inland empire bounded by the Appalachians, the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico. The task of disposing of this territory fell to the government as it was organized under the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789). Conflicting claims of states, settlers, land companies, and American Indians confused the issue. Lands south of the Ohio River were settled separately from those north of it. The Old Northwest, including the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was claimed by Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Thomas Jefferson chaired a committee that, in 1784, proposed to Congress the creation of a temporary government for the Northwest and the area’s eventual division into sovereign states eligible to join the Confederation on terms equal to the original members. Though the plan was not enacted, it did provide a model for the Northwest Ordinance and facilitated the cession of western lands by Virginia (in 1784), Massachusetts (1784-1785), and Connecticut (17841786) to the national government. If state claims were resolved, those of Native Americans were refused. Under British rule, by the Proclamation of 1763, the entire West had been set aside as Indian Country, starting at the Appalachian Divide. The pressure for white settlement of the region had been a contributing cause of the American Revolution, a lesson the Confederation had learned. As settlers from New England, Pennsylvania, and the South pressed toward the Ohio Country, Indian claims were extinguished. By the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784) the Iroquois, exhausted by war, surrendered their claims to western New York and Pennsylvania. The next year, major Ohio tribes relinquished their claims to most of the future state, with the exception of the southwest shores of Lake Erie. Formal concession came within a decade in the Treaty
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of Fort Greenville (1795), when, for a ten-thousand-dollar annuity, twelve tribes relinquished the southwest portion of the Old Northwest (Ohio and Indiana). Utilizing Jefferson’s plan, the Congress of the Confederation (1787), even as the Constitutional Convention was meeting, established the Northwest Ordinance, by which those lands would be organized as a territory, with a nationally appointed governor, secretary, and judges. It stated that when five thousand free white males resided there, a bicameral legislature was to be created. Eventually three to five states were to be formed (with a minimum of sixty thousand free white inhabitants needed for statehood), each to be admitted to the United States and to be equal in standing to the original states. Freedom of religion, the right to jury trial, public support of education, and the prohibition of slavery were to prevail. While this legislation is traditionally regarded as the greatest achievement of the Confederation Congress, it set a tragic precedent by riding roughshod over the rights of Native Americans. See also: Fort Greenville Treaty; Fort Stanwix Treaty; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Proclamation of 1763. C. George Fry
Nunavut Territory Date: 1993 Locale: Canadian Northwest Tribes involved: Inuit Categories: National government and legislation, Treaties, Twentieth century history Significance: The Canadian government gives control over half of the former Northwest Territories to the native Inuit. In 1993, the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement was signed with Canada’s federal government. It stated that, on April 1, 1999, the Northwest Territories would be divided and the eastern region would become Nunavut Territory. “Nunavut” comes from the Inuit language Inuktitut and means “our land.” The Inuit have inhabited these lands for thousands of years, and they made up 80 percent of the population in the late 1990’s. The Inuit have long desired a territory of their own, and the agreement gave the Inuit control over more than 350,000 square kilometers of land, mineral rights, and
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financial aid. This agreement is designed to give the Inuit people control over their own education, health, social services, and many other provincialtype responsibilities. The government of the territory is to be democratically elected to represent all residents of the territory: about twenty-two thousand people, seventeen thousand of whom are Inuit. The agreement placed the seat of government in Iqualuit and described the territory as containing twenty-eight villages or communities, including Iqualuit, which is located on Baffin Island. See also: Indian-white relations: Canadian; Nisga’a Agreement in Principle; Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: Subarctic; Treaties and agreements in Canada. Gregory Walters
Oka crisis Date: 1990 Locale: Quebec Tribes involved: Mohawk Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Protest movements, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: A conflict over Mohawk land claims leads to an armed confrontation between Indians and the Surreté du Québec. The conflict that erupted in early July, 1990, at Oka in Quebec was the result of long-standing problems both within the Mohawk community in Canada and between that community and various other, mainly governmental, bodies. It was brought on in large measure by disputes regarding the ownership of the relevant lands at Oka that dated back to the early eighteenth century. The lands at Oka do not fit the usual pattern of disputed territory, and for this reason, a 1975 land claim presented to the federal government was rejected outright. The Mohawk community nonetheless continued to make a claim based on territorial sovereignty, treaty rights, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, unextinguished aboriginal title under common law, and land rights from obligations imposed by order of the King of France in the eighteenth century.
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More recent origins of the conflict date back to 1987 and pertain both to internal conflicts in the Mohawk community over issues of governance and legitimacy of leadership in the community and to external conflicts with various governments, chiefly local, about disputed land known as “the Pines.” By the late 1980’s, the Municipality of Oka had proposed to allow expansion of a local golf course onto the disputed lands and followed the lead of the federal government in refusing to consider a Mohawk land claim against the “the Pines.” Mohawk protest ensued in the form of barricades, which the Municipality asked the Surreté du Québec to dispense with in restoring law and order. It was the move on July 11, 1990, by the Surreté that brought about the armed conflict and resulted in the death of a Surreté officer. As the report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs stated, Eventually the controversy over land use in the Pines became symbolic of Mohawk land rights in general. This pattern of escalating conflict continued until the shaky state of peace that managed to hold from 1987 was completely shattered by the events of July 11, 1990.
Those events would unite the previously fractured Mohawk community and would galvanize public opinion in general in favor of a solution to the land claim problem provided violence was not again used. This public support prompted the standing committee, in its fifth report, The Summer of 1990, to set forth several recommendations. The committee did not explore all the historical and other details of the conflict but concluded its report with a series of recommendations to resolve aboriginal issues in general and the Mohawk-Oka conflict in particular. Those recommendations included the formation of a royal commission; a review of the National Defense Act, under which Quebec was able to ask and receive from the federal government the use and support of the army in resisting the Mohawk standoff; and a better process for federal land claims and dispute resolution. More specifically, they proposed that there be an independent inquiry into Quebec’s handling of native issues and of the Surreté in responding at Oka; the appointment of a mediator to resolve the conflict around land claims; and a process of healing and compensation begun in order to build a better future for all concerned. See also: Indian-white relations: Canadian. Gregory Walters
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Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act Date: June 26, 1936 Locale: Oklahoma Tribes involved: All in Oklahoma except those in Osage County Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: This act made provision for all Indian tribes, bands, or groups in Oklahoma to adopt a constitution allowing for selfgovernment, allowed the secretary of the interior to purchase land to be held in trust for all Oklahoma Indians, and allowed small groups of Indians to form a local cooperative association and receive interest-free loans from the Revolving Loan Fund for Indians. A major reform of U.S. policy toward American Indians resulted in the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA, or Wheeler-Howard Act), enacted by Congress on June 18, 1934. With this act, further allotment of tribal lands to individual Indians was prohibited, purchase of additional lands for Indians by the secretary of the interior was authorized, and a fund (the Revolving Loan Fund for Indians) was established that could be used for tribal enterprises. The IRA allowed and encouraged the tribes or groups to adopt written constitutions allowing for self-government, gave Indians applying for positions in the Bureau of Indian Affairs preference over other applicants, and called for very strict conservation practices on Indian lands. Oklahoma, however, was excluded from the IRA because the IRA was essentially a system of reservation government, and it was deemed inappropriate for Oklahoma because, at the time of statehood, the Five Civilized Tribes had given up their autonomy. In 1936, the benefits of the IRA were extended to Oklahoma by way of a separate statute, the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act. This act authorized the secretary of the interior to purchase, at his discretion, good agricultural and grazing land, from within or without reservations, to hold in trust for the tribe, band, group, or individual Indian for whose benefit the land was acquired. Title to all lands was to be taken in the name of the United States and held by the United States. All land was exempt from any and all federal taxes, but the state of Oklahoma could levy and collect a gross production tax upon all oil and gas produced from the land. The secretary of the interior was responsible for overseeing the payment of these taxes to Oklahoma. Any tribe or band in the state of Oklahoma was given the right to organize for its common welfare and could adopt a constitution and bylaws;
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these had to follow the rules and regulations set forth by the secretary of the interior. Any ten or more Indians, as determined by the official tribe rolls, or Indian descendants of such enrolled members, in convenient proximity to each other, could be chartered as a local cooperative association for the following purposes: credit administration, production, marketing, consumers’ protection, or land management. Funds from the Revolving Loan Fund for Indians could be used to provide interest-free loans to these groups. See also: Indian Reorganization Act. Lynn M. Mason
Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe Date: 1978 Locale: Washington State Tribes involved: Suquamish Categories: Court cases, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: On March 6, 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe decided that tribes do not have jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit crimes on reservations. In 1978, during a tribal celebration, two non-Indian residents of the Port Madison Reservation of the Suquamish Tribe (Washington) violated tribal laws. Mark Oliphant was arrested for assaulting tribal police officers and resisting arrest, and Dan Belgarde was arrested for hitting a tribal police car in a high-speed chase. The two argued the Suquamish tribe had no criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians, and they took their case to federal court. The Supreme Court agreed with them and determined that non-Indians, even those residing on a reservation and charged with a crime, are not subject to the jurisdiction of tribal courts. This ruling dealt a major blow to tribal sovereignty and the authority of tribal courts because it determined that tribes lack the power to enforce laws against all who come within its borders. This ruling created serious and important law-and-order problems on reservations. Some tribes have approached the problem by crossdeputization with local and county police or by arranging for non-Indians on the reservation to submit voluntarily to tribal authority. See also: Tribal courts. Carole A. Barrett
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Pavonia Massacre Date: February 26, 1643 Locale: Pavonia, New Amsterdam (modern New Jersey) Tribes involved: Hackensack, Wecquaesgeek Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: This massacre, perpetrated by European settlers on peaceful Indian tribes, led to brutal retaliation by the Indians and the eventual destruction of Pavonia. Pavonia, a Dutch settlement located in the current Staten Island and Bayonne-Jersey City region, was the terminus of a trail used by Indians to move trading goods. A use tax imposed in 1639 and other incidents so outraged the Hackensack that in 1642 they killed two settlers. In 1643, a number of Wecquaesgeek Indians fled in terror from Mohawk raids—some to Pavonia, near the Hackensack, seeking Dutch protection. Following a carefully laid-out plot, eighty soldiers launched a brutal surprise attack on the Indian camp shortly after midnight on February 26 to revenge the killing of the settlers. Between 80 and 120 Indians were killed and about thirty prisoners taken. In retaliation for this massacre, regional tribes intermittently terrorized the Dutch over the next decade. See also: Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial. Laurence Miller
Paxton Boys’ Massacres Date: December 14-27, 1763 Locale: A Conestoga village near Lancaster, Pennsylvania Tribes involved: Iroquois Confederacy (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Tuscarora), Lenni Lenape, Shawnee, Susquehannock Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: Growing tensions between Pennsylvania backcountry settlers and Native Americans reflect western resentment of inequitable representation. The French and Indian War (1754-1763) was a particularly difficult time for settlers in the Pennsylvania backcountry. By the early 1750’s, the harmony that had characterized the relationship between Native Americans and the
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colony since the time of William Penn had ended. Led by the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, various Pennsylvania tribes, encompassing numerous Native American villages throughout the region, fought to limit future European expansion onto ancestral lands. The struggle engendered much bloodshed and carnage on both sides. During the war, the Pennsylvania Assembly, influenced by pacific Quakers, pursued a policy of negotiations rather than resorting to armed confrontation. Despite pleas from embattled backcountry residents for military assistance, provincial leaders steadfastly refused to organize or outfit an official militia. As a result, western residents were left to fend for themselves. By the 1760’s, the Quaker policy had produced some minimal results. Pennsylvania authorities were able to reestablish peaceful relations with a few villages. Cooperative tribes were promised land rights, commercial opportunities, and protection from their enemies. However, many villages questioned the sincerity of the offers and remained at war. This put backcountry residents in a particularly difficult situation. It was virtually impossible for them to differentiate between peaceful and hostile natives, a distinction that could become a matter of life or death. Therefore, many homesteaders chose simply to label all of the indigenous population as hostile until all had agreed to a peace. The Massacres. On the morning of December 14, 1763, the tensions generated the first of two massacres. A band of approximately four dozen angry Pennsylvania backwoodsmen attacked an unsuspecting Conestoga village situated approximately fifty miles northwest of Lancaster. The village was inhabited by fewer than two dozen Susquehannocks. A month earlier, in a petition to Governor John Penn, these same Susquehannocks had promised to maintain the peace that they claimed they had always honored. Nevertheless, the Pennsylvanians, who called themselves the Paxton Boys, complained that villagers were assisting and sheltering Native American warriors. Several of the warriors were believed to have murdered nearby settlers. In the assault, the Paxton Boys struck quickly, burning the village’s huts and killing three Susquehannock men, two women, and a child. Panicked by the raid, fourteen Susquehannock survivors fled to the safety of provincial authorities in Lancaster. Upon their arrival, the refugees were placed under protective custody and held in the town jail. It was there that the Paxton Boys found them on December 27, and it was there that the backwoodsmen committed a second massacre. Enraged that local officials would shelter the natives, a force of about one hundred wellarmed Paxton Boys rode up to the jailhouse. They burst into the build-
Paxton Boys’ Massacres / 405
Two days after Christmas, 1763, about one hundred backwoodsmen who called themselves the Paxton Boys shot and tomahawked defenseless Susquehannocks who had been jailed after the backwoodsmen’s earlier attacks. (Library of Congress)
ing, seized the keeper, and then shot and tomahawked the defenseless Susquehannocks. A few minutes later, with their task accomplished, the backwoods raiders rode off to their homes, satisfied that they had taken an important step toward easing the Native American threat within the region. News of the two attacks created a flurry of activity in Philadelphia. Governor Penn immediately issued a proclamation instructing western magistrates to apprehend those involved in the massacres. Colonial officials, fearing additional assaults, rounded up 125 friendly Native Americans, many of whom had converted to Moravianism, and brought them to Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the colonial Assembly asked New York authorities to provide a sanctuary for the refugees. However, the New York governor denied the request. Instead, a regiment of British regulars was assigned to escort the “Moravian Indians” to a military barracks on a Delaware River island and to defend them against all potential assailants. The Assembly’s precautions were not popular in the backcountry. John Elder, a Presbyterian minister and militia colonel who was alleged to be the Paxton Boys’ organizer, warned that “the minds of the inhabitants are so exasperated
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against the Quakers” that western residents were ready to confront the Assembly and take matters into their own hands. The Paxton Boys Head for Philadelphia. By late January, 1764, reports about an impending attack by the Paxton Boys swirled through Philadelphia. One letter to Governor Penn claimed that fifteen hundred well-armed backwoodsmen, a force three times larger than the British regiment guarding the Native Americans, were planning to march on the city and go door to door until they had found all the Native Americans in Philadelphia. The westerners intended to burn down the houses of those who resisted. The letter ended with a prediction that the backwoodsmen would fight to the death, if necessary. The rumored march became a reality in early February. Although considerably smaller than most reports had forecast, a force of two hundred backwoods residents, comprising primarily Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from the lower Susquehanna River region, began a hike toward the provincial capital. Armed with muskets, tomahawks, and pistols, they announced that they were coming to Philadelphia to rectify the various abuses directed at them by the Assembly. Intercepting the westerners at Germantown, five miles northwest of the city, Benjamin Franklin led a delegation appointed by the governor. Matthew Smith and James Gibson, two militia officers, presented Franklin with a petition that identified nine specific grievances. Surprisingly, the primary complaint had nothing to do with the colony’s Native American policy. Instead, the Paxton Boys protested that the four western counties had significantly less representation in the Assembly than did the three eastern counties. If this inequity were rectified, the backwoodsmen claimed that the other eight complaints, all of which dealt with policies concerning Native Americans, would be remedied. While Franklin conferred, other Philadelphians prepared for an attack. Some local residents insisted that the force in Germantown was simply an advance unit of Paxton Boys and that hundreds more would soon arrive. To defend the city against the “Lawless Party of Rioters,” the Assembly swiftly enacted emergency legislation. Six companies, each with one hundred volunteers, were hastily organized. Cannons were pulled into defensive positions around the courthouse. Shops were closed. The roads and ferries leading into the city were blockaded. The British regiment guarding the Native American refugees was placed on alert. Franklin Negotiates. Aided by the city’s impressive mobilization, Franklin’s deliberations proved fruitful. The westerners agreed that if their peti-
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tion were promptly delivered to the governor and Assembly, they would return home. In a gesture aimed at compromise, the Philadelphia delegation announced that the Paxton Boys had been misunderstood and were, in fact, “a set of worthy men who laboured under great distress.” The delegation then accompanied about thirty backwoodsmen into the city. The following day, one of the visitors was permitted to inspect several Native Americans to determine whether they had been involved in recent attacks upon settlers. They had not. Several days later, the westerners’ petition was presented to the legislature. In July, the Assembly responded legislatively to the Paxton Boys’ demands. Pennsylvania formally declared war against the Lenni Lenape and Shawnee tribes. A bounty for Native American scalps, another of the westerners’ demands, was enacted. Money also was appropriated for the creation of an official provincial militia, something the Quaker government had steadfastly refused to do, even during the French and Indian War. The colony’s search for the Paxton Boys involved in the two massacres had ended months earlier, with no arrests made. Pennsylvania felt the impact of the Paxton Boys’ activities for years to come. Most important, the crisis initiated an ongoing dispute about fair and equitable representation for western counties. It was a contest in which political power eventually shifted away from Philadelphia Quakers and toward a diverse and democratic coalition of political leadership. Ultimately, the crisis surrounding the Paxton Boys’ Massacres served as an initial step toward the political divisions that generated an independence movement within the colony. See also: French and Indian War; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Iroquois Confederacy; Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting; Paxton Boys’ Massacres; Proclamation of 1763. Paul E. Doutrich Sources for Further Study Franz, George W. Paxton: A Study of Community Structure and Mobility in the Colonial Pennsylvania Backcountry. New York: Garland, 1989. Focuses on political and socioeconomic development of the Paxton community. Hindle, Brooke. “The March of the Paxton Boys.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 3 (October, 1946): 461-486. Still one of the best narrative accounts of the massacres. Jacobs, Wilbur R. The Paxton Riots and the Frontier Theory. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967. A brief booklet that includes many primary documents produced during the episode.
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Kelley, Joseph J., Jr. Pennsylvania: The Colonial Years. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980. Includes a general description of the Paxton Boys episode. Schwartz, Sally. “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania. New York: New York University Press. 1987. A general history that describes the various tensions within colonial Pennsylvania and how the colony dealt with them.
Peach Wars Date: 1655-1664 Locale: Hudson River Valley, New York Tribes involved: Esophus, Lenni Lenape Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: This conflict is regarded as the most significant confrontation between the Dutch and the Indians; the end of the conflict also marked the end of Dutch rule. Dutch traders depended upon the Indian tribes of the Hudson and Niagara regions for their livelihood. With the development of frontier trading posts in 1620, the Dutch established a permanent presence in the wilderness. Governor-general Willem Kieft began an extensive campaign to intimidate and subjugate Indian tribes after he took office in 1639. In 1655, a Dutch farmer killed a Delaware woman for picking peaches in his orchard. Her tribe quickly retaliated, and ambushes occurred throughout the Hudson Valley, even at New Amsterdam. Fighting was particularly fierce on the northern reaches of the Hudson, at the settlement of Wiltwyck. The new governor-general, Peter Stuyvesant, arrived with a militia that forced the attacking Esophus tribe into negotiation. The Dutch, however, murdered the Indian delegation. Retaliatory raids resulted in eight Dutch casualties, and warfare continued for five years. In 1660, Stuyvesant embarked on a new policy: taking Indians as hostages to ensure peace. The Esophus, however, refused all Dutch peace offers until Stuyvesant ordered the hostages sold into slavery. In 1664, after the Mohawks agreed to help the Dutch defeat the Esophus, the English captured New Netherland, ending both the Peach Wars and Dutch rule.
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See also: Bacon’s Rebellion; Beaver Wars; Fur trade; Iroquois Confederacy; Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial; Manhattan Island purchase; Pavonia Massacre; Peach Wars; Pequot War. Richard S. Keating
Pequot War Date: July 20, 1636-July 28, 1637 Locale: Connecticut Tribes involved: Pequot, Narragansett Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: The first major conflict between Native Americans and New England settlers. As suggested by their name (from pekawatawog, “the destroyers”), the Pequots were once the most formidable tribe in New England. Part of the Eastern Algonquian language family, the Pequots, by the dawn of the seventeenth century, were well established in what is now Connecticut. Their powerful sachem (principal chief) was the venerable Sassacus, who was born near what is now Groton. In spite of many years of experience, Sassacus faced, in his seventies, the biggest crisis in his people’s history. Although the Pequots had a virtual hegemony over their adjacent nations— as the leader of the Mohegans, Uncas was married to the daughter of the Pequot chief—the Pequots had trouble coping with the impact of the European powers in the Connecticut Valley. The Pequots found themselves caught between the Dutch moving eastward from New Netherlands and the English moving westward from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Connecticut. European competition for control over trade on the Connecticut River proved to be a destabilizing factor in intertribal relationships. The political climate was ripe for violence. It began when two English traders were killed in Connecticut—John Stone in 1633 and John Oldham on July 20, 1636. It has never been firmly established that the Pequots were responsible for their deaths. When John Gallup, an English merchant, found natives in control of Oldham’s ship, anchored off Block Island, he fought with them in July, 1636, for control of it. Captain John Endecott, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with ninety soldiers, conducted a punitive raid on Block Island, killing every male native there. Although most of the casualties were Narragansetts, not Pequots, Endecott
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Contemporary engraving of the 1637 defeat of the Pequots at Fort Mystic, their fortified village, from Captain John Underhill’s account in Newes from America (1638). (Library of Congress)
pushed eastward along the Connecticut coast, demanding reparations from the Pequots, who refused, resisted, and suffered at least one death, as well as the destruction of several villages. Siege of Fort Saybrook. Sassacus, outraged, invited the Narragansetts to join him in war on the English. Their chief, Miantonomo, was favorably disposed toward the colonists, probably due to the influence of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. Even without Narragansett support, Sassacus acted, laying siege to Fort Saybrook, situated on the Connecticut River, during the winter of 1636-1637 and concurrently attacking several outlying English settlements, including Wethersfield, where at least nine settlers were killed. Puritan retaliation was not long in coming. Captains John Mason and John Underhill shared command. Born in England, Mason had served as an army officer in the Netherlands before his arrival in Massachusetts in 1632. From Hartford, he set forth with a band of eighty, supported by the
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Mohegans and Narragansetts. Like Mason, Underhill had been born in England and then was reared in the Netherlands, where his father had fought the Spanish. Since 1630, he had lived in Massachusetts. Mason and Underhill initially went eastward, by ship, along the Connecticut coast, making landfall at Narragansett Bay. Then, with their native allies, they moved westward by land. After crossing the Pawcatuck and Mystic Rivers, they were poised to attack the main Pequot village at sunrise on May 25, 1637. The Puritan forces divided, each half attacking one of the two main gates, located at opposite ends of the stockaded native settlement. The English did not profit as much as expected by their surprise attack; their opening forays were repulsed. Then the colonials set fire to the wigwams, and as the village burned, the Pequots faced horrible alternatives. Some, mostly women and children, remained inside the fort, perishing in the flames. Those who fled, mostly the warriors, were cut down by the English and their Narragansett, Mohegan, and Niantic allies. Between six hundred and one thousand Pequots perished in this massacre. Only two colonials were lost, a mere twenty wounded. Underhill rejoiced in the “mighty victory,” comparing his annihilation of the Pequots to David’s destruction of his foes in biblical times. A large group of Pequot refugees sought sanctuary in a swamp near New Haven, only to be discovered and destroyed on July 28, 1637. In the subsequent confusion, Sassacus and a handful of followers fled, seeking asylum in Mohawk territory. Desiring to prove their loyalty to the English, the Mohawks beheaded Sassacus. Uncas Rises to Power. As a consequence of the Pequot War, Uncas, the sonin-law of Sassacus, seized control of the Mohegan tribe. With English support, Uncas began a career of conquest that made him the most powerful sachem in New England. Miantonomo, sachem of the Narragansetts, was killed by command of Uncas in 1643, perhaps as a political act asked by his English allies. Although Uncas initially prospered as a prominent warrior and ruler, he discovered his English allies to be unpredictable. When he attacked Massasoit in 1661, the Puritans forced him to give up prisoners and plunder; during Metacom’s War (1675-1676), Uncas surrendered his sons as hostages to the colonists, who, defeating Metacom (or King Philip) of the Wampanoags, effectively ended Indian resistance to European settlement. The Pequot War also marked the advent of almost constant conflict between the Puritan settlers and the natives, and its results were ultimately tragic for all the Native Americans. The Pequots, who (together with the Mohegans) had counted perhaps four thousand men when the English ar-
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rived at Plymouth Rock in 1620, steadily declined in numbers. An estimate made in 1643 suggested that there were twenty-five hundred men in their group. Following their defeat, many of the Pequots were massacred or enslaved; those enslaved were shared between the Europeans and other natives, some being deported as far from home as Boston or the island of Bermuda. Others were assimilated into other tribes, by being resettled among their former enemies. In 1655, the Pequots were moved to two reservations on the Mystic River. By 1674, there were only three hundred men in this once-proud nation. Pequot place names disappeared: The Pequot River, for example, became the Thomas. Their power had been forfeited, their identity nearly eradicated. In 1990, there were between nine hundred and sixteen hundred Pequots. See also: Metacom’s War; Saybrook, Battle of. C. George Fry Sources for Further Study Cave, Alfred A. The Pequot War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. The first in-depth study of the Pequot War, emphasizing the motives behind the hostilities through archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological analysis. De Forest, John W. History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850. Hartford, Conn.: W. J. Hammersley, 1851. Reprint. Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1988. A classic study of the native peoples of Connecticut. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Five Hundred Nations: An Illustrated History of the North American Indians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. This generously illustrated volume is sympathetic to the point of view of the Native Americans. References to the situation in New England are corrective to earlier writings. Orr, Charles, ed. History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent, and Gardener. Cleveland, Ohio: Helman-Taylor, 1897. A valuable anthology of eyewitness reporting on the Pequot War from the Puritan perspective, drawing on the recollections of major English participants. Peale, Arthur L. Memorials and Pilgrimages in the Mohegan Country. Norwich, Conn.: Bulletin Company, 1930. Peale, author of a groundbreaking study of Uncas, was celebrated for his knowledge of the Mohegans and the Pequots. Remarkably readable reflections. Salisbury, Neal E. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. A thorough, objective study of the contrasting attitudes and values of the
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Native Americans and the Europeans during a century and a half of contact and conflict. Stoutenburgh, John L., Jr. Dictionary of the American Indian. New York: Philosophical Library, 1960. A concise resource with excellent brief biographies and summary descriptions of key events in Native American history. Vaughan, Alden T. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. This helpful study of a half-century of relationships between Native Americans and European settlers is a fine starting point for research.
Pima uprisings Date: 1695, 1751 Locale: Southern Arizona, northwestern Mexico Tribes involved: Pima Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: These uprisings, instigated by Spanish mistreatment and possibly by personal ambition, caused significant death and destruction and undermined the formerly cordial relations between the Spanish and Indians. By the late 1600’s the Spanish Jesuits had established a successful system of missions and maintained cordial relations with the Upper Pimas. In Tubutama, however, in 1694 the Spanish unjustly and summarily executed three Pimas for alleged horse stealing and forcibly silenced Pima leaders who were openly critical of the Spaniards and their methods. Christianized Opata Indians who oversaw running the mission herds and lands at Tubutama alienated the Pimas with attitudes of condescension and superiority. In 1695 an uprising occurred by a disaffected faction of Pimas at Tubutama. Three Opata were killed. Moving southwest and enlisting some allies, they destroyed the presidio at Altar and killed the missionary at Caborca. The Spanish retaliated immediately. They killed a few women and children and destroyed fields at Caborca as a lesson but were not able to find the instigators of the uprising. The aid of peaceful Pima leaders who were not part of the uprising was enlisted to identify the instigators. The first
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one identified was instantly beheaded. This set off a frenzy among the Spanish, who killed nearly fifty Pimas, including several peaceful ones. As soon as the Spanish left, enraged Pimas organized and destroyed Tubutama, Caborca, and churches at Imuris and San Ignacio. Again, Spanish forces, this time aided by friendly Pimas, retaliated by killing a few Pimas and burning their crops, but they were again unable to engage the instigators. A number of Pima headmen who realized they could not oppose the Spanish arranged to surrender the instigators to the Spanish soldiers, who then left. The damage was done, however; much of Pima territory was destroyed. The Pimas were divided into pro- and anti-Spanish factions. Anger and distrust of the Spaniards smoldered among many Pimas. A second Pima uprising occurred in 1751. The uprising was instigated by Luis Oacpicagigua, who had formerly served the Spanish so well that he was made captain-general of the Pimas. Oacpicagigua claimed that he revolted against the cruelty and oppression of Spanish military and missionary rule and was trying to end their domination over his people. The Spanish claimed that he desired to be chief of all the Pimas. This uprising was isolated rather than general. It began at Saric, near Tubuand. Oacpicagigua and some Western Pimas killed eighteen Spaniards invited to his house, attacked Tubutama, and killed two missionaries at Caborca and Senoita. After the deaths of more than a hundred Spaniards and more than forty Pimas and a loss of support, Oacpicagigua ceased hostilities and was imprisoned. The Jesuit missions never recovered from this uprising by the time of their expulsion in 1767. Several missions remained in operation but with successively declining success and influence. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Pimas had pretty much returned to their former way of life. See also: Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Pueblo Revolt; Zuñi Rebellion. Laurence Miller
Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings Date: June 25-26, 1975 Locale: Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota Tribes involved: Oglala Sioux Categories: Protest movements; Twentieth century history
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Significance: The Pine Ridge shootout was a turning point for the American Indian Movement (AIM) in their relations with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In 1973, members and supporters of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The activists were demonstrating against what they considered to be autocratic and sometimes corrupt practices of the Oglala Sioux tribal political leaders, especially Richard Wilson, the tribal chairman. Wilson, an aggressive opponent of AIM, along with local Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials, requested federal support in removing the activists. The occupation evolved into a state of siege lasting seventy-one days and leaving two native people dead. AIM leaders were indicted, but the case was dismissed after a federal judge accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of gross misconduct. Discontent and strong opposition to the Pine Ridge Reservation tribal government and the chairman continued. On June 25, 1975, violence erupted again when a BIA policeman killed a young Oglala man. The following day, in an exchange of gunfire, two FBI agents were slain outside a house about fifteen miles from the town of Pine Ridge. Although the occupants of the house fled, two Oglala men were ultimately apprehended and charged with the murders; they were acquitted. Leonard Peltier, another suspect, was arrested in Canada, extradited to the United States, and sent to prison after a controversial trial in which he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Peltier declared himself innocent of the killings and appealed his conviction many times. During the appeals, the court found that the government had acted improperly in arresting and trying him. Federal authorities admitted to falsifying affidavits used to extradite Peltier from Canada. Witnesses in the original trial had been coerced, and evidence supporting Peltier’s claims was suppressed. In spite of these irregularities, the courts refused to overturn Peltier’s conviction. Peltier’s case became known throughout the world. Many people believed that, even if he were guilty, he had not been granted a fair trial. Amnesty International declared him a political prisoner, and important religious leaders spoke out on his behalf. A book and three films were made about the case. In 1992, a “Mr. X” confessed to the killings. Peltier’s supporters continued to hope that they could win him a new trial. Other victims of the 1975 violence included Leonard Crow Dog, an Oglala medicine man and spiritual leader of the movement who was arrested at his home on the neighboring Rosebud Reservation, and AIM sup-
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porter Anna Mae Aquash, a Micmac Indian woman, believed by the FBI to be a witness to the killing of the two agents. Aquash was found murdered in 1976. There was a determined effort to get Peltier pardoned by President Bill Clinton at the end of his term in 2000, but pressure and protests from the FBI persuaded Clinton to refuse the pardon. In April, 2002, Peltier’s lawyers filed a lawsuit against former FBI director Louis Freeh, the FBI Agents Association, and numerous past and present FBI officials for spreading lies about Peltier in their attempts to derail a pardon. See also: American Indian Movement; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Indianwhite relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Trail of Broken Treaties; Wounded Knee occupation. Lucy Ganje and Cynthia A. Bily
Pontiac’s Resistance Date: May 8, 1763-July 24, 1766 Locale: Great Lakes region Tribes involved: Chippewa, Lenni Lenape, Huron, Illinois, Kickapoo, Miami, Mingo, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Seneca, Shawnee Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: A pan-Indian uprising presents the greatest threat to British expansion before the American Revolution. Having signed the Treaty of Paris on February 10, 1763, Great Britain and France concluded the French and Indian War, nearly a decade of battle for empire in North America. Victorious, Great Britain then had to decide how to organize its vast new territories, embracing Canada and the area lying between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. At issue in these transAppalachian lands were the rights, vital interests, profits, and responsibilities of the remaining Frenchmen, fur traders and trappers, British governors and colonials with claims to these territories, land speculators, the British army, and, not least, Native Americans. A plan to separate transAppalachia from eastern British colonies and keep out settlers had been recommended by William Petty, earl of Shelburne, then president of Britain’s Board of Trade. Shelburne had hoped that his plan would be implemented by 1767, but despite mounting political pressure for Parliament to act on imperial reorganization, nothing was done until Shelburne had left
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office. What determined his successor’s action and his issuance of the Proclamation of 1763 was a native uprising and the siege of the British fort at Detroit by a little-known Ottawa war chief, Pontiac. A large, imposing figure, Pontiac was born in present-day northern Ohio, the son of an Ottawa father and a Chippewa (Ojibwa) mother. Although he married several times (as was customary), only one of his wives and two sons have been identified. Esteemed for his strategic skills and his intelligence, he had become a war chief by 1755, when he was in his midthirties. The Ottawa, like most of their neighbors, were traders who had profited from close relationships with the French and who, therefore, fought with French forces in America during the French and Indian War. Pontiac had fought with the French when they defeated British troops commanded by General Braddock at Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania. Indian Grievances. France’s defeat, sealed by the Treaty of Paris, proved disastrous to frontier natives, who were constrained thereafter to deal with the British. Contrary to the intent of the Proclamation of 1763, colonial settlers poured across the Appalachians into American Indian territories. In addition, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief of British forces, discontinued bestowing on the tribes gifts and supplies, the most import of which was gunpowder. During the war, Amherst had also provided alcohol to the natives, but he refused to dispense it at war’s end. Thus, genuine hardship from a lack of gunpowder, which curtailed their hunting and disrupted their fur trade, an unslaked addiction to drink, discomfort due the diminution of other supplies, and increasing white encroachments on their lands furnished many Great Lakes tribes with seri- The Ottawa chief Pontiac, who organized a ous grievances against the pan-Indian resistance to English colonists in British. the 1760’s. (Library of Congress)
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On April 27, 1763, Pontiac convened a general war council in order to finalize war plans that envisaged a wholesale assault on British forts along the frontier. His call to arms solicited support from Chippewas, Lenni Lenapes (Delawares), Hurons, Illinois, Kickapoos, Miamis, Mingos, Potawatomis, Senecas, and Shawnees. On May 8, 1763, he and three hundred warriors—mostly his own tribesmen, along with Chippewas and Potawatomis—entered Fort Detroit, weapons concealed and ready to strike. Previously alerted to Pontiac’s intentions, however, Major Henry Gladwin foiled Pontiac’s attack from within and the natives put Gladwin’s fort under what became a six-month siege. Within weeks, every British fort west of Niagara was destroyed: Forts Sandusky, St. Joseph, Miami, Quiatenon, Venango, Le Boeuf, Michilimackinac, Edward Augustus, and Presque Isle. Forts in the Monongahela Valley, such as Fort Ligonier, were attacked. Only Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit survived. Before the winter of 1763, the British had suffered costly ambushes such as one outside Detroit at Blood Ridge and counted two thousand casualties overall. Fearful that their entire frontier would collapse, the British counterattacked. By late fall, tribal resistance had weakened, as the natives were unused to protracted warfare and lacked the measure of aid they had expected from the French. At Fort Pitt, blankets distributed by the fort commander, Captain Simon Ecuyer, infected besieging natives and produced a devastating smallpox epidemic, while another of Amherst’s commanders tracked them with English hunting dogs. In late autumn, Pontiac lifted the siege of Detroit, although elsewhere some Indian forces continued fighting throughout 1764. Other tribes, however, had concluded peace treaties with Colonel John Bradstreet at Presque Isle as early as August, 1763. By July, 1765, Pontiac had entered peace negotiations that resulted in a treaty signed with the British at Oswego on July 24, 1766, a treaty under which he was pardoned. Following his pardon, Pontiac was received with hostility by neighbors in his Maumee River village and he, his family, and a handful of supporters were driven out by tribe members who wanted resistance to continue. While at a trading post in Cahokia (Illinois), Pontiac was murdered in April, 1769, by Black Dog, a Peoria Indian whom the British may have paid in hopes of forestalling future rebellions. Alteration of British Policy. In the aftermath of Pontiac’s resistance, the British, apprehensive about a renewal of Native American resistance, altered their Indian policy. They abandoned their Indian posts everywhere in the West, except at Detroit, Michilimackinac, and Niagara, and crossmountain trade was placed again in colonial hands. British authorities,
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seeking to remove yet another cause of native grievances, renewed the practice of favoring tribes with sumptuous gifts. Unable to stem the tide of European settlers into trans-Appalachian tribal lands, as the Proclamation Line of 1763 was intended to do, British representative William Johnson negotiated a new boundary with Iroquois leaders at Fort Stanwix in September, 1768. This line was drawn farther west, in hopes of lessening chances of friction between the natives and the settlers. Britain’s concerns over Native American affairs soon gave way to coping with rising resistance among its own colonials. In retrospect, Pontiac’s pan-Indian alliance represented the greatest threat mounted by Native Americans against Great Britain’s New World expansion prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution. It dramatically launched Native American resistance to white civilization, resistance that subsequently included uprisings by Little Turtle (1790-1794) and by Tecumseh (1809-1811) and, during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, drew the U.S. military into the lengthiest and most numerous succession of campaigns in its history, ending with the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. See also: French and Indian War; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Proclamation of 1763. Mary E. Virginia Sources for Further Study Hawke, David. The Colonial Experience. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Chapter 13 brilliantly places Pontiac’s resistance in the context of Great Britain’s halting steps toward imperial reorganization. Leach, Douglas E. Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607-1763. New York: Macmillan, 1973. A formidable study that details the increasingly impossible task Great Britain faced in trying to devise an effective military defense for a vast colonial empire against France and Spain, British colonists, and Native Americans. The latter chapters provide excellent background on Pontiac’s resistance. ____________. “Colonial Indian Wars.” In History of Indian-White Relations, edited by Wilcomb B. Washburn. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. More specific in its focus than the Leach study, this article combines British and American Indian politics and perspectives in the context of colonial wars. Nester, William R. Haughty Conquerors: Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763. Greenwood, Conn.: Praeger, 2000. An up-to-date history of Pontiac’s resistance.
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Parkman, Francis. The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada. 1874. Reprint. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Despite minor inaccuracies, this remains the classic study of the subject. Based on original documents and written by one of the greatest of American historians. Peckham, Howard. Pontiac and the Indian Uprising. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947. Corrects Parkman’s inaccuracies, updates the subject, and provides fresh insights into American Indian attitudes. Sosin, Jack M. Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760-1775. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Concentrates on the evolution of British policy in trans-Appalachia between 1760 and 1765, including British adjustments to Pontiac’s resistance.
Powhatan Confederacy Date: 1570’s-1644 Locale: Eastern Virginia Tribes involved: Arrohattoc, Appomattoc, Mattapanient, Pamunkey, Youghtanund, Powhatan, Accohannock, Accomac, Chesapeake, Chickahominy, Chiskiack, Cuttatawomen, Kecoughtan, Moraughtacund (Morattico), Nandtaughtacund, Nansemond, Onawmanient, Opiscopank, Paspahegh, Piankatank, Pissaseck, Patawomeck, Quiyoughcohannock, Rappahannock, Sekakawon, Warraskoyack, Weanoc, Werowocomoco, Wiccocomico Categories: Colonial history, Native government Significance: Wahunsonacock makes political alliance with native tribes in the Virginia region against encroaching European settlers. The term “Powhatan” is used in several ways. It was the name given to a group of tribes of Virginia Indians; the name of an Indian village; the “throne name” of a chief; and the name of the man who created the Powhatan Confederacy in eastern Virginia. Geographically, the Powhatan Confederacy extended north to Alexandria along the Potomac River, south to the Neuse River in North Carolina, west along Virginia’s fall line, and east to the Atlantic Ocean. Although historians have consistently referred to the chief of the Powhatan Indians and the ruler of the Powhatan Confederacy as Powhatan, his birth name was Wahunsonacock. This discrepancy was caused by the English, who either did not know his birth name or
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found it more convenient to call him Powhatan because he had so many names. It has been suggested that Powhatan or his father came from the south. This contention is supported by the fact that Powhatan succeeded his father as chieftain, a practice in opposition to the matriarchal system of succession practiced by the Algonquians of eastern Virginia. Upon his father’s death, Powhatan inherited control over six tribes in eastern Virginia: the Arrohattoc (Arrohateck), Appomat- Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, married toc (Appomattox), Mattapa- one of the original settlers of Jamestown, John Rolfe, and was instrumental in improving relanient (Mattaponi), Pamunkey, tions between the settlers and the Powhatan Youghtanund, and Powhatan. Confederacy. After a visit to England, where By the time of Jamestown’s she was warmly received by the British court, founding in 1607, Chief Pow- she contracted smallpox and died there in hatan’s control extended to 1617. (Library of Congress) more than twenty additional tribes: the Accohannock, Accomac, Chesapeake, Chickahominy, Chiskiack, Cuttatawomen, Kecoughtan, Moraughtacund (Morattico), Nandtaughtacund, Nansemond, Onawmanient, Opiscopank (Piscataway), Paspahegh, Piankatank, Pissaseck, Patawomeck (Potomac), Quiyoughcohannock, Rappahannock (Tappahannock), Sekakawon (Secacawoni), Warraskoyack, Weanoc (Weyanock), Werowocomoco, and Wiccocomico (Wiccomico). Most historians agree that the Powhatan Confederacy was forged by Powhatan’s treachery, fear, and force. Powhatan allegedly attacked the Piankatank tribe at night and then slaughtered all the captives. When Powhatan invaded the Kecoughtan, he slaughtered all resisters and distributed the captives throughout his domain. He was reputed to have slaughtered the entire Chesapeake tribe because an oracle had divined that Powhatan would be overthrown by a force from the east. He then transplanted his own people to the area formerly occupied by the Chesapeake. Powhatan consolidated his power by conferring chiefdoms on his relatives, by his own multiple marriages with the daughters of chieftains, and by the intermarriage of his family with the sons and daughters of locally
422 / Powhatan Confederacy
powerful chiefs. The four known brothers of Powhatan all became chiefs: Opitchapam, Powhatan’s successor; Opechancanough, the chief of the Pamunkey Indians and a Powhatan successor; Kekataugh, the ruler of the village of Pamunkey; and Japasus (Iopassus), the king of the Potomacs. William Strachey, an English writer who lived in Virginia in the early 1600’s, suggested that Powhatan’s twelve marriages increased his authority among Virginia’s native tribes. A thirteenth wife has been attributed to Powhatan: Oholasc, the regent of the Tappahannocks. There is no accurate listing of the number of children fathered by Powhatan. At the time of the English arrival in 1607, it was estimated that Powhatan had twenty living sons and twelve living daughters. The betterknown Powhatan offspring included Taux-Powhatan, the eldest son and ruler of the Powhatans; Na-mon-tack, who was presented to James I; Pocahontas; Cleopatre; Tohahcoope, chief of the Tappahannocks; Nantaquaus, described by John Smith as the manliest, comeliest, and boldest spirit in a “savage”; Matachanna; and Pochins, chief of the Kecoughtan. Powhatan’s original capital, Werowocomoco, was about ten miles from Jamestown. In 1608, Werowocomoco was abandoned for Orapax on the Chickahominy River to keep Powhatan geographically distant from the English. Powhatan used his retreat to the interior and the threat of the English presence to increase his control over the tribes of the confederacy. Political and Cultural Organization. The domain over which Powhatan ruled was a collection of villages. There is dispute about the exact number. William Strachey counted thirty-four villages; historians have estimated from thirty to more than one hundred villages. Often a tribe would people more than one village. Regardless of the number, Powhatan ruled about thirty tribes in eastern Virginia with an estimated population of at least 14,300, although this figure is also in dispute. Each village was expected to pay eight-tenths of its rude wealth in tribute to Powhatan. The village was the administrative unit of the Powhatan Confederacy, with power invested in a cockarouse, the weroance or war-leader, the tribal council, and the priest. The cockarouse was the first person in dignity in the village, a member of the tribal council, and the highest elected civil magistrate, chosen for experience and wisdom. The cockarouse exercised authority only during times of peace, received the first fruits of the harvest, and was in charge of all public and private concerns of the village. The cockarouse presided at tribal councils, was a delegate to Powhatan’s council, and held the office for life on condition of good behavior. Although elective, the position of cockarouse might be hereditary in the female line. Women could be cockarouses.
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Powhatan appointed the weroance. The weroance was a member of Powhatan’s council, the leader in hunting and fishing expeditions, and in charge of all military affairs. The weroance exercised the power of life and death over the members of his tribe, collected the tribute due Powhatan, declared war, maintained a crude ceremonial state, and presided over the village council in the absence of the cockarouse. The tribal council regulated matters of concern to the whole confederacy. It governed by a sense of right and wrong, by custom, by fashion, by public opinion, and by a sense of honor. It is difficult to determine whether the tribe or the village was the basic political unit of the Powhatan Confederacy, because they were frequently one and the same. Historians generally agree that a king or queen ruled over a tribe. Usually, the king was a weroance. Strachey mentions one queen, Opossunoquonuske of the Mussasran, who was also a weroance. This is probably an exception, because Oholasc was a queen but her son was the weroance. The highest political authority resided with Powhatan and his council (Matchacomoco). The council was composed of cockarouses, weroances, and the priests of all the subject and allied tribes. The council shared the supreme authority over the Powhatan Confederacy with Powhatan, was convened by the people, and held open meetings. Powhatan presided over this advisory body to declare war or peace, conduct foreign relations, and manage domestic affairs. A unanimous vote of the council was required to implement council decisions, but the personal authority of Powhatan greatly affected council policy. Powhatan’s increasing association with the English may have led to his coronation ceremony, which elevated him both in his own eyes and among his subjects. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England has an object called “Powhatan’s Mantle.” It measures approximately 233 by 150 centimeters and is made of four pieces of tanned buckskin bearing a design in shell depicting a standing human figure flanked by two quadrupeds and a series of large rosettes. It is unlikely that this particular mantle was Powhatan’s coronation cloak, but it is judged to be authentically seventeenth century Virginia Indian. During Powhatan’s lifetime and because of the religious conversion of Pocahontas, his daughter, and her subsequent marriage to John Rolfe, relations between the Powhatan Confederacy and the Jamestown settlement steadily improved. After the deaths of Pocahontas (1617) and Powhatan (1618), Powhatan’s successors, particularly his brother Opechancanough, viewed the English as intruders and sought to remove the English from the ancestral native lands. From 1622 until 1676, Native American rebellions occurred intermittently until the eastern Virginia tribes were either de-
424 / Powhatan Wars
feated or fled westward, leaving the English in firm control of the lands of the Powhatan Confederacy. See also: Indian-white relations: English colonial; Powhatan Wars. William A. Paquette Sources for Further Study Barbour, Philip L. Pocahontas and Her World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. A good synthesis of seventeenth century accounts of Jamestown’s founding, including much information on Powhatan. Beverly, Robert. The History and Present State of Virginia. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. A study of Indian life and customs in the seventeenth century, first published in 1705. McCary, Ben C. Indians in Seventeenth Century Virginia. Williamsburg: Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957. Reviews the history of seventeenth century Native Americans in Virginia. Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Written by an ethnohistorian and anthropologist, this is one of the best studies of Jamestown and the settlement’s relationship to the Powhatan Confederacy. ____________. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1989. A comprehensive study of all aspects of life among the Powhatan Confederacy tribes. Smith, John. The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles. Philadelphia: Kimber and Conrad, 1812. An account of life in Virginia by the first Englishman to meet Chief Powhatan. Strachey, William. The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612). Edited by Louis Wright and Virginia Freund. 1953. Reprint. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967. A contemporaneous account of Virginia’s Native Americans.
Powhatan Wars Date: 1622-1646 Locale: Virginia Tribes involved: Powhatan Confederacy: Arrohattoc, Appomattoc, Mattapanient, Pamunkey, Youghtanund, Powhatan, Accohannock, Accomac, Chesapeake, Chickahominy, Chiskiack, Cuttatawomen,
Powhatan Wars / 425
Kecoughtan, Moraughtacund (Morattico), Nandtaughtacund, Nansemond, Onawmanient, Opiscopank, Paspahegh, Piankatank, Pissaseck, Patawomeck, Quiyoughcohannock, Rappahannock, Sekakawon, Warraskoyack, Weanoc, Werowocomoco, Wiccocomico Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: Led by Opechancanough, the Powhatan Confederacy unsuccessfully attempted to drive English settlers from Virginia. The Powhatan tribes of the Chesapeake Bay region of Virginia had been at peace with the English settlers during the eight years prior to the outbreak of the Powhatan Wars. Powhatan, the chief of this confederacy of about nine thousand, had engaged the English in intermittent warfare from the time of their settlement of Jamestown in 1607. The combination of serious losses of warriors in those conflicts and the 1614 marriage of his daughter Pocahontas to English planter John Rolfe persuaded Powhatan to avoid further hostilities. Upon Powhatan’s death in 1618, his brother Opechancanough continued his policy of accommodation. Yet Opechancanough was alarmed at the continued expansion of English settlement on Powhatan land, and he resented the English efforts to assimilate his people into their culture. Consequently, he patiently planned a colony-wide uprising in the hope of driving the English from Virginia. While often professing to the English his hopes for continued peace, Opechancanough negotiated with the almost thirty tribes in the Powhatan Confederacy to join in his proposed campaign. When the English murdered a highly reA depiction of Powhatan in a longhouse meet- garded warrior and prophet ing from a German engraving. (Library of Con- named Nemattanow in early March, 1622, on suspicion of gress)
426 / Powhatan Wars
killing a white trader, Opechancanough realized that his enemies had presented him with an incident to rally his forces. In two weeks of visits with confederacy tribes, Opechancanough persuaded them to attack simultaneously on March 22. The devastating strike claimed 347 lives, almost a third of the English population in Virginia. More would have died had not a Pamunkey servant informed his master, who, in turn, warned the main settlements in and around Jamestown, allowing them to prepare for the attack. In response, the English launched a vigorous counterattack, including military expeditions, the destruction of crops, and the burning of villages. This struggle, which took more native lives than English, continued for a decade and ended with a truce in 1632. Opechancanough ended the truce a dozen years later. Feeble and nearly blind—according to the English sources he was one hundred years old— the Powhatan leader once again persuaded confederation tribes to participate in a coordinated attack on English settlements. Beginning on April 18, 1644, the attack claimed nearly five hundred lives but proved less devastating to the English than the 1622 foray because there were now about eight thousand settlers in Virginia. The fighting, which lasted for two years, effectively concluded with the English capture of Opechancanough. He was taken to Jamestown, where a guard killed him two weeks later. In October, 1646, the colonial assembly made peace with Opechancanough’s successor, Necotowance. The treaty provided for a clear boundary between the two peoples, roughly along the York River. Neither side was to enter the other’s territory without the colonial governor’s permission. The English victories in the Powhatan Wars virtually ended native opposition to English expansion in Virginia. The combination of two decades of warfare and disease took a heavy toll not only on the Powhatan Confederacy but also on all Virginia tribes. By 1670, there were only about seven hundred warriors in a total population of barely three thousand. Since the English population had grown to more than forty thousand, further resistance was futile. See also: Indian-white relations: English colonial; Powhatan Confederacy. Larry Gragg
Prehistory: Arctic / 427
Prehistory: Arctic Date: c. 10,000 b.c.e.-c. 1800 c.e. Locale: Bering Strait land bridge (Beringia), northern Alaska, northern Canada, the Canadian Archipelago, northern Greenland Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian predecessors to Aleut, Eskimo, Inuit Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The Arctic is the area of North America that has been longest inhabited by Indians. The Arctic ordinarily is defined as the circumpolar region lying north of the treeline where the warmest temperature is below 10 degrees centigrade; it only roughly approximates the Arctic Circle. In the Western Hemisphere, the prehistoric Arctic culture area included the Bering Strait land bridge (Beringia), northern Alaska and northern Canada, the Canadian Archipelago, and most of Greenland. Next to the Antarctic, it was the last of the global niches in which humans made those adaptations essential to their survival, a process that had begun by 10,000 b.c.e. Serious archaeological research into the Western Hemisphere Arctic began in the 1920’s with the work of Knud Rasmussen, Kaj Birket-Smith, and Terkel Mathiassen. It bared the outlines of a whale-hunting Eskimo culture named Thule, the origins of which lay in Alaska, where a Paleo-Arctic tra-
Arctic Culture Area Saint Lawrence Island Eskimo
Siberian Eskimo
West Alaskan Eskimo Aleut
North Alaskan Eskimo
Polar Eskimo
East Greenland Eskimo
Yupik
South Alaskan Eskimo
Mackenzie Eskimo
Netsilik Copper Eskimo Caribou Eskimo
West Greenland Eskimo
Iglulik
Baffin Island Eskimo Sallirinuit Quebec Inuit
Labrador Coast Eskimo
428 / Prehistory: California
dition dated to 10,000 b.c.e. In 1925, archaeologist Diamond Jenness unearthed evidence of a hitherto unknown Arctic culture, since called Dorset, that predated the Thule tradition. A rapid extension of Arctic research after 1945 by Helge Larsen, Jorgen Meldgaard, J. Louis Giddings, William Taylor, and Elmer Harp, Jr., among others, broadened knowledge of Thule and Dorset cultures. They and other researchers also provided evidence of a pre-Dorset culture that spread across the northern, central, and eastern Arctic during postglacial warming periods and discovered an Arctic Small Tool tradition as well. By the 1990’s, the Arctic prehistoric cultural sequence—as defined by archaeological findings—proceeded from PaleoArctic (10,000 b.c.e.-6000 b.c.e.), to the Arctic Small Tool tradition (4200 b.c.e.-3100 b.c.e.), to pre-Dorset (4500 b.c.e.-c.1300 b.c.e.) to Dorset (700 b.c.e.-1000 c.e.), to Thule (100-c.1800). Note that there are gaps as well as periods during which traditions overlap. These historically related traditions underlay more recent Aleut and Eskimo cultures and undoubtedly had still more ancient origins in Asia. See also: Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. Clifton K. Yearley
Prehistory: California Date: c. 8000 b.c.e.-c. 1600 c.e. Locale: California and northernmost Baja California Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian precedessors to Achumawi, Atsugewi, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Chumash, Costanoan, Cupeño, Diegueño, Esselen, Fernandeño, Gabrielino, Hupa, Juaneño, Kamia, Karok, Luiseño, Maidu, Mattole, Miwok, Patwin, Pomo, Quechan, Salinan, Serrano, Shasta, Tolowa, Tubatulabal, Wailaki, Wappo, Wintun, Wiyot, Yahi, Yokuts, Yuki, Yurok Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The prehistory and ethnology of California’s Indian societies significantly contribute to understanding the hunting-gathering cultures in rich and varied environments. Although archaeological findings that are conjectural (and controversial) have placed Paleo-Indian cultures in California as early as 50,000 b.c.e.,
California Culture Area Tolowa Karok Shasta Yurok Hupa
Wiyot Mattole
Achumawi
Wintun
Sinkyone
Atsugewi
Yana
Wailaki
Yahi
Yuki
Maidu Pomo
Patwin Wappo
Coast Miwok Miwok Costanoan Monache Yokuts
Esselen
Tubatulabal
Salinan
Chumash Fernandeño Serrano
Chemehuevi
Gabrielino Luiseño Juaneño
Cahuilla
Cupeño Diegueño
Kamia
Quechan
430 / Prehistory: Great Basin
hard evidence confirms their existence there by 8000 b.c.e. Such evidence consists of Clovis points—fluted stone projectile points used in biggame hunting—discovered throughout present-day California in at least eleven archaeological sites, among them Borax Lake, Lake Mojave, Tulare Lake, China Lake, Pinto Basin, Tiefort Basin, and Ebbetts Pass. In addition to Clovis points, other artifacts have been found at many of these digs, including hammer stones; cutting, scraping, chopping, and engraving tools; other projectile points; awls; charms; shell beads; and atlatl (throwing) hooks. At sites in central and Northern California, such artifacts have been located amid the remains of mammoths, giant bison, camels, horses, deer, elk, seal, small land animals, fish, and birds. Cemeteries with human remains in the Sacramento Valley attest the sedentary occupations and lengthy settlements that characterized a number of diverse and complex prehistory communities. Overall, these California communities have been grouped by archaeologists and ethnographers into four broad cultural provinces that roughly coincide with California’s major environmental features: Northwest Pacific, Central-transSierran, Southern Coastal, and Southern Desert. Archaeologists estimate the population of prehistoric California at between 300,000 and 350,000 people, comprising nearly five hundred distinct communities and ethnic groups. See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. Clifton K. Yearley
Prehistory: Great Basin Date: c. 9500 b.c.e.-c. 1800 c.e. Locale: Central and southern Oregon, eastern California, Nevada, Utah Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian predecessors to Bannock, Gosiute, Kawaiisu, Mono, Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, Walapai, Washoe Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The harsh environment of the Great Basin forced the tribes living there to make significant cultural adaptation for survival. In the Great Basin, which included portions of present-day central and southern Oregon, eastern California, Nevada, and much of Utah, prehis-
Prehistory: Great Basin / 431
toric Native Americans confronted the most rigorous environment they encountered anywhere. The region’s prehistorical importance, therefore, stems from archaeological evidence that indicates the adaptations made by the ancestors of more than a dozen major tribes to this difficult environment. Archaeological discoveries at Tule Springs, Nevada, suggest that parts of the Great Basin may have been occupied by Pleistocene peoples by 26,000 b.c.e., while other findings in south-central Oregon sug-
Great Basin Culture Area
Northern Paiute (Paviotso)
Northern Shoshone
Bannock
Eastern Shoshone
Western Shoshone
Washoe
Mono
Gosiute
Panamint Kawaiisu
Southern Paiute
Ute
432 / Prehistory: Northeast
gest human occupancy by 11,200 b.c.e. These dates are highly controversial, however; uncontroverted evidence places earliest human occupancy of the region at between 9500 b.c.e. and 9000 b.c.e., particularly evidence of the presence of Clovis people, whom archaeologists now believe to have been widespread in the Great Basin as well as the rest of the West by those dates. Major archaeological discoveries, among a number confirming this, are located at the C. W. Harris site in San Diego, California; Gypsum Cave and Fallon, Nevada; Fort Rock Cave, Oregon; Death Valley, Owens Lake, and Tulare Lake, California; and Danger Cave, Deadman, Promontory, and Black Rock caves in Utah. Throughout most of the Great Basin, early peoples formed small nomadic groups that foraged for lake plants and animals. In environmentally favored sections of the Basin, village life developed and lasted for several millennia. Contacts among regional groups appear to have been frequent, and trade was sophisticated. Artifacts from throughout the Great Basin include a rich variety of projectile points, knives, scrapers, milling stones, coiled basketry, cloths, moccasins, jars, and appliqued pottery. See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. Clifton K. Yearley
Prehistory: Northeast Date: c. 9000 b.c.e.-c. 1600 c.e. Locale: Northeastern North America Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian predecessors to Abenaki, Adena, Algonquian, Erie, Fox, Hopewell, Huron, Illinois, Iroquois, Kickapoo, Lenni Lenape, Mahican, Maliseet, Massachusett, Menominee, Miami, Micmac, Mohawk, Nanticoke, Narragansett, Neutral, Old Copper, Ottawa, Owasca, Passamaquoddy, Pequot, Petun, Potawatomi, Sauk, Shawnee, Susquehannock, Tuscarora, Wampanoag, Winnebago, Woodland Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The Northeast Woodlands region was the heartland of the forebears of the Algonquian linguistic family. Evidence suggests that Iroquoian speakers have also lived there for thousands of years.
Prehistory: Northeast / 433
Northeast Culture Area
Micmac Maliseet Passamaquoddy
Ottawa
Sauk
Winnebago
Huron Petun Neutral
Fox Miami Kaskaskia Illinois
Erie
Kickapoo
Piankashaw Shawnee Moneton
Penobscot Abenaki Pennacook
Mahican
Potawatomi
Mohawk Oneida Onondaga Cayuga Seneca
Menominee
Algonquin
Nipissing
Ojibwa
Nipmuck Pequot Massachusett Wampanoag Narragansett Wappinger
Lenni Lenape Susquehannock Nanticoke Powhatan Nottaway Secotan Tuscarora Pamlico
Paleo-Eastern Woodlanders used stone tools and foraged for small game and seasonal plants. Grit-tempered, cord-marked pottery dates from 2500 b.c.e., and fiber-tempered pottery appeared at about 500 b.c.e. Evidence suggests the Adena cultural influence from about 1000 b.c.e. and then Hopewell mound cultural influences from the beginning of the millennium entered the Northeast. After 500 c.e., the region was the recipient of migrations from Caddoan-speaking or Siouan-speaking people of the Mississippian mound cultures. The most important influence on the area two thousand years ago was the agricultural culture associated with Iroquoianspeaking people, who emerged from an archaeological complex called Owasco. It was the Owasco who began to create tribal units and to cultivate crops, returning to agricultural sites year after year simply because certain crops grew well in certain soils and zones. Native seeds such as squash and bottle gourds have been gathered and planted by paleo-Indians of the Northeast Woodlands for four thousand years. Local economies based on the slash-and-burn agriculture of many native crops had evolved by about 100 c.e. It was only around 800 c.e. that maize (corn) was introduced, probably from the Southwest. It may have been the introduction of corn throughout the continent that lessened the re-
434 / Prehistory: Northeast
ligious influence of the mound-building culture called Hopewell. The cultivation of corn and corn’s concomitant mythologies loosened the religious hold Hopewell thought had on the Northeast. The Northeast Woodlands have long had cultural interchanges with other areas, and this area was the focus of migratory movement from
Mound-Building Cultures and Mound Sites
Aztalan Norton
Mounds State Park Miamisburg Fort Ancient Cahokia Angel Kincaid Spiro
Chucalissa
Newark
Grave Creek
Adena Seip Serpent Mound
Mound Bottom
Hiwassee Island
Etowah Winterville Belcher
Hollywood Moundville Ocmulgee
Emerald Mound
Kolomoki Adena culture
Mount Royal
Hopewell culture Mississippian core area Mississippian culture
The earliest of the Ohio River Mound Builders, the Adena Indians, are thought to have lived between 700 B.C.E. and 200 C.E. The Adena gave rise to the Hopewell Indian culture, also centered in the valleys of the Ohio River and its tributaries, which is recognized from around 100 B.C.E. until about 400 or 500 C.E. The Hopewell developed vast, nearly continentwide, trading networks. Some researchers posit that Hopewellians were ancestral to the Iroquois. The last North American mound-building culture, the Mississippian, was centered along the Mississippi River, at Cahokia, where East St. Louis, Illinois, now stands. It developed around 700 C.E. and flourished until after 1500. Many scholars believe that the Mississippians were direct ancestors to the Cherokee, Sioux, and other American Indian tribes.
Prehistory: Northwest Coast / 435
the Great Lakes, the Ohio River Valley, and the Eastern shore routes for thousands of years, setting the stage for the arrival of Europeans in the 1600’s. See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. Glenn Schiffman Sources for Further Study Jennings, Jesse D. Prehistory of North America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Newcomb, William. North American Indians: An Anthropological Perspective. Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear, 1974.
Prehistory: Northwest Coast Date: c. 9500 b.c.e.-c. 1800 c.e. Locale: From Yakutat Bay in southern Alaska to Cape Mendocino in Northern California Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian predecessors to Bella Coola, Chehalis, Chinook, Coast Salish, Coos, Haida, Hupa, Karok, Klamath, Klikitat, Kwakiutl, Nootka, Quinault, Takelma, Tillamook, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Wiyot, Yurok Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The rugged coastal area of the Northwest provided an environment suited to the development of maritime tribal cultures. The Northwest Coast culture area extends from the modern regions of Yakutat Bay in southern Alaska south to Cape Mendocino in Northern California. It has a rugged coastline with many deep inlets. In the northern half, mountains rise several thousand feet directly from the edge of salt water. There are numerous small islands offshore, but there are few beaches or low-level areas convenient for village sites. Natural History. Climatic conditions along this coastal strip are characterized by even temperatures and heavy rainfall (up to one hundred inches a year in many places). The abundant rainfall and moderate temperature of the region produce a distinctive and dense vegetation. Forests extend from
Northwest Coast Culture Area
Eyak
Tlingit
Nishga Gitksan Tsimshian Haida Haisla Bella Bella Bella Coola
Kwakiutl Nootka Squamish Semiahmoo Cowichan Nooksack Makah Quileute Clallam Quinault Skokomish Chehalis Twana Chemakum Duwamish Chinook Snoqualmie Puyallup Klikitat Clatskanie Nisqually Cowlitz Tillamook
Siletz Yaquina Kalapuya Alsea Siuslaw Coos Umpqua Tututni Takelma Chasta Costa Klamath
Prehistory: Northwest Coast / 437
the Pacific shoreline to near the highest ridges of the major river drainage systems, such as the Columbia, Fraser, and Skeena Rivers. As one goes southward, the terrain changes from towering mountains of raw, naked rock cut by deep canyons gouged out by glacial flow and watercourse turbulence to, around upper Puget Sound and along the Oregon and northwestern California coasts, steep but rounded coastal hills and estuaries resulting from the buildup of sand bars formed at the river mouths. In prehuman times, wildlife and game of all sorts were unimaginably plentiful. In fact, the extreme abundance of natural resources in this culture area later gave rise to a high degree of civilization without the emergence of agriculture. Maritime, estuarine, and riverine resources were the mainstays that provided an ample foundation for the building of prehistoric human cultures. The sea and the forests, even today, are the most important providers of sustenance. Fishing and sea mammal hunting required an intricate extraction technology that allowed the first human hunter-gatherers, after their arrival thousands of years ago, to harvest and use the available natural resources to the fullest extent. This required each community to develop the complex tools and skills necessary to ensure their individual success among the many diverse communities that eventually developed in, and occupied, the region. Archaeological History. Archaeological research has been undertaken in this culture area since the late 1800’s. Sites such as those discovered at Port Hammond, Marpole, Vancouver, Yakutat, Graham Island, and the more recent Montague Harbor have revealed numerous peoples, languages, and communities of great biological and cultural diversity. This culture area is thought to have been inhabited initially by maritime peoples, with highly developed Stone Age technology, and mobile cultures, who could have come from many directions. Athapaskan, Salish, and Penutian speakers were subdivided into more than a hundred communities and dialects, spread from one end of the area to the other, which have provided modern researchers with a wealth of artifacts and information. Northwest Coast studies entered a new phase with the 1970 discovery of water-saturated “wet” sites, where immersion of material remains below the water table and the lack of oxygen prevents vegetal decay. Sites at Ozette and Prince Rupert are particularly notable for the sophisticated methods of study used in both field and laboratory work. Radiocarbon dating and other scientific techniques indicate constant occupation of this culture area since at least ten thousand years ago. Local-
438 / Prehistory: Northwest Coast
ized tribal creation stories suggest that peoples have always existed in their lands. If prehistoric peoples did indeed migrate into the area, linguistic and genetic distribution suggests that they could have come from such diverse places as Siberia (traveling across the Bering Strait land bridge), northeastern China (traversing the exposed continental shelf), or even from Polynesia (boating across the South Pacific) to Mexico or Central America, then as far northward along the coastline as the Columbia River basin. Various basal cultures have been defined by their remains through a wide variety of descriptive means. Early boreal and protowestern cultures, microblade and pebble tool traditions, and stemmed point and fluted point traditions are all names commonly used to describe these early prehistoric cultures. It is generally thought that the diversity of peoples can best be explained through a combination of migration, diffusion, and adaptation. See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. Michael W. Simpson Sources for Further Study Borden, Charles E. Origins and Development of Early Northwest Coast Culture to About 3000 B.C. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975. Cressman, Luther S. The Sandal and the Cave: The Indians of Oregon. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1981. Drucker, Phillip. Indians of the Northwest Coast. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1963. ____________. “Sources of Northwest Coast Culture,” In New Interpretations of Aboriginal American Culture History. Seventy-fifth anniversary volume of the Anthropological Society of Washington. Seattle: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1955. Fladmark, Knut R. “The Feasibility of the Northwest as a Migration Route for Early Man.” In Early Man from a Circum-Pacific Perspective, edited by Alan Bryan. University of Alberta Department of Anthropology Occasional Papers 1. Edmonton, Alberta: Archaeological Researchers International, 1978. ____________. “The Patterns of the Culture.” In Indians of the North Pacific Coast, edited by Tom McFeat. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966.
Prehistory: Plains / 439
Prehistory: Plains Date: c. 9500 b.c.e.-c. 1800 c.e. Locale: Western Canada and United States Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian predecessors to Apache of Oklahoma, Arapaho, Arikara, Assiniboine, Atsina, Blackfoot, Caddo, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Hidatsa, Iowa, Kansa (Kaw), Kiowa, Mandan, Missouri, Omaha, Osage, Oto, Pawnee, Ponca, Quapaw, Sarsi, Sioux, Tonkawa, Waco, Wichita Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: Large herds of mammals in the Great Plains contributed to the development of tribal cultures based on nomadic hunting. The prehistory of the Great Plains begins with evidence of nomadic PaleoIndian bands at around 9500 b.c.e. to 9000 b.c.e. These groups arrived before the end of the Pleistocene epoch and took advantage of herds of large mammals, such as mammoth, giant bison, camels, and horses, that have since become extinct (the horse was not reintroduced until the sixteenth century). It ends with the proto-historic period, when Spanish and other European explorers contacted agricultural village peoples and mobile bison hunting groups in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. The earliest Paleo-Indian populations utilized large, bifacial, fluted Clovis points for hunting mammoth. They captured the animals by chasing them into natural traps, such as stream heads or lakes, where females and immature animals were the most likely to be killed. Artifacts such as bifacial scrapers, choppers, worked flakes, and a variety of bone tools were used for butchering and processing hides. Sites of this period, known mainly from the southern and western Plains, include both kill sites and quarries for stone. Examples include Miami (Texas), Blackwater Draw Number 1 (New Mexico), Dent (Colorado), Domebo (Oklahoma), and Colby (Wyoming). No campsites, burials, or remains of dwellings have been discovered for this period. Around 9000 b.c.e. Clovis points were replaced by unfluted points known as Plainview, shorter fluted points known as Folsom, and other successive styles such as Firstview, Midland, Agate Basin, Hell Gap, Albert, and Cody. The Hell Gap (Wyoming) site provides a long record for bison hunters in the form of a series of temporary campsites that are chronologically transitional between Clovis and Folsom. The hunting of large herds of bison was a Plains tradition for thousands of years, and Folsom culture was based on the nomadic hunting of the giant precursors to modern buffalo,
440 / Prehistory: Plains
such as Bison antiquus and Bison occidentalis. These animals were stalked in small groups or killed in large numbers by stampeding herds off cliffs, into ditches, or into traps. Large hunts, which provided abundant supplies of meat, may have required the cooperative efforts of several bands working together. At Olsen-Chubbuck, a site in eastern Colorado, almost two hundred bison were killed and slaughtered. Bones indicate systematic butchering and selective use of choice animal parts. Several sites, such as Lindenmeier (Texas), suggest regular use by nomadic groups from year to year. The Paleo-Indian way of life, based on large-game hunting, was transformed around 6000 b.c.e. by the end of the Pleistocene and the extinction of species such as Bison antiquus. Projectile point styles such as Agate Basin were followed by styles of the Plano tradition, such as Scottsbluff, Milnesand, Portales, and Eden. These were utilized by the last of the biggame hunters until around 5000 b.c.e. Archaic Period. Between around 5000 b.c.e. and 2500 b.c.e., both human and animal populations in the Plains regions were affected by a period of warmer and drier climates known as the Altithermal period. During this period, reduction of grasslands and water sources resulted in smaller, more highly dispersed human groups. The archaeological evidence of this period is scarce compared with that for earlier and later periods. Sites of this period consist mostly of temporary campsites. When bison were hunted, they belonged to the smaller, modern species Bison bison. There is evidence for local experimentation with fiber-tempered pottery in the central Plains around 3000 b.c.e., but this technology does not become important until a much later time. Among the sites that have provided an understanding of this tradition is Mummy Cave (Wyoming), where thirty-eight distinct cultural levels bore evidence of a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle oriented toward mountain resources between 7300 b.c.e. and 1580 c.e. By 2500 b.c.e., people living in the cave used milling stones, tubular bone pipes, coiled basketry, and fiber cordage. Sites from between 2500 b.c.e. and about 100 c.e. suggest a continuation of the pattern of small groups of nomadic foragers. These groups moved across the landscape in conjunction with the seasonal availability of plant and animal resources, collecting seeds, roots, nuts, and berries when they were in season and doing occasional hunting of bison. Woodland Period. The Woodland tradition in the Plains begins with the widespread use of pottery. During the Early Woodland period, the eastern Plains were inhabited by semisedentary villages of incipient agricultural-
Plains Culture Area
Sarsi
Plains Cree
Blood Blackfoot Piegan Assiniboine
Atsina
Crow
Hidatsa Mandan
Yanktonai Sioux
Arikara Teton Sioux Cheyenne
Ponca
Santee Sioux Yankton Sioux Omaha
Pawnee
Iowa Oto
Arapaho
Kansa
Kiowa
Comanche
Apache of Oklahoma Wichita Kichai Tonkawa
Lipan Apache
Missouri
Osage
Quapaw Caddo
442 / Prehistory: Plains
ists. The year-round occupation of settlements resulted from a combination of increasing sedentism by earlier peoples and the colonization of portions of the central Plains by village cultures from farther east via fertile river valleys. Although there is no evidence for maize farming until around 500 c.e., by 250 b.c.e. Plains peoples were experimenting with sunflower, chenopodium, squash, and marsh elder. Ceramic styles of eastern Kansas and western Missouri suggest participation in the larger “Hopewell Interaction Sphere,” through which maize (corn) may have been introduced during the latter part of this period. In the vicinity of Kansas City, Hopewellian villages approached 4 hectares (10 acres) in area. Among the new features associated with them were earth-covered burial mounds with stone chambers, usually built on the tops of bluffs. Houses were more substantial, sometimes marked with oblong patterns of postholes. The pottery of this period includes cordmarked and rocker-stamped wares with shapes and decorations similar to Early Woodland styles of the eastern United States. Other Hopewell markers include platform pipes. Maize and beans were cultivated, and largestemmed or corner-notched projectile points were used for hunting deer and bison. Burial mounds of the late Plains Woodland and early Plains Village periods are found throughout the eastern Dakotas and in southern Manitoba. Frequently grouped, these were usually situated on bluffs overlooking lakes and valleys. Their forms consisted of low, circular and oblong shapes as well as long, linear embankments. Burials with pottery vessels were placed in timber-covered pits below or within mounds. In the northwestern and southern Plains, there was a persistence of mobile Archaic patterns. A number of sites indicate the continued practice of communal bison hunts. It is likely that bison hunters were in contact with village farmers, exchanging meat, hides, and other products for cultivated foods. Plains Village Period. The Late Woodland, beginning around 900 c.e., is marked by an increased reliance on the cultivation of maize in alluvial river valleys. In eastern Kansas there is evidence that suggests contact with Mississippian cultures (probably via canoe along the Missouri River) and the possible existence of trading colonies. Plains Village cultures may have been trading buffalo meat and hides with their neighbors to the east. Among the most characteristic bone artifacts of Plains Village culture is the bison scapula hoe. Ceramics of this period were typically cordroughened. Some pottery from sites of this period in the vicinity of Kan-
Prehistory: Plains / 443
sas City display “sunburst” motifs and other designs reminiscent of the Mississippian culture at the large temple mound village at Cahokia, Illinois. There was a wide variability in cultures of the Plains at this time. In the central Plains, the best-documented cultures are the Upper Republican, Nebraska, Smoky Hill, and Pomona. Characteristic house types included rectangular earth lodges with four central posts supporting timber roofs covered with soil. Earth lodge villages ranged in size from about fifty to one hundred people. Along the middle Missouri River in the Dakotas, villages of as many as three hundred people were surrounded by ditches and palisades. Maize was one of the principal cultigens of the Plains Village tradition. A characteristic agricultural implement of this period was the bison scapula hoe. Hunting of bison, deer, and antelope was undertaken with bows and arrows tipped with small, triangular, side-notched points. Fishing in rivers was done with bone hooks and harpoons. Animal products such as hides and bones were intensively utilized by Plains Village peoples. Sites have yielded a wide variety of bone implements, including needles, pins, punches, and flaking tools. Shell ornaments were common. In the Upper Republican and Nebraska phases, fine stone and ceramic pipes, occasionally decorated with human or animal effigies, were among the most important ceremonial items. Large villages in the east were clearly affected by the contact with complex societies of the eastern Missouri and central Mississippi valleys. In the northwestern and southern Plains, however, ancient patterns of mobile foraging and bison hunting still continued. Nomadic bison hunters traded with both the Plains Village peoples to the east and the Pueblo peoples of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Between 1400 and 1500 c.e., a culture known as the Lower Loup phase appeared along the banks of the Loup and Platte Rivers in eastern Nebraska. Their earthlodge villages were substantially larger than earlier settlements, sometimes covering an area of 100 acres, and often were fortified. In central Kansas, the contemporaneous Great Bend culture was characterized by large agricultural villages that were occupied at the time of the first European incursions, as evidenced by fragments of Spanish armor. In the Middle Missouri region, the proto-historic period is represented by villages with circular house foundations that were probably occupied by the agricultural ancestors of the historic Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples. In the far western and northwestern Plains, the mobile bison hunting pattern that had begun at least ten thousand years earlier persisted into the nineteenth century, but it was aided by the introduction of the horse. The
444 / Prehistory: Plateau
historic heirs to this tradition, whose ancestors may never have participated in agricultural Plains Village patterns, are tribes such as the Blackfoot, Arapaho, and Assiniboine. The first Spanish to arrive in the Great Plains included Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who in 1541 traveled north in search of a kingdom known to him as Gran Quivira. Reaching central Kansas, he was disappointed to discover settled Great Bend villages with little gold. Nevertheless, it is clear that the indigenous peoples of the Plains share a rich and ancient cultural history. See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. John Hoopes Sources for Further Study Adair, Mary J. Prehistoric Agriculture in the Central Plains. University of Kansas Publications in Anthropology 16. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988. Bamforth, Douglas B. Ecology and Human Organization on the Great Plains. New York: Plenum Press, 1988. Frison, George C. Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains. 2d ed. San Diego: Academic Press, 1991. Wedel, Waldo C. Central Plains Prehistory: Holocene Environments and Culture Change in the Republican River Basin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ____________. “The Prehistoric Plains.” In Ancient North Americans, edited by Jesse D. Jennings. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1983.
Prehistory: Plateau Date: c. 9500 b.c.e.-c. 1800 c.e. Locale: Eastern British Columbia, Oregon, Idaho, Washington Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian predecessors to Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, Nez Perce, Spokane, Yakima Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The native cultures of the Plateau area were among the last to make contact with Europeans and thus maintained their own traditions the longest.
Prehistory: Plateau / 445
Plateau Culture Area
Lillooet Shuswap Nicola Lake
Methow
Kutenai
Okanagan
Wenatchi
Sanpoil Colville Chelan
Klikitat
Yakima Wishram Tenino Molala
Walla Walla
Umatilla
Kalispel
Columbia Wanapam Spokane Palouse
Coeur d’Alene Flathead
Nez Perce Cayuse
Klamath Modoc
The Plateau culture area is enclosed between the Cascade mountain range to the west and the even higher northern Rockies to the east. The area is very dry; it is closely related to the Great Basin, but its dryness is tempered somewhat by its more northerly location (and therefore cooler temperatures) and the presence of two major river systems, the Columbia and the Fraser. Alone among all the major regions of the United States, the Plateau does not show any evidence of the fluted Clovis points. Instead, at Lind Coulee
446 / Prehistory: Plateau
in southeastern Washington, non-fluted spear points dated to 9500 b.c.e. have been found. This possibly indicates the hunting of a variety of Ice Age and modern large animals. Around 9000 b.c.e., life changed at The Dalles in Oregon (a Columbia River site) with the advent of salmon fishing, which would continue to be a major part of the Plateau diet until modern times. Salmon may have supplied as much as half of the food, because it could be dried and stored for long periods. Other items used included birds, mussels, rabbits, beaver, and numerous types of roots and bulbs. This would indicate that the western Archaic form of life, known as the Desert culture farther south, could have begun in this region. Scholars disagree about the similarity of the cultures of the Plateau and the Great Basin. Some have seen very little difference, based on similar tools, moccasins, and folklore. Others feel that the availability of salmon created a much more sedentary lifestyle for the Plateau tribes. By 5000 b.c.e., Plateau peoples were making grinding stones and living in pit houses, and by 4000 b.c.e., pit house villages existed in the Snake River Valley of Idaho. Well-made, leaf-shaped points were being used to hunt deer, elk, and pronghorn antelope to supplement the river’s resources. Contact with the outside led to changes. Algonquian-speaking peoples appeared about 1000 b.c.e., and with them came the use of ground-stone tools including mauls, pestles, atlatl weights, fish gorges, and tubular pipes, as well as animal sculptures. Contact with the northwestern coastal cultures along the Columbia and Fraser River Valleys led to the final culture phase, called Piqunin. After 1300 c.e., Plateau peoples lived in villages of five to ten earthlodges in the sheltered canyons of the rivers, which often were ten degrees warmer than the surrounding winter countryside. Here they hunted deer and fished for salmon, which they preserved by drying. In the spring and fall, they set up temporary camps in the smaller canyons and uplands to collect canas and kous roots, along with berries, and to hunt larger game. Plateau peoples were some of the last to come into direct contact with Europeans, with first known encounters being with the Alexander Mackenzie expedition of 1793, along the Fraser River, and the Lewis and Clark expedition, when it reached the Columbia River and its tributaries in 1805. See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. Fred S. Rolater
Prehistory: Southeast / 447
Prehistory: Southeast Date: c. 9500 b.c.e.-c. 1600 c.e. Locale: Southeastern North America Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian predecessors to Alabama, Atakapa, Biloxi, Caddo, Calusa, Catawba, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Coushatta, Creek, Hasinai, Hitchiti, Mobile, Natchez, Pensacola, Seminole, Timucua, Tuskegee, Yamasee Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The native inhabitants of the Southeast had a long and complex evolution into a number of different types of culture. The prehistory of the Southeast may be divided into five basic periods: Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Early and Middle Woodland, Mississippian, and Later Woodland Tribal. The first known inhabitants of the Southeastern region were Clovis culture Paleo-Indians who arrived about 9500 b.c.e. following the herd of mammoths. They were efficient hunters, and by 9000 b.c.e., aided by a warming climate, they had killed all the mammoths. They were replaced by the bighorn bison specialists known as Folsom. Adopting the atlatl (or spearthrower), they moved in smaller bands but still in a nomadic manner. Local variations of nomadic big-game hunters, including the Cumberland, harvested a variety of large animals until approximately 8000 b.c.e. One of the oldest Indian skeletons was found at Little Salt Spring in southern Florida, dated at 9000 b.c.e. At approximately 8000 b.c.e., a transition was made to the Archaic culture. For 6,500 years, or more than half of the entire period of human occupation, the Archaic peoples dominated the Southeast. Spread over eons of time and a large region, there were many variations of the culture. All showed a mastery of hunting and gathering and effective adaptation to life in the river and stream bottoms of a wet area. They hunted white-tailed deer, buffalo, rabbit, squirrel, and ducks and other birds. They became the first fishers of the area, specializing in catfish in many areas. They also gathered the abundant wild plant matter. From the first, they wandered less, and by 4500 b.c.e. they had settled down to centralized movement based on two homes: one on the stream and one nearby in the hill country. This brought about a population explosion. By 2500 b.c.e., pottery had reached the Savannah River area, from where it slowly spread throughout the Southeast. In 1700 b.c.e., the Poverty Point culture appeared in northern Louisiana; it probably consisted of migrants from
448 / Prehistory: Southeast
Southeast Culture Area Manahoac Saponi Monacan Tutelo
Chickasaw
Coushatta
Yuchi Cherokee
Tuskegee Caddo Hasinai
Atakapa
Cheraw Catawba Waccamaw
Creek
Hitchiti Tunica Alabama Ofo Chiaha Yazoo Yamasee Guale Natchez Choctaw Tohome Houma Mobile Biloxi Apalachee Chitimacha Timucua Ais Seminole Calusa
Mexico. They brought elaborate villages, small-scale agriculture, and jadeworking. Combined with influences from the north, Poverty Point led to the Early Woodland phase. The most noticeable factor in Early Woodland is the appearance of a cult of the dead, with its burial mounds filled with grave goods. By 1 c.e., improved agriculture had led to the much more elaborate Middle Woodland period, with hundreds of oval and circular burial mounds. Their grave goods included copper from Lake Superior, obsidian from the Rockies, and soapstone from Minnesota, indicating both a longrange trading system and excellent craftsmanship. After 400 c.e., Middle Woodland declined from overpopulation, too much violence, local goods competing with the imported, and perhaps other causes. About 800 c.e., the climactic Mississippian culture emerged to dominate most of the Southeast, except Virginia and Florida, until 1600. Based on an elaborate maize, beans, and squash agriculture (with fields often running for miles along river bottoms), they developed city-states such as Mound-
Prehistory: Southwest / 449
ville, Alabama; Mound Bottom, Tennessee; Etowah and Okmulgee, Georgia; and Natchez, Mississippi, all of which were centered on mound towns. Mound towns were temple mounds on which were built religious and governmental centers and possibly homes for the prominent. They were a highly stratified society led by priest-rulers and a nobility. After 1200, the Southern Death Cult imported from Mexico dominated religion. Art reached its pre-white climax in pottery, statuary, and shell-work. The Mississippians dominated the Southeast when Hernando de Soto traveled the region from 1539 to 1543, but they had disappeared from everywhere but Natchez by the early 1600’s. European diseases are often blamed for their downfall, but it is also known that Moundville split up from overpopulation. The Mississipians were replaced by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw, as well as many other tribes, by the time of white entry in the early 1600’s. See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southwest; Prehistory: Subarctic. Fred S. Rolater
Prehistory: Southwest Date: c. 10,000 b.c.e.-c. 1540 c.e. Locale: Southwestern North America Tribes involved: Paleo-Indians and Anasazi, Hohokam, Mogollon Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: The tribes of the early Southwest developed sophisticated dwellings and agricultural systems. Archaeologists have determined that the first people in the Southwest were nomadic hunting and gathering peoples who drifted into the region in small groups in the late Pleistocene period. These people, known in archaeological literature as the Cochise, had minimal tools and equipment, although some of their stone implements were expertly flaked into beautiful spear points and knives. There are several different groups of these “early man points,” which are identified by the localities where they were first discovered: Folsom, Sandia, and Clovis. Near the pueblo of Santa Ana, evidence has been found of a semipermanent camping ground dating back to the Cochise. Apparently, game
450 / Prehistory: Southwest
was abundant in this area and water was available from several springs. Artifacts found here include a number of stone tools such as knives, scrapers, drills, choppers, points, and grinding implements. These grinding tools, which indicate that the Cochise supplemented their meat diet with seeds and wild grains, consisted of a large, irregular stone with a shallow, concave area in which seeds or grains were placed and a smaller, rounded stone with which the grinding was done. These crude grinding stones ultimately developed into the metate-mano combination which allowed the later agriculturists in the region to prepare corn. Development of Agriculture. Over a period of centuries, the Cochise evolved from a nomadic society into several different cultures that were
Southwest Culture Area
Havasupai Walapai Mojave
Navajo Jicarilla Tiwa Apache Tewa Zuni Yavapai Jemez Pecos Laguna Maricopa South Acoma Quechan Tiwa Coyotero Cocopa Apache Mimbreño Tohono Apache O’odham Mescalero Chiricahua Apache Apache Pima Suma Hopi
Opata
Seri
Jumano Yaqui
Lipan Apache
Tarahumara
Karankawa Coahuiltec
Tobosco Comarito
Lagunero Zacatec
Prehistory: Southwest / 451
Prehistoric pictographs on rocks at Adamana, Arizona, 1903. (National Archives)
primarily agricultural and sedentary. The major stimulus for this change was the introduction of corn into the region. Corn had been grown in Mexico since about 7000 b.c.e., and over time new genetic strains more resistant to cold and drought were developed, which made it a viable crop for the Southwest. By about 300 b.c.e., the Cochise had settled down to farming and village life, and by circa 300 c.e., three major agricultural groups had materialized: Hohokam, Mogollon, and Anasazi. All three of these cultures depended on the “sacred triad” of corn, beans, and squash for their subsistence. They practiced simple farming methods, with the digging and planting stick as their principal tool. Agriculture and an accompanying interest in the weather eventually led the three cultures to the development of religious and ceremonial practices by which they hoped to influence nature in their favor. With the possible exception of the Hohokam, who appeared in southern Arizona along the Gila River in the third century b.c.e., the agriculturalists of the Southwest were indigenous. It was a situation of a people adopting new ideas and developing a new way of life rather than of migrants coming into the area with a new, ready-made culture. Many scholars believe that the Hohokam came from Mexico, although no geographical area of origin has been identified. If, on the other hand, the Hohokam evolved from the Cochise, as did the Mogollon and Anasazi, it is certain that they were an
452 / Prehistory: Southwest
important conduit for influences from the cultures in Mexico to come into the Southwest. Of the three prehistoric groups, the Mogollon in the mountains of southern New Mexico were the first to cultivate corn and the first to have the bow and arrow, probably having acquired both from cultures in Mexico. The Mogollon were never a cohesive society, perhaps because of the rugged terrain along the Little Colorado River where they lived. Their culture consisted of scattered groups of small villages which, while sharing certain basic traits, were characterized nevertheless by many regional differences. The Hohokam are generally divided into two main groups: the Desert and the Riverine. The Desert Hohokam, the smaller group, did not settle near streams and so were less successful agriculturally. The Riverine Hohokam built villages along rivers and developed an extensive irrigation system consisting of many miles of canals constructed with rudimentary hand tools. The building of these canals, each of which served several villages, required a high degree of social and political organization as well as effective intercommunity cooperation. The Anasazi, who lived in the high plateau country of the Four Corners area, apparently acquired corn from the Mogollon. Their first farming methods were extremely crude compared to the other two cultures, but they were such a vigorous, dynamic, and creative people that they soon surpassed their neighbors to the south and were farming the mesa tops as well as the valleys, using irrigation systems of their own design. Housing. Early in their development, all three prehistoric cultures constructed permanent dwellings known as pit houses. Generally, this was simply a shallow pit dug into the ground, lined with rocks or logs to prevent the sides from collapsing inward, and then covered with a roof made of slim branches and twigs with several inches of mud on top. The Mogollon pit house was circular, with a single center post to support a conical roof and a short, sloping ramp on one side which served as an entryway. A hole in the center of the roof provided a vent for the fire pit. The Hohokam pit house was a rectangular hole about 30 feet long with an entire structure built inside it, using the “wattle-and-daub” method, which consisted of small posts set into the ground a few inches apart, interlaced with brush and packed with mud. It was topped by a double-pitched roof and entered by a sloping ramp on one side. Although the earliest Anasazi lived in caves, by about 500 c.e. they had developed a circular pit house, approximately 5 feet deep and up to 25 feet in diameter. The structure had a flat roof, with entry by ladder through the smoke hole. By about 700, the Anasazi had developed stone architecture
Prehistory: Subarctic / 453
and were building aboveground pueblos. As their culture spread through the Southwest, they gradually absorbed most of the other two groups. Crafts. One of the benefits that results from social organization and specialization is leisure time that can be devoted to the development of arts and crafts. As the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi began to make utilitarian objects such as pottery, baskets, sandals, robes, and mats, they decorated them according to their own rapidly developing aesthetic tastes. From the beginning, all three groups made jewelry from shells, bone, and minerals such as turquoise. A careful study of all these things reveals the emergence of a rich artistic tradition which was related to other aspects of these prehistoric cultures and which constitutes the artistic heritage of the modern Puebloan artist. See also: Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Subarctic. LouAnn Faris Culley Sources for Further Study Amsden, Charles A. Prehistoric Southwesterners from Basketmaker to Pueblo. Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 1949. Cordell, Linda S. Prehistory of the Southwest. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1984. Cummings, Byron. The First Inhabitants of Arizona and the Southwest. Tucson, Ariz.: Cummings Publication Council, 1953. Gummerman, George J., ed. Exploring the Hohokam: Prehistoric Desert Peoples of the American Southwest. Dragoon, Ariz.: Amerind Foundation, 1991. Muench, David. Anasazi, Ancient People of the Rock. Palo Alto, Calif.: American West, 1975. Noble, David G., ed. The Hohokam: Ancient People of the Desert. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School of American Research Press, 1991.
Prehistory: Subarctic Date: c. 25,000 b.c.e.-c. 1700 c.e. Locale: Alaska, Canada, Greenland Tribes involved: Paleo-Indian predecessors to Aleut, Athapaskan, Eskimo (Inuit), Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian
454 / Prehistory: Subarctic
Categories: Pre-Columbian history Significance: Linguistic evidence suggests that the native tribes of the Subarctic region are closely related to those of Siberia. Determination of the lifeways and approximate dates of prehistoric cultures can be accomplished only through examination of archaeological sites and artifacts. Precisely dating the prehistory of the Subarctic is impossible. Considering the fact that many of the languages spoken in this area are related to those spoken in Siberia, however, it is generally believed that early Subarctic dwellers entered North America over the land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska, where the Bering Strait is now located, during the last Ice Age. There were at least two separate migrations, and probably three, during a period between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago. The earliest migration probably involved the Athapaskans, as their language group is by far the most widespread and has apparently changed the most over time. The Athapaskan languages spoken in Alaska and Subarctic Canada are related to the Navajo and Apache languages of the American Southwest. Eskimo groups, on the other hand, have languages so similar that a native of Alaska can easily communicate with one of Greenland. A
Subarctic Culture Area
Koyukon
Ingalik
Tanaina Tanana Kutchin Ahtna
Han
Hare
Mountain Tutchone Tagish Tahltan
Yellowknife Dogrib
Tsetsaut Kaska Slave Sekani Carrier
Chilcotin
Beaver
Chipewyan Western Woods Cree
Naskapi
Swampy Cree West Main Cree Saulteaux
East Cree Montagnais
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third group, completely unrelated to the other two, is the Northwest Coast Indians. In a real sense, the prehistory of the Subarctic extends as late as the late nineteenth century, when whites were first attracted into Alaska and Yukon by the gold rush. Unfortunately, the cultures in the region were changed by the impact of white culture before they were thoroughly studied. Some of the more remote regions were never seen by white people until the midtwentieth century, when air travel made it easier to visit any place on earth. Before this time, transport was primarily by boat in the summer and dog sled in the winter. Prehistoric Eskimos and Aleuts lived in igloos, made of packed snow. The Athapaskans lived in log cabins quite similar to those built by others much farther south. There were a great number of tribal rituals, some of which are still practiced, but details are difficult to determine, because in most instances outsiders are barred from these rituals; moreover, they are held in native languages that few outsiders understand. See also: Bering Strait migrations; Prehistory: Arctic; Prehistory: California; Prehistory: Great Basin; Prehistory: Northeast; Prehistory: Northwest Coast; Prehistory: Plains; Prehistory: Plateau; Prehistory: Southeast; Prehistory: Southwest. Marc Goldstein
Proclamation of 1763 Date: October 7, 1763 Locale: North America Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Colonial history, National government and legislation Significance: The British draw a frontier line between Native Americans and colonists, hoping to avoid more costly conflicts. How would Great Britain, victorious in the French and Indian War against France and its allies, control the vast domain between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River after 1763? The answer to that question interested not only Native Americans, French Canadians, and British colonial administrators but also American fur traders, merchants, and land speculators. The trans-Appalachian West had increasingly occupied the attention of British and colonial officials since the Albany Congress of 1754.
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During the ensuing war, the Crown appointed superintendents to coordinate Native American affairs—Sir William Johnson for the Northern Department and Edmund Atkin (replaced by John Stuart in 1762) for the Southern Department—but exigencies of the moment made the new arrangement inadequate. In the eyes of Whitehall officials, the old policy of leaving control of the frontier to the individual colonies had been chaotic and ruinous. The line of European American agricultural settlement had steadily edged westward, with scant regard for Native American land claims or indigenous culture. Royal governors, superintendents for Native American affairs, and British military men repeatedly had complained that the colonists disregarded Native American treaties and made fraudulent land purchases, and that European American traders mistreated the tribal peoples. Pontiac’s Resistance. The necessity of reaching an accord with the Native Americans seemed even more urgent with Pontiac’s Resistance, which had begun in the spring of 1763. The indigenous population, already uneasy over the defeat of their French allies, encountered repeated insults from the British commander in chief, General Jeffrey Amherst, who refused to present them with guns, ammunition, and other gifts, as had been the French custom. Striking first in the remoter sections of the West, such as at Fort Michilimackinac, and later on the Pennsylvania frontier, roving parties of Ottawas, Chippewas, Lenni Lenapes (Delawares), and Senecas overran one British-occupied post after another; by the end of June, only Forts Detroit, Pitt, and Niagara still held out against the warriors. Amherst, near recall from the home government, dispatched relief expeditions to his remaining garrisons, and several colonies raised troops to repel the indigenous combatants. The prospect of fire and sword, the diplomatic skills of William Johnson, Pontiac’s calling off the sieges, and the breakup of the coalition of tribes—which never was united on ultimate objectives—explain the demise of the rebellion and restoration of peace in 1764. Anxious to bring an end to hostilities and avoid another outbreak, the British exacted little retribution from the western tribes. During the uprising, the government announced its new policy for the West, one that had evolved from British experience in the French and Indian War. It was the work of no single minister or subminister, although Charles Wyndham (the earl of Egremont and secretary of state for the Southern Department, 1761-1763), William Petty (the earl of Shelburne, president of the Board of Trade in 1763 and later secretary of state for the Southern Department), and Wills Hill (the earl of Hillsborough, president of the Board of Trade from 1763 to 1765 and later secretary of state for the colonies) were keenly interested in the matter.
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On October 7, 1763, King George III signed the edict now known as the Proclamation of 1763. By its terms, the recently acquired territories of Canada and East and West Florida became Crown colonies, and their inhabitants became entitled to the same rights as the English at home. The proclamation nullified all colonial claims to territories west of the crest of the
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Appalachians and set those lands aside for Native Americans “for the present, and until our further Pleasure be known.” Wishing to monopolize the substantial and lucrative fur trade of the area, Whitehall hardly wanted colonial farmers crowding out the furbearers’ habitat and local traders competing for the business. The trade with the tribal peoples would be “free and open,” although traders would have to obtain a license and obey any pertinent regulations. As the Proclamation of 1763 contained no provision for law enforcement in the area beyond provincial boundaries, an ad hoc system of confining trade to a few forts under superintendent and military supervision developed. The Crown expected that the colonials would obey the edict out of allegiance to England. Moreover, the royal government hoped that restless colonists would move northward into the thinly settled districts of Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick to offset the Catholic French Canadian population there and in Quebec, or relocate southward into Georgia to bolster that buffer province against the Spaniards. Indian Reaction. Native Americans in the region heard about the Proclamation Line and watched some of the actual surveying with distrust and bemusement. The document promised that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under Our Protection should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to, or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds.
British general Thomas Gage rushed copies westward, because he imagined that “these Arrangements must be very satisfactory to the Indians.” The tribes, however, had witnessed earlier attempts at boundary treaties, such as at Easton and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1758 and 1760 respectively, and in South Carolina in 1761, crumble as squatters leapfrogged the line. In the long run, Great Britain’s “western policy” failed. Land-hungry settlers spilled over into the trans-Appalachia area in defiance of the Proclamation of 1763. British troops could not guard every mountain gap, nor could they and royal superintendents force traders to patronize specific posts. Several ambitious Virginia speculators, some of whom later joined the patriot cause in the revolution, had claims across the divide. Faced with the prospect of worthless holdings, they pressed for repeal of the order. The maintenance of western garrisons was expensive, especially when American revenues for the army’s upkeep failed to materialize, and when the troops did not accomplish their mission. In 1768, the British government,
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beset with these problems and colonial rebelliousness in the eastern regions, adopted a policy of retrenchment in the West. Control of the trade with Native Americans reverted to the individual colonies, and British troops received orders to abandon all the interior posts except Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac. Almost simultaneously, the government bowed to pressure to push the Native American boundary westward. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) with the Iroquois Confederacy and the Treaties of Hard Labor (1768) and Lochaber (1770) with the Cherokee signified this change. No longer did the trans-Appalachian West loom uppermost in British imperial policy. See also: Albany Congress; French and Indian War; Fur trade; Indianwhite relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Iroquois Confederacy; Northwest Ordinance; Pontiac’s Resistance. R. Don Higginbotham, updated by Thomas L. Altherr Sources for Further Study Jennings, Francis. Empires of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Contains a short discussion of the Proclamation of 1763 and the Native American response. Martin, James Kirby. In the Course of Human Events: An Interpretive Exploration of the American Revolution. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1979. Links the Proclamation of 1763 with other British decisions to control the colonies, such as stationing ships in American waters. “Proclamation of 1763: Governor Henry Ellis’ Plan May 5, 1763.” In The American Revolution, 1763-1783: A Bicentennial Collection, edited by Richard B. Morris. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970. Demonstrates the thinking by one colonial official that prompted the Proclamation of 1763. Sosin, Jack M. Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760-1775. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Detailed examination of royal decisions leading to the Proclamation of 1763. Stagg, Jack. Anglo-Indian Relations in North America to 1763 and an Analysis of the Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763. Ottawa: Research Branch, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1981. Provides a detailed interpretation of the text of the Proclamation of 1763 and the Crown’s motives. Steele, Ian K. Warpaths: Invasions of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Places the decisions for the Proclamation of 1763 within the context of the military actions of the recent war and earlier treaties.
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Prophetstown Date: Established April, 1808 Locale: Northwestern Indiana Tribes involved: Chippewa, Iroquois, Lenni Lenape, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Wyandot (Huron) Categories: Nineteenth century history, Organizations, Protest movements, Religion and missionary activities Significance: A Shawnee spiritual leader establishes the headquarters of Native Americans’ renewed resistance to Anglo-American expansion. At least since the 1730’s, some native leaders west of the Appalachian Mountains advocated an alliance of tribes to resist the expanding British settlements and the powerful Iroquois Confederacy. Prophets preached a radical idea, beginning a new movement: All native peoples, despite their diverse languages and cultures and ancient tribal rivalries, were really one people, separate and distinct from the Europeans, and never meant to live with the Europeans or to adopt their ways. By 1795, disagreements over strategy, factional strife within tribes, failing support from European allies, and military defeats disrupted the nativist movement. Tribal leaders willing to accept compromise signed treaties with the new United States government, surrendering millions of acres of land. In return, the U.S. government supported these so-called government chiefs, hoping that through them it could control the tribes and prevent organized resistance east of the Mississippi. Native people now faced a desperate struggle for survival. Frontiersmen settling old grudges freely hunted and raided on tribal lands. Indians could not testify in U.S. courts and had no protection under U.S. law. Native people took their own form of revenge, escalating the violence. Anglo-American squatters crowded onto tribal lands, openly violating treaties. Displaced refugees fled to the remaining tribal lands, exhausting the already depleted game supply and farmlands. Most tribesmen had become dependent on the fur trade for the necessities of life. Cheap liquor was another basic fur trade commodity. By 1800, alcoholism had reached epidemic proportions among the northwestern tribes. European diseases, against which the native peoples had neither biological immunity nor medical remedies, ravaged tribes. For native peoples throughout the trans-Appalachian West, it was a time of despair, starvation, and social chaos.
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Lalawethika Returns from the Dead. In a Shawnee village, in April, 1805, an aging alcoholic called Lalawethika (“Rattle” or “Noisemaker” for his bragging and belligerent behavior) collapsed, apparently dead. Although of no use as a hunter or warrior, Lalawethika had studied with the noted doctor Penagashea. His teacher had died in 1804, however, and working alone, Lalawethika had failed to stop an epidemic that struck his village in early 1805. Now he too, it seemed, was dead. Before Lalawethika’s funeral could take place, he suddenly returned to life. He told his amazed neighbors that he was sent back from the spirit world with a mission. The alcoholic braggart was dead; he had been born again as Tenskwatawa, the “Open Door,” to lead his people in a spiritual renewal. The use of alcohol and other vices must stop. Violence between neighbors and the greedy accumulation of material wealth must stop. The people must restore traditional communal values, living in peace with all other tribes. Native people were children of the Master of Life, but Europeans came from the Great Serpent, the Destroyer, and corrupted all they touched. The people must have nothing more to do with them or their goods. If the people purified themselves and faithfully performed the new rituals given in Tenkswatawa’s visions, they would restore the spiritual power of the tribes, the earth would be renewed, and the white invaders would disappear forever. News of the Shawnee prophet spread among the tribes of the region. His message was believable, not only because Tenskwatawa seemed infused with magnetism and power but also because three generations of prophets among the tribes had reported similar visions. Followers gathered around Tenskwatawa in 1805, hoping that he might be able to make the promise of spiritual renewal finally a reality. In the summer of 1805, he established a new village at Greenville, Ohio, on the United States’ side of a boundary line set by the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. The new site was not associated with any specific tribe; therefore, it would be easier to establish his great village of all tribes there. This new, independent village would not be controlled by any of the government chiefs, and its location openly defied the hated treaty. Through the fall and winter of 1805, Tenskwatawa met delegations from many tribes and cultivated alliances with Native American leaders throughout the region. Seven treaties signed by the government chiefs between 1804 and 1807 ceded millions of acres of tribal land to the United States and sent many angry, disillusioned tribesmen into Tenskwatawa’s camp. Disciples and allied prophets carried his message throughout the Great Lakes region and to the tribes of the South. The powerful Potawatomi shaman and war chief Main Poc, probably the most influential na-
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tive leader in the region, journeyed to Greenville in the fall of 1807 to confer with Tenskwatawa. Main Poc was in favor of the movement, although he planned a regional confederacy rather than a union of all native peoples. He firmly refused to give up his old blood feud with the Osage or his fondness for alcohol. On other crucial points, however, he and Tenkswatawa agreed and joined as allies. Tecumseh. Hundreds of people from a dozen tribes gathered at Greenville. Tenskwatawa, increasingly occupied with his duties as spiritual leader, delegated diplomatic missions to his older brother Tecumseh. Tecumseh was a gifted orator with a wide network of contacts among leaders of both northern and southern tribes. He was, moreover, a respected war chief and a confirmed nativist. Of intertribal heritage himself (his mother was Creek, his father Shawnee), Tecumseh had traveled widely among the tribes and knew their common problems and the need for a common solution. He opposed U.S. expansion; treaty land cessions in which he had no voice had cost him his home. His father and two brothers died fighting the European Americans, and he made his reputation as a warrior in battle against that same enemy. By 1807, Tecumseh had become his brother’s adviser and representative abroad, while Tenskwatawa concentrated on the problems at Greenville. Relations with Shawnee government chief Black Hoof and his followers deteriorated rapidly, and a violent clash seemed likely. The small cornfields and depleted game around Greenville could not feed the village. The site was far from the northwestern tribes, now Tenskwatawa’s strongest supporters. U.S. frontiersmen were alarmed by the rapidly growing village so near their settlements, and ugly incidents between individuals or small parties of natives and U.S. settlers escalated. Rumors spread of an impending military campaign against the village. Main Poc urged Tenskwatawa to move the village to Potawatomi territory. The people would find better hunting and more land for their gardens. They would be farther from enemies and closer to friends. In January, 1808, Tenskwatawa agreed. Through February and March, his followers gathered supplies and prepared for the move. In the first week of April, they burned their old village and started west. Miami government chief Little Turtle, who claimed authority over the region to which Tenskwatawa was moving, attempted to prevent establishment of the new village. Tenskwatawa informed Little Turtle that the Master of Life had chosen the place. There, a great union of all native peoples would guard the boundary between Indian and U.S. lands and prevent further U.S. expansion.
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Prophetstown Is Built. While Tecumseh visited Canada to get supplies of food and ammunition from the British, Tenskwatawa supervised the construction of the new village. Called Prophetstown by the U.S. settlers, the village was situated on the northwest bank of the Wabash River, just below the mouth of the Tippecanoe River, in northwestern Indiana. The site quickly became a focal point for the nativist movement. With a population of more than four hundred in June, and more arriving daily, food and other supplies remained a pressing problem. While Tecumseh was persuading the British to help, Tenskwatawa tricked Indiana governor William Henry Harrison into supplying corn. The overconfident Harrison now believed he could control Tenskwatawa and his followers. The winter of 1808-1809 was unusually hard, and Prophetstown suffered severely from food shortages and a devastating epidemic. Many people went back to their old villages, bitterly disillusioned with Tenskwatawa. By summer, Harrison believed that the influence of the Prophet, as Tenskwatawa had become known, was broken and thought he could push another land cession on the tribes of the region. At the Treaty of Fort Wayne, September 30, 1809, government chiefs of the Miami, Potawatomi, and Lenni Lenape signed away millions of acres of land for about two cents an acre. Members of Tenskwatawa’s movement were outraged by the treaty. The widespread anger revitalized the movement, and people flocked again to Prophetstown. While Tenskwatawa remained the spiritual leader of the movement, Tecumseh emerged as the political and military leader. When Tecumseh traveled south to confer with the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and others, Harrison decided the time to strike had come. He burned Prophetstown after the Battle of Tippecanoe, November 7-8, 1811. See also: Creek War; Fort Wayne Treaty; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Little Turtle’s War; Pontiac’s Resistance; Tecumseh’s Rebellion; Thames, Battle of the; Tippecanoe, Battle of. Mary Ellen Rowe Sources for Further Study Allen, Robert S. His Majesty’s Indian Allies. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992. Presents material from British sources neglected by U.S. historians. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Traces the nativist movement from the 1730’s, providing the ideological and historical context for Prophetstown. Drake, Benjamin. Life of Tecumseh. 1858. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Biography using primary documents and interviews with individuals who knew Tecumseh.
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Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Carefully researched and objective biography of Tenskwatawa. ____________. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Thorough research separates fact from fiction in this biography.
Public Law 280 Date: August 15, 1953 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: This law limited tribal sovereignty by allowing courts in some states to have jurisdiction over Indian reservations. During the early 1950’s, federal Indian policy returned to the goal of promoting the assimilation of Indians into American society. Tribes were considered to be major barriers to this end, and a number of policies were developed to reduce their influence. One of these measures was Public Law 280, which sought to place tribal Indians under the jurisdiction of the laws of the states in which they resided. This marked a significant change in the legal status of Native Americans, for while Indians had long been subject to federal law, they had usually been considered to be subject to their own tribal courts when on reservations. Like other measures of the 1950’s, Public Law 280 sought to undermine those aspects of Indians’ legal status that set them apart from other Americans. Passed by Congress in August, 1953, Public Law 280 authorized state courts to assume civil and criminal jurisdiction of all Indian lands in the states of California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin. (Three reservations were excluded by name in the act.) Furthermore, other states were allowed to extend jurisdiction over reservations if they desired by making the necessary changes in their laws or constitutions. A few limits were placed on state powers: States could not levy property taxes on reservations or exercise jurisdiction with regard to Indian water rights. By 1968 nine additional states had extended jurisdiction over Indian lands within their borders.
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Public Law 280 was very unpopular with American Indians, who saw it as a drastic limitation on the tribal right of self-government that had been enacted without their consent. (President Dwight D. Eisenhower had objected to the lack of a provision for tribal consent but had signed the act when Congress refused to amend it.) Indian resentment of the act helped to persuade Congress to amend its provisions in the changed atmosphere of later years. The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 included provisions (known collectively as the Indian Bill of Rights) that were intended to safeguard Native American rights. One section altered Public Law 280 to require Indian consent before future extensions of state jurisdiction. States were also allowed to return jurisdiction to tribes. Public Law 280 was further limited in its impact by the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which gave tribal courts exclusive jurisdiction over child custody cases on reservations. Though initially regarded as a major threat to tribal self-government, modification of Public Law 280 lessened its potential for restricting tribal authority. Some states found that they preferred to avoid the expense involved in extending legal jurisdiction, while some tribes found it useful to ask the states to provide law and order. By the late twentieth century, the law was being used in a somewhat more cooperative manner that took Indian opinions into account. See also: Indian Child Welfare Act; Indian Civil Rights Act; Reservation system of the United States; Termination Resolution; Tribal courts. William C. Lowe
Pueblo Revolt Date: August 10, 1680 Locale: Rio Grande River Valley Tribes involved: Navajo, Pueblo peoples Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: The most successful uprising against European colonial authority, ensuring the survival of Puebloans as a distinct people. The first permanent European colony in Pueblo territory was established by Juan de Oñate in 1598. The jewels and gold of the fabled Seven Cities of Cíbola had proven to be a myth, but the Spanish still intended to settle the land. Franciscan friars came to seek converts to Catholicism, the civilian
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authorities and settlers to seek their fortunes in mining, trading, and ranching. The entire Spanish system was based on the need for American Indian labor. In order to get it, the Spanish imposed the encomienda system, which gave large land grants to holders, known as encomanderos. The part of this program known as repartimiento bestowed upon the encomanderos the right to the labor of any nearby natives. Annual taxes also were collected from the natives in the form of produce, textiles, or other resources. The Spanish were able to impose these measures by access to guns and horses and frequent displays of force. Harsh physical punishments were meted out for even slight infractions. The Franciscans—who recognized no belief system except their own and thus felt justified in exterminating Pueblo religion—saved the most extreme measures for natives practicing their traditional beliefs. Father Salvador de Guerra, in 1655, had an “idolator” at Oraibi whipped, doused with turpentine, and burned to death. Even missing the daily Mass could bring a public flogging. Causes of the Revolt. This unrelenting assault on native beliefs and practices was the single greatest cause of the Pueblo Revolt. The people believed that harmony within the community and with the environment was maintained through their relationships with a host of spirit figures called kachinas. They communicated with the kachinas at public dances and in ceremonies conducted in their circular churches, called kivas. It seemed no coincidence to the natives that when priests stopped these practices, things began to go wrong. Severe droughts, famine, Apache raids, and epidemics of European diseases reduced a population of fifty thousand in Oñate’s time to seventeen thousand by the 1670’s. Three thousand were lost to measles in 1640 alone. At times between 1667 and 1672, people were reduced to boiling hides and leather cart straps for food. The abuse of women and sale of slaves south to work the silver mines of Mexico made it seem that the moral as well as the physical universe was collapsing. Calls were made to return to the old ways. Popé Plans Retribution. In 1675, forty-seven Puebloans were arrested for practicing their religion. All were whipped, three were hanged, and one committed suicide. One deeply resentful survivor was a Tewa medicine man for San Juan Pueblo named Popé. Incensed by this oppression, he began planning retribution, but his task was formidable. The Spanish label “Pueblo” obscured the fact that these people were not of one tribe, but members of a collection of autonomous villages that cherished their independence and rarely acted in unison. Although they shared
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many cultural features, three major language families were represented in the Rio Grande area alone: Zuñi, Keresan, and Tanoan. The latter had three distinct dialects of its own: Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa. Hopi villages of UtoAztecan speech lay farther west. Previous revolts had been localized affairs and were suppressed quickly. In hiding at Taos Pueblo, fifty miles north of the Spanish capital at Santa Fe, Popé began building a multilingual coalition. He enlisted the great Picuris leader Luis Tupatú, a Tiwa speaker who was influential in the northern Rio Grande pueblos; Antonio Malacate, a Keresan spokesman from pueblos to the south; the Tewa war leader Francisco ElOllita of San Ildefonso; and many others. His role becoming more messianic, Popé claimed inspiration from spirit contacts. Gradually, a plan emerged to expel the Spanish from Pueblo territory entirely. The time came in August of 1680. Runners were sent out bearing knotted maguey cords, each knot representing one day. The uprising was to begin the day the last knot was untied. Governor Antonio de Otermín was told by informants that that day was August 13, but Popé had advanced it to August 10 and the Spanish were caught completely by surprise. Just nine miles north of Santa Fe, the citizens of Tesuque killed Padre Juan Pio early that morning as he came to gather them up for Mass, and upheaval soon swept the countryside as eighty years of frustration came to a boil. Siege of Santa Fe. Lieutenant Governor Don Alonso Garcia led soldiers on a sweep to the south of the capital and encountered such destruction that he organized the survivors for evacuation south. They left for El Paso del Norte (now Juarez) on August 14. The next day, Governor Otermín found himself besieged in Santa Fe by five hundred Puebloans who demanded that he free any slaves and leave the territory. He responded by attacking, but when the opposition increased to more than two thousand warriors and Otermín’s water supply had been cut, he abandoned the capital. On August 21, Otermín led more than a thousand settlers south, meeting Garcia’s group on September 13, and the whole bedraggled column reached El Paso on September 29. Four hundred civilians and twenty-one of thirty-three priests had been killed. To undo their conversions, baptized Puebloans had their heads washed in yucca suds. A new kachina entered the pantheon of Pueblo spirit figures known among the Hopi as Yo-we, or “Priest-killer.” In the years following the revolt, the coalition began to unravel, as drought, disease, and Apache raids continued to plague the tribes. Popé, who had become something of a tyrant himself, died in 1688. In 1692, Spain reconquered the area,
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and the new governor, Don Diego José de Vargas, entered Santa Fe on September 13. The Pueblo Revolt did much more than dispel the stereotype that Puebloans were unassertive and peaceful farmers who could not unify. It also was much more than a twelve-year respite from colonial oppression. It catalyzed transformations in Native American cultures in many directions. Large numbers of Spanish sheep came into the hands of the Navajo, forming the core of a new herding lifestyle. Weaving skills, possibly passed along by Puebloans fleeing Spanish reprisals, soon turned the wool into some of the world’s finest textiles. Previously forbidden horses, now freed by the hundreds, became widely traded. Within a century, tribes such as the Nez Perce, Cayuse, and Palouse to the northwest, Plains Cree to the north, and Sioux, Cheyenne, and others to the east became mounted. With the mobility to access the great bison herds of the Plains, the economic complex that became the popular image of the Native American evolved. The continued importance of the Pueblo Revolt to all Native Americans was demonstrated during the tricentennial of 1980. Cultural events celebrating the “First American Revolution” were held all across the United States. The revolt was seen as a symbol of independence and religious freedom. It was also recognized that some Puebloans who chose to settle with Otermín at El Paso in 1680 subsequently had lost most of their language, arts, and customs. After three centuries, the Puebloans see their ancestors’ revolt as a key reason for their survival as a distinct people. See also: Acoma, Battle of; Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Zuñi Rebellion. Gary A. Olson Sources for Further Study Hackett, Charles W. Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermín’s Attempted Reconquest, 1680-1682. Translated by Charmion Shelby. 2 vols. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942. The definitive report on the subject to date. Hait, Pam. “The Hopi Tricentennial: The Great Pueblo Revolt Revisited.” Arizona Highways 56, no. 9 (September, 1980): 2-6. The entire issue is a beautifully illustrated exploration of Hopi culture, the persistence of which is a tribute to the Pueblo Revolt. Hill, Joseph. “The Pueblo Revolt.” New Mexico Magazine 58 (June, 1980): 38. An overview of the subject, with nine illustrations. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Patriot Chiefs: A Chronicle of American Indian Resistance. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Gives an account of the precursors to the revolt, but presents no consideration of the aftermath.
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Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth Century New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Explores the mutual interaction between Native Americans and Europeans in the years surrounding the Pueblo Revolt. Page, James K., Jr. “Rebellious Pueblos Outwitted Spain Three Centuries Ago.” Smithsonian 11 (October, 1980): 221. Tells the story through Padre Pio’s last day. Good observations on the revolt’s modern significance. Preucel, Robert, ed. Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. A collection of essays exploring the light archaeology and material culture can shed on the historical understanding of the Pueblo Revolt. Sando, Joe S. “The Pueblo Revolt.” In Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 9, edited by Alfonso Ortiz. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1979. A brief article that gives details on the planning of the revolt. Silverberg, Robert. The Pueblo Revolt. Introduction by Marc Simmons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. An account based mainly on Hackett’s earlier work. Introduction considers the revolt’s legacy three centuries later.
Red River Raids Date: June, 1815-August, 1817 Locale: Red River Colony, Manitoba, Canada Tribes involved: Metis Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: A series of battles between native peoples and European settlers for the fur trade. In 1811, Thomas Douglas, fifth earl of Selkirk, bought a large number of shares in the Hudson’s Bay Company, England’s largest fur-trading company. In return, he received 116,000 square miles of land in the Red River Valley in what is now southern Manitoba, just north of the Dakota Territory of the United States. In this huge territory, he planned to build a community called Assiniboia. Colonists would grow food, mainly potatoes, for Hudson’s Bay Company trappers but would not be allowed to trap or trade in furs. Selkirk hoped to recruit farmers suffering from an agricultural de-
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pression in his native Scotland to settle the land. He sent an advance party, led by Miles Macdonell, a retired army officer from Scotland, to establish an initial base. Selkirk appointed Macdonell the colony’s first governor. Macdonell’s party of thirty-six Scottish and Irish farmers arrived on August 29, 1812. They settled near the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, in what is now Winnipeg. The settlement, called Point Douglas, was only a few miles from a North West Company post known as Fort Gibraltor. Selkirk’s original settlement had great difficulty surviving its first years on the prairie. Only help from fur traders and métis working for the North West Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s major rival for furs in the region, enabled Macdonell’s group to survive. A French word meaning “mixed,” métis was used to describe people of French-Indian, or EnglishIndian descent. (Sometimes these people were called the Bois Brulés.) Written with a small m, the word refers to all persons of mixed blood, but with a capital M, it signifies a distinct cultural and ethnic group living in the region of southern Manitoba. These Metis were descended from marriages between native women and European fishermen on Canada’s Atlantic coast in the early 1600’s. By 1810, the Metis had moved into buffalo (bison) country on the northern Great Plains. Many were employed as buffalo hunters by the North West Company to supply provisions for its trappers. The second year, a group of eighty more immigrants arrived, which greatly increased the colony’s chance for survival. They started growing wheat, barley, oats, and corn, although potatoes remained the principal crop. Some of the settlers also had brought sheep with them. Settlement took place during the War of 1812 with the United States, while another English army was engaging Napoleon’s forces in Europe. Macdonell Versus Trappers and Metis. Macdonell proved to be an arrogant and unpopular governor, and engaged in major conflicts with North West Company trappers and Native Americans. With the population of his colony increasing to more than two hundred Europeans by 1814, he sought to prevent food shortages by prohibiting the export of pemmican from his lands. Buffalo hunters made pemmican—a key food source for trappers and métis—from dried strips of buffalo meat that they pounded into a powder, mixed with melted fat, and stored in buffalo skin bags. The governor angered local trappers and métis by prohibiting the export of pemmican from Assiniboia after January 8, 1814. This order made it difficult for employees of the North West Company to get food, since U.S. troops had recently recaptured the company’s key trading post of Detroit, from which food supplies for trappers had been sent west. Now both sources of provi-
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sions, Assiniboia and Detroit, were cut off. The trappers for the North West Company saw the Pemmican Proclamation as part of a Hudson’s Bay Company plot to destroy their business. At a meeting in August, North West Company trappers decided to destroy the Red River colony and take back control of the region. To accomplish this goal, the company needed the support of the métis population of the upper Assiniboine River Valley. Macdonell angered the Metis by prohibiting them from killing buffalo in his colony. The North West Company recognized the Metis as a new nation and accepted their title to lands occupied by Selkirk’s colonists. Thus, the North West Company and the Metis came together to drive out the Assiniboia settlers. In 1815, agents of the North West Company arrested Governor Macdonell and brought him to Montreal for trial. He was charged with interfering with Native American rights in what the North West Company claimed was Indian Territory. While the governor stood trial in the east, the Metis attacked the colonists along the Red River, drove them from their homes, and burned their fields. Only one colonist remained in the community after the attack, but he managed to save some of the wheat crop. When a few settlers, under the leadership of Colin Robertson, returned in the fall, they harvested enough grain to assure survival. A few weeks later, a relief party sent out by Lord Selkirk made it to the Red River. Led by the newly appointed governor, Robert Semple, the settlement began to rebuild. When news of this development reached the headquarters of the North West Company, orders were sent out to destroy the village again. Violence spread into the area again in the spring of 1816. Robertson led a force that took control of the North West Company’s Fort Gibraltor in May, giving Assiniboians control of the river. On June 1, Metis set out on the Assiniboine River in three boats filled with pemmican. When Robertson heard this news, he ordered the abandonment of Fort Gibraltor and left the colony for England. The Metis continued their journey and reached the Red River at Frog Plain, below the Hudson’s Bay Company settlement. On June 19, Governor Semple set out with twenty-five colonists to intercept the Metis. At a point in the woods called Seven Oaks, the Metis confronted Semple’s band. A Metis named Boucher rode out to talk with Semple, but after they exchanged a few words, a fight broke out between the two and a shot rang out. Firing began from all sides, but the colonists quickly were surrounded by a much larger force and twenty men, including Semple, were killed. The remaining six men escaped into the woods. Only one Metis was killed. The Seven Oaks Massacre gave the North West Company control of the Red River territory once again.
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Selkirk’s Treaty. Lord Selkirk did not give up on his colony, however, but hired a band of mercenaries to recapture control. Selkirk led the force himself and in June of 1817 returned to Assiniboia after destroying a North West Company outpost. He quickly signed a treaty with local Metis allowing resettlement of the region. Fields were restored, seeds were planted, and settlers brought in a small crop before winter arrived. New colonists from the Orkney Islands came in, along with a small group of French Canadians. Selkirk provided money for a school and a church, and Catholic and Presbyterian missionaries began work among the Cree and Assiniboin Indians living along the Red River. The colony seemed to be at peace at last. The next summer brought further disaster, however. In August, a vast swarm of locusts attacked Assiniboia. Most of the potato crop was killed, forcing many farmers to abandon their land. Locusts came again in 1819 and devastated the entire prairie. No food or seed remained in the entire valley. Settlers had to send a party all the way into the Wisconsin Territory to buy seeds for a new potato crop. Lord Selkirk’s death in 1820 was another major setback for the community, and it would be several years before farmers grew enough to feed the local population. Buffalo herds continued to provide subsistence during hard times. The Metis hunted the buffalo and sold their hides and meat to the farmers. Gradually, however, the native peoples and the new settlers learned to live together and end their hostilities. While the Red River colony was becoming a permanent part of the landscape, the right for control of the fur trade was waged in the courts. Shortages of fur-bearing animals east of the Rocky Mountains brought economic problems to both companies. In 1821, the companies merged and ended their fighting. The Seven Oaks Massacre was the worst single incident in the great battle for control of Canada’s fur trade. See also: Fur trade; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Riel Rebellions. Leslie V. Tischauser Sources for Further Study Brown, Jennifer S. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Families in Indian Country. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980. Discusses the development of the Metis people in eastern Canada and the Great Plains from the 1600’s to the twentieth century. Illustrations and index. Davidson, Gordon Charles. The North West Company. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967. A history of the development and expansion of the second largest fur company in North America. Maps, illustrations, and index. Morton, W. L. Manitoba: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. One chapter is devoted to the importance of the Red River colony.
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Presents a decidedly old-fashioned view of the métis, referring to them as “halfbreeds” and “savages.” Maps, illustrations, and index. Pritchett, John Perry. Red River Valley, 1811-1849: A Regional Study. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942. Contains an almost minute-byminute account of the Seven Oaks Massacre.
Red River War Date: June, 1874-June, 1875 Locale: Texas Panhandle, western Indian Territory (Oklahoma), and northwestern Kansas Tribes involved: Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The U.S. Army defeats three of the West’s most formidable Indian tribes, opening large areas of the Southwest to settlement. Despite good intentions expressed in the 1867 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, the southern Great Plains remained a hotbed of hostile Indian activity, lawlessness, and punitive military action. Kiowa and Comanche bands continued to raid into Texas and Mexico, while southern Cheyenne and Arapaho braves still threatened parts of Kansas, often returning to the protection of reservations. The Army, frustrated by restrictions imposed under President Ulysses S. Grant’s Quaker Peace Policy, labored to control the volatile situation. By 1874, the inadequacies of the reservation system and other outside influences combined to trigger a major tribal uprising. For most members of plains tribes, reservation life and the imposition of Anglo-American values threatened the most basic tenets of their existence, depriving them of freedom, mobility, and dignity. This proved especially problematic for young men, whose status largely depended on demonstrations of bravery in war or prowess on the hunt. Reservation Indians suffered poor food; frequently, promised rations were never delivered. Whiskey traders and horse thieves preyed on reservations with relative impunity. Most grievous to the American Indians was the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo, or bison, by hide-hunters and sportsmen who were killing the beasts by the hundreds of thousands, leaving stripped carcasses to litter the prairie. With the arrival of spring, the South Plains erupted in violence, as American Indians left their reservations in large numbers.
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Bison meat dries on a line at an Arapaho camp near Fort Dodge, Kansas, 1870. The bison, which roamed the Plains in large herds, formed the basis for the economy of many indigenous peoples of the Plains until white settlers, aided by the railroad, slaughtered most of them during the 1870’s. (National Archives)
On June 27, 1874, several hundred Cheyenne and Comanche warriors attacked a group of twenty-eight buffalo hunters at an old trading post in the Texas Panhandle known as Adobe Walls. Prominent among the attackers was Quanah Parker, the son of an influential Comanche chief and his captured wife, Cynthia Ann Parker. Despite overwhelming odds, the wellprotected buffalo hunters devastated the attackers with high-powered rifles. Although never confirmed, American Indian casualties probably exceeded seventy. The attack at Adobe Walls signaled the beginning of the Red River War. In July, Lone Wolf’s Kiowas assailed a Texas Ranger detachment, Cheyenne warriors struck travel routes in Kansas, and Comanches menaced Texas ranches. As hostile action intensified, the Army received permission to pursue raiders onto previously protected reservations and take offensive action to end the uprising. On July 20, 1874, Commanding General William T. Sherman issued orders initiating a state of war, the prosecution of which fell to Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan, whose massive jurisdiction included the South Plains. Sheridan, like Sherman an advocate of total war, quickly devised the most ambitious campaign yet mounted by the Army against American Indians in the West.
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Sheridan’s Campaign. Sheridan’s plan called for five independent columns to converge on American Indian camps in the Texas Panhandle, surround them, and punish the Indians to such an extent as to discourage future uprisings. Accordingly, Colonel Nelson Miles marched from Fort Dodge, Kansas, with a large force of cavalry and infantry; Colonel R. S. Mackenzie, with eight companies of cavalry and five infantry companies, moved northward from Fort Concho, Texas; Major William R. Price led a squadron of cavalry eastward from New Mexico; and Lieutenant Colonels John W. Davidson and George P. Buell prepared their commands, comprising several companies of Buffalo Soldiers (African American troopers from the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries), to strike westward from Indian Territory. The total force numbered more than two thousand soldiers and Indian scouts. In August, Army units moved onto reservations to separate peaceful Indians from the hostile. While almost all Arapahos enrolled as friendly, most Cheyennes refused to submit. Troubles at the Fort Sill agency triggered a confrontation between Davidson’s cavalry and a band of Comanches supported by Lone Wolf’s Kiowas. Most of these Indians escaped to join hostile factions on the Staked Plains. The Army listed almost five thousand Indians as hostile; of these, roughly twelve hundred were warriors. A severe drought made water scarce, and late August temperatures reached 110 degrees as Colonel Miles eagerly pushed his men southward. On August 30, near Palo Duro Canyon, the column clashed with Cheyenne warriors, who were soon joined by Kiowas and Comanches. The soldiers prevailed, driving the warriors onto the plains. Miles could not exploit the opportunity, however; supply shortages forced him to retire in search of provisions. The drought gave way to torrential rains and dropping temperatures as Miles linked with Price’s column on September 7. Two days later, a band of Kiowas and Comanches assailed a supply train en route to Miles. Following a three-day siege, the American Indians abandoned the effort unrewarded, but the incident complicated the supply crisis. With Miles temporarily out of action, Mackenzie and his crack Fourth Cavalry Regiment took up the fight. After stockpiling supplies, Mackenzie moved, in miserable conditions, to the rugged canyons of the Caprock escarpment. On September 26, Mackenzie thwarted a Comanche attempt to stampede his horses. Two days later, the crowning achievement of the campaign came as Mackenzie struck a large encampment in Palo Duro Canyon. Following a harrowing descent, wave after wave of cavalry swept across the canyon floor. The soldiers inflicted few casualties but laid waste to the
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village, burning lodges, badly needed food stocks, and equipment. Mackenzie’s troopers completed the devastation by capturing fifteen hundred of the tribe’s ponies, a thousand of which the colonel ordered destroyed to prevent their recapture. Over the next three months, Army units scoured the Texas Panhandle, despite freezing temperatures and intense storms. In November, a detachment from Miles’s command destroyed Gray Wolf’s Cheyenne camp, recovering Adelaide and Julia German, two of four sisters seized in a Kansas raid. Catherine and Sophia German were released the following spring. Indian Resistance Fails. Hungry and demoralized, Indians began to trickle into the reservation by October, but most remained defiant until harsh weather and constant military pressure finally broke their resistance. In late February, 1875, five hundred Kiowas, including Lone Wolf, surrendered. On March 6, eight hundred Cheyennes, among them the elusive Gray Beard, capitulated. In April, sixty Cheyennes bolted from their reservation in an effort to join the Northern Cheyennes; twenty-seven of these, including women and children, were killed by a cavalry detachment at Sappa Creek in northwestern Kansas. On June 2, Quanah Parker and four hundred Comanches—the last organized band—surrendered to Mackenzie at Fort Sill. After a dubious selection process, seventy-four Indians, ostensibly the leading troublemakers, including Gray Beard and Lone Wolf, were shipped to prison in Florida. Gray Beard was later killed trying to escape, others perished in captivity, but some accepted the benevolent supervision and educational efforts of Lieutenant Richard Pratt. Several Red River War veterans remained with Pratt after their release to assist him in establishing the Carlisle Indian School in 1879. The Red River War was among the most successful campaigns ever conducted against American Indians. It brought almost complete subjugation to three of the most powerful and revered tribes in North America. It also provided a model for future Army campaigns and boldly confirmed the doctrine of total war. Now less concerned with inflicting casualties, the Army would focus on destroying the American Indians’ means and will to resist. Combined with the annihilation of the buffalo, this campaign of eradication made it impossible for American Indians to exist in large numbers outside the reservation. Finally, the campaign’s successful completion opened vast areas to white settlement and ranching. See also: Adobe Walls, Battles of; Bison Slaughter; Carlisle Indian School; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty. David Coffey
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Sources for Further Study Chalfant, William Y. Cheyennes at Dark Water Creek: The Last Fight of the Red River War. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. A thorough study of the final encounter of the Red River War and the circumstances leading up to it. Haley, James L. The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Provides substantial background information and military analysis. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Hutton, Paul Andrew. Phil Sheridan and His Army. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. An expansive study of Sheridan’s post-Civil War career, including his role as the Red River War’s chief architect. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Leckie, William H. The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Discusses the considerable role played by African Americans in the frontier Army, devoting an entire chapter to the Red River War. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Robinson, Charles M. Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie. Austin, Tex.: State House Press, 1993. A comprehensive study that treats Mackenzie’s pivotal role in the Red River War in suitable detail. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Utley, Robert M. Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. An essential study of the frontier Army and the Indian Wars. Includes a chapter on the Red River War and a wealth of other pertinent information. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. ____________. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. This authoritative treatment of cultures in conflict includes a discussion of the causes and effects of the Red River War. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Wooster, Robert. Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Includes a chapter on the controversial soldier’s extensive Red River War operations.
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Reservation system of the United States Date: Nineteenth century-present Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Twentieth century history Significance: As the United States expanded and increasing numbers of white Americans moved westward, the confinement of American Indians to reservations was deemed the most efficient way to separate Indians and whites while allowing whites access to the greatest amount of land. In colonial times and the earliest years of the United States, there was little thought given to the need for a permanent answer to the competition for land between Europeans and Native Americans. Because there were vast uncharted areas of wilderness to the west, it was generally thought that the Indian population could be pushed westward—eventually, across the Mississippi—whenever problems arose. This was the main policy of the preCivil war era, as eastern tribes were “removed” westward, many to land in present-day Oklahoma. The movement to place all Indians on reservations began in earnest after the Civil War ended (1865) during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. The policy came about because of the failure of previous programs and the desire of white Americans to open more western land for white settlement. From the end of the American Revolution to 1830, Indian tribes had been treated as if they were foreign nations within the United States. The federal government sent ambassadors to negotiate treaties with the tribes, and many groups such as the Cherokees in northern Georgia, had established their own governments and states within the United States. Others had traded territory in the East for land farther west. Trouble began in Georgia after the discovery of gold on Indian land. Eventually, Congress passed a law, supported by Andrew Jackson, offering territory west of the Mississippi River to tribes willing to relinquish their lands in the East. All Indians would have to accept this trade or face forced removal. Several wars and the infamous Trail of Tears, which saw the deaths of thousands of Native Americans, followed the imposition of this removal policy. Early Reservation Policy. Most of the new Indian lands were in the Plains region—or the “Great American Desert,” as whites, who at first believed
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that it was too hot and dry for farming, called it. In the 1840’s, thousands of white settlers began crossing this “desert” on their way to California and Oregon. Travel through Indian Territory could be dangerous and difficult because of Indian attacks, so travelers and settlers called for a safe corridor to be maintained by the army. From this proposal a concentration policy developed, under which Indians would be driven into southern and northern colonies with a wide, safe passageway to the Pacific in the middle. These Indian enclaves, it was said, would be safe from white settlement. In the early 1860’s, these Indian lands were closed to all whites except those on official business. In 1869 Congress created a Board of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior to control the reservations, and two years later ended the policy of treating Indians as residents of foreign states within the United States. On March 3, 1871, the Indian Appropriation Act declared that tribal affairs would be managed by the U.S. government without consent of the tribes. Indians were supposed to have enough land on their reservations so that they could continue to hunt, but this idea lasted only briefly as land hunger among white farmers and ranchers after the Civil War led to demands for greatly reducing the size of Indian Territory. If Indians learned to farm rather than hunt, Indian affairs commissioners and congressmen (and most whites) believed, more land could be put to productive use, and the natives would give up their “wild” ways and enjoy the fruits of civilization. Indians were given a choice: Either they could relocate, or volunteer armies would be recruited to force them to move. On the reservations, Indians were to get education for their children, rations from the government until they knew how to grow their own crops, and certain other benefits. By 1877 more than 100,000 Indians had received rations on reservations. Reservation education programs did not work quickly enough to satisfy many in Congress; additionally, some claimed, they cost too much money. Maintaining a large army in the West to keep Indians within their boundaries also proved expensive. The notion that Indians would become farmers proved false. Congress reacted to these problems by reducing rations, which caused terrible suffering and malnutrition among Indians, and by reducing the number of reservations as more tribes were moved into Indian Territory (Oklahoma). The federal government mandated that all Indian males receiving rations would have to work, but since few jobs existed on Indian lands this policy proved a miserable failure. To improve education and help Indians become more like whites, Congress commanded that all instruction take place in English and that the teaching of Indian religions be banned.
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General Allotment Act. In 1887 Congress changed Indian policy by passing the General Allotment Act (Dawes Severalty Act). Designed by Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, who considered himself a friend of the Indians, the new policy provided for an eventual end to the reservation system and the abolition of tribal organizations. In the future, Indians would be treated as individuals, not as members of tribes. Each head of a family would be allotted 160 acres of reservation land, and each adult single person would get 80 acres. The government would keep this land in trust for twenty-five years, and at the end of that period Indians would get title to the land and full citizenship rights. Land on reservations not distributed to Indians would be declared surplus land and could be sold to the highest bidder. When the bill was passed, there were about 138 million acres of land on reservations. Between 1887 and 1900, Indians had been allotted only 3,285,000 of those acres, while almost 30 million acres were declared surplus and ceded to whites. In addition, of the 32,800 Indian families and individuals getting allotments, fewer than one-third managed to remain on their land for the required twenty-five years to attain full ownership. The program was never applied among the Indians of the Southwest, and these were the tribes most successful in retaining their traditional cultures. In 1891 Indians received the right to lease their lands for agriculture, grazing cattle, and mining. The pressure for leases from cattle ranchers and mining companies was enormous, and hundreds of thousands of acres found their way to white control through leasing provisions that took advantage of Indian poverty. Many reformers and politicians denounced leasing, but only because it made Indians who lived off their leases idle—not because it took advantage of them and made them poor. Between 1900 and 1921 Congress made it easier for Indians to dispose of their allotments. A 1907 law, for example, gave Indians considered too old, sick, or “incompetent” to work on their land permission to sell their land to whomever they wished. White reservation agents decided questions of competency. Under this program millions more acres were lost as impoverished Indians sold their property at very low prices just to survive. This policy was speeded up in 1917 under the “New Policy” of Indian Commissioner Cato Sells, who declared that all adults one-half or less Indian were “competent,” as were all graduates of Indian schools once they reached twenty-one years of age. Under this policy more than twenty-one thousand Indians gained control of their lands but then quickly lost them because they could not afford to pay state property taxes or went bankrupt. This policy was reversed in 1921, but Indians faced new problems as the federal government in the 1920’s moved to end all responsibility over Indians.
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In 1923, John Collier, a white reformer, became executive secretary of the American Indian Defense Association, the major lobby defending Native American interests before Congress. Collier believed Indian civilization, especially Pueblo culture, to be superior in many ways to the materialistic, violent society found in the United States and Europe. For the first time, under Collier’s leadership, Indians presented a program to Congress aimed at preserving their traditional values and way of life. Reservations, it was argued, had to be retained to save these old ways but needed economic assistance to survive. Collier’s program called for civil liberties for Indians, including religious freedom and tribal self-government. The “Indian New Deal.” In 1928 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) issued an influential report by Lewis Meriam, a student of Indian culture. In The Problem of Indian Administration, Meriam criticized American policy, condemned the General Allotment Act, and concluded that the BIA showed little interest in retaining Indian culture. The report advocated spending more money for economic assistance and suggested that the aid go directly to local tribal councils. The councils, rather than BIA officials, should decide how to spend the funds. Meriam called for a policy of cultural pluralism: Native Americans should be allowed to live by their old customs and values if they chose. The Great Depression hit Indian reservations, particularly the poorest in South Dakota, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico, very hard. By 1933 thousands of Indians faced starvation, according to reports from the Emergency Relief Administration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed John Collier to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs and deal with the crisis. Collier, with the president’s help, pushed the Indian Reorganization Act through Congress in 1934. This law radically changed Indian-white relations and gave Native Americans control of their lands; it was nicknamed the Indian New Deal. The law ended the allotment system, gave local councils authority to spend relief money, and allowed Indians to practice traditional religions and customs. Congress increased appropriations for reservations from twelve million dollars to an average of forty-eight million dollars while Collier held his post. The commissioner had his critics, mainly advocates of assimilation and western senators and congressmen fearful of Indian selfrule. In 1944 the House Indian Affairs Committee criticized Collier’s policy and called for a return to the old idea of making Indians into Americans. The next year Collier resigned, and many of his programs ended. Policy Since World War II. Creation of the Indian Claims Commission in 1946, which was empowered by Congress to settle all Indian land claims
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against the government, resulted in victories for some tribes. Between 1946 and 1960 the commission awarded more than 300 million dollars to Indian tribes wrongfully deprived of their lands, but Congress saw this as an excuse to end other assistance to reservations. Some BIA officials foresaw the abolition of the reservation system. In the 1950’s relocation became a popular idea. More than sixty thousand Indians were moved to cities such as Denver, Chicago, and Houston. To save money and hasten the end of separate development for Native Americans, Commissioner Dillon S. Meyer took away powers of tribal councils and returned decisions concerning spending to BIA headquarters. In 1953 Congress approved the Termination Resolution, which terminated federal control over Indians living on reservations in California, Florida, Iowa, New York, and Texas. The states now had criminal and legal jurisdiction over the tribes. Results proved disastrous, especially after removal of federal liquor control laws. Unemployment and poverty increased under the termination program. The BIA tried to resolve the unemployment problem by expanding the relocation program, hoping that jobless Indians would find work in cities, but by 1958 more than half of the relocated workers had returned to the reservations. In the 1960’s Congress reversed direction yet again and revoked the termination policy. During the federal government’s War on Poverty, it increased tribal funds for education, health care, and job training. Expanded federal aid greatly improved living conditions for Indians, and reservation population increased from 367,000 in 1962 to 452,000 in 1968. Life expectancy improved from a dismal 51 years (1940) to 63.5 (1968), not yet up to white American levels but a great improvement nevertheless. In 1975 the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act gave tribes control over school funds and returned most important economic decisionmaking powers to locally elected councils. Three years later Congress established a community college system on reservations in which native languages, religions, and cultures were taught. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978) protected traditional practices, and the Supreme Court advanced Indian self-determination by authorizing tribal courts to try and punish even non-Indians for violations of the law committed on Indian territory. In a key ruling in 1978 the Court said that tribes could be governed by traditional laws even if they conflicted with state and federal laws. In the 1980’s such ideas of separate development continued to dominate reservation policy, and the Reagan administration followed a policy of “government-to-government relationships” among the states, the federal government, and the tribes. In many ways this “new” policy greatly resembled ideas first enunciated by George
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Washington in 1794, when Americans also doubted the possibility of assimilation and opted for a policy of pluralism and cultural separation. Although a few reservations have become quite rich because of the lease or sale of mineral rights, and recently because of revenues from gaming concerns, most remain very poor. When a Bureau of the Census study of poverty in the United States in the 1980’s listed the ten poorest counties in the union, eight of them were on reservations. Cultural self-determination, improved education, and increased financial assistance had not yet improved economic conditions for many Native Americans. Reservations in South Dakota and New Mexico were the poorest; they also had the highest levels of alcoholism, divorce, and drug addiction found anywhere in the United States. See also: Allotment system; American Indian Defense Association; American Indian Religious Freedom Act; Bureau of Indian Affairs; General Allotment Act; Indian Claims Commission; Indian New Deal; Indian SelfDetermination and Education Assistance Act; Meriam Report; Reserve system of Canada; Termination Resolution; Trail of Tears; Treaties and agreements in the United States. Leslie V. Tischauser Sources for Further Study Brandon, William. The Indian in American Culture. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. A massive volume covering Indian-white relations since the beginning; includes an interesting discussion of reservation policy. Includes a good index. Frantz, Klaus. Indian Reservations in the United States: Territory, Sovereignty, and Socioeconomic Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. A thorough, detailed cultural-geographic study of life on American Indian reservations. Frazier, Ian. On the Rez. New York: Picador, 2001. A depiction of contemporary Ogalala Sioux life on the Pine Ridge reservation. Written by an Anglo, somewhat controversial among American Indians. Fritz, Henry E. The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963. A comprehensive analysis of government policy in the critical period when assimilation policy was the order of the day. Priest, Benson. Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1885-1887. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1942. An old but still useful discussion of the origins of the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act). Washburn, Wilcomb E., ed. History of Indian-White Relations. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu-
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tion Press, 1988. Contains several useful essays on past and current reservation policy, including William T. Hagan’s “United States Indian Policies, 1860-1900" and Lawrence C. Kelly’s ”United States Indian Policies, 1900-1988." Excellent index, detailed bibliography. ____________. The Indian in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Arguably the best one-volume survey of the Indian experience in North America, with many useful insights and comments concerning the reservation system. Contains an extensive bibliography and comprehensive index.
Reserve system of Canada Date: Nineteenth century-present Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Twentieth century history Significance: Until well into the twentieth century, Canada’s Indian reserve system assumed that lands not specifically defined “surrendered” to white settlement were for traditional Indian use; reactions to abuses in “surrender” arrangements brought more protective selfgovernment and ownership provisions in the 1990’s. By the early 1990’s the percentage of land reserved by law for the specific use of Canadian Indian tribes varied considerably from province to province. In eastern provinces such as Newfoundland, reserves were largely symbolic, amounting to about 0.06 percent of all land. To the west, percentages were somewhat higher (2 percent in Alberta, for example), while in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, a full third of what Canada calls the “traditional lands” remain reserved for the aboriginal tribes, referred to in Canadian law as “bands.” The situation of Indian self-government on reserve lands is a relatively recent development that must be viewed in the light of key legislation passed between 1930 and 1990. One can say, however, that the Canadian federal government has tried, since the 1930’s, to ease strains created by unfortunate reversals of what long appeared to be a relatively enlightened history of protecting the lands (if not tribal governing autonomy) of Canadian Indians.
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Ideal and Reality of Traditional Reserve Policy. The history of Indian reserves in Canada began at the end of the French and Indian War (17541763), when French claims on Canada were abandoned to British imperial control. A British royal proclamation in 1763 forbade governors of both the Canadian and the American colonies from issuing any land grants to colonists unless it was clear that the land in question was not “traditionally occupied” by Indians. This act began the so-called policy of protection, which stipulated that only the Crown held ultimate responsibility for protecting or acquiring traditional Indian lands. Such acquisition, or “surrendering over,” was to be with the consent of tribes; what was not “surrendered” to the Crown was presumed to remain Indian property. When the American Revolution ended in 1783, the influx of Loyalists into Canada caused pressures for colonial land grants to rise. In response, the Crown initiated a series of treaties and purchase agreements, particularly with tribes in Ontario. What was not turned over by sale or treaty agreement would from that date be called Indian “reserves.” What appeared to be benevolent recognition of the Indians’ traditional lands, however, was not always that generous. In a few extreme cases, such as the Chippewa (Ojibwa) agreement to surrender their Chenail Ecarte and St. Clair lands, only a very small portion was left for exclusive tribal use (in this case, some 23,000 acres out of a total of 2.7 million acres). For a number of years there was no specific definition of what responsibilities the British might accept with respect to Indian rights within their reserves. This changed by the 1830’s, when it became obvious that Indians even farther west were going to be affected by expanding white settlements and that, as their traditional way of life would no longer be possible in areas left as reserves, government assistance would have to be part of the land surrender process. Thus, an agreement concerning the Manitoulin Islands near the north shore of Lake Huron became, in 1836, part of a “new” attitude toward reserves: Indians there were to receive, free from “the encroachments of the whites . . . proper houses . . . and assistance . . . to become civilized and to cultivate land.” At the same time, it became increasingly apparent that the “traditional” reserve system would have to involve higher degrees of Indian dependence on Crown authorities to intercede between them and aggressive settler communities anxious to gain access to the natural resources on Indian land. In 1850, a decade and a half before Canada’s federal/provincial arrangement (the Constitutional Act) placed the authority of the Crown across the entire width of the Atlantic, troubles broke out over settler access to minerals in the Lake Superior area. William Robinson was appointed
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treaty commissioner in order to define how Indian hunting and fishing rights could be preserved while sale and development of mining rights on the same land passed to outside bidders. With the coming of Canada’s independent status after 1867, it became apparent that a specific Indian act would be necessary and somehow should be binding on all provinces of the federal system. Neither the first Canadian Indian Act of 1876 nor later acts, however, provided for the establishment of new reserves. The object of all Canadian Indian acts (into and through the twentieth century) was supposed to be to improve the management and developmental prospects of reserves that already existed. Nevertheless, the traditional but in many ways manipulated concept of what constituted a reserve in Canada continued, for nearly a century, to allow for “surrender” of lands considered to be in excess of tribal needs. Thus, in Quebec Province, some 45,000 choice acres considered Indian reserves in 1851 would be given over to white settlement between 1867 and 1904. The most spectacular case of additional surrenders occurred in Saskatchewan, the source for almost half of the nearly 785,000 acres of Indian lands taken in the early twentieth century. In addition to formal acts of surrender, amendments in 1895 and 1918 to the Indian Act allowed the superintendent-general of Indian affairs to recognize private leases of reserve land that was not being exploited economically by the tribes. Perhaps the most striking example of consequences that could come from application of these and other amendments occurred in the 1924 Canada-Ontario Indian Reserve Lands Agreement which would stand, despite challenges, into the 1990’s. The 1924 agreement essentially acknowledged Indian rights to exploit non-precious minerals on their land, but provided for separate conditions to govern (external) exploitation of, and revenues from, precious mineral mines in Ontario (and by extension, elsewhere in Canada). Post-1930 Trends Toward Self-Government on Reserves. The year 1930 was a watershed, for after that year, federal, or Dominion, approval for surrenders would become the exception rather than the rule. In the same year, the Dominion transferred public land control rights in the Prairie provinces to the provincial governments of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba, with the express condition that existing Indian reserves would be maintained unchanged under federal control. The 1930 agreements nevertheless recognized the applicability of the 1924 precious metals “exception” (the Canada-Ontario Reserve Agreement noted previously) to any Indian reserves in the Plains provinces.
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Rising governmental and public attention to Indian affairs came in the early 1960’s, partially in the wake of the government’s Report on Reserve Allotments (published in 1959) and partly following publication of a major study by Jean Lagasse on native populations in Manitoba. Lagasse’s findings brought the beginnings of community development programs on Indian reserve lands, but they remained limited mainly to Manitoba itself. By 1975, a specific scheme for self-management and community government was legislated in the James Bay Agreement for northeastern Quebec, but this again had limited geographical scope. Substantial change in conditions affecting life on reserve lands across Canada would not come until the late 1980’s, and then specifically with passage of the 1989 Indian Act. A good portion of the local legislative precedents that formed the bases for the Indian Act of 1989 can be seen to have been drawn from key decisions ranging from the James Bay Agreement through the Municipal Grants Act of 1980 and the much broader 1986 Sechelt Indian Band Self-Government Act. When legislators extended such precedents to define the status of the totality of Canada’s Indian population, the government in Ottawa granted for the first time several essential principles of self-government to tribes throughout the country. They now included the right to hold full title to property formerly considered their “reserves” (but ultimately controlled by Dominion authorities) and to dispose of that property legally as they might see fit (through sales, leases, or rentals), through procedures they would determine via the autonomous channels of their own councils. See also: Aboriginal Action Plan; Declaration of First Nations; Delgamuukw v. British Columbia; Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development; French and Indian War; Indian Act of 1876; Indian Act of 1951; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian; International Indian Treaty Council; Meech Lake Accord; Nisga’a Agreement in Principle; Nunavut Territory; Oka crisis; Riel Rebellions; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples; Treaties and agreements in Canada; White Paper of Canada. Byron D. Cannon Sources for Further Study Bartlett, Richard H. Indian Reserves and Aboriginal Lands in Canada. Saskatoon, Canada: University of Saskatchewan, Native Law Center, 1990. Frideres, James. Canada’s Indians: Contemporary Conflicts. Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall of Canada, 1974. Hawley, Donna L. The Annotated 1990 Indian Act. 3d ed. Toronto: Carswell, 1990.
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Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada. Native Rights in Canada. Calgary: Author, 1970. Nagler, Mark. Natives Without a Home. Don Mills, Ontario, Canada: Longman, 1975.
Riel Rebellions Date: 1869-1870, 1885 Locale: Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada Tribes involved: Assiniboine, Cree, Metis Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Two separate revolts against the government of Canada led to the dispersal and marginalization of the once thriving Metis. Canadian policies that threatened both the Metis and Indian ways of life were at the heart of two separate revolts in Canada’s newly acquired prairie region. (Metis people are of mixed Indian and European descent.) In 1869 the Hudson’s Bay Company relinquished its claim over Rupert’s Land and the Northwest to the recently confederated nation of Canada. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald set out to build a great nation joined from the Atlantic to the Pacific by a rail line. Although the government negotiated treaties that established Indian reserves, it offered the Metis, whom it did not regard as legally Indian, no such consideration. This contributed significantly to the erosion of the Metis economic and social life. Red River Rebellion, 1869-1870. Preparing to take over the new territories in the fall of 1869, Canada sent survey parties into the Red River region. The Metis of the region had for many years occupied long, narrow farmsteads along the riverbank. Contrary to this practice, the surveyors delineated square township lots. Both fearing the imminent arrival of large numbers of English-speaking Protestants and fearing that their long-established land tenure would be ignored once Canada asserted control over the area, the Metis and a few of the original white settlers declared a provisional government in early November, 1869. Prairie-born but Montreal-educated Louis Riel, Jr., was elected secretary and, within a few weeks, president of the government of Assiniboia. The Red River Rebellion actually involved very few military skirmishes. On November 2, 1869, the Metis seized Upper Fort Garry and arrested fifty
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Canadians including a militant Orangeman named Thomas Scott. Scott escaped from custody twice but was recaptured each time. He was tried, convicted of treason against the Metis government, and executed in March, 1870. Scott’s execution became a rallying point in English Canada against the mainly French Catholic Metis. Riel, who was president of Assiniboia at the time, was held responsible. He was forced into exile for much of the next fifteen years. The Metis of Assiniboia had no intention of remaining independent of Canada and issued a declaration of their desire to join the Confederation of Canada as a new province with full representation in Parliament. According to their declaration, the new province would have both English and French as its official languages, control of public lands would remain with the local legislature, and the citizens would retain the property rights they held prior to entering confederation. In May, 1870, after several months of negotiation between Ottawa and the Metis, the Canadian Parliament passed the Manitoba Act. While the establishment of the new province should have met many of the Metis demands, in practice it did not. The province was limited to 100,000 square miles, Parliament rather than the Manitoba Legislature retained control of the public lands, and the conveyance of the Metis’ land titles was delayed so long that many Metis sold their rights to land speculators and moved farther west.
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Northwest Uprising, 1885. Many of the same economic concerns that caused the 1869-1870 Red River Rebellion fueled the Northwest Uprising of 1885. This second revolt, however, included Cree and Assiniboine Indians as well as the Metis. Ottawa, fearing a general Indian uprising on the prairies, responded with swift military action rather than negotiation. Faced with the near extinction of the buffalo and once again with the fear of being uprooted by new settlers, the Metis around Batoche on the Saskatchewan River invited Riel to return from exile to argue their claims with Ottawa. Riel, however, had changed greatly in the intervening decade and a half. He had spent several years in insane asylums in Montreal before settling on a farm in Montana. He was obsessed with the idea that it was his divine mission to establish a French Catholic state in the northwest. He viewed the arrival of four Metis emissaries on June 4, 1884, as divine intervention and returned to Canada to fulfill his mission. Riel spent much of his time drafting petitions to Ottawa outlining the Metis’ grievances. Finally, reminiscent of events in 1869, the Metis, led by Riel and Gabriel Dumont, seized the parish church at Batoche and declared a provisional government. The army and the Northwest Mounted Police responded promptly, and the entire revolt was crushed within two months. The Metis and the Indians, however, did inflict casualties. The first skirmish occurred near Duck Lake when the Mounted Police arrived to assert Canadian authority. The Metis, joined by a few Indians, killed ten of the police and forced the remainder to retreat. The Indians, starving as a result of the loss of the buffalo and then Ottawa’s withholding of treaty rations, were encouraged by the Metis victory at Duck Lake. The Cree and Assiniboine were easily persuaded to join the revolt. Several hundred hungry Indians under the leadership of Poundmaker attacked the fort at Battleford, burning the homes and looting the stores. Other Cree, led by Big Bear, killed nine people, including the Indian agent and two priests in what became known as the Frog Lake Massacre. Three others were spared by Big Bear. The Canadian military response was swift. Eight thousand well-armed troops were dispatched to the region, and the revolt was summarily crushed. Among the leaders of the revolt, Dumont escaped to the United States, where he performed for a time with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Big Bear and Poundmaker each received three years in prison. Riel, who used his trial as a forum for his cause, was found guilty of treason and hanged on November 16, 1885. Many of the Metis and Cree fled to Montana. Others dispersed to the north. Fearing additional Indian uprisings, the Canadian government rushed to complete the Canadian Pacific Railroad and promptly began to settle the West.
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See also: Declaration of First Nations; Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development; Indian Act of 1876; Indian Act of 1951; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Red River Raids; Treaties and agreements in Canada. Richard G. Condon and Pamela R. Stern Sources for Further Study Beal, Bob, and Rod Macleod. Prairie Fire: The 1885 North-West Rebellion. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1984. Emphasizes the Native Canadian perspective. Bowsfield, Hartfield. Louis Riel: The Rebel and the Hero. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971. A good introductory book. Dempsey, Hugh A. Big Bear: The End of Freedom. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1984. Flanagan, Thomas. Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered. 2d ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Provides a revisionist perspective. Giraud, Marcel. The Metis in the Canadian West. Translated by George Woodcock. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. A primary source on the Metis, originally published in French in 1945. Volume 2 deals with the period of the rebellion. Some of the language suggests racial determinism. McDougall, John. In the Days of the Red River Rebellion. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1983. Memoir of a Methodist missionary during the time of the rebellion. Miller, J. R. Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada. Rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Chapter 9 deals with the rebellion. Owram, Doug. Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Chapter 4 discusses the politics of the Canadian response to the rebellion. Purich, Donald. The Metis. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1988. Highly readable treatment of the Metis. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with the 1869 and 1885 rebellions and their outcomes. Riel, Louis. The Collected Writings of Louis Riel. Edited by George F. G. Stanley. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1985. Shows that Riel was a thinker as well as a political leader. Siggins, Maggie. Riel: A Life of Revolution. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994. Readable, lively narrative account. Stanley, George F. G. The Birth of Western Canada: History of the Riel Rebellions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960. Argues that the rebellions were the defining event in western Canadian history.
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Rosebud Creek, Battle of Date: June 17, 1876 Locale: Montana Tribes involved: Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: This battle was preliminary to the Little Bighorn fight; it neutralized General George Crook’s northbound column of the 1876 Sioux campaign, bolstered the Indians’ confidence, and opened the door for the Custer defeat. On January 31, 1876, the U.S. government issued an ultimatum that all Indians must reside on reservations or be deemed “hostiles.” This declaration ultimately led to the army’s 1876 summer campaign against the northern Plains Indians. The campaign was a three-pronged pincer tactic designed to surround, push, and engage the “hostile” bands in present northcentral Wyoming and south-central Montana, with Colonel John Gibbon coming from the west, General Alfred Terry and Colonel George Armstrong Custer from the east, and General George Crook from the south. Embarking from Fort Fetterman, Wyoming, on May 29, Crook marched up the Bozeman Trail with
A depiction of the Battle of Rosebud Creek from the August 12, 1876, issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. (Library of Congress)
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more than a thousand troopers and established a base camp at present-day Sheridan, Wyoming. He was joined by more than two hundred Crow and Shoshone allies on June 14. Mid-June was also when the Hunkpapa Sioux held their Sun Dance in which Sitting Bull experienced his famous vision of many soldiers falling into camp. The Indians knew of Crook’s forces and were eager to fulfill Sitting Bull’s vision. By June 16, Crook’s troops had moved on to the Rosebud River. The next morning, while his forces were relaxing, Crazy Horse’s warriors struck. After the Sioux’s initial charge the soldiers were able to regroup enough to take command of the high ground on the valley’s northern bluffs. From there, Crook orchestrated his troop’s movements. The Rosebud Valley is long, however, and the terrain broken with hills, ravines, and ridges. These created a disjointed battle with scattered pockets of fierce action stretching three miles along the valley. During the fight, Crook mistakenly believed that Crazy Horse’s village lay northward and ordered Captain Anson Mills’s detachment to find and seize it. The battle intensified, and Crook’s Crow and Shoshone allies proved their worth throughout. In one instance they rescued an officer from the Sioux in a hand-to-hand struggle. Meanwhile, Mills, finding no village, returned to the fight, coming to the rear of the Sioux and Cheyenne. This eventually caused the Indians to disengage and abandon the battlefield. The battle lasted six hours and was filled with intense fighting. Crook proclaimed victory on the notion that he possessed the battlefield in the end. In truth, Crook’s troops were bested by Crazy Horse’s warriors, and had it not been for the valiant efforts of his Crow and Shoshone allies, Crook would have suffered greater casualties than his twenty-eight dead and fifty-six wounded. The Sioux and Cheyenne suffered comparable casualties but in the end forced Crook to retreat south with his dead and wounded, thus neutralizing his forces at the most critical juncture in the campaign. In Crook’s defense, he faced (on onerous terrain) an unexpectedly unified force whose tenacious fighting was unparalleled— a combination Custer would face a week later with more disastrous results. See also: Bozeman Trail War; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Little Bighorn, Battle of the; Wounded Knee Massacre. S. Matthew Despain
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Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples Date: 1991-1996 Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: In April, 1991, the government of Canada, in response to aboriginal leaders’ concerns, established the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to review the role and place of aboriginal people in contemporary Canada. The final report, published in November, 1996, made 440 recommendations in response to problems that have long plagued the relationship between aboriginal peoples, the Canadian government, and Canadian society as a whole. In April, 1991, the government of Canada set forth a sixteen-point mandate for the seven commissioners (four aboriginal, three nonaboriginal) of the newly constituted Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Amid much upheaval, uncertainty, and in some cases violence, the commissioners held 178 days of public hearings, conducted public hearings in ninety-six communities, listened to dozens of expert witnesses and testimony, and engaged in additional research. Acknowledging that the colonial policy of the federal government for the last 150 years had been wrong, the commission attempted to determine the “foundations of a fair and honorable relationship between the aboriginal and nonaboriginal people of Canada.” The commissioners sought to examine this relationship as a central facet of Canada’s heritage, describe how the relationship became distorted, and examine the terrible consequences for aboriginal people in the loss of lands, power, and self-respect. The commissioners hoped that the report would repair the damaged relationship and provide a new footing for mutual recognition and respect, sharing, and responsibility. Consisting of five volumes of several thousand pages each, the final report provided a comprehensive answer to the guiding question and related questions and problems. A History of Mistakes. “Aboriginal peoples” refers to organic and cultural entities stemming from the original peoples of North America, not to collections of individuals united by “racial” characteristics. The commissioners traced the relationship of aboriginal and nonaboriginal peoples through four stages. The first stage was before 1500, when no contact had
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been made between North American aboriginals and Europeans. The second stage started in the 1500’s and was marked by initial mutual curiosity and then increasing trust, trade, exchange of goods, intermarriage, and military and trade alliances that created bonds between and among nations. This stage was crowned by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which governed the relations between nations on the question of land rights. The third stage began in the 1800’s as increasing numbers of Europeans immigrated to Canada. Respect gave way to domination. The new policy of “assimilation” proved, in time, to be a form of cultural genocide. The solution to the problems left by the assimilation policy, the report stated, is in recognizing that “aboriginal peoples are nations.” This affirmation is not to say that these peoples are nation-states seeking independence from Canada but rather collectivities with a long, shared history, a right to govern themselves, and a strong desire to do so in partnership with Canada. The fourth stage, the report concluded, was just beginning. The report hoped to assist the process of “renewal and renegotiation” well into the twenty-first century. The mistakes that characterize the relationship with aboriginal peoples have been serious, often deadly. On average, the life expectancy of aboriginals is lower than that of nonaboriginals; illnesses such as alcoholism and diabetes are more prevalent; families are more often broken or marred by violence, abuse, and criminality, leading to a disproportionately high number of aboriginals in jail; and educational failure and dropout for children is common. The commission argued that these problems had reached the point where aboriginal peoples had become tired of waiting for handouts from governments. It found that these people wanted control over their lives instead of the well-meaning but ruinous paternalism of past Canadian governments. They needed their lands, resources, and selfchosen governments in order to reconstruct social, economic, and political order. They needed time, space, and respect from nonaboriginals to heal their spirits and revitalize their cultures. Renewing and Restructuring the Relationship. Four principles formed the basis for renewed relationships between aboriginals and nonaboriginals: recognition by nonaboriginals of the principle that aboriginals were the original caretakers of the land along with the recognition that nonaboriginals now share, and have a right to, the land; respect between peoples for their rights and a resistance to any future forms of domination; sharing of benefits in “fair measure”; and responsibility, the hallmark of a “mature relationship,” which includes accountability for promises made, for behaving honorably, and for the effect of one’s actions on the well-being
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of others. The needs and problems of all groups in their diversity cannot be addressed piecemeal. The renewed relationship entails a fundamental structural component that is centered on reclaiming aboriginal peoples as “nations.” These nations, however, are not to be formed by every single aboriginal community in Canada. The commission concluded that the right of self-government cannot reasonably be exercised by small, separate communities, whether First Nations, Inuit, or Metis. It should be exercised by groups of a certain size—groups with a claim to the term “nation.” The commission went on to suggest a process for doing this, beginning with a royal proclamation, issued by the monarch as Canada’s head of state and guardian of the rights of aboriginal peoples. Such a move would dramatically signal a new day for aboriginal people, setting out the principles, laws, and institutions necessary to turn these into reality. This new royal proclamation would not supplant, but instead support and modernize the Royal Proclamation of 1763, or so-called Aboriginal Peoples’ Magna Carta. The commission recommended that the proclamation contain the following elements: a reaffirmation of Canada’s respect for aboriginal peoples as distinct nations; acknowledgment of harmful actions by past governments, which deprived aboriginal peoples of their lands and resources and interfered with family life, spiritual practices, and governance structures; a statement placing the relationship on a footing of respect, recognition, sharing, and mutual responsibility, thus ending the cycle of blame and guilt and freeing aboriginal and nonaboriginal peoples to embrace a shared future; affirmation of the right of aboriginal peoples to fashion their own lives and control their own governments and lands—not as a grant from other Canadian governments but as a right inherent in their status as peoples who have occupied these lands from time immemorial; and acknowledgment that justice and fair play are essential for reconciliation between aboriginal and nonaboriginal peoples and a commitment by Canada to create institutions and processes to strive for justice. Such a proclamation would be followed by the enactment of companion legislation by the Parliament of Canada. The legislation would create the new laws and institutions needed to implement the “renewed relationship” with a view to providing both the authority and the tools needed for aboriginal peoples to structure their own political, social, and economic future. Governance and Polity. The most dramatic and sweeping proposal made by the commission was the creation of a parallel parliament for aboriginal peoples. The commission suggested that after the royal proclamation, the
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Canadian government draft and pass an act that would establish a body to represent aboriginal peoples within federal governing institutions and advise Parliament on matters affecting aboriginal peoples. A constitutional amendment would create a “house of first peoples” that would become part of Parliament along with the House of Commons and the Senate. Other recommendations included restructuring the federal government to allow the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) and the ministerial position that goes with it to be replaced by a senior cabinet position, the “minister for aboriginal relations,” and a new “department of aboriginal relations.” In addition, the commission recommended establishing a minister and department of Indian and Inuit services to deliver the gradually diminishing services coming from the federal level. It recommended three models of self-government: national government, to be exercised among aboriginal peoples with a strong sense of shared identity and an exclusive territorial base inside which national governments would exercise a wide range of powers and authority; public government, in which all residents would participate equally in the functions of government regardless of their heritage; and community of interest government, to be exercised primarily in urban centers where aboriginal persons form a minority of the population but nonetheless want a measure of selfgovernment in relation to education, health care, economic development, and protection of culture. The latter would operate effectively within municipal boundaries, with voluntary membership and powers delegated from aboriginal nation governments and/or provincial governments. Land Rights and Claims. The commission stated that the land claims process is “deeply flawed” and recommended that it be replaced by a fairer and more balanced system in which the federal government does not act as both defender of the Crown’s interests and judge and jury on claims. The commission further stated that this process is not open to Metis claims, thereby leaving Metis people without a land and resource base and with no mechanisms for settling grievances. It also categorized as unfair the governmental demands that aboriginals “extinguish” their general land rights in favor of specific terms laid down in claim settlements and recommended a new process that would result in three categories of allocation: lands selected from traditional territories that would belong exclusively to aboriginal nations and be under their sole control; other lands in their traditional territories that would belong jointly to aboriginal and nonaboriginal governments and be the object of shared management arrangements; and land that would belong to and remain under the control of the Crown but to
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which aboriginal peoples would have special rights, such as a right of access to sacred and historical sites. In support, the commission recommended establishing regional treaty commissions and an aboriginal lands and treaties tribunal that would facilitate and support treaty negotiations. Also, the commission called on the federal government to allocate to aboriginal nations “all land promised to them in existing treaties,” “to return to First Nations all land it has expropriated or bought, then left unused,” and “to establish a fund to help aboriginal people purchase land on the open market.” The commission recommended one major piece of companion legislation, namely an aboriginal treaties implementation act that would seek to establish a process for “recognized aboriginal nations to renew existing treaties or negotiate new ones.” The act would also “set out processes and principles to guide negotiation, include a commitment to implement existing treaties according to their spirit and intent, and . . . renegotiate treaty terms on which there was no meeting of minds when they were originally set down” and would “establish regional treaty commissions to convene and manage the negotiation process, with advice from the aboriginal lands and treaties tribunal on certain issues.” Other Measures Proposed. Other recommendations included measures to overcome epidemic health problems, child abuse, welfare and economic dependency, and related socioeconomic problems, including poor housing and a lack of overall infrastructure in aboriginal communities. In recommending aboriginal control of education, the commission noted that aboriginal peoples are simply asking for no more than what other communities already have—the chance to say what kind of people their children will become. Aboriginal peoples want schools to help children, youth, and adults learn the skills they need to participate fully in the economy, develop as citizens of aboriginal nations, and retain their languages and the traditions necessary for cultural continuity. The commission also recommended that aboriginal peoples be given control over youth and adult education, including not only education in aboriginal culture, customs, and traditions but also that which will assist in overcoming the massive problems of unemployment in aboriginal communities. The report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples challenged aboriginal and nonaboriginal relationships. It documented the myriad problems of the past century and offered a considered and considerable number of recommendations for change. However, these recommendations, detailed and numerous though they were, are probably not enough to bring about change. As the commissioners noted, “It will take an act of
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national intention—a major, symbolic statement of intent, accompanied by the laws necessary to turn intentions into action.” See also: Aboriginal Action Plan; Declaration of First Nations; Delgamuukw v. British Columbia; Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development; Fifteen Principles; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Meech Lake Accord; Nisga’a Agreement in Principle; Nunavut Territory; Reserve system of Canada; Treaties and agreements in Canada; White Paper of Canada. Gregory Walters Sources for Further Study Looking Forward, Looking Back; Restructuring the Relationship; Gathering Strength; Perspectives and Realities; and Renewal: A Twenty Year Commitment. 5 vols. Ottawa: Canada Communication Group, 1996. The final report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Long, J. Anthony, and Menno Boldt, eds., in association with Leroy Little Bear. Governments in Conflict? Provinces and Indian Nations in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Addresses aboriginal-provincial relations focusing on self-government, provincial jurisdiction, land claims, and financial responsibility. ____________. The Quest for Justice: Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal Rights. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Presents a broad cross section of tribal, geographic, and organizational perspectives. The authors discuss constitutional questions such as land rights, concerns of Metis, nonstatus Indians and Inuit, and historical, legal/constitutional, political, regional, and international rights issues. Miller, J. R. Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Contains key, previously published articles concerned with regional developments from the days of New France to the present. Morrison, Andrea P., with Irwin Cotler, eds. Justice for Natives Searching for Common Ground. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. A volume that came together around the Oka crisis between aboriginal people in Quebec and the government. Its thirty-five essays and stories provide helpful discussions on native women and the struggle for justice, self-determination, title and land claims, the Oka crisis, and legal relations and models for change. Morse, Bradforse W. Aboriginal Peoples and the Law: Indian, Metis and Inuit Rights in Canada. Rev. ed. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989. Provides a basic resource for cases and materials on the original inhabitants of Canada.
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Sand Creek Massacre Date: November 29, 1864 Locale: Sand Creek, southeastern Colorado Tribes involved: Cheyenne Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The slaughter of Cheyenne women and children by Colorado militia regulars presages the subjugation of Great Plains Indians for the next three decades. Against the backdrop of the American Civil War (1861-1865), on August 17, 1862, the beleaguered Santee Sioux in Minnesota began an uprising against the continuing encroachment of white settlers. This bloody fighting touched off general warfare the length and breadth of the Great Plains and frightened gold seekers in the new mining settlements of Colorado. Governor John Evans of the new Colorado Territory tried to get Cheyennes and Arapahos to give up their hunting ranges for reservations, but they did not want to leave. In the meantime, white settlers’ devastation of the buffalo (bison) herds was limiting the tribes’ hunting ranges, and regular army troops had moved out to support the Union as a new influx of settlers swept across the plains, seeking fortune and avoiding Civil War service. Sporadic raids by American Indians made travelers along the California and Santa Fe Trails nervous. White migration and the settlers’ practice of decimating buffalo herds merely for their tallow and hides caused concern among the natives, who were further hampered by intertribal warfare, a diminishing food supply, and the scourge of smallpox. On November 10, 1863, Robert North, an illiterate white man of dubious credibility who had lived with the Arapahos, gave a statement to Governor John Evans, saying that the Comanches, Apaches, Kiowas, Northern Arapahos, Sioux, and all Cheyennes had pledged to one another to go to war with the settlers in the spring of 1864. On December 14, 1863, Evans wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton asking for military aid and authority to call out the state militia. The situation remained relatively quiet in the early spring. Cheyennes and Arapahos were fighting the Utes, the Arapahos were feuding with the Kiowas, and the Sioux bided their time. By April, Colonel John M. Chivington’s command had begun an aggressive military campaign against American Indians in general and Cheyennes in particular. This campaign provoked a war that lasted well into 1865 and cost the government thirty million dollars.
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Chivington’s Campaign. Chivington, the military commander of Colorado Territory, had had a minor success against Confederate forces in New Mexico in 1862. He was a former Methodist minister who was dubbed the Fighting Parson. Zealous and unscrupulous, he harbored political ambitions. Encouraged by Governor Evans, Chivington used scattered incidents to declare that the Cheyennes were at war, and he sent out soldiers to “burn villages and kill Cheyennes wherever and whenever found.” Ominously, he declared that he believed in killing American Indians “little and big.” The tribes struck back. By the summer of 1864, fighting and atrocities on both sides plagued western Kansas and eastern Colorado. In June, Evans, trying to separate peaceful tribes from warlike bands, urged friendly Kiowas and Comanches to report to Fort Larned on the Arkansas River in Kansas and Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos to report to Fort Lyon, 250 miles up the same stream in southeastern Colorado. He ordered the friendly tribes to submit to military authority. A skirmish at Fort Larned rendered this strategy useless, and by August Evans had issued a proclamation calling for indiscriminate killing of American Indians. The natives retaliated by closing the road to Denver, which stopped the mail and caused prices of staples to skyrocket. White settlers mobilized for war. The Cheyenne chief Black Kettle urgently wanted peace. Accordingly, he and other Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders met with Evans and Chivington at Camp Weld near Denver on September 28, 1864. The talks were confusing, because Evans made the distinction between surrender to the military authorities and securing peace by treaty. The tribal leaders did not understand, and they received no clear promise of peace. Clearly, the settlers were spoiling for a fight. In fact, Chivington had recruited enlistees for his Third Colorado Volunteer Regiment from among mining camp toughs and bums with a promise that they would kill American Indians. The stage was set for a tragedy. After submitting themselves to military authorities at Fort Lyon in early November, Black Kettle’s band of approximately six hundred Indians were sent to make camp to hunt buffalo in the broad, barren valley of Sand Creek, a tributary of the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado about forty miles north of Fort Lyon. Because the younger braves had drifted north to listen to the war drums at a council on the Smoky Hill River, Black Kettle’s group mainly consisted of old men, women, and children. They were mostly Cheyennes, with a few dozen Arapahos. They believed they were safe. Chivington’s views were unequivocal. He would take no prisoners and “damn any man that was in sympathy with the Indians.” After a bitter night march over rolling prairie, Chivington deployed approximately seven hundred men and four howitzers around Black Kettle’s village at
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daybreak on November 29, 1864. In addition to his Third Colorado Volunteer Regiment, Chivington had 175 soldiers of the First Colorado Cavalry and a small contingent of New Mexico infantry. Massacre of Cheyennes. Mounted troops and foot soldiers swept across the dry creekbed into the Cheyenne camp. Black Kettle ran up a U.S. flag and a white surrender flag over his teepee at the center of the camp. The flags were ignored. Panic ensued as the natives were butchered where they stood. One of the first killed was White Antelope, a seventy-five-year-old man. The Arapaho chief Left Hand fell quickly. Small groups of Cheyennes fought from sand pits, but most fled in panic. Black Kettle miraculously escaped. Atrocities followed the slaughter. Eyewitness testimony later recalled, They [the Indians] were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.
A Lieutenant Richmond of the notorious Third Colorado shot and scalped three women and five children as they screamed for mercy. The final tally of American Indian dead ranged from 150 to 500. Three-quarters of those killed were women and children. Chivington’s report said of his troops, “All did nobly.” Chivington returned to Denver in triumph, his men brandishing a hundred American Indian scalps. The triumph would be short-lived. A letter from Indian agent S. G. Colley printed in the Missouri Intelligencer on January 6, 1865, mentioned the atrocities and stirred public opinion in the states. General Halleck, the Army chief of staff, ordered Chivington investigated, and the district commander, General Curtis, attempted to have him court-martialed. Instead, Chivington mustered out of the service. Indian Retaliation. Following the massacre, Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Sioux ravaged the South Platte River Valley. They killed approximately fifty whites, burned stage stations, destroyed telegraph lines, and twice sacked the town of Julesburg in northeast Colorado. With the Civil War drawing to a close, on March 3, 1865, a joint resolution of Congress created a joint committee to study the “Indian problem.” A shifty and temporary treaty in October, 1865, made peace on the plains but inexplicably contradicted itself and forbade some tribes any legal home. On January 26, 1867, the final report of the joint committee released testimony about the Sand
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Creek Massacre and traced many American Indian wars to “lawless white men always to be found upon the frontier or boundary lines between savage and civilized life.” The American Indian wars lasted until the closing of the frontier. The incessant pressure of whites moving westward across North America had produced constant conflict with the Native Americans. Special circumstances surrounding the Civil War, the Colorado gold rush, and the decline of the buffalo herds led to the tragedy of Sand Creek. The pent-up forces of expansion released in the aftermath of these events ensured that this tragedy would not be an isolated one. Who was “savage” and who “civilized” remains a large historical question. See also: Bear River Campaign; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty; Navajo War; Sioux War; Washita River Massacre. Brian G. Tobin Sources for Further Study Grinnell, George Bird. The Fighting Cheyennes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915. Drawing heavily on primary documentation and such venerable authorities as Hubert Howe Bancroft, this detailed account of the Sand Creek events evokes Cheyenne sympathies. Hoig, Stan. The Peace Chiefs of the Cheyennes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. This short work paints the Cheyenne in general, and Black Kettle in particular, as men of peace. Includes many interesting photographs. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Indian Heritage of America. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. Examines the clash of cultures in words and illustrations. Lavender, David. The Great West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Suggests that Black Kettle may have been more interested in handouts than in peace. Utley, Robert M., and Wilcomb B. Washburn. The Indian Wars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Puts the Sand Creek Massacre in the context of the times.
Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez Date: 1978 Locale: New Mexico Tribes involved: Santa Clara Pueblo, Navajo
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Categories: Civil rights, Court cases, Twentieth century history Significance: A U.S. Supreme Court decision deepens the concept of tribal sovereignty and reinforces the sanctity of tribal customs in determining tribal membership. The Santa Clara Pueblo (New Mexico) passed an ordinance stating that if a male member of the tribe married a woman who was not a member of the tribe, their children would be eligible for membership in the tribe. However, children born of a woman from the tribe who married a nonmember man were not eligible for enrollment in the tribe. When the tribe refused to enroll her daughter, Julia Martinez, an enrolled member of the Santa Clara Pueblo married to a Navajo, brought suit against her tribe on behalf of her daughter. Martinez charged that the tribal law violated her daughter’s rights to equal protection under the Indian Civil Rights Act (1968), and further, Martinez contended that the law discriminated against her based on her sex. The tribe argued that its rules for membership were culturally based on a traditional patrilineal system that predated the United States and its laws. The tribe also asserted its sovereign right to determine who is a tribal member without federal government involvement. In deciding the case in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to interfere with the tribe’s conception of membership. The Court also stressed that the Indian Civil Rights Act did protect the civil rights of individuals from unjust acts of tribal governments, but its overriding purpose was to promote tribal self-government and self-determination rather than impose the dominant society’s standards of equal protection. This case deepened the concept of tribal sovereignty and reinforced the sanctity of tribal customs. See also: American Indian Religious Freedom Act; Federally recognized tribes; Indian Civil Rights Act; Indian Claims Commission. Carole A. Barrett
Saybrook, Battle of Date: September, 1636-May, 1637 Locale: Saybrook, Connecticut Tribes involved: Pequot Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles
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Significance: Defeat in this battle, actually a nine-month siege of Fort Saybrook, led to the destruction of the Pequots as a power in the Northeast. The roots of the Battle of Saybrook are found in the 1634 treaty between the Pequots and Massachusetts Bay. The treaty granted the Pequots trade with Massachusetts and peace with the Narragansetts. In exchange the Pequots were required to deliver a specified amount of wampum to Massachusetts. When the Pequot wampum delivery did not meet expectations, Massachusetts officials viewed the wampum delivery as proof of the Pequots’ subordinate status. John Winthrop, Sr., former and future governor of Massachusetts, said that the Pequots relinquished their right to Connecticut to Massachusetts in 1635. This claim provided the justification necessary for Massachusetts to involve itself in the settlement of the Connecticut Valley, a region beyond the boundary of the Massachusetts royal charter. Working in conjunction with the Saybrook Company, Massachusetts officials built Fort Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. In July, 1636, John Winthrop, Jr., nominal governor of Fort Saybrook, met with the Pequots and issued an ultimatum. Winthrop demanded that the Pequots meet English expectations regarding wampum demands and hand over the killers of Captain John Stone. Winthrop knew that Western Niantics had killed Stone a few years earlier; his demands were not meant to be accepted. To avoid trouble, the Pequot sachem Sassacus placed the Pequot territory under Massachusetts’s domain. Shortly thereafter, events occurred that produced the First Pequot War. Block Island Narragansetts killed Captain John Oldham in July, 1636. In August, 1636, colonial militiamen sailed to Block Island and looted and burned empty villages. Colonists then turned their attention to the Pequots. They wanted the Pequots’ land, and they used Oldham’s murder to justify an expedition against the Pequots. The expedition failed to subdue the Pequots, and the Indians saw the expedition as an injustice. In September the Pequots took up arms, and by November, 1636, they had isolated Fort Saybrook. The Pequots chose not to attack more northerly communities such as Hartford. The militiamen stationed at Saybrook spent the next nine months cut off from the rest of the colonies, begging for help; none was forthcoming. The Pequots could isolate the fort for that long because the sponsor of the post, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was distracted by an internal matter concerning the antinomian crisis. Then in April, 1637, everything changed. In that month colonists drove the Connecticut Valley sachem Sequin and his followers off their land. This ran contrary to the agreements Sequin and the colonists had reached con-
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cerning the land. Sequin then appealed to the Pequots, to whom he paid tribute, to aid him. The Pequots did and on April 23, 1637, the Pequots attacked Wethersfield. Connecticut then used the Pequot attack on Wethersfield to justify an offensive war against the Pequots on May 1, 1637. The Pequots hoped their rivals the Narragansetts would support them in their war against Connecticut Valley settlers. The Narragansetts almost did, but Roger Williams secured a Narragansett-Massachusetts alliance that isolated the Pequots. This alliance allowed Connecticut soldiers to attack the Pequots at Mystic in late May, 1637. The predawn attack killed between three hundred and seven hundred Pequots and destroyed the remaining Pequots’ will to continue the war. The peace treaty that followed, the Treaty of Hartford (1638), declared the Pequot Nation dissolved. See also: Pequot War. Michael J. Mullin
Seminole Wars Date: November 21, 1817-March 27, 1858 Locale: Florida Tribes involved: Seminole Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: A continuation of the U.S. policy of containment and relocation of Native Americans east of the Mississippi. The conflicts known as the First, Second, and Third Seminole Wars were never declared wars on the part of the U.S. government. The Seminole Wars were a continuation of U.S. policy to contain Native American populations east of the Mississippi and remove them to reservations west of the Mississippi, a policy that resulted in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. They also might be seen as early battles fought over the jurisdiction of runaway slaves that would eventually escalate into the Civil War. First Seminole War. The First Seminole War was preceded by years of disputes along the Florida-Georgia border, climaxing in the destruction of Fort Negro on the Apalachicola River. Built by the British in 1815 and turned over to a band of runaway slaves on the British departure from Florida, Fort Negro proved an obstacle in the supply route to Fort Scott in Georgia. When a U.S. vessel was fired upon from the fort, Andrew Jackson
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ordered General Edmund Gaines to destroy the fort. A hot cannonball, fired from the expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Clinch, landed in a powder magazine, blowing up the fort and killing 270 of its 344 occupants. Neamathla, village chief of Fowltown, reacted by warning General Gaines that if U.S. soldiers tried to cross the border into Florida, they would be annihilated. A gunfight between U.S. soldiers and Neamathla’s Seminoles on November 21, 1817, is considered the opening salvo of the First Seminole War. This conflict, ending with Andrew Jackson’s occupation of the city of Pensacola in May, 1818, led to the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, in which Spain ceded the territory of Florida to the United States. The 1823 Moultrie Creek Treaty restricted Seminole settlements to a reservation of four million acres north of Charlotte Harbor and six small reservations for north Florida chiefs. The Seminoles agreed not to make the reservations a haven for escaped slaves. The 1830 enactment of the Indian Removal Act mandated that all Indians be encouraged to trade their eastern land for western land. If they failed to do so, they would lose the protection of the federal government. In May, 1832, U.S. commissioner James Gadsden convened a meeting with the Seminole chiefs at Payne’s Landing. What transpired at the meeting has been the subject of much political and scholarly controversy. All that is certain is that a treaty was signed on May 9, 1832, in which the chiefs agreed that a delegation would travel to inspect the lands in Oklahoma, and, if the lands were satisfactory, the Seminoles would agree to move west as a part of the Creek allocation. The ambiguity of who “they” were—the chiefs or their tribal councils—and the peculiar stipulation that the Seminoles would be absorbed by their longtime enemies, the Creeks, put the validity of the treaty into question. There have been allegations that bribery and coercion were used to get the Seminoles to sign the treaty. All of the chiefs whose names were on the treaty later repudiated it. An exploratory party left for Oklahoma in October, 1832, and returned to Fort Gibson, Arkansas, in March, 1833, where they entered into a series of negotiations. Again, there have been allegations of coercion and forged marks on the Fort Gibson Treaty, by which the chiefs agreed that the Seminoles would move west within three years. Second Seminole War. In October, 1834, Indian agent Wiley Thompson brought the chiefs together to discuss plans for a spring removal. The Seminoles gathered in their own council after Thompson’s initial meeting, and strong opposition to migration emerged, especially from the Seminole war leader Osceola. Relations deteriorated and skirmishes increased between
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This engraving, portraying the Second Seminole War from the white perspective of the time, appeared in 1836. (Library of Congress)
the government and Seminoles throughout 1835, culminating in the outbreak of war in December. The two most notable incidents occurred on December 28. Ote-emathla, also known as Jumper, and a warrior known as Alligator led 180 warriors in ambushing a relief column under the command of Major Francis Dade. Only 3 of the 108 soldiers escaped slaughter in the fierce battle that followed. Meanwhile, Osceola led sixty warriors in an attack on Fort King with the express purpose of killing Wiley Thompson, who had imprisoned Osceola in chains earlier in the year. The army was in disarray during most of 1836. General Winfield Scott immediately began to feud with General Gaines. General Call was put in charge of the troops until November, when General Thomas S. Jesup arrived in Florida and assumed the command until 1839. Jesup’s command in Florida was crucial for the outcome of the Seminole Wars. The general had persuaded a large number of chiefs and their tribes to emigrate on the condition that they would be accompanied by their African American allies and slaves. When opposition arose among landowners claiming that the Seminoles harbored runaway slaves, a compromise was reached: Only those blacks who had lived with the Seminoles before the outbreak of the war would be permitted to go. More than seven hundred Seminoles had gathered at Fort Brooke north of Tampa by the end of May, 1837. On the night of June 2, Osceola and the Mikasuki shaman Arpeika surrounded the camp with two hundred warriors and spirited away nearly the entire population. The defection caused a drastic shift in Jesup’s tactics; no longer did he feel any compunction about using trickery to gain his ends. In September, General Joseph Hernandez captured King Philip, Yuchi Billy, Coacoochee, and Blue Snake in the vicinity of St. Augustine and imprisoned them at Fort
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Marion. When Osceola and Coa Hadjo sent word to Hernandez that they were willing to negotiate, he set up a conference near Fort Peyton. Jesup ordered him to violate the truce and capture the Indians. News of Osceola’s capture spread through the nation, and when he was transferred to Fort Moultrie in Georgia, George Catlin visited him and painted his portrait. His death on January 30, 1838, enshrined him as a martyr to the Indian cause. Coacoochee, having escaped from Fort Marion on November 29, 1837, headed south to join bands led by Jumper, Arpeika, and Alligator. The largest and last pitched battle of the war was fought on the banks of Lake Okeechobee on December 25. Colonel Zachary Taylor commanded eleven hundred men against approximately four hundred Indians. The Indians finally retreated from the two-and-a-half-hour battle, leaving 26 killed and 112 wounded and having sustained 11 killed and 14 wounded. In February, 1838, further treachery at Fort Jupiter netted more than five hundred Seminoles. Persuasion and mopping-up operations sent many of the remaining Seminole leaders, including Micanopy, the chief, on the westward migration. Jesup’s tenure in Florida, which had resulted in the capture, migration, or death of more than twenty-four hundred Indians, ended in May, 1838, when Taylor took over command of the Florida forces. Taylor remained in Florida for another two years, during which time operations were carried out against scattered bands of natives throughout the peninsula. General Alexander MacComb, commanding general of the army, came to Florida in April, 1839, and declared the war over when he concluded an agreement with the Seminoles, who agreed to withdraw south of the Peace River by July 15, 1839, and remain there until further arrangements were made. Although a guarded trading post was set up on the Caloosahatchee River, the Indians learned that they were not to be allowed to stay in Florida. Chekika, chief of the Spanish Indians, led an attack and destroyed the post in July. After he led a raid on Indian Key in August, 1840, Chekika was surprised in the Everglades and executed. The commands of General Walker K. Armistead and General William J. Worth saw the final years of the Second Seminole War. Following the successful policy of deceiving chiefs who came to negotiate, most notably Coacoochee, and through continuing guerrilla warfare, the army managed to remove all but about six hundred of Florida’s Indians, who were restricted to a temporary reservation south of the Peace River because Congress refused to continue to fund any further campaigns in 1842. The Second Seminole War was more costly than all the other Indian wars combined. Still, new settlers came to the interior of Florida, which had been made accessi-
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ble by the mapping, exploration, and road-building required by the wars. The military had gained skill in guerrilla warfare and an understanding of the need for interservice cooperation, and the federal government learned to exercise its power to convert economic power into military strength. Third Seminole War. Between 1842 and the outbreak of the Third Seminole War in 1855, the Seminoles kept to the reservation and followed the dictates of regulations imposed upon them. They remained adamant in their opposition to removal until Secretary of War Jefferson Davis declared that, if they did not leave voluntarily, the military would remove them by force. In December, 1855, a patrol investigating Seminole settlements in the Big Cypress Swamp was attacked by a band of forty Seminoles led by Billy Bowlegs and Oscen Tustenuggee, marking the first skirmish of the war that was dubbed Billy Bowlegs’ War. It was a war of skirmishes, raids, and harassment against small settlements, both white and Seminole. A treaty signed on August 7, 1856, that granted the Seminoles more than two million acres in Indian Territory separate from the Creek allotment, along with a generous financial settlement, was the catalyst to the end of the conflict in Florida. A government offer of money in return for removal was accepted on March 27, 1858. Bowlegs and his band left Florida in May, and two other bands left the following February. Only the Muskogee band led by Chipco, hidden north of Lake Okeechobee, and Arpeika’s Mikasuki band, buried deep in the Everglades, a remnant of one hundred to three hundred persons, remained in relative peace in Florida, the ancestors of twentieth century Seminoles. See also: Civil War; Indian Removal Act; Prehistory: Southeast; Trail of Tears. Jane Anderson Jones Sources for Further Study Covington, James W. The Seminoles of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. The most thorough history of the Seminoles in Florida; devotes six chapters to the Seminole Wars. Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842. Rev. ed. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1985. Describes the battles and leaders, the problems of military organization and ordnance, and Seminole culture and history in the period of the Second Seminole War. Tebeau, Charlton W. “The Wars of Indian Removal.” In A History of Florida. Rev. ed. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1980. This chapter in a standard Florida history covers the Seminole Wars.
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Wickman, Patricia R. Osceola’s Legacy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. A study of the life and myth of Osceola, based on a survey of artifacts and documents. Wright, J. Leitch. Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. An examination of the culture of the Creeks and Seminoles, and their Spanish, British, and African connections.
Sioux War Date: Beginning August 17, 1862 Locale: Southern Minnesota Tribes involved: Sioux Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Minnesota Sioux lose their tribal lands to encroaching white settlers in one of the largest mass slaughters in U.S. history. On August 17, 1862, four Santee Sioux men, returning from a fruitless search for food beyond the boundaries of their southern Minnesota reservation, attacked and killed five white settlers near Acton, in Meeker County. Ordinarily, the culprits would have been surrendered to white authorities, but these were no ordinary times. The Sioux of Minnesota were starving. Long-promised annuities were slow in coming, as usual, and doubts about the ability of a nation divided by civil war to fulfill its obligations to an isolated frontier led traders at the Redwood Agency to refuse to open their warehouses until payment in gold arrived from Washington, D.C. Trader Andrew Myrick had advised the starving population to “go home and eat grass, or their own dung.” On August 18, a large war party attacked and looted the Redwood Agency and wiped out most of a military expedition from Fort Snelling. Myrick, among the first to fall, was found with his mouth symbolically stuffed with grass. As politicians argued over payment of annuities in paper money or in gold, the Great Sioux War began. Prelude to War. Although the outbreak of hostilities appeared to be local, its causes must be viewed in a national context. The Fort Snelling reserve, established in 1819 near present-day St. Paul, was, until 1851, the only land in Minnesota Territory that did not belong to Native Americans. Neverthe-
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less, thousands of white settlers, in the familiar pattern of national expansion, occupied most of southern Minnesota. In 1851, the Minnesota Sioux negotiated away most of their best hunting grounds in the treaties of Traverse de Sioux and Mendota, and were tricked into signing away most of the promised compensation to pay debts, real and imagined, to traders there. The remaining annuities were slow in coming and insufficient to support the Sioux, and there was no promise of permanent occupancy of the Minnesota reservation. Furthermore, there was no consistent policy regarding American Indians in the United States during the period. Native Americans had no legal recourse against white depredations. Appeals for protection from soldier and civilian alike fell on deaf ears. The quality and abilities of American Indian agents declined as the nation moved toward the Civil War. Resentment smoldered, but several hundred of the approximately seven thousand Sioux in Minnesota cut their hair, donned “white men’s” clothes, and took up farming following the 1851 treaties. These “farmer” Sioux received most of the annuities, and a rift developed between them and the traditional, or “blanket,” Sioux. Despite the influx of settlers, the Minnesota frontier had been generally peaceful. The occasional murder of a settler by a native resulted in the miscreant being turned over to white authorities for punishment. In 1857, a group of renegade blanket Sioux slaughtered thirty settlers in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota, causing momentary panic in the area. Led by Chief Little Crow, the Sioux denied responsibility for the outlaws and formed a party to pursue them into Dakota Territory. The effort proved futile but apparently satisfied white authorities. No punishment for the Spirit Lake Massacre was forthcoming. Annuities were paid on time, and the prestige of the United States declined among the image-conscious Sioux. By 1862, most of Minnesota’s white male settlers had left to fight in the Civil War, and the Sioux, confined to a narrow strip of land along the Minnesota River, were facing starvation. Little Crow’s Reluctance. Chief Shakopee and his followers knew the Acton murders would be avenged. Although Chief Little Crow, long a spokesman for the Sioux, had lost prestige when he cut his hair and began farming, he remained the person most able to unify the Sioux. He was reluctant and argued against war. Accused of cowardice, he replied, The white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick the sky is like a snowstorm. Yes, they fight among themselves, but if you strike one of them, they all will turn upon you and devour your women and little children . . . you will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the hard moon.
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Sioux leaders of the Red Cloud delegation, c. 1876 (left to right): Red Dog, Little Wound, interpreter John Bridgeman, Red Cloud, American Horse, and Red Shirt. (National Archives)
Nevertheless, he led the Sioux, forlornly hoping to regain his prestige. The Sioux were inefficient attackers. Most of the inhabitants of the Redwood Agency escaped to spread the alarm at Fort Ridgely. During the first week, far more whites were spared than were killed, many taken prisoner by Little Crow and protected from harm in his camp. Attacks on New Ulm and settlers in Brown and Renville Counties convinced the Sioux that success was imminent. Little Crow knew that Fort Ridgley, which protected the Minnesota River Valley, would have to fall. Meanwhile, panic spread across the Midwest, as politicians from Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Dakota Territory petitioned the federal government for troops and leadership. Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey, who had negotiated the fateful 1851 treaties, appointed his old political rival, former governor Henry H. Sibley, to lead the Minnesota Militia against the Sioux. General John Pope, in disgrace because of his defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Virginia, was assigned to head the new Northwest Department. His policy of pursue and confine would dominate American Indian policy in the trans-Mississippi West for years to come. He directed the Minnesota war from St. Paul. On August 20 and again on August 22, before Sibley reached Fort Ridgely with a motley crew of raw recruits, Little Crow and Chief Mankato attacked. The fort’s cannon was used to devastating effect; only three of the
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fort’s defenders were killed, and both attacks were repelled. The Sioux attacked New Ulm the second time on August 23, but again failed. Several other settlements suffered attacks, but the fate of the now demoralized Sioux was sealed. Sibley’s Triumph. By the middle of September, Sibley had formed his sixteen hundred troops into a fighting unit and moved north. On September 23, Sibley defeated several hundred warriors under Chief Mankato, who was killed. As most of the combatants slipped away, Sibley rounded up 400 Sioux, conducted trials, and sentenced 306 to death. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the records and, refusing to “countenance lynching, within the forms of martial law,” commuted most of the sentences. On December 28, 1863, thirty-eight Sioux were hanged on a single scaffold at Mankato, the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The war was not over. Little Crow was murdered near Hutchinson in 1863; Shakopee was kidnapped in Canada and hanged at Fort Snelling in 1865. The U.S. Army, following General Pope’s orders, pursued the Sioux west. Such occasional engagements as the Battle of White Hill, Dakota, in 1863, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in Montana Territory in 1876, kept the Sioux moving. The Great Sioux War cost the lives of 413 white civilians, 77 soldiers, and 71 American Indians, counting those 38 hanged at Mankato. There was no treaty, no negotiation to end the war. All Sioux, blanket and farmer, were condemned to lose all but a minuscule piece of their tribal lands in Minnesota, and ultimately, their way of life. The 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee, in which U.S. troops killed almost two hundred Sioux, was the last battle in the American Indian wars. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Little Bighorn, Battle of the; Minnesota Uprising; Wounded Knee Massacre. Stephen G. Sylvester Sources for Further Study Anderson, Gary Clayton. Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986. A carefully researched and documented biography of the most important Native American war leader; sympathetic to both Little Crow and the Santee Sioux. Provides a detailed description of the war. Anderson, Gary Clayton, and Alan R. Woolworth, eds. Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 1988. Carefully edited, readable first-person ac-
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counts of the war, some sympathetic to the blanket Sioux, some to the farmer Sioux who opposed the war. Blegen, Theodore C. Minnesota: A History of the State. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1975. The standard history of Minnesota. Its chapter on the Sioux War is solid and balanced. Ellis, Richard N. General Pope and U.S. Indian Policy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970. Ellis’s detailed account provides insight into the policy of punishment and containment that grew out of the war. Green, Jerome A., ed. Lakota and Cheyenne: Indian Views of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Collects first-hand accounts from Indians at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Hedren, Paul. Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Focuses on the events of 1876 at Fort Laramie. Lass, William E. Minnesota: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Chapter 5 is a concise but insightful statement of the war’s effect on Minnesota. Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier of the American West: 1846-1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Although the description of the war is brief and simplistic, it places the war in the context of Western policy toward the American Indians.
Snake War Date: 1866-July, 1868 Locale: Southeastern Oregon, southwestern Idaho Tribes involved: Northern Paiute (especially the Yahuskin and Walpapi bands), Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: After two years of guerrilla warfare, peace talks between Brevet Major General George Crook and Snake leader Old Weawea effectively pacified most Snake bands. The Snakes (named Gens du Serpent by early French explorers) were ancient inhabitants of the Great Basin along upper reaches of the Missouri River southward to the Sweetwater River. From the seventeenth century onward, they invariably had been described as a very poor, largely itinerant people whose chief preoccupation was scrounging food from hard country. After the failure of Oregon and Nevada volunteers to end Snake attacks on miners during Civil War years, the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry and Four-
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teenth Infantry under General George Crook assumed responsibility for operations in 1866. Thereafter, in a remorseless campaign of forty-eight battles, resulting in five hundred Indian casualties and the death of Chief Pauline, Crook suppressed the Snakes’ guerrilla war by exhausting them. Eight hundred Snakes were led to Fort Harney, Oregon, in July, 1868, by Old Weawea, signaling peace. Most Snake survivors retired to the Klamath and Malheur River reservations. See also: Bannock War; Bozeman Trail War; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933. Clifton K. Yearley
Society of American Indians Date: 1911-1924 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: Headed by educated Native American professionals, the SAI advocated native educational and social advancement, true historical representation, native franchise, and legal assistance. On October 12, 1911, more than fifty Native American delegates met in Columbus, Ohio, at the Society of American Indians’ (SAI) founding conference. The date, Columbus Day, was significant: This gathering marked a reclaiming of indigenous voices, a rediscovering of native pride. The “father” of this organization was a non-Native American sociologist from Ohio State University, Fayette A. McKenzie. Six months prior to the October conference, McKenzie had met with Dr. Charles A. Eastman (Sioux), Dr. Carlos Montezuma (Apache), attorney Thomas L. Sloan (Omaha), Laura Cornelius (Oneida), and Henry Standing Bear (Sioux). Coming from different backgrounds, these educated professionals united to form a native-run association. Already assimilated into the dominant society, they sought to retain their Native American identity. Calling themselves the American Indian Association, the group rallied around panIndian reforms, especially in the educational arena. At the October convention, the historical, legal, and cultural bonds connecting all natives were emphasized. The delegates drafted a constitution that advocated native advancement, true historical presentation, native cit-
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izenship, and legal assistance. To assert that this was a native movement and not a “white-run” organization, delegates changed the name to the Society of American Indians. National meetings were to be held annually, and Washington, D.C., was designated as the society’s headquarters. The SAI’s publication, the Quarterly Journal, was first issued on April 15, 1913. The masthead was framed with the society’s emblem, the American eagle, on one side and a lighted torch on the other. Below this was the SAI’s motto: “The honor of the race and the good of the country shall be paramount.” The journal’s editor, Arthur C. Parker (Seneca), was the SAI’s most intellectual influence. With his anthropological background, Parker sought to design the SAI after Tecumseh’s historical visions. Parker ardently fought for educational reforms, for an American Indian Day, and for visible Native American role models. As a peacekeeper, Parker often tempered the rising factionalism in the SAI. In 1913 the SAI was at its membership height with more than two hundred active (native) members and more than four hundred associate (nonnative) members. Friction in the following years sharply eroded membership numbers, however; lacking resources for assisting tribes with legal aid and for affecting the structure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), members began to air their frustrations internally. Conflicts involved arguments over the abolition of the BIA, the denouncement of peyote religion, and the responsibility of individual tribal complaints. The SAI officially rejected peyote religion, but no consensus was reached on the BIA question, an issue that eventually splintered the SAI. A change in focus was attempted by renaming the society’s publication The American Indian Magazine. One of its editors, Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), a Yankton Sioux, became involved in the SAI by opening an educational center among the Utes. Even with Zitkala-Sa’s strong contributions, however, the SAI’s status remained precarious. In the early 1920’s, a sense of despair clouded the SAI’s visions. PanIndian unification attempts had failed, BIA abolition was hopeless, political clout was slight (many members were not franchised), and individual interests were detracting from pantribal ones. On June 2, 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act was signed, marking the success of one of the SAI’s hardest fought battles. By this time, however, the group was almost completely defunct, and symbolically, this date marks the end of the SAI. See also: Bureau of Indian Affairs; Indian Citizenship Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; National Council of American Indians. Tanya M. Backinger
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Sports mascot controversies Date: Beginning 1970’s Locale: Canada, United States Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Twentieth century history Significance: Native American objections to the use of “Indian” and “Indian warrior” mascots for professional, high school, and college sports teams reflects a growing sensitivity to negative stereotyping but also set the stage for a backlash against “political correctness.” The rise in Native American political activism in the 1960’s and 1970’s, coupled with a general interest in the cultural representation of all minorities, including African Americans, women, and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, led to increasing discomfort with the widespread practice of using “Indian” mascots for sports teams. Common team names, such as “Redskins,” “Braves,” or “the Fighting [tribal name],” were represented by a person, invariably not of Native American descent, dressed in stereotypical Indian warrior costume as seen in the standard Hollywood western: loincloth, a headband and feathers or full war bonnet, “war paint” streaked on the face, and a bow and arrows or spear in tow. This mascot would enter the playing field, sometimes on horseback, and perform an equally Hollywood-inspired “war dance,” using ritually aggressive body language to indicate that the team was going to “massacre” its opponents in the upcoming game. The mascot was often given an appropriate local Indian name, whether that of a historical figure or a suitable invention—the University of Florida mascot is “Chief Osceola,” an early nineteenth century Seminole leader, while the former San Diego State University mascot was “Monty Montezuma,” reflecting the city’s proximity to the ancient Mexican Aztec empire. The trend toward giving sport teams “Indian” names only began in the early twentieth century. It is probably no coincidence that this fashion began with the closing of the American frontier and the end of outright hostilities between Native Americans and the U.S. government. The reduction of the actual threat posed by Native Americans allowed them to become romantic figures whose virtues could now be idealized. Although more than six hundred teams have changed their names since the first wave of political sensitivity in the 1970’s, the issue of racially charged sports mascots reached another peak in the 1990’s. In a large
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part, this was due to the resistance of remaining Indian-themed teams to changing their names, on the grounds that such names were, in fact, complimentary, referring to Native American bravery, physical prowess, and overall martial virtues. Furthermore, the backers of Indian team names and mascots claimed that words such as “redskin” no longer carried the kind of cultural baggage that had made them pejoratives in the nineteenth century. In twentieth century America, they argued, the primary association of such words was with sports themselves: “Redskins” was first and foremost the name of the Washington, D.C., football team, and the “Braves” play baseball in Atlanta, Georgia. Such arguments were fueled by the conservative backlash against political correctness, perceived as the imposition of the will of overly sensitive minorities on the majority culture. A Harris poll of 743 sports fans, 217 Native Americans living on reservations, and 134 Native Americans living off reservations, conducted by Sports Illustrated magazine in February, 2002, revealed that not only most white Americans (79 percent) but also most Native Americans (83 percent) did not believe that sports teams should stop using Indian nicknames, mascots, or symbols. Surprisingly, the gap in opinion was larger between Native Americans on reservations (67 percent in favor of Indian mascots) and off reservations (89 percent in favor) than between Native Americans as a whole and whites. However, the more significant result of the poll was probably the finding that, while Native Americans might not disapprove of the simple use of even pejorative words such as “redskin,” they did object to derogatory representations of Native Americans through the mascots’ on-field antics. Anthropologists Charles Springwood and Richard King, who coedited a collection of essays, Team Spirits: The Native American Mascots Controversy (2001), reported that the negative stereotyping of Native Americans as the result of Indian names and mascots tends to come, not from the teams themselves, who regard their names as symbols of strength and power, but from their opponents, who draw upon the vast cultural repertoire of images of Indians as savage, primitive, incompetent, and vanquished to promote their own team spirit. The danger of Indian mascots, Springwood and King argue, is that they provide a cultural arena for the perpetuation of these negative stereotypes that is, ironically, completely irrelevant to the history of actual Native Americans. Some Native Americans, however, have decided that equal opportunity stereotyping is the best way to get their message across. In 2002, a Native American intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado named themselves the “Fightin’ Whites.” Their mascot is a 1950’s
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style white male, complete with tie, dimples, and tidy hair. His slogan: “Every thang’s going to be all white.” Leslie Ellen Jones See also: American Indian; Amerind; Native American; Tribe.
Standing Bear v. Crook Date: 1879 Locale: Nebraska Tribes involved: Ponca Categories: Court cases, Nineteenth century history Significance: A United States district court finds that “an Indian is a ‘person’ within the meaning of the laws of the United States.” In 1865, the Ponca, a small tribe, were guaranteed a ninety-six-thousandacre reservation along the Missouri River in northern Nebraska. Three years later, the United States gave the entire Ponca Reservation to the Sioux without consulting the Poncas. The government’s solution was to remove the Poncas to Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Despite Ponca protests, in 1879 federal troops escorted the whole tribe south to Indian Territory. Hardships caused by the journey and the radical change in climate caused many deaths among the Ponca. The people longed to return to their homeland, and in January, 1879, one chief, Standing Bear, set out for home with a small group of followers. After the people reached Nebraska, federal troops arrested the runaways in order to return them to Indian Territory. The plight of Standing Bear captured national attention, and prominent lawyers in Omaha drew up a writ of habeas corpus to prevent the people’s return to Indian Territory. On April 30, 1879, when the matter came before the United States district court in Omaha, Judge Elmer S. Dundy ruled “an Indian is a ‘person’ within the meaning of the laws of the United States” and determined that Standing Bear and his followers had been illegally detained by the federal government. The Ponca affair got national attention and inspired the formation of organizations to fight for Indian rights. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933. Carole A. Barrett
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Taos Rebellion Date: January 19, 1847 Locale: Taos, New Mexico Tribes involved: Apache, Comanche, Taos Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Resistance by Hispanics and Indians in New Mexico leads to the first revolt against new U.S. authority. In the twenty years prior to the outbreak of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the northern borderlands frontier of Mexico had undergone profound changes. A breakdown in relations with Native Americans, particularly the Apaches and the Comanches, resulted in such an increase in Native American raids that whole sections of the frontier were depopulated of settlers. Unable to institute effective pacification measures, the national government in Mexico City largely abdicated responsibility for frontier defense to the northern Mexican states and territories, a task few had the resources to implement or maintain. At the same time, U.S. influence in the borderlands was growing. In the province of New Mexico, the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821 increasingly drew north-central Mexico into the economic sphere of the United States; while in Mexican Texas, large-scale U.S. immigration led that area to declare its independence from Mexico in 1835-1836. When the United States annexed Texas in 1845, precipitating the crisis that would lead to war with Mexico, the northern borderlands frontier of Mexico seemed acutely vulnerable to a U.S. takeover. Kearney and the Army of the West. In Missouri, Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny recruited the so-called Army of the West among enthusiastic frontier supporters of manifest destiny and Missouri merchants eager to expand their Mexican markets. Following the Santa Fe Trail, Kearny and sixteen hundred troops set out first for Bent’s Fort, a trading establishment just north of the Arkansas River, then the United States-Mexico border. Charles and William Bent, with their partner Ceran St. Vrain, had established the post in 1833. From it, they had quickly monopolized the fur and American Indian trades of the southern Rockies and Great Plains. They also had expanded into the Santa Fe trade, operating a mercantile outlet in Taos, New Mexico, where Charles Bent had taken up residence after marrying into a prominent New Mexican family. From Bent’s Fort, Kearny’s forces left for New Mexico, preceded by James Wiley Magoffin, a
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Santa Fe trader acting as President James Polk’s emissary. Arriving in Santa Fe, Magoffin secretly met with New Mexico governor Manuel Armijo and persuaded him that resistance was futile. After making a show of defending the province, Armijo fled southward, allowing U.S. troops to occupy New Mexico. On August 18, 1846, Kearny’s forces entered Santa Fe, the capital. Kearny quickly reassured the sixty thousand inhabitants of New Mexico that U.S. rule would not threaten their persons or possessions. The Kearny Code, in conjunction with the United States Constitution, codified these promises and provided a legal framework for the conquered province. Kearny established a new civil government, naming Charles Bent as governor and Donaciano Vigil of Santa Fe as secretary or lieutenant governor. Soon after, Kearny departed for California to continue the conquest of northern Mexico. Colonel Sterling Price, newly arrived from Missouri with additional troops to garrison the province, took military command. Kearny’s governmental appointments had excluded many of the New Mexico ricos, or upper classes, who had formerly controlled the province. Several of his appointees, many of whom had traded for years in New Mexico, held land grants or interests in land grants that had been issued earlier by former governor Armijo. Their new positions of authority gave these appointees the opportunity to expand their New Mexico holdings at the ex-
A photograph of Taos Pueblo recorded by the Library of Congress in 1878, approximately three decades after the rebellion. (Library of Congress)
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pense of the ricos, or so many ricos believed. Rumors began circulating throughout the province that the U.S. occupiers wished to register land titles, in preparation for the seizure of the ricos’ property, and to exact heavy taxes (as a territory of Mexico, New Mexico was exempt from paying national taxes). Moreover, Taos Indians believed that Charles Bent also wished to acquire lands of the Pueblo de Taos. As a result, Tomás Ortiz, Diego Archuleta (formerly Armijo’s second-in-command), and possibly Padre Antonio José Martínez of Taos, along with other prominent native New Mexicans, began to conspire against U.S. rule, planning an uprising. Lieutenant Governor Vigil, learning of the conspiracy, quickly suppressed it, but not before news of the planned insurrection had spread to towns and communities in northern New Mexico. Bent Is Ambushed. On January 14, 1847, Governor Bent left for Taos (also called Don Fernando de Taos, to differentiate it from the pueblo of the same name, only two miles north of the village), ignoring warnings from Vigil that such a journey might be dangerous in the volatile climate following the suppression of the conspiracy. Bent felt reasonably secure, not only because he had long resided in Taos but also because news of U.S. victories farther south in Chihuahua seemed to preclude the possibility of aid reaching New Mexico from that quarter. On January 19, 1847, however, Taos Indians, led by one Tomasito, joined insurrectionists in the village, led by Pablo Montoya. They destroyed U.S. settlers’ homes and attacked the residence of Charles Bent. Bent himself was killed and scalped, as were other Americans and Mexican supporters of the new regime. The insurrectionists then burned a nearby distillery at Arroyo Hondo, also operated by a U.S. citizen. Similar uprisings occurred at other northern communities, most notably at Mora, where seven more U.S. settlers, many of them Santa Fe traders, were killed. When news of these events reached Santa Fe, Colonel Price immediately set out for Taos with 480 men and four artillery pieces, while Vigil took over as provisional governor and issued a proclamation denouncing the rebels. The insurgents, numbering almost two thousand, met Price’s forces on January 29, 1847, at the village of Cañada, twenty-five miles north of Santa Fe. The U.S. settlers drove the rebels toward the Pueblo de Taos, where they made their stand in the fortress-like church. On February 3, 1847, the battle resumed. Turning their artillery on the church, the U.S. forces breached the walls, forcing the insurgents out. After more fighting, the Taos Indians and their Hispanic allies eventually surrendered, having suffered losses of 150 persons. U.S. losses were seven killed and fortyseven wounded.
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Fate of the Conspirators. While in custody awaiting trial, Tomasito, believed to have been responsible for Bent’s murder, was shot and killed by a U.S. soldier. Pablo Montoya and fourteen others were tried by courtmartial and sentenced to death. The New Mexico civil court indicted other conspirators, who were subsequently tried for treason against the United States and executed. President Polk and Secretary of War William L. Marcy later pointed out that the conspirators could not actually have been guilty of treason against the United States, as the United States and Mexico were still at war. Nevertheless, they supported the measures taken to end the uprising and the execution of its principal leaders. Diego Archuleta fled New Mexico before he could be apprehended but later returned, took the oath of allegiance to the United States, and became active in territorial politics. Padre Martínez, against whom nothing was ever proven definitely, also escaped indictment and continued his leadership role in northern New Mexico until his death in 1867. Although peace returned to New Mexico following the uprising, four years of military rule followed. In 1850, the Territory of New Mexico was finally established. Although Anglo-Americans tended to dominate federally appointed positions, the New Mexico ricos established firm control over the legislative assembly, largely securing their place in the new order. Other native New Mexicans, however, lost their lands to unscrupulous Anglo-American lawyers who used their knowledge of U.S. law and their political connections to undermine land guarantees given in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War. The Taos Indians lost much of their former territory during the period of U.S. rule over New Mexico. See also: Apache Wars; Gadsden Purchase; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Navajo War. Joseph C. Jastrzembski Sources for Further Study Crutchfield, James Andrew. Tragedy at Taos: The Revolt of 1847. Plano, Tex.: Republic of Texas Press, 1995. First comprehensive narrative of the events at Taos. Contains valuable appendices concerning the participants, a chronology of events, casualty figures, and other items of interest. Keleher, William A. Turmoil in New Mexico, 1846-1868. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Rydal Press, 1952. Details the events leading up to the U.S. invasion of New Mexico and the subsequent occupation of the province. Simmons, Marc. New Mexico: An Interpretive History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Chapter 4 covers the events of the occupation of New Mexico and briefly discusses the Taos Rebellion.
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Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico from 1846 to 1851 by the Government of the United States. 1909. Reprint. Chicago: Rio Grande Press, 1963. Quotes extensively from government documents; provides biographical sketches of the principal participants. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. A comprehensive overview of the Mexican borderlands before the Mexican War. Discusses the economic impact of the Santa Fe Trade, American Indian relations, the church, society, and culture.
Tecumseh’s Rebellion Date: 1809-1811 Locale: Old Northwest (Great Lakes region) Tribes involved: Chippewa, Iroquois, Lenni Lenape, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Wyandot (Huron) Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Tecumseh, a powerful advocate of united Indian resistance to American encroachments onto Indian lands east of the Mississippi River, led what many believe was the last great hope for effective Indian opposition to the advance of the European American frontier in the eastern portion of the United States. Soon after the conclusion of the Treaty of Fort Greenville in 1795, frontiersmen, land speculators, and settlers surged into the newly opened lands and beyond into Indian country, thereby exacerbating tensions with the tribes. As pressure mounted for further expansion beyond the line delimited under the terms of the Treaty of Fort Greenville, the governor of the new Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison, inaugurated a policy designed to acquire additional territory from the Indians incrementally. Hence, between 1802 and 1809, Harrison and Governor William Hull of the Michigan Territory concluded a series of treaties under the terms of which a significant portion of the area between the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, and the Mississippi River were opened for settlement. As the white settlers pressed against the Indians from the south and east, the tribes north of the Ohio Valley were simultaneously pressed from the west by the expansive Chippewa and Sioux in the upper Mississippi region. Hence, under
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vicelike pressure from several directions, the tribes increasingly concluded that they would have to coordinate their policies and be prepared to fight or perish. Indian Resistance. Tecumseh and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa, emerged determined to preserve the identity and territorial integrity of the tribes and their lands in the region between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. Tecumseh maintained that the Americans had been successful in depriving the Indians of A portrait of the most influential pantribal leader their lands because the tribes of the early eighteenth century, Tecumseh, had consistently failed to stand painted by Mathias Noheimer. (Library of Conunified against external engress) croachments. Hence, he argued that the tribes must create a meaningful confederation and agree not to cede additional lands to the United States without the concurrence of all the tribes in the union. Only in this way could the tribes negotiate with the Americans from a position of strength. Moreover, Tecumseh and his brother called upon the Indians to purge themselves of corrupting influences, such as alcohol, and return to traditional ways. Finally, notwithstanding the Indian disillusionment with the British as a result of Britain’s abandonment of the Indians in 1794, Tecumseh again looked to Great Britain for political and material support in his effort to coalesce effective resistance to the Americans. Indeed, because of escalating Anglo-American tensions as a result of the Chesapeake Affair of 1807, the British were more willing to extend the support sought by Tecumseh. Consequently, Tecumseh and his brother made considerable progress toward the establishment of an Indian Confederation and the renewal of Indian society. In 1808, as momentum gathered behind Tecumseh and his new confederation, he and his brother founded Prophetstown, located near the confluence of Tippecanoe Creek and the Wabash River. The Indian leaders hoped that Prophetstown would serve as a center of the confederation movement
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and that from it Tecumseh and his brother could influence the policies of the tribes throughout the region bounded by the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, and the Ohio Valley. In addition, in 1808 Tecumseh visited the British at Fort Malden, across the U.S.-Canadian border near Detroit. On this occasion, the British assured Tecumseh of their full support of the tribes’ combined efforts to form a confederation and to resist further American encroachments upon their lands. The British authorities, however, urged the Indian leaders not to be the ones to initiate hostilities along the frontier. As a result of continued efforts by American authorities to detach additional Indian lands (culminating in the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809), American intransigence concerning the implementation of the various treaties negotiated since the Treaty of Fort Greenville, and, finally, continued encroachment by American frontiersmen into Indian territory, hostilities again erupted along the frontier in 1810. Both Tecumseh and the British attempted to ameliorate the crisis, but radical elements among the tribes pressed for more aggressive military action against the Americans. During the summer of 1811, Tecumseh traveled south of the Ohio River in an effort to enlist the support of the Creek, Cherokee, and Choctaw tribes. The Creeks expressed support for Tecumseh, but Cherokee and Choctaw leaders were reluctant to take actions that might provoke open warfare with the United States government. Tippecanoe. With Tecumseh absent from his center of power north of the Ohio, Harrison decided to avail himself of the opportunity and attack the geographic heart of the confederation movement—Prophetstown. By November 6, 1811, Harrison’s force had moved to a position less than a mile from Prophetstown. The following day, on November 7, as Harrison had hoped, the Indians, unrestrained because of Tecumseh’s absence, attacked the American force and were severely defeated amid heavy fighting. Following this costly victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison’s force destroyed Prophetstown before returning to their base of operations at Vincennes. Following the Tippecanoe campaign, the frontier war continued; eventually it was submerged in the context of the greater struggle between the United States and Great Britain in the War of 1812. Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813. In many respects, the death of this great Indian leader marked the end of the last real hope of effective Indian resistance to American settlement east of the Mississippi and the extinction of the traditional Indian culture in the eastern portion of the United States.
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See also: Fort Wayne Treaty; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Prophetstown; Thames, Battle of the; Tippecanoe, Battle of. Howard M. Hensel Sources for Further Study Billington, Ray Allen. Westward Expansion. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Philbrick, Francis S. The Rise of the West, 1754-1830. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Sword of the Republic. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Tucker, Glenn. Tecumseh: Vision of Glory. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956.
Termination Resolution Date: Beginning August 1, 1953 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: National government and legislation, Twentieth century history Significance: Congress ends its policy of special treatment of American Indians. Termination was viewed by its advocates as freeing American Indians from special laws and regulations, making them equal to other citizens, and by opponents as precipitously withdrawing federal responsibility and programs. The term used for the federal policy came to be applied to the people themselves: “terminated” tribes. Termination actions included repealing laws setting American Indians apart, ending Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) services by transferring them to other federal agencies or to the states, and terminating recognition of the sovereign status of specific tribes. Termination, many have observed, did not deviate from the norm of federal policy. Its emphasis on breaking up American Indian land holdings is often compared to the General Allotment Act of 1887 (the Dawes Act). The latter required the allocation of a certain number of acres to each person and, during its forty-seven years in force, reduced tribal lands by nearly ninety-one million acres. In public debate, opponents of termination argued that the United States had a special obligation to American Indians because they had been
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conquered and deprived of their customary way of life. All people in the United States, opponents said, have the right to be different and to live in the groupings they prefer. Any changes in federal supervision of American Indians should be implemented slowly and with the involvement of the affected tribes; rather than dissolving tribal communities, federal policy should continue meeting tribes’ special needs until those needs no longer exist. Opponents also pointed to American Indian culture, tribal lands, and tribal government—their form of community—as their source of strength. Advocates of termination asserted that all U.S. citizens should be similar, and there should be no communities with special legal rights. Dissolving separate American Indian communities would expedite the integration of these people into the mainstream. American Indians, according to Senator Arthur V. Wakens, would be freed from wardship or federal restrictions and would become self-reliant, with no diminution of their tribal culture. Wakens saw termination as liberation of American Indians and compared it to the Emancipation Proclamation. Non-natives objected to the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, the prior federal policy, and were swayed toward termination by several arguments: American Indian communal property ownership and their form of government resembled communism; the IRA’s promotion of American Indian traditions amounted to condoning heathenism; developers wanted tribal lands made available; and Congress perceived that the resignation of Indian Commissioner John Collier (the IRA’s chief advocate) and severe BIA budget cuts had diminished its effectiveness, necessitating a stepped-up program of assimilation. Zimmerman’s Formula. After Collier’s resignation, Senator William Langer asked Acting Commissioner William Zimmerman for a formula for evaluating tribal readiness for termination. On February 8, 1947, Zimmerman presented, in a congressional hearing, three categories of tribes—those who could be terminated immediately, those who could function with little federal supervision within ten years, and those who needed more than ten years to prepare. He discussed the four criteria used in his lists and presented three specimen termination bills. This testimony was embraced by termination supporters and, Zimmerman believed, frequently misquoted. In 1950, Dillon Myer, a staunch advocate of immediate termination, became Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Although he claimed to be streamlining the BIA, it seemed to some that he was moving to dissolve both the bureau and all IRA programs. Myer was asked to write a legislative pro-
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posal for expeditious termination of federal supervision of American Indians. The result was House Concurrent Resolution 108 (August 1, 1953), which passed with little debate. The resolution directed Congress to make American Indians subject to the same laws, privileges, and responsibilities as other citizens; to end their wardship status; and to free specific tribes from federal control as soon as possible. Once the named tribes were terminated, the BIA offices serving them would be abolished. PL 83-280 (August 15, 1953) also advanced termination. It transferred to the states, without tribal consent, jurisdiction over civil and criminal offenses on reservations in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin. It provided that, by legislative action, any other state could assume similar jurisdiction. Termination Bills of 1954. A rush of termination bills was introduced in 1954. As problems with the termination process became known and the membership of congressional committees changed (after 1956), legislation slowed. These acts caused several changes: Tribal lands were either appraised or put under a corporation’s management; the federal government no longer protected the land for the tribe; state legislative and judicial authority replaced tribal government; tribe members no longer received a state tax exemption; and tribes lost the benefits of special federal health, education, and other social programs. Fifteen termination acts were passed between 1954 and 1962, affecting 110 tribes or bands in eight states: the Menominee, Klamath, Western Oregon (sixty-one tribes and bands), Alabama-Coushatta, Mixed-Blood Ute, Southern Paiute, Lower Lake Rancheria, Wyandotte, Peoria, Ottawa, Coyote Valley Ranch, California Rancheria (37 rancherias), Catawba, and Ponca. Termination of the Menominee of Wisconsin received the most attention. The tribe was specifically targeted in House Concurrent Resolution 108, and their termination act was passed on June 17, 1954. They appeared to be the healthiest tribe economically, as a result of their lumbering and forestry operations, but were not as ready for termination as they seemed. In 1951, the Menominee won a fifteen-year legal battle against the federal government, awarding them $8.5 million in damages for mismanagement of their tribal forest. They could not obtain the award, however, until Congress passed an act appropriating it. The tribe asked that part of the money be released—amounting to fifteen hundred dollars per capita. Senator Wakens’s Subcommittee on Indian Affairs told the tribe that if they could manage fifteen hundred dollars per person, they were ready for freedom from federal wardship. Termination, he suggested, was inevitable, and the tribe would not receive the money unless they moved to accept a termina-
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tion amendment to the per-capita payment bill. The election was not a true tribal referendum, as only 174 members voted; many of these later said that they had not understood what they were voting for. Final termination of the Menominee did not go into effect until 1961. The tribe had to decide how to set up municipalities, establish a tax system, provide law and order, and sell their tribal assets. There were complications concerning the payment of estimated taxes on Menominee forests. Federal officials saw the tribe’s reluctance as procrastination. State agencies could provide only limited assistance, because the tribe was still under federal control. As a result of these experiences and others, both American Indians and non-Indians became critical of termination. BIA expenditures spiraled in the late 1950’s. Many terminated tribe members felt uncomfortable living in the mainstream and often were not accepted socially by non-Indians. Relocated Indians often suffered poverty in the cities and often became dependent on social programs. Some terminated tribes later applied for federal recognition. During its short span (the last act was passed in 1962), termination affected 13,263 of a total population of 400,000, or 3 percent of the federally recognized American Indians. The acts withdrew 1,365,801 acres of trust land, or 3 percent of the approximately 43,000,000 acres held in 1953. The end of federal endorsement of the termination policy was seen in 1969, when President Richard Nixon, in a message to Congress, called for promotion of self-determination and the strengthening of American Indian autonomy without threatening community. See also: Allotment system; Bureau of Indian Affairs; General Allotment Act; Indian Reorganization Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002. Glenn Ellen Starr Sources for Further Study Fixico, Donald L. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 19451960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. Detailed discussion, from World War II through 1981. Discusses the Menominee and Klamath, as well as smaller tribes. Useful analysis of Dillon Myer and PL 83-280. La Farge, Oliver. “Termination of Federal Supervision: Disintegration and the American Indians.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 311 (May, 1957): 41-46. Summarizes arguments against termination, except when tribes request it and members are ready to handle their own affairs. Philp, Kenneth R. Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to SelfDetermination, 1933-1953. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. A
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history of termination policy, with useful emphasis on the ambivalent attitudes of Native Americans themselves towards U.S. policy. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indian. Vol. 2. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Portions of chapters 40 and 41 provide a succinct, balanced account of the aims of termination; its articulation in Congress, the popular press, and American Indian publications; congressional and federal actions to bring it about; and its impact. Stefon, Frederick J. “The Irony of Termination: 1943-1958.” The Indian Historian 11, no. 3 (Summer, 1978): 3-14. A thorough chronological review that begins with 1887 and ends in 1968. Copiously documented, with many quotations from congressional documents and policymakers. Walch, Michael C. “Terminating the Indian Termination Policy.” Stanford Law Review 35, no. 6 (July, 1983): 1181-1215. Well-documented survey of the rise of termination, its effects, and the impact of the fact that Congress did not repeal the termination acts.
Thames, Battle of the Date: October 5, 1813 Locale: Ontario, Canada Tribes involved: Shawnee, Sac, Fox, Ottawa, Ojibwa, Wyandot, Potawatomi, Winnebago, Lenni Lenape, Kickapoo Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: U.S. victory in the Northwestern theater of the War of 1812 also sees the death of Tecumseh and the decline of his multitribal alliance. The Battle of the Thames was an important United States victory in the Northwestern theater during the War of 1812 with Great Britain. The battle took place on the northern bank of the Thames River near Moraviantown in Upper Canada (southern Ontario Province). In the Battle of Put-In Bay (September 10, 1813), U.S. naval forces won control of Lake Erie. This prevented reinforcement and resupply of the British army at the lake’s western end, in the vicinity of Detroit and Fort Malden. When a superior U.S. force under William Henry Harrison crossed the lake on September 27, the British commander in Upper Canada, Major General Henry Procter, began withdrawing toward the east along the
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The Shawnee chief Tecumseh, leader of a confederation of Indian tribes and supporter of the British during the Battle of the Thames, lost his life to the Americans in that confrontation. With his death came the decline of the multitribal allliance that Tecumseh had fashioned and brilliantly led, dissolution of native support for the British, and victory for the colonists in the Northwestern theater of the War of 1812. (Library of Congress)
Thames River. Procter’s native allies, who made up the bulk of his forces, angrily protested the abandonment of their homelands in Michigan. The Shawnee chief Tecumseh, leader of an alliance of warriors from many tribes, was reassured by Procter that a stand soon would be made against Harrison’s advancing army. Procter’s retreat up the Thames was mismanaged and slow, and most of his spare ammunition and other supplies were lost. Harrison’s faster-moving army overtook the British on October 5, forcing Procter to turn and fight before he had reached a defensive position being prepared at Moraviantown. Tecumseh’s Alliance. The British force included five hundred warriors of Tecumseh’s alliance. Besides Tecumseh’s fellow Shawnees (then dwelling principally in Indiana), there were warriors from the Sac, Fox, Ottawa, Ojibwa, Wyandot, Potawatomi, Winnebago, Lenni Lenape, and Kickapoo nations, all from the Northwest Territory, and a small band of Creeks from the South. Their women and children accompanied the still-loyal warriors.
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Approximately a thousand of Tecumseh’s followers, angered by Procter’s retreat from Michigan, had abandoned the British. Proctor’s forces totaled more than a thousand, including 450 regulars of the Forty-first Regiment of Foot and a scattering of Canadian militia. The U.S. army under Harrison numbered about three thousand troops. One hundred twenty of these were infantrymen from the regular army; the rest, Kentucky mounted militia volunteers. A thousand-soldier mounted militia regiment commanded by Colonel Richard Mentor Johnson played a decisive part in the battle. There were also 260 American Indians in Harrison’s force, including about 40 Shawnees. Proctor’s British and American Indian force, outnumbered three-to-one by the U.S. troops, took a position across a road that ran along the north bank of the Thames River. With the river protecting his left flank and a wooded swamp his right, Procter placed his British regulars in two parallel lines a hundred yards apart. On his left, commanding the road, Procter positioned his one cannon, a six-pounder. Tecumseh’s warriors were placed in the swamp on the British right flank. The swamp slanted away at an angle that would enable the natives to fire into the left flank of U.S. troops advancing toward the British infantrymen. Because Procter expected Harrison to send his mounted units, as usual, against the Native Americans, he dispersed the two lines of British soldiers thinly, sheltering behind scattered trees in open order, several feet apart. Only when infantry were positioned almost shoulder-to-shoulder, however, could they effectively repel a cavalry charge. When Harrison noticed this inviting disposition, he sent Colonel Johnson’s mounted regiment to attack the British infantry, while his other forces, dismounted as infantry, marched against the natives on the American left. The small force of regular U.S. infantry was assigned to rush the single British cannon. Colonel Johnson’s well-drilled mounted regiment, organized in columns, galloped through the two lines of thinly spread British infantry to their rear. The militiamen then dismounted and began to fire. The British, demoralized and hungry after not having eaten in more than fifty hours, surrendered. Each line of British soldiers seems to have fired a single volley and panicked. The crew of Procter’s one cannon fled without even firing it. This part of the battle lasted less than five minutes. The infantry units on the U.S. troops’ left were having much less success against Tecumseh’s warriors in the swamp. The poorly disciplined militia infantry, now on foot, were initially repulsed and driven back by the natives. The collapse of the main British position enabled Johnson to swing part of his regiment leftward to attack the Indians’ flank. At this point, where his warriors joined the right of the British soldiers, Tecumseh and
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the Shawnees had taken their position. Led by Johnson and a small, select group that called itself the Forlorn Hope, Johnson’s regiment dismounted and pushed into the woods. Heavy firing erupted, and most of the twenty men in the Forlorn Hope were killed or wounded. Colonel Johnson was hit by five bullets, his horse by seven. Early in this intense action, Tecumseh fell, killed by a shot near his heart. With the death of their leader, the warriors in this part of the swamp (the natives’ left) began to fall back. Demoralization spread, and this, coupled with the continuing advance of the U.S. forces, brought an end to the fighting. Although Procter, the British commander, had fled after a brief effort to rally his troops, Tecumseh had stood his ground and died fighting, as he had sworn to do. The native warriors had fought on for more than thirty minutes after the British regulars had given up, but now they slipped away through the woods to find their families. The victory of Harrison’s army was complete. Aftermath. Because of mismanagement of the retreat and his poor handling of the battle, Major General Procter was court-martialed and publicly reprimanded. Harrison became a national hero, as did Colonel Johnson, widely credited with having shot Tecumseh. Of the British troops 12 were killed, 22 wounded, and 601 captured. Harrison reported a count of thirtythree warriors’ bodies on the field. Contradictory records suggest that on the U.S. side, as many as twenty-five were killed or mortally injured, and thirty to fifty wounded. The Battle of the Thames enabled the United States to regain control of territory in the Detroit area that had been lost in earlier defeats, ended any British threat at the western end of Lake Erie, and greatly reduced the danger of tribal raids in the Northwest. An important result of the battle was the decline of the multitribal alliance that Tecumseh had fashioned and brilliantly led. Natives continued to take the field in support of British operations, but now this support was sporadic and ineffective. Tecumseh’s strategy of protecting tribal lands through military cooperation with Great Britain had failed. On the northern shore of Lake Erie, the Canadian right flank, a stalemate developed. Harrison’s army disintegrated as the enlistment of his militiamen expired, and they returned to Kentucky. The weakened U.S. troops were unable to advance eastward toward Burlington and York, or to threaten British-held Michilimackinac to the north. However, U.S. naval control of Lake Erie prevented fresh initiatives in the area by the British. See also: Creek War; Fort Wayne Treaty; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Little Turtle’s War; Pontiac’s Resistance; Prophetstown; Tecumseh’s Rebellion; Tippecanoe, Battle of. Bert M. Mutersbaugh
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Sources for Further Study Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Explains the Shawnee leaders’ struggles as part of a larger pattern of cultural revitalization and military resistance. Maps, illustrations, and index. Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. An insightful study of the Shawnee society that produced Tecumseh and his alliance. Argues that Tecumseh’s brother, Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, originated the alliance, which Tecumseh took over as Tenskwatawa’s influence faded. Maps, illustrations, and index. ____________. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. A brief treatment that concentrates on the warrior brother. Map, illustrations, and index. Gilpin, Alec R. The War of 1812 in the Old Northwest. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1958. A scholarly, well-written study that puts Harrison’s 1813 campaign and the Battle of the Thames into context of the entire war in the Northwestern theater. Maps, illustrations, and index. Sugden, John. Tecumseh’s Last Stand. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Detailed analysis of the battle and the campaign that preceded it. Examines the question of who killed Tecumseh. Maps, illustrations, and index.
Tippecanoe, Battle of Date: November 7, 1811 Locale: Indiana Tribes involved: Kickapoo, Lenni Lenape, Miami, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Winnebago, Wyandot (Huron) Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The destruction of Prophetstown by an American army broke the religious power of Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee Prophet) but failed to demoralize the Indian movement led by his brother Tecumseh. During the early nineteenth century Tenskwatawa began to preach a new religious message among the tribes of the Old Northwest. At the heart of his message was a rejection of European American influence. Aided by his
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brother Tecumseh, an intertribal Indian movement took hold which threatened the ability of U.S. Indian agents to force land cessions on the tribes of the Old Northwest. In the spring of 1808, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh led their followers to the banks of the Wabash River and began to construct a capital for their movement which came to be known as Prophetstown. Working from this base of operations, the two brothers proselytized among the Indian villages of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. Thousands of warriors from numerous tribes flocked to Prophetstown, causing alarm among American settlers in the region. Tensions increased after Indiana Governor William Henry Harrison concluded the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), which provided for a land cession of three million acres of Indian land. Convinced that Tecumseh was plotting to kill him, Harrison raised an army of a thousand men and prepared a campaign to destroy Prophetstown. When Tecumseh journeyed to the south to bring his message to the Choctaw and the Creek, Harrison saw his opportunity. On November 6, 1811, the American army was on the west bank of the Wabash, within a mile of Prophetstown.
The Battle of Tippecanoe ended Tenskwatawa’s spiritual influence but not his brother Tecumseh’s resistance efforts. (Library of Congress)
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In the absence of his brother, Tenskwatawa had little control over the warriors in his village. The Shawnee Prophet sent a delegation to meet with Harrison on the afternoon of November 6, seeking to assure the governor that they did not have hostile intentions toward Americans. Unimpressed by these words, Harrison planned to attack the Indian village the following day. During the night, Tenskwatawa exhorted his Indian warriors to attack the enemy before dawn. He assured them that his magic would confuse the American soldiers. He also instructed them to kill Harrison. The Indians struck Harrison’s camp two hours before sunrise. Alert sentries fired warning shots in time to wake the Americans. A few warriors managed to penetrate the interior of the American camp, but Harrison managed to escape and rally his troops. Fierce fighting bent the American line on several occasions, but Harrison was able to shift troops skillfully in time. At dawn, the Indian warriors began to retreat, and Harrison ordered his troops to charge. The American advance forced Tenskwatawa to abandon Prophetstown. During the fighting, Tenskwatawa prayed to the Master of Life for victory. Unfortunately, his spiritual powers failed. Tenskwatawa was discredited by the Battle of Tippecanoe. Many angry warriors confronted the Prophet after the defeat. He blamed the failure of his magic on his wife’s unclean state. Harrison’s victory was far from overwhelming. Of the estimated seven hundred warriors who attacked his camp, about fifty were killed and eighty were wounded. The larger American force sustained 188 casualties. Harrison burned Prophetstown, but he failed to end hostilities. The defeated warriors returned to their villages and led further attacks against frontier settlements throughout the Old Northwest. See also: Creek War; Fort Wayne Treaty; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Little Turtle’s War; Pontiac’s Resistance; Prophetstown; Tecumseh’s Rebellion; Thames, Battle of the. Thomas D. Matijasic
Trade and Intercourse Acts Date: 1790-1834 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Eighteenth century history, National government and legislation, Nineteenth century history
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Significance: These acts were efforts by the U.S. government to restrain private settlement and enterprise by European Americans in Indian territory; the restrictions eroded as a part of the market revolution of the nineteenth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the United States government feared that rapacious private traders and land-grabbing settlers were creating resentment among Indians that could lead to war on the frontier of white settlement. Therefore, the government sought to prevent the wholesale migration of white settlers westward to lands controlled by Indians, regulate the trade in furs between Indians and European Americans, and acculturate Indians to Euro-American norms. The government hoped that these efforts would preserve peace between Indians and European Americans. The vehicles for these goals were the successive Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts. The first Trade and Intercourse Act was passed in 1790 and was scheduled to expire at the end of the congressional session of 1793. Before expiration, a new Trade and Intercourse Act was passed in 1793. Further laws were enacted in 1796, 1799, and 1802. The 1802 act was made permanent; it stood until 1834. The Trade and Intercourse Acts built upon precedents established by the Continental Congress in an ordinance of August 7, 1786. The Ordinance of 1786 empowered the federal government to issue licenses to United States citizens allowing them to reside among or trade with Indians. Like the later Trade and Intercourse Acts, the ordinance was an assertion of federal over state power in the regulation of Indian affairs. The Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790 provided for the licensing of private traders and outlined the penalties for trading without a license. The act of 1790 also detailed the punishments for crimes committed by whites against Indians. The act of 1793 reiterated the provisions of the 1790 act in stronger terms and further authorized the distribution of goods to Indians to promote acculturation to Euro-American mores. In response to the continuing influx of white settlers, the act of 1796 delineated the boundaries of territories belonging to Indians, the first such delineation by the federal government. The acts of 1799 and 1802 were substantially similar to the act of 1796. In 1834, the federal government for the last time passed an Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. The 1834 act defined Indian territory as all lands west of the Mississippi River excluding the states of Missouri and Louisiana and the territory of Arkansas. The 1834 act banned liquor from the trade and outlawed white fur trappers from operating in Indian territory. Unlike any of the previous acts, however, the 1834 law empowered the federal govern-
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ment to use force to stop intertribal wars in order to protect the interests of fur trade companies. Ironically, a series of acts that began in 1790 by reining in white traders in order to preserve peace ended in 1834 by policing Indians in order to protect traders. See also: Albany Congress; Fur trade; Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830. Andrew C. Isenberg
Trail of Broken Treaties Date: October 6-November 8, 1972 Locale: From Seattle to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Oklahoma City to Washington, D.C. Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Protest movements, Twentieth century history Significance: Militant American Indians take over the Bureau of Indian Affairs to protest U.S. government treaty policies. Against the backdrop of political activism in 1969, the rise of Red Power began with the occupation of Alcatraz Island, which became a symbol of American Indian unity. New tribal alliances were formed around a common purpose: to bring attention to continuing failures in the bureaucratic administration of American Indian affairs. During the summer gathering at Rosebud Sioux Reservation, residents and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) began plans for a caravan to Washington, D.C., just prior to election day. Eight American Indian organizations planned the event, and four national groups endorsed its concept. The new alliance, including tribes from Canada and Latin America, was known as the Trail of Broken Treaties and Pan American Native Quest for Justice. Planning for the possibility of 150,000 participants, cochairs Reuben Snake, a Winnebago, and Robert Burnette, a Lakota, organized eleven committees, including media, medical, congressional contact, emergency legal needs, and participant accreditation. The spiritual foundation of the caravan was declared in a public statement inviting “all Indians, spiritual leaders of the Western Hemisphere, and Indian interest groups to participate,” but excluding all persons who would
Trail of Broken Treaties / 541 cause civil disorder, block traffic, burn flags, destroy property, or shout obscenities in the street. . . . Each trail would be led by spiritual leaders who carried the Sacred Peace Pipe and Drum . . . and every pipe smoked was to remind America of the manner in which the treaties were signed.
Burnette emphasized the serious purpose of the caravan: We should be on our finest behavior . . . ban all alcohol and drugs, with expulsions guaranteed to violators. The Caravan must be our finest hour.
The Trail to Washington. Departing for Washington, D.C., on October 6, caravans passed through historic sites, stopping to offer prayer. Requests had been made for a police escort into Washington, adequate housing, permission to conduct honoring ceremonies at Arlington, and presentation of the Twenty Points. The Twenty Points to be presented formally to the administration covered treaty reform, reform of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), new land policies, improved cultural and economic conditions, and criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians on reservations. Even as the caravan traveled, obstructions were being planned in Washington, D.C. In a memorandum to BIA commissioner Louis Bruce, dated October 11, Harrison Loesch of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) stated, “This is to give you very specific instructions that the Bureau is not to provide any assistance or funding, either directly or indirectly” to the AIM demonstration in early November. The caravan of the first five hundred participants arrived in Washington, D.C., at 4:00 a.m. on November 2. Denied the official recognition of a police escort, they proceeded through downtown blowing horns and stopping traffic. At 6:00 a.m., they paused in front of the White House to drum and sing a victory song, after which their police escort arrived. The early caravanners faced more barriers when the Army denied permission for Arlington ceremonies, and housing arrangements revealed a building full of rats. They headed for their only home, the BIA, where they were permitted to await accommodations. Hostilities Escalate. With no solution by afternoon, confusion and hostility escalated. When the shifts changed at 4:00 p.m., the new guards were unaware of the agreement, and in trying to clear the area, began to remove the American Indians forcibly, attacking several with clubs. The misunderstanding escalated into panic as the injured Indians alerted others of impending attacks. Riot police surrounded the building, while Indians inside barricaded doorways with desks and chairs. They broke off table legs for
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At the end of the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan, protestors occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building for six days after security guards tried to remove them. (Library of Congress)
clubs and stacked typewriters upstairs to drop out the windows on intruders. The Twenty Points and the significant spiritual purpose of the caravans were disregarded in the conflict over housing and food. The likelihood of gaining public support for their cause was hindered by media attention to the unplanned takeover. Still, the presentation of the Twenty Points was attempted. Appeals for help were telegraphed to the United Nations and the Vatican, as negotiations with government officials were delayed or postponed daily. During the six-day occupation, BIA offices were ransacked, American Indian artifacts taken, files seized, and much damage done to the building. AIM leaders claimed that federal agents had infiltrated the occupation and had done much of the damage. Some American Indians who had occupied the building and went on official tours of the site weeks later asserted that there was extensive damage in rooms where they were certain there had been no damage before. Slogans, names, and addresses covered walls where there had been no marks at the time of their departure. American Indians received unexpected support from several people.
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Presidential candidate Dr. Benjamin Spock and African American activist Stokely Carmichael appeared at the scene. Representative Shirley Chisholm telegraphed support, and Judge John Pratt delayed holding a showcause hearing demanded by the federal government to determine if American Indians were in contempt of his order to leave the building. LaDonna Harris, a Comanche and wife of Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, and Louis Bruce stayed the first night in the BIA; as a result of his support for the cause, Bruce was suspended from his post as BIA commissioner. End of the Protest. The protest ended on November 8. After several attempts at getting a response from White House officials and a series of court actions, demonstrators agreed to leave the BIA building. On behalf of the White House, Leonard Garment, White House minority affairs adviser, Frank Carlucci, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Bradley Patterson, Garment’s assistant, signed documents granting immunity for protesters, funding their transportation home, and committing to respond to the Twenty Points within sixty days. The number of participants was estimated to have been five thousand. Although Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton asserted that they were mostly urban activists, more than 80 percent of those who had made the journey were traditional reservation Indians. Among the elders were Frank Fools Crow and Charlie Red Cloud, both chiefs at Pine Ridge, and Tuscarora medicine man Mad Bear Anderson, also a leader at the Alcatraz occupation. Early estimates of damage ranged from half a million dollars to more than two million dollars; however, the final estimate was set at a quarter million dollars, because most artifacts and documents were returned. The crisis had ended, but nothing had been resolved. Public reaction showed that much of the previous support for the American Indians’ cause had been lost. Before winter had passed, echoes of the same demands were heard amid the gunfire during the occupation of Wounded Knee. Six years later, in July, 1978, several hundred American Indians marched again into Washington, D.C., at the end of the Longest Walk from San Francisco. The event was intended to reveal continuing problems faced by American Indians and expose the backlash movement against treaty rights. Unlike earlier conflicts, it was a peaceful event. Red Power had come full circle— from lively Alcatraz days, through times of violent confrontation, to the spiritual unity celebrated at the end of the Longest Walk. See also: Alcatraz Island occupation; American Indian Movement; Indianwhite relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Longest Walk; Wounded Knee occupation. Gale M. Thompson
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Sources for Further Study DeLoria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1987. Lawyertheologian DeLoria discusses the doctrine of discovery, treaty-making, civil rights, American Indian activism, sovereignty, and the Trail and Wounded Knee occupations. Harvey, Karen D., and Lisa D. Harjo. Indian Country: A History of Native People in America. Discusses ten culture areas, historical perspectives, contemporary issues, and ceremonies. Presents timelines (50,000 b.c.e. to twentieth century), summaries, lesson plans, and resources. Appendices and index. Trail of Broken Treaties: BIA, I’m Not Your Indian Anymore. Rooseveltown, N.Y.: Akwesasne Notes, 1973. Contains articles published during and after the Trail events; text of the Twenty Points; the White House response; replies suggested by Trail leadership; and an update on the BIA one year later. Waldman, Carl. Atlas of the North American Indian. New York: Facts on File, 1985. Comprehensive coverage of history and culture, land cessions, wars, and contemporary issues. Maps, illustrations, and appendices.
Trail of Tears Date: May 28, 1830-1842 Locale: Southeastern United States Tribes involved: Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole Categories: Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation Significance: The removal to the western Indian Territory of the Five Civilized Tribes is one of the most tragic events of U.S. history. Soon after 1783, when the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution, demands began for the removal of all Native Americans from the southeastern part of the new United States. After a brief renewal of violent resistance, led by warriors like Dragging Canoe of the Cherokees and Alexander McGillivray of the Creeks, most tribes were peaceful but firm in their efforts to remain in their ancestral lands. The exception was the Seminoles in Florida. Many early treaties were negotiated to persuade these tribes to move west voluntarily. When the desired result was not achieved, Congress
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Trails of Tears: Routes of Indian Removal to the West After 1830
INDIAN TERRITORY
Cherokees
Mississippi R.
Chickasaws
Chocktaws
Creeks
Seminoles Routes of removal to Indian Territory Indian lands ceded
G U L F
O F
M E X I C O
passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, paving the way for forced removal. President Andrew Jackson, an old foe of the southeastern tribes, signed the bill; it became law on May 28, 1830. Choctaw Relocation. The first of these tribes to experience forced removal was the Choctaw of southeastern Mississippi. Preliminary treaties with the Choctaws, whose population was about twenty-three thousand, began with the Treaty of Mount Dexter in 1805. Individual Choctaws had been encouraged to incur debts at government trading posts that were beyond their ability to pay. At Mount Dexter, Choctaw leaders were forced to cede four million acres of their land in return for the cancellation of those debts. The first exchange of Choctaw land for land in the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River was approved by the Treaty of Doak’s Stand in 1820. Pushmataha, the principal chief and able diplomat of the Choctaws, negotiated this treaty with General Andrew Jackson. However, since white settlers already occupied much of the new Choctaw land, the treaty had little effect.
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The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, signed on September 27, 1830, was the first negotiated under the Indian Removal Act. It provided for the exchange of all Choctaw land for land in the Indian Territory. Choctaw acceptance of this treaty was facilitated by intratribal conflicts and by the duplicity of their self-proclaimed spokesperson, Greenwood LeFlore. By the end of 1832, about two-thirds of the Choctaws had emigrated to their new homes. Most others migrated over the next twenty years. A few, including Greenwood LeFlore, remained in Mississippi. The Choctaw removal became a pattern for the removal of the remaining tribes in the Southeast. The next to experience the process were the twenty-three thousand Creeks of eastern Alabama. Led by such chiefs as Menewa, the Creeks bitterly resisted removal. In 1825, Menewa carried out the execution for treason of William McIntosh, a half-breed chief who favored removal. Creek Resistance. By 1831, chiefs such as Eneah Micco, although vigorously protesting the invasion of their land by white squatters, realized that only removal could save the Creeks from total destruction. The Treaty of Washington, signed on March 24, 1832, provided for complete removal to the Indian Territory. Although the generous provisions of this treaty soon were ignored, conditions in the Creek Nation became intolerable and they began their sad trek to the west. Creek migration was interrupted in May, 1836, by reprisal raids against white settlements. This action brought in the U.S. Army, with orders to forcibly remove all Creeks from Alabama. By 1838, the removal was complete. An ironic footnote is that during the course of their removal, several hundred Creek men were impressed into the army for service against their Seminole cousins in Florida. Chickasaw Removal. The least controversial of the Trail of Tears removal was that of the five thousand Chickasaws from the northern parts of Mississippi and Alabama. For thirty years, the government worked to transform the Chickasaws from a hunting society into an agricultural society that would require less land. By 1830, the process seemed complete, but the result had been widespread poverty. It also produced friction between the full-bloods who resisted the process and the part-bloods who favored it. The Chickasaw removal process was initiated by the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek in 1832. It was agreed that the Chickasaws would move west when suitable land could be obtained. Finding such land was difficult, with the best possibility being part of the Choctaw domain already established. Levi Colbert, the most prominent of several Chickasaw chiefs, was ill and
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not present when the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek was signed. He protested the use of coercion by General John Coffee, the leading government negotiator, to get the other chiefs to sign. However, he cooperated with the removal process in order to secure the best possible land and to ease the burden on his people. Chickasaw removal followed the signing of the Treaty of Doaksville in January, 1837. Land was secured and most of the tribe moved that year. Unlike other tribes, they were able to take most of their possessions with them, and very few died along the way. However, after arrival in the Indian Territory, they faced the typical problems of intertribal conflicts, substandard food, and a smallpox epidemic. Cherokee Trail of Tears. By 1830, about sixteen thousand Cherokees remained on their ancestral lands, by then mostly in northern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee. Their removal, first called the “trail where they cried,” is the source of the name Trail of Tears. The movement to remove the Cherokees began with the signing of the Georgia Compact in 1802, when President Thomas Jefferson agreed to seek reasonable terms for that removal in a peaceful manner. In 1828, when gold was discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia, the process was facilitated, but not on the reasonable terms stipulated by Jefferson. The state of Georgia nullified Cherokee laws and incorporated a large portion of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee defense was led by their democratically elected principal chief, John Ross, who took their case to federal court. Although a decision by Chief Justice John Marshall favored the Cherokees, President Jackson refused to enforce it. A small group of proremoval Cherokees, led by Major Ridge, signed the New Echota Treaty in December, 1835. Following ratification by the U.S. Senate in May, 1836, the entire tribe had two years to move to the Indian Territory. John Ross and the majority protested the treaty and refused to move. Forced removal began in June, 1838. When the journey ended in March, 1839, there were four thousand unmarked graves along the way. About one thousand Cherokees escaped removal by fleeing into the southern Appalachian Mountains. The final tragedy of Cherokee removal was the murder in the Indian Territory of the proremoval leaders who had signed the treaty. Seminole Removal. The Seminoles of central Florida, descendants of Creeks who had moved there to escape harassment in the eighteenth century, provide the last chapter in the Trail of Tears. Their population of about six thousand included many African Americans, both freemen and run-
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away slaves from the Southern states. The desire to cut off that escape route for slaves was part of the incentive for Jackson’s invasion and the resulting acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1819 under the Adams-Onís Treaty. The demand to move the Seminoles to the Indian Territory soon followed. In 1832, an unauthorized group of Seminoles signed the Treaty of Payne’s Landing, declaring that all would give up their land and move west. Opposition to the treaty was led by Osceola and Coacoochee (Wildcat). The result was the Second Seminole War, in 1835. Seminoles captured during that war were immediately deported to the Indian Territory. By 1842, the war was over and the remaining Seminoles slowly migrated west. By 1856, the only Seminoles left in Florida were those in the inaccessible swamps of the Everglades. The Trail of Tears removals rank among the most tragic episodes in United States history. The policies of three American leaders reveal the changing attitudes on how to best accomplish the removals. After Thomas Jefferson’s peaceful persuasion and reasonable terms failed, John C. Calhoun, as secretary of war under President James Monroe, favored educating Native Americans to accept the need for removal. In the end, it was Andrew Jackson’s policy of forced removal that completed the distasteful task. See also: Cherokee legal cases; Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of; Indian Removal Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Seminole Wars; Treaties and agreements in the United States. Glenn L. Swygart Sources for Further Study DeRosier, Arthur. The Removal of the Choctaw Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970. Discusses removal circumstances. Includes maps and portraits. Ehle, John. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Covers Cherokee history from 1770 to 1840. Details the intratribal conflicts relating to removal policy. Foreman, Grant. Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932. Surveys the treaties and leaders of removal. Maps and illustrations. Gibson, Arrell. The Chickasaws. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Puts removal in context with Chickasaw history from the eighteenth century to 1907. Hoig, Stanley. Night of the Cruel Moon: Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears. New York: Facts on File, 1996. An account of Cherokee removal relying on first-person accounts.
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Williams, Jeanne. “The Cherokees.” In Trails of Tears: American Indians Driven from Their Lands. Dallas: Hendrick-Long, 1992. Puts Cherokee removal in the context of the similar experiences of the Comanche, Cheyenne, Apache, and Navajo. Wright, J. Leitch. Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Discusses removal and resettlement in the West. Extensive bibliography.
Treaties and agreements in Canada Date: 1760-2001 Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada Categories: Colonial history, National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Treaties, Twentieth century history Significance: The character of treaties between the Canadian government and Canada’s Indian peoples has varied as Indians have lost and partially regained power. The capture of Quebec from the French in the Seven Years’ War in 1760 allowed Britain to consolidate its holdings in North America. In order to establish colonial governments in the newly obtained Quebec and Florida, King George III issued what has become known as the Royal Proclamation of 1763. A provision of the proclamation reserved for the Indians all lands to the west of Upper Canada and provided a mechanism for the Crown to purchase these and other lands from the Indians. Since the French had never recognized aboriginal title in their colonies, however, Quebec and those portions of the Maritimes captured from the French were exempted from this provision of the proclamation. The early Indian treaties reflected the strong military position of the Indians, and the stated purpose of most treaties was simply peace and friendship. The Indians were important in military rivalries, first between the French and the British and later between the British and the Americans. There were relatively few Europeans compared with Indians, so land cessions were relatively small and were accomplished with onetime payments (usually in the form of trade goods).
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After 1812, the Indians were no longer militarily significant, and the character of treaties changed. In recognition of their weaker position, Indians began to make greater demands for relinquishing their lands. European needs for agricultural lands increased at the same time as a result of increased emigration from Europe. In an effort to save money, the Europeans began the practice of issuing annuities rather than onetime payments. In 1817, a land cession treaty was signed with the Saulteaux and Cree to permit the establishment of the Red River Colony of Thomas Douglas, earl of Selkirk. This was the first treaty that entirely ceded native title to lands west of Upper Canada. In 1850, Special Commissioner W. B. Robinson concluded two treaties with the Ojibwa living along the northern shores of Lakes Huron and Superior. Known as the Robinson-Huron and Robinson-Superior treaties, they were signed after the Ojibwa requested that the Europeans purchase the land before mining it. These two treaties set the precedent of permitting Indians to continue hunting and fishing on their ceded territory. The Situation at Confederation. Canada was created as a nation in 1867 with the confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ottawa into the Dominion of Canada. The British North America Act, which created Canada, charged the Dominion with discharging the Crown’s duties toward the Indians. In 1870, much of the remainder of present-day Canada was transferred from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the new nation. This transfer illustrates a paradox in the history of relations between natives and whites in Canada. While the Royal Proclamation of 1763 preserved native title to this transferred territory and established the Crown as the only legitimate purchaser of Indian lands, the sale of Rupert’s Land by the Hudson’s Bay Company indicated disregard of aboriginal title. Furthermore, in order to facilitate white settlement in the new territory and to connect, via railroad, the settlements in eastern Canada with the colony of British Columbia, the Crown moved to extinguish any remaining native title to that region. Seven treaties, covering much of present-day Canada, were concluded between 1871 and 1877. The provisions of the treaties varied only slightly and were similar to the two Robinson treaties. The Numbered Treaties. Treaties 1 and 2, negotiated in 1871, were virtually identical and covered lands held by the Swampy Cree and Chippewa (Ojibwa) in southern Manitoba and southeastern Saskatchewan. In exchange for relinquishing title to 52,400 square miles, the Cree and Chippewa were promised 160 acres of reserved land for each family of five, a school, farm implements, a gift of three dollars for each person, and an an-
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nuity of three dollars per person. Chiefs and headmen were awarded additional payments. The area covered by Treaty 1 included the Red River farmsteads of the Metis. With the signing of Treaty 3, known also as the North-West Angle Treaty, in 1873 by the Saulteaux, the initial payment was raised to twelve dollars and the annuity was increased to five dollars per person. Larger reserves (one square mile per family) were also granted, as well as the continued rights to hunt and fish on unoccupied lands. This provision to allow traditional subsistence activities on the ceded territories appears in the remainder of the numbered treaties. As the prairie provinces were established, however, most of the Crown’s lands were transferred to the provinces. Increasingly, the courts have ruled that native Canadians are subject to provincial game laws. Treaty 4, signed in 1874 by the Saulteaux and Cree, encompassed southern Saskatchewan and small portions of Alberta and Manitoba. Treaty 5 was made in 1875 with the Saulteaux and Cree of central Manitoba and extended to northern Manitoba in 1908. The Blackfeet, Blood, Piegan, Sarcee (Sarsi), and Assiniboine tribes of southern Alberta agreed to Treaty 7 in 1877. Treaty 6 was made in 1876 with Poundmaker’s and Crowfoot’s Plains and Wood Cree bands in central Alberta and Saskatchewan; however, the bands led by Big Bear refused to sign until 1884 and succeeded in obtaining somewhat greater concessions. The failure of the government to meet the obligations to which it agreed in the treaty are among the factors that contributed to the Riel Rebellion of 1885. Treaty 6 is interesting also in that it is the only one of the numbered treaties that mentions medical care for Indians. It provides that the Indian agent on each reserve maintain a “medicine chest” for the benefit of the Indians. It is likely that medical care was verbally promised during negotiation for other treaties but was not written into the final documents. Twenty-two years passed between the signing of Treaty 7 and the next set of treaty negotiations. The last four numbered treaties were made in order to make way for northern resource development rather than to permit white settlement. Treaty 8, signed in 1899 with the Beaver, Cree, and Chipewyan, covers portions of Saskatchewan, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, and British Columbia. It was the only treaty covering the Indians of British Columbia. Several small treaties had been negotiated between coastal tribes of British Columbia and the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1850’s, but because the Hudson’s Bay Company had no authority to negotiate for the Crown, these treaties were not considered valid. After British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871, an attempt was made to have
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that province negotiate treaties; other than granting several small reserves, the province refused to acknowledge aboriginal title. Ontario joined with the federal government in the making of Treaty 9 with the Ojibwa and Cree of north central Ontario in 1905 and 1929. The Cree and other Indian groups ceded their remaining territory in northern Saskatchewan with Treaty 10 in 1906. Treaty 11 was signed in 1922 with the Dene (Slave, Dogrib, Loucheux, and Hare) Indians who occupy the Mackenzie River region between the sixtieth parallel and the Arctic coast. The impetus for this treaty was the discovery of oil a year earlier at Norman Wells. The numbered treaties presumably settled all land claims based on aboriginal title for Indians living in the prairie and western Subarctic regions, but several court cases have thrown that issue into question. In one of the most important of these cases, Re Paulette et al. and the Registrar of Titles (1974), the court held that the Indians covered by Treaties 8 and 11 had not, in fact, extinguished their aboriginal titles to the land. Modern Land Claims Agreements. The court decisions, coupled with the politicization of Native Canadians, led the federal government to rethink its position on the issue of aboriginal title. The government’s desire to develop the natural and mineral resources in its northernmost territories created the conditions necessary for comprehensive land claims settlements. Between 1975 and 1992, five major land claims agreements were concluded. Varying levels of progress were made on several others. The first of these modern land claims agreements, known as the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, was signed in 1975 by Inuit and Cree of northern and northwestern Quebec, the federal government, and the Province of Quebec. The agreement cleared the way for Quebec to begin hydroelectric development in James Bay. The Northeastern Quebec Agreement, concluded in 1978 with the Naskapi, was for the same purpose. The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement provided $225 million, divided proportionally between the Inuit and the Cree for the lands (excluding mineral rights) in the immediate vicinities of their communities. The natives were allowed to retain exclusive hunting and fishing rights over a much larger area; however, the flooding caused by the hydroelectric development has caused major disruptions of wildlife. The Inuit chose to form public municipal-type village governments with powers over zoning, taxation, public health, housing, and education. The Cree made their communities into reserves. Representatives of both groups serve on environmental and economic development boards meant to monitor the development of the region.
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National native organizations have been highly critical of the James Bay land claims agreements largely because of the clauses that extinguish aboriginal rights. Because the term “aboriginal rights” was not defined, future understandings of its scope have also been negotiated away. In addition, the vague language of the agreement has allowed both the Quebec and federal governments to shirk their obligations. Far more generous than the James Bay Agreements are the two land claims settlements achieved by the Inuit of the Northwest Territories. The Inuvialuit Final Agreement, which was signed in June, 1984, settled the claim of the twenty-five hundred Inuit living between the Yukon border and central Victoria Island. Under the agreement, the Inuvialuit (or western Inuit) retained title to 91,000 square kilometers but mineral rights to only one-seventh of that land. The Inuvialuit surrendered land covering 344,000 square kilometers. In exchange for the land cessions the Inuvialuit received $152 million to be paid over a thirteen-year period. In an arrangement similar to that established by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the money has been paid to the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, which was chartered to invest the proceeds and to manage the land retained by the Inuvialuit. In contrast to the provisions of the numbered treaties, all income earned by the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation from either its lands or investments is subject to taxation. The Eastern Arctic Claim was negotiated between the federal government and the Tungavik Federation of Natives. Signed in 1992, it settled the claim of seventeen thousand Inuit living in the area of the Northwest Territories between Coppermine and Baffin Island. The claim established Inuit title to 352,000 square kilometers (9.9 percent of the total land and offshore area), making the Eastern Arctic Inuit the single largest landholder in Canada. Unlike other land claims agreements, the Eastern Arctic Agreement includes offshore areas, which continue to be vital food sources. In exchange for relinquishing claim to the remaining territory, the Inuit are to receive $580 million as well as resource royalties earned from their lands. Perhaps the most substantial concession made by the federal government was to allow the Inuit to govern themselves through the formation of a new territory to be known as Nunavut. Negotiations between the governments of Newfoundland and Canada and the thirty-five hundred Inuit of Labrador proceeded slowly. In 1988, agreements in principle were signed between the federal government and the Yukon Council of Indians and with the Dene-Metis Association of the Mackenzie River region. Neither agreement was concluded. At their annual meeting in July, 1990, the Dene Assembly failed to ratify the accord because of divisions within the organization over the “extinguishment” of
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the still undefined aboriginal rights. After the failure of the Dene-Metis Land Claims Agreement, the federal government agreed to settle the claim on a region-by-region basis. The communities situated along the lower Mackenzie River signed the Gwich’in Final Agreement a year later, which provided resource royalties and $75 million cash in exchange for relinquishing aboriginal rights and title to most of the region. The Gwich’in (Delta area) natives retained title to slightly more than 21,000 square kilometers. They also retained the subsurface mineral rights to about onefourth of that land. Like the Eastern Arctic Agreement, the Gwich’in Final Agreement established a framework for self-government. See also: Aboriginal Action Plan; Declaration of First Nations; Delgamuukw v. British Columbia; Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development; Fifteen Principles; Indian Act of 1876; Indian Act of 1951; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Indian-white relations: French colonial; Nunavut Territory; Red River Raids; Reserve system of Canada; Riel Rebellions; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples; White Paper of Canada. Pamela R. Stern Sources for Further Study Dickerson, Mark O. Whose North? Political Change, Political Development, and Self-Government in the Northwest Territories. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992. Discusses the contemporary political issues facing the Dene, Metis, Inuit, and non-native residents of northern Canada. Getty, A. L., and Antoine S. Lussier, eds. As Long as the Sun Shines and the Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983. A collection of articles covering relations between the Indians and the Canadian government from the time of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to the constitutional crisis of the 1980’s. Morris, Alexander. The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-west Territories. Toronto: Belfords, Clark & Co., 1880. Reprint. Toronto: Coles, 1971. An account by one of the negotiators of Treaties 3 through 6. Morse, Bradford W., ed. Aboriginal Peoples and the Law: Indian, Metis, and Inuit Rights in Canada. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1985. A thorough discussion of all aspects of Canadian law (including treaties) as they apply to native peoples. Purich, Donald J. The Inuit and Their Land: The Story of Nunavut. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1992. Contains a thorough discussion of each of the Inuit
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land claims agreements, paying special attention to the Eastern Arctic Agreement and the preparations for native self-government in the proposed New Nunavut Territory. St. Germain, Jill. Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867-1877. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Explores and contrasts the “civilizing” efforts of the United States and Canada through their Indian treaty policies.
Treaties and agreements in the United States Date: 1787-2002 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Eighteenth century history; National government and legislation; Native government; Nineteenth century history; Treaties; Twentieth century history Significance: Native Americans generally look upon their treaties as permanent and inviolate compacts between two sovereign nations. European Americans, in contrast, have tended to consider the treaties to be temporary arrangements subject to alteration and renegotiation. This difference in perspective has been a source of much misunderstanding and bitterness. Following the American Revolution (1775-1783), the U.S. government continued the European tradition of treating Indian tribes as independent foreign nations, which meant negotiating formal treaties for establishing peace, exchanging land, and recognizing mutual obligations. The government also negotiated agreements or accords, which were less formal and usually dealt with fewer issues. In 1871, Congress passed the Indian Appropriation Act, stating that the American Indians no longer belonged to their own sovereign nations, and treaty making ended. The existing treaties remained valid, unless explicitly abrogated or changed by a law of Congress. Until the twentieth century, the U.S. government often did not look upon Indian treaties as important commitments. Since World War II, however, Native Americans have become increasingly effective in using the federal courts to obtain broad interpretations of treaty rights.
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An 1891 council of Sioux leaders settles the Indian wars at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, soon after the Battle of Wounded Knee. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner would claim that the frontier had been “closed” as an outcome of that battle. (National Archives)
Nature of the Treaties. The U.S. Constitution authorizes the president to negotiate treaties with foreign nations, and these treaties become legally binding after approval by a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Because they are recognized as part of the “supreme law of the land,” treaties have the same legal standing as laws passed by Congress. The concept of “supreme law” also means that treaty rights are a matter of federal jurisdiction, and that state governments must follow legal decisions made in federal courts. This is significant, because state governments, reflecting local opinion, often oppose treaty provisions such as the right to hunt and fish off reservation lands. From 1787 until 1871, the U.S. government negotiated about 800 formal treaties with various Native American tribes and bands, and the Senate ratified some 367 of these into law. The Secretary of War was responsible for negotiating treaties until 1849, when the Office of Indian Affairs was transferred to the Department of the Interior. In 1871, the Indian Appropriation Act, which declared that tribes were not independent nations, ended the practice of contracting by treaty, but the act left the existing treaties in place unless explicitly modified by Congress. Thereafter, the U.S. government continued to enter into agreements with the tribes, but Congress increasingly directed Indian policy by statute. Although Congress passed a statute recognizing all Indians as citizens in 1924, the tribes
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retained attributes of sovereignty necessary to negotiate agreements and assert treaty rights. Except for the early period, the U.S. government was generally in a position of dominance when it negotiated treaties with Native American tribes. Following armed conflicts, the government tended to be especially harsh in its demands. Even in the best of conditions, the treaties were written in English, and the Indians frequently did not clearly understand what was written. Basic assumptions, such as the very idea of land ownership, were often foreign to Native American cultures. In addition, the government frequently chose to negotiate with cooperative individuals who were not recognized as legitimate negotiators by tribal majorities. In some cases, as with the Cherokee treaty of removal in 1835, the Senate ratified treaties that had been repudiated by the American Indians. Indian treaties are especially important for the determination of land claims. About 230 of the treaties included a delineation of boundaries based on a cession of land from the tribe to the U.S. government, with reserved lands (called reservations) for the use of the tribe. Many of the treaties also recognized the retention of hunting and fishing rights in the ceded territories. The treaties usually stated that the tribe would acknowledge the authority of the United States, and the U.S. government promised to provide food and services for the tribe. The treaties generally were silent or unclear concerning whether various provisions were to be permanent or temporary. Interpretations of Treaties. Because treaties are legal documents, the U.S. Supreme Court has the final authority in determining their meanings. When the language of a treaty is clear, it is applied as written. Because the language is often very unclear, however, the Supreme Court has gradually developed “rules of construction” for resolving disputes. As compensation for the disadvantages of the tribes during the treaty-making process, ambiguities are normally resolved in favor of the Indian perspective, and federal courts attempt to interpret the language as it would have been reasonably understood by the tribal leaders responsible for the negotiations. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, for example, some of the most controversial interpretations involved the meanings of treaties in regard to the rights of Native Americans to fish and hunt with traditional methods in the lands ceded to the government. The treaties tended to use vague language such as “at the pleasure of the president,” but Indian negotiators were frequently led to believe that hunting-fishing rights would continue as long as the Indians were peaceful. Since 1968, federal courts have ruled again and again that these rights remain valid unless they have been clearly and
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explicitly abrogated by an act of Congress. In a major case in 1974, a U.S. District Court of Washington State ruled that Indian tribes had the right to one-half of the salmon harvest, and in subsequent years, there were similar rulings in several states, including Wisconsin and Minnesota. Many nonIndian sports fishers and hunters bitterly resented these decisions, resulting in anti-Indian demonstrations and even threats of violence. Abrogation of Treaties. If there is an inconsistency between the terms of a treaty and a congressional statute, the more recent of the two is legally binding. Based on this principle, the Supreme Court in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) reaffirmed that Congress has the full authority to abrogate or modify any treaty. The Endangered Species Act of 1973, for instance, overruled those treaties that included the right to hunt eagles on reservations. If Congress wishes to make changes in a treaty, however, this intent must be clear and explicit in a statute. If there is any doubt about the meaning of a statute, the Supreme Court interprets it in ways that uphold relevant treaties. In contrast to treaties made with foreign countries, treaties with Native Americans often establish property rights. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that there be “just compensation” for any property that is “taken” for public use. The power of Congress to abrogate treaties, therefore, does not release it from the duty of providing fair payment for any taking of land or other property. Frequently in the past, of course, the federal government did take property without compensation. In 1946, Congress passed the Indian Claims Commission Act to allow tribes to seek indemnities for their lost property. During the 1950’s, powerful members of Congress wanted to put an end to Indian treaties. Their long-term goal was to promote assimilation, which they argued would produce greater opportunities and equality. As a first step, they pursued “termination” of the political relationship existing between the federal government and the tribes. Based on the termination law of 1954, numerous small tribes lost most of their claims to sovereignty and many of their treaty privileges. In Menominee Tribe v. United States (1968), however, the Supreme Court ruled that Indians retained those treaty rights that were not explicitly mentioned in the termination law, including the right to hunt and fish. President Richard M. Nixon repudiated the termination policy in 1970, and gradually most tribes regained their pre-termination status. In 1972, the Trail of Broken Treaties protest called for the recognition of greater tribal sovereignty and the return of the treaty-making process. Although the protest did not obtain its announced goals, the resulting public-
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ity appeared to produce a greater public respect for the treaties. By that date, the termination policy found relatively few supporters, and a firm majority of Congress appeared to accept the idea that respect for treaty rights, as interpreted by the courts, is a question of national honor. The general trend of court cases throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century recognized these principles. See also: Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of; Federally recognized tribes; Fort Atkinson Treaty; Fort Greenville Treaty; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868; Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851; Fort Stanwix Treaty; Fort Wayne Treaty; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Horseshoe Bend Treaty; Indian Appropriation Act; Indian Citizenship Act; Indian Claims Commission; Indian New Deal; Indian preference; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1775-1830; Indianwhite relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002. Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting; Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock; Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty; Reservation system of the United States; Termination Resolution; Trail of Broken Treaties; Trail of Tears. Thomas T. Lewis Sources for Further Study Burt, Larry. Tribalism in Crisis: Federal Indian Policy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Good coverage of termination policy. Canby, William. American Indian Law. St. Paul: West, 1983. Chapter 6 gives a concise and useful legal analysis of the treaties. Deloria, Vine, Jr. American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. One of many interesting books written and edited from a strong Native American perspective. Kappler, Charles, ed. Indian Treaties, 1778-1883. New York: Interland, 1972. Provides the texts of most of the actual treaties. Prucha. Francis. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. San Jose: University of California Press, 1995. Views U.S. policy as one of failed paternalism. St. Germain, Jill. Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867-1877. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Explores and contrasts the “civilizing” efforts of the United States and Canada through their Indian treaty policies. Satz, Ronald. Indian Treaty Rights. Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin Academy, 1991. Provides a fascinating pro-Indian account of the fishing-rights controversy in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Washburn, Wilcomb. Red Man’s Land/White Man’s Law. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. An older but still useful account.
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Wunder, John. “Retained by the People”: A History of the American Indians and the Bill of Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Provides a broad historical account from the Indian point of view, with an excellent bibliography.
Tribal courts Date: Established 1883 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Native government, Nineteenth century history, Twentieth century history Significance: U.S. law allows Native American governments to retain their traditional mechanisms for settling legal disputes. Prior to European contact, all American Indian tribes and bands had institutional mechanisms for settling disputes. The mechanisms varied from Eskimo song duels and Yurok mediation to Cheyenne and Pueblo councils. Under U.S. law, tribal governments have the right to retain or modify adjudication procedures unless Congress limits that right. For example, in the nineteenth century the Cherokee legal system went through a series of changes from a clan- and council-based system to a system based on an Anglo-American model. In the late nineteenth century Congress expanded federal court jurisdiction in Cherokee territory and finally passed the Curtis Act (1898), which abolished Cherokee tribal courts. Pueblo adjudicatory systems have been influenced by Spanish and U.S. institutions and policies but were never abolished by federal edict and continue to develop. For example, many Keresan pueblos have a council which decides cases. Many disputes are settled before a partial council or single official acting as a mediator. Important cases are decided by the full council; the presiding officer may act as both prosecutor and a judge. Litigants may be advised by kinsmen or ceremonial group members. In a modification of this system, Laguna Pueblo has a full-time judge while retaining the council as an appellate court. In the mid-nineteenth century a number of tribes were confined to reservations, creating new problems of social order. In 1883 the Department of
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the Interior established Courts of Indian Offenses. The judges, tribal members appointed by reservation superintendents, enforced administrative rules established by the Department of the Interior. The superintendent had appellate power over the judges’ decisions. In 1888, Congress implicitly recognized the legitimacy of these courts by appropriating funds for judges’ salaries. By 1900, Courts of Indian Offenses had been established on about twothirds of the reservations. These courts were even established in some pueblos, where they competed with indigenous legal systems. Courts of Indian Offenses have an enduring legacy as a model for the procedures and codes of many contemporary tribal judicial systems. In 1935, substantive law administered by the Courts of Indian Offenses was revised. Moreover, the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) made it easier for tribes to establish court systems less dominated by the Interior Department. Insufficient tribal economic growth slowed replacement of the Courts of Indian Offenses. By the close of the twentieth century, however, few remained. By contrast, there were more than one hundred tribal courts. Tribal courts vary in size, procedure, and other matters. The Navajo nation, for example, now has an independent judicial branch which processed more than eighty-five thousand cases in 1992. There are seven judicial districts and fourteen district court judges. The practice of law before these courts is regulated. Appeals may be taken to the high court. Appellate decisions of note are published. In addition, there are local “peacemaker” courts with 227 peacemakers who act generally as mediators. See also: Indian Offenses Act; Indian Reorganization Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933. Eric Henderson
Tribe Date: 1492-present Locale: The Americas and West Indies Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Terminology Significance: The terminology used to describe American Indian social organization has implications for the subjective value placed on that organization by European Americans.
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The word “tribe” has deep roots in Indo-European languages and cultures. In Indo-European the word tre refers to trees and the way they branch. This later became the word tri, meaning one-third, or division into three parts. The word bus refers to “bush,” or branching plant. In Latin, tribus was used in reference to the three groups—Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan—who united to form Rome. The original term comes from the Etruscans. It has come into modern usage through French and Middle English derivations and was carried into North America by colonial peoples. Definitions. This term describes various human social groups who share a common name, territory, ancestry, and feeling of community. Peoples with similar customs and cultural, linguistic, and religious homogeneity are thought by Western Europeans and European Americans to be tribes. In some areas populated by groups considered tribes, people traveled in nomadic groups loosely bound by family ties. In others they settled and established their tribes on a clan basis; in still other regions the power structure was based on a village or community system. Some social scientists consider a tribe to be an organized band or group of bands who have shared means of resolving disputes and making communal decisions and possess a written language. A tribe is also thought to be a self-sufficient group of people living and working together but producing little or no surplus goods or services. A tribe is larger than a family or a band yet smaller than a chiefdom, kingdom, or empire. Some scholars say the term refers to early stages in the development of human political systems and nation-states. This assumes that a tribe lacks a state apparatus, civil government, and the complex political organization commonly associated with the more easily recognized governmental forms of chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires. Unfortunately the word “tribe” is often used to refer to any group of people considered “primitive” by others—groups who live a “simple” life of traveling, hunting, migrating, marrying, and meeting for ceremonies and who share a common dialect, customs, culture, and worldview. Such peoples are generally lacking in advanced technology and are organized in ways considered “uncivilized” by citizens of nation-states. Some of the things that bind any human community together include family and kinship ties; shared beliefs about self, group, and their origins; and the best ways to care for and relate to the environment. The variety of types of social, political, and religious organization regulated through ritualistic, governmental, and other institutional forms are numerous and diverse. Any people who share a language, social structure, worldview, and territory can be assumed to qualify as a tribe.
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Tribes and the American Experience. Some indigenous American tribes were so loosely organized that no tribal unit is said to have existed. Their lives were thought to “border on anarchy.” They were nomadic or migratory. They had no secret societies, tradition of hereditary nobility, complex clan structures, or settled places of constant habitation. They were small groups, often called “bands,” who shared a common identity because of their common presence and activities. Some assembled into duly constituted independent states when they gathered all their numbers together, while other groups entered into an even higher organic state by confederating with neighboring tribes (a level of organization that could qualify them as nations). Others forced many smaller tribes to take part in the formation and maintenance of an empire, as among the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas. Tribe, in its European denotation, signifies only a political unit, whereas the actual diversity among American Indian peoples of organizational forms indicates a wide variety of complex social expressions of the communal uniting of personal and environmental conceptions. Social relations depended on the self-evident order of nature and a people’s place in it. American Indian peoples traditionally had no commonly agreed-upon concept of “tribe.” They were generally animists, meaning that they believed everything to be alive and related; all things were defined by their relationship to all other things. They had many varieties of kinship groups, clans, lineage systems, and social structures. Each group had a name for itself in its own language, most often a word that meant “the people” or “human beings.” For example, the Tsalagi (Cherokee) word Junwiya, the Navajo word Diné, and the Nez Perce word Nimipuu all mean “the people.” Colonial Europeans often thought of all peoples unlike themselves as primitives and therefore as “tribes.” It was their tendency, because of the categorical and reductionist strains of their thinking and languages, to reduce the diversity of indigenous American peoples to a general category of “primitives” or “tribes.” They did not recognize or understand the communities and peoples they encountered in their drive to colonize the Americas and to develop new sources of raw materials, generate income for the European monarchies, and procure converts to Christian churches. They generally looked upon native peoples in the Americas as savage, barbaric, uncivilized, primitive, and worthy only of extermination or exploitation. As the United States developed into a nation, these abstract generalizations were projected onto all indigenous peoples who organized themselves in ways not recognizable to Anglo-Europeans. Indigenous tribal peoples in Hawaii and the Philippines, for example, were viewed as primi-
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tives who needed to be controlled or exterminated either by force of arms or by coercive cultural assimilation. Each tribal community in the Americas is the product of distinctive conditions, circumstances, and experiences from which the community derives the shape of its culture and the form of its identity. There were originally thousands of unique peoples in the Americas before contact with Europeans. Only after contact with Europeans did it eventually become a legal necessity to define oneself in terms of tribal affiliation. Modern, Legal and Political Considerations. Many indigenous peoples consider the term “tribe” to be offensive, seeing its use as a typical European attempt to justify “civilizing,” forcibly assimilating, or exterminating them. Yet they also realize that they must struggle today to receive and maintain recognition as “federally recognized tribes” in order to receive protections under the law and fulfillment of treaty rights and benefits. Alternative terms such as “ethnicity,” “minority group,” and “identity group” have been suggested, but any such redefinition involves political (and economic) issues. “Tribe” is a term with distinct political connotations in the United States. American Indian peoples have a constitutionally mandated relationship with the government as defined by treaties and other agreements between recognized Indian nations and their enrolled citizens. This is called the federal-Indian trust relationship and is carried out through various intra- and intergovernmental contacts and institutions. Tribes’ inherent, although limited, sovereignty and inalienable right to self-determination is thereby supposed to be assured. At the same time, the federal government’s duties and obligations to modern tribes are spelled out. For these reasons federally recognized Indian tribes traditionally did not seek civil rights. They believed, and many still believe today, that the U.S. government and Indian peoples are best served through the fulfillment of treaties rather than the passage of laws in the interest of immigrant minority groups. There is considerable money and power at stake; thus, what tribe a person is enrolled in and what factors determine membership in an Indian tribal nation become matters of great political and social import. In the United States one cannot receive benefits as a beneficiary in the federalIndian trust relationship unless one is “an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe.” In other words, an individual must be a citizen of a legally and politically defined “Indian nation” with rights under federal law. Exactly what defines membership in a federally recognized tribe varies from one group to another. Ancestry, blood quantum, and acclamation are all legally sound bases used to support claims to tribal membership. These
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bases go against traditional methods of identification such as language, clan membership, and religion. The process of imposing Western political and legal standards tends to erode traditional forms of organization. Legal definitions are of great import today. Tribes are not states but “dependent” nations with limited sovereignty and an inherent right to selfdetermination and self-government, even if the specific governmental forms are imposed from without. Many tribal groups maintain their traditional forms of governing themselves, while creating federally recognized nation-state frameworks that allow them to participate in nation-to-nation relationships. This is essential to the preservation of cultural integrity on the one hand and to the fulfillment of treaty obligations on the other. The concept or term “tribe” is thus ambiguous and represents a superimposition of European modes of viewing and defining the cultural, social, and political organization of indigenous peoples. It is a term of convenience used to designate all North American Indian peoples even though only about half of them actually had any form of tribal organization. The indigenous peoples of North America lived in a wide spectrum of identity groups, including families, clans, bands, villages, tribes, chiefdoms, and empires. Their social and political systems were diverse and distinctive; they were expressions of each group’s unique adaptations to the many geographical and environmental conditions evident in North America from prehistoric times to the present. See also: American Indian; Amerind; Federally recognized tribes; Indian; Native American. Michael W. Simpson Sources for Further Study Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. An excellent in-depth study of the development of tribal nationalism and of the political meaning of being an enrolled citizen of a federally recognized Indian tribe. Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and EmpireBuilding. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. The author explores the intellectual process which defines indigenous tribal groups as primitive and leads to violence between nations and tribes. Includes many helpful illustrations and an extensive bibliographic essay. Fried, Morton H. The Notion of Tribe. Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings, 1975. An exploration of the development and meaning of the concept of tribe. Gluckman, Max. Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society. 1966. Reprint. New York: Blackwell, 1977. This book studies tribal organization and
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the ways tribal groups develop and maintain their integrity. Though not focused specifically on American Indian tribes, it provides a comprehensive conceptual basis for investigation of the concept. Illustrated in the original. Sahlins, Marshall D. Tribesmen. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968. This book has illustrations which represent tribal life in all its diversity.
Tuscarora War Date: September 22, 1711-March 23, 1713 Locale: Fort Neoheroka on Contentnea Creek in North Carolina Tribes involved: Tuscarora Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: Decimation of the Tuscaroras dispersed their society and opened the way for westward expansion by European settlers. When European settlers began arriving in North America, the Tuscarora tribe controlled nearly all the North Carolina coastal plains. The tribe’s territory stretched from today’s Virginia state line, south to the Cape Fear River, and inland to the Appalachians. Tribal land cut a wedge between the Algonquian tribes of the coast and the Siouan tribes of the piedmont. The Tuscaroras held a trade monopoly throughout the area. Information about the Tuscaroras and their western holdings was limited, because the tribe denied passage through the area. Contact with settlers was infrequent as a result of the natural protection provided by swamps, sand reefs, and shallow harbors. Conflict between the tribe and the settlers began, however, when the two groups started occupying the same areas and the Indians began raids on settlers’ livestock and crops. The Indians saw no problem with their actions, because there was no Tuscarora law or custom that discouraged stealing from an enemy. Settlers were helpless to prevent these attacks, because the tribe had a vicious policy of revenge. In 1705, the Tuscaroras became such a problem for the settlers that Virginia passed a law forbidding natives to hunt on patented land. Trade agreements were established between the tribe and the settlers, but things did not go smoothly. The Tuscaroras felt the settlers were taking advantage of them and complained about being cheated. Tuscarora tribal leaders approached the Pennsylvania government in 1710. They presented eight wampum belts, signifying various grievances concerning the safety
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of American Indian families. No agreement was reached. Unscrupulous traders accelerated the Tuscarora discontent by describing the settlers as easy targets with no government backing or protection. Then the Tuscaroras declared war. Tuscaroras Attack. On September 22, 1711, approximately five hundred Tuscaroras and their allies attacked at widely scattered points along the Neuse, Trent, and Pamlico Rivers. Men, women, and children were butchered and their homes destroyed by fire. The Indians’ frenzy was slowed only by fatigue and drunkenness. At the end of the two-day rampage more than 130 whites were dead and nearly 30 women and children had been captured. The frightened survivors scrambled to reach fortified garrisons. The situation in North Carolina was desperate. Planters west of the river could not help protect those under attack without weakening their own defenses. Quaker settlers refused to fight. Governor Edward Hyde appealed to Virginia and South Carolina for help. Virginia worked to secure the loyalty and assistance of the neutral Tuscaroras who had not participated in the raids, but met with little success. South Carolina responded by sending Colonel John Barnwell and a force of five hundred native allies and thirty white men. Barnwell’s departure was delayed, and his winter march was difficult. He crossed the Neuse River in late January and marched an entire day and night to attack the Tuscarora town of Narhontes. Although the natives knew of his approach, Barnwell’s raid was successful. For the next four months, Barnwell led several victorious attacks in Tuscarora territory, but he was displeased by the weak North Carolina support. In April, against orders from North Carolina, he signed a treaty with the Tuscaroras. During Barnwell’s return to South Carolina, he broke the treaty by capturing native women and children to sell as slaves, thereby provoking new raids. The summer of 1712 brought no relief. Settlers and natives were starving; no one could plant crops or hunt in safety. Residents along the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers had their homes burned, their stock stolen, and their plantations destroyed. The North Carolina Assembly held a special session in July and passed a law requiring all men between sixteen and sixty years of age to fight the natives or pay a fine. The law was widely disliked and few men obeyed it. Then a yellow fever epidemic hit the area. North Carolina’s governor was one of those who died. Pollock’s Negotiations. Thomas Pollock was chosen as the new governor until the colony could receive instructions from the Lord Proprietors. Pollock appealed to South Carolina for aid but suggested that Colonel
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Barnwell would not be suitable. Barnwell went before the South Carolina assembly and advised that it was necessary to prosecute the Tuscarora War to a successful conclusion. South Carolina agreed to help. A force of nine hundred Indians and approximately thirty-three soldiers was placed under the leadership of Colonel James Moore, who was experienced in fighting the American Indians. Governor Pollock reopened negotiations with King Tom Blunt, the chief ruler of the neutral Tuscaroras in the upper towns. In September, Blunt requested peace with North Carolina. Pollock insisted Blunt’s people fight on the side of the settlers and would not accept neutrality. Pollock demanded the capture of King Tom Hancock, the chief who had authorized the massacre in September, 1711. In mid-November, 1712, Hancock was delivered and executed. King Blunt then signed a treaty with North Carolina on behalf of nine Tuscarora towns. Colonel Moore and his forces arrived in the Neuse River region in late December. Although the people were thankful for the protection, they were angered when the troops consumed all the provisions in the area. It was nearly a month before Moore’s forces left for Fort Barnwell to prepare an attack on Fort Neoheroka. Fort Neoheroka lay within a wide curve of Contentnea Creek and was protected on three sides by deep water and steep river banks. The fourth side was enclosed by an angled palisade, a fence created by pointed stakes. There were bastions, or projections, on the four main corners, and an angled passageway led from the fort to the water. The natives also had access to a network of tunnels and caves within the fort. Moore instructed his men to create zigzag trenches to within gun range of the fort’s east wall. He then built a triangular blockhouse to allow his troops to provide crossfire while men raised a battery against the fort wall. Moore also ordered a mine tunneled under the wall near the blockhouse and lined it with explosives. Once preparations were completed, Moore placed his forces around the fort. Two captains, a battery of artillery, and more than three hundred Cherokees were assigned to the northwest area of the fort and stream to block off the most likely escape route. East of the fort and in the trenches, Moore’s brother, two other captains, ten whites, and fifty Yamasees took their positions. Colonel Moore placed himself, four other commanders, eighty whites, and four hundred members of Siouan nations in the southeast. Mulberry Battery took its place within the southern curve of the creek. Battle of Fort Neoheroka. The attack began on March 20, 1713, with the blast of a trumpet. The powder in the mine failed, but the attack on the
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northeast quickly succeeded. Captain Maule went against the southern side of the fort instead of the southeast, as he had been ordered. This caused Maule’s troops to be caught in the crossfire, and only twenty of his men escaped unhurt. Colonel Moore erected a low wall and managed to set two of the fort’s blockhouses on fire. By the next morning, the fire had destroyed the structures as well as several houses within the fort. Some of the Tuscaroras hid in the caves and created problems for the attackers, but by Sunday, March 23, Moore’s forces controlled the fort. Destruction of Fort Neoheroka was complete. Moore had lost fewer than sixty men and had fewer than one hundred wounded. Nearly one thousand Tuscaroras were killed or captured. As word of the defeat spread, other members of the Tuscarora tribe fled. Many of the refugees headed to Virginia, where they endured great hardships and found little food. Several raiding bands continued guerrilla warfare in North Carolina, but Moore’s help was no longer needed. He returned to South Carolina in September, 1713. See also: Fox Wars; Indian slave trade; Indian-white relations: English colonial; Iroquois Confederacy; Yamasee War. Suzanne Riffle Boyce Sources for Further Study Graymont, Barbara, ed. Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard. Reprint. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Introduction includes information about Tuscarora history. Main text chronicles the life of Chief Clinton Rickard (1882-1971) and his work for American Indian rights. Johnson, F. Roy. The Tuscaroras. Vols. 1 and 2. Murfreesboro: Johnson, 1967. Discusses history, traditions, culture, mythology, and medicine. Maps, illustrations, index, and many footnotes. Provides listings of numerous original resources. Snow, Dean R. The Iroquois. The Peoples of America series. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Follows the development of the Iroquois Confederacy. Extensive bibliography, index. Waldman, Carl. Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. New York: Facts On File, 1988. One page summarizes events leading to Fort Neoheroka and gives some details about tribal life. Wilson, Edmund. Apologies to the Iroquois. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1959. Contains a chapter on Tuscarora history. Also discusses land disputes at Niagara Falls in the 1960’s.
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United States v. Kagama Date: 1886 Locale: California Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Court cases, Nineteenth century history Significance: A U.S. Supreme Court decision reaffirms that Native American tribes are not sovereign in the same ways as nations or states, but are dependent in many ways upon the U.S. government. American Indian “Pactah Billy” Kagama was charged with murdering another Indian on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in California in 1885. Indian tribes were regarded as a separate people within the United States having the power to regulate their own social relations within reservations. Kagama challenged the Indian Appropriation Act of March 3, 1871, which gave jurisdiction to U.S. federal courts for several specific crimes, including murder, committed by Native Americans on another Native American within an Indian reservation created by the U.S. government and set apart for use by an Indian tribe. On May 10, 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the act constitutional and reaffirmed that Native American tribes were not to be considered sovereign in the same way as nations or states but to be viewed as largely helpless communities dependent upon the U.S. government for their food, protection, and constitutional political rights. See also: Indian Appropriation Act; Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933. Steve J. Mazurana
United States v. Washington Date: 1974 Locale: Washington State Tribes involved: Quinault, Queet, Muckleshoot, Squaxin Island, SaukSuiattle, Skokomish, Stillaguamish, Makah, Lummi, Quileute, Yakima, Hoh, Upper Skagit Categories: Court cases, Treaties, Twentieth century history Significance: A U.S. district court rules that Indians may fish at sites not on reservations because this right had been reserved in treaties.
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Swinomish Indians displaying a skate caught in a tribal fishing trap in Washington State, 1938. Fishing has always been an important part of tribal economies in the Northwest. (National Archives)
United States v. Washington is commonly referred to as the Boldt decision after the judge who decided it in federal district court. In a series of treaties negotiated between 1854 and 1855, various Washington and Oregon tribes ceded nearly sixty-four million acres of land but retained the right to continue to fish in accustomed areas. The states of Washington and Oregon eventually sought to regulate Indians’ rights to fish in off-reservation areas. In response, some Indian people staged fish-ins in the 1960’s to assert their treaty rights. Finally, the state of Washington used its regulatory powers to limit Indian fishing, and in 1970, thirteen tribes sued the state in federal court. After extensive study, Federal District Judge George Boldt ruled in 1974 that Indians had rights to fish at off-reservation sites because this right had been reserved in the treaties. The court understood the treaties involved a grant from the tribes to the United States, and in return, the tribes obtained rights for its members and heirs. The ruling also stated that United States citizens and tribal people had the right to share equally in the salmon catch, and both were directed by the court to develop plans to protect and replenish the salmon population. This decision caused widespread opposition among state officials, sports fishers, and others, and Indian people complained of harassment
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and continued problems with exercising their fishing rights. On appeal from the state of Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1979 and essentially upheld Boldt’s ruling. See also: Fish-ins; National Indian Youth Council; Winters v. United States. Carole A. Barrett
Wabash, Battle of the Date: November 4, 1791 Locale: Mercer County, Ohio Tribes involved: Miami, Shawnee, Lenni Lenape, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Huron (Wyandot), Ottawa, Cherokee, Creek Categories: Eighteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: Usually known as St. Clair’s defeat, this victory of the Maumee Valley tribes and their confederates from around the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley constitutes perhaps the most dramatic defeat of the U.S. Army at the hands of Native Americans in the history of the Indian wars of 1790-1890. During the 1780’s and 1790’s, Indian resistance to American encroachment north of the Ohio River rose to new heights. Led primarily by the Miami, Shawnee, and Lenni Lenape (Delaware), the western Algonquianspeaking peoples felt betrayed by the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which placed their homelands within the United States. They also assumed that the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) was still valid, with its prohibition of white settlement in what became the Northwest Territory. The British encouraged them by stationing soldiers at Fort Detroit and through the blandishments of their Indian Department representatives, who raised Indian expectations. Many of the militant Indians settled along the upper Wabash and Maumee River Valleys. Under the nominal leadership of the Miami war chief Little Turtle (Michikinikwa), the tribes most associated with him were the Shawnee (led by Blue Jacket, or Wyeapiersenwah) and the Lenni Lenape (led by Buckongahelas). Little Turtle’s warriors inflicted a critical defeat on the first United States military incursion into their territory. Brigadier General Josiah Harmar’s expedition to the Maumee forks (Fort Wayne, Indiana) was badly mauled in two engagements by a pan-Indian
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force in October, 1791. This defeat caused President George Washington to name the Northwest Territory’s governor, Arthur St. Clair, as a major general commanding a second expedition into the Maumee Valley. Harmar’s defeat raised Little Turtle’s reputation and increased Indian Unity throughout the region. The Maumee Confederacy’s contacts and support stretched from Lake Superior to the Lower Creek villages in modern Alabama. The coalitions of Pontiac and Tecumseh were never as broad or as unified as this one. Miami, Shawnee, and Lenni Lenape warriors would be joined by Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Huron (Wyandot), and Ottawa militants and there was some coordination with the Cherokees and Creeks to the south. With Little Turtle in nominal command, the Indians’ consensual and tribal kinship approach to combat proved effective in this campaign. St. Clair’s ill-trained and poorly equipped regulars, plus even less effective and less disciplined militia volunteers, left Cincinnati at the end of September, 1791. St. Clair’s regulars constituted almost all the combat troops in the U.S. Army. By November 3 they had advanced only 89 miles, and discipline was so poor that entrenched encampments were no longer maintained. The American encampment near the Wabash River’s source (now Fort Recovery, Ohio) was divided between regular and militia units, thereby diluting St. Clair’s command authority even more. The Indians advanced south from the Glaize (modern Defiance County, Ohio), keeping their presence and size hidden from St. Clair. Little Turtle struck at dawn on November 4, and his thousand warriors quickly overran the militia camp, pushing the survivors into an ever smaller killing zone among the regulars. With his forces encircled, St. Clair’s attempts to rally his defense failed. Indian marksmanship directed at the officers contributed to the disorganization. Eventually a breakout to the south was successful for about a third of the fourteen hundred American soldiers. The remainder were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Never before or since has such a high proportion of the total United States military establishment been defeated. Approximately twenty-one Indians died, and forty were wounded. It would be three years before Major General Anthony Wayne would lead a third expedition toward the Maumee Valley. In the meantime, Indian unity declined. Wayne’s subsequent victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers opened the Ohio country for American settlement. See also: Fallen Timbers, Battle of; Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830; Little Turtle’s War. David Curtiss Skaggs
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Sources for Further Study Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Eid, Leroy V. “American Indian Military Leadership: St. Clair’s 1791 Defeat.” Journal of Military History 57 (January, 1993): 71-88. Tanner, Helen Hunt. “The Glaize in 1792: A Composite Indian Community.” Ethnohistory 25 (Winter, 1978): 15-39.
Walking Purchase Date: September 19, 1737 Locale: Bucks County, Pennsylvania Tribes involved: Lenni Lenape, Iroquois Confederacy Categories: Colonial history Significance: Pennsylvania’s acquisition of Native American land enhances Iroquois dominance over eastern Pennsylvania tribes. The first half of the eighteenth century was a time of profound population growth in Pennsylvania. Europeans, especially Scotch-Irish and German settlers, came into the colony in unprecedented numbers. The steadily expanding population put considerable pressure on the provincial government to make additional acreage available for settlement. The demand for land also created potentially lucrative opportunities for aggressive speculators, particularly speculators who also served as provincial officials. Such was the case with those who initiated the 1737 Walking Purchase. The Lenni Lenape, or Delaware as they were also known, were among the first Native American tribes to negotiate with William Penn. At the time that Pennsylvania was founded, the Lenni Lenape occupied much of the land between the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers. Penn’s policies toward the Lenni Lenape were more benevolent than were the tribal policies of most colonial administrators. Penn generally recognized native land rights and usually was tolerant of the native lifestyle. By the 1730’s, Pennsylvania settlers along the Delaware River had moved well north of Philadelphia. This was Lenni Lenape territory, and the natives refused to share possession. Some provincial officials, including William Penn’s son Thomas, disputed the Native American claim. The younger Penn maintained that the Lenni Lenape had promised his father
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that they would surrender a portion of the land. The younger Penn no doubt also had ulterior motives for contesting the Lenni Lenape land. While serving as the colony’s governor, he was beset with ever-growing family debts. In an effort to solve his financial woes, he chose to sell some of his family’s real estate. Among the most desirable and salable parts of his acreage was the Lenni Lenape land along the Delaware. Border Disputes. When confronted by Thomas Penn’s claim to their land, the Lenni Lenape acknowledged that the Penn family had title to a portion of the land along the Delaware. They agreed that Mechkilikishi, one of their chiefs, had granted to William Penn some acreage north of Philadelphia. According to Nutimus, a Lenni Lenape chief who was present when land was given, the Penn claim ended at the Tohickon Creek, which is about thirty miles north of Philadelphia. James Logan, an influential member of Thomas Penn’s council, led several Pennsylvania officials in challenging Nutimus’s assessment. He contended that Penn’s land extended beyond the Forks of the Delaware, which was more than fifty miles to the north. To resolve the dispute, Thomas Penn called Nutimus and two other Lenni Lenape chiefs to his home at Pennsbury Manor. Assisted by Logan, Penn showed the Native Americans a copy of a deed dated 1686. The agreement transferred to the Penn family a large tract of land west of the Delaware and extending “back into the woods as far as a man can walk in one day and a half.” Nutimus argued that the walk had been made and ended at the Tohickon. The creek, therefore, was the formal border between Penn land and Lenni Lenape territory. Additionally, since Nutimus’s village had for several centuries occupied the Forks area, Mechkilikishi, who was chief of another Lenni Lenape village, had no authority to turn over land at the Forks to William Penn. Nutimus’s arguments were greeted with disdain by several influential Pennsylvania officials who, like Penn, had interests in the Forks area beyond providing more land for settlers. One of the most concerned Pennsylvanians was Logan. A few years earlier, he had begun operating an iron furnace in the region and hoped to expand his facility. Two other interested parties were Andrew Hamilton and his son-in-law, William Allen. Hamilton was mayor of Philadelphia, and Allen was on his way to becoming one of the colony’s most successful entrepreneurs and the chief justice of the provincial court. Allen already had begun negotiating quietly for a large tract in what is today Allentown. Once he acquired the land, he hoped to divide it into lots and sell the lots to settlers.
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Although the Pennsylvanians passionately argued their claim, the 1686 deed upon which they based their arguments was suspicious in several ways. Among other shortcomings, it lacked signatures and seals. There were also blank spaces in several crucial places, including the spot where the final dimensions of the tract should have appeared. In most cases, such a document would have been voided by the British courts. When questioned about the flaws, Penn and Logan claimed that it was a copy of an original that had been lost. Nevertheless, they continued to uphold the document as valid. In the months that followed the Pennsbury meeting, Logan quietly expanded his plan of attack. To undermine Nutimus’s authority, he appealed to Iroquois representatives for support. The powerful Iroquois nation dominated most tribes throughout Pennsylvania; without their support, the Lenni Lenape had little hope of retaining the disputed land along the Delaware. Assisted by Conrad Weiser, Logan was able to get the Iroquois to confirm the Penn claims. With Iroquois approval secured, it was just a matter of time before the Lenni Lenape conceded to Penn’s claims. On August 25, 1737, Nutimus and three other Lenni Lenape chiefs grudgingly endorsed Governor Penn’s furtive 1686 treaty. A walk that would determine the extent of Penn’s holdings along the Delaware was soon scheduled. The Walk. The walk began at the Wrightstown Quaker Meeting House at daybreak on September 19. Three local men known for their athletic prowess were hired by provincial authorities to make the hike. Two Native American representatives accompanied the Pennsylvanians. The Lenni Lenape expected that the walk would conform to native customs. The walkers would walk for a while then rest, smoke a peace pipe, and share a meal before resuming their trek. The Lenni Lenape expected that the journey would cover about twenty miles. Pennsylvania officials, however, had much different plans. It became clear immediately that the walk would not be a leisurely stroll along the Delaware. Instead it proceeded northwest toward the Kittatiny Mountains and followed a path that had been cut through the backcountry to aid the walkers. Additionally, much of the time the walkers did not walk. They ran. The Pennsylvanians also were accompanied by supply horses carrying provisions, and boats that were used to ferry the hikers across streams. By early afternoon, the unsuspecting Lenni Lenape escorts fell far behind the Pennsylvanians. A few hours later, already well beyond the Tohickon, one Pennsylvanian dropped from exhaustion. A second walker gave up the following morning. The final Pennsylvanian persevered until
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noon on the second day. In all, he covered sixty-four miles, more than three times what the Lenni Lenape had expected. Even after the walk had ended, the Penn land grab continued. Rather than draw a straight line from start to finish and then a right angle to the river, surveyors were instructed by Logan to set the borders of the walk in a zigzag course that followed the flow of the Delaware. As a result, another 750,000 acres were acquired from the Lenni Lenape. During the months that followed, Nutimus and his tribe complained bitterly about the devious tactics employed by provincial officials. However, the Lenni Lenape had few alternatives to accepting the results. With Walking Purchase completed, the new land was soon opened to Pennsylvania settlers and the Lenni Lenape relegated to diminished status among Native American tribes living in the colony. See also: Iroquois Confederacy; Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting. Paul E. Doutrich Sources for Further Study Jennings, Francis. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Offers a detailed explanation of the duplicitous tactics used by Pennsylvania officials to acquire the Walking Purchase acreage. Kelley, Joseph J., Jr. Pennsylvania: The Colonial Years, 1681-1776. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980. Describes the Walking Purchase and many other episodes in Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Thomas, David Hurst, et al. The Native Americans: An Illustrated History. Atlanta, Ga.: Turner Publishing, 1993. A colorful history that includes a concise accounting of the purchase. Tolles, Frederick B. James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1957. Details the life and career of James Logan, including his role in the Walking Purchase. Wallace, Paul A. W. Indians in Pennsylvania. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1981. Survey of Native Americans, including a general description of the Walking Purchase.
Walla Walla Council Date: May 24-June 11, 1855 Locale: Mill Creek, Walla Walla, Washington
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Tribes involved: Cayuse, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Yakima Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Nineteenth century history, Treaties Significance: The resulting treaty drastically reduced the area of Indian lands, marking the end of a centuries-old era and forcing Native Americans to make a radical adjustment to white civilization. The westward migration of settlers and immigrants reached the Northwest by the mid-1800’s. In 1848 about five thousand immigrants and one thousand wagons arrived in Oregon, more than the combined population of the Nez Perce, Cayuse, and Walla Walla tribes. In 1855 Isaac Stevens, governor and superintendent of Indian affairs of the Washington Territory, took steps to implement treaties with the Indians to acquire their land (to provide room for white settlers) and preclude hostilities with the increasingly anxious and angry Indians. He also sought to clear the way for a northern route for the Pacific Railroad. The resulting council was one of the largest tribal gatherings in the United States. Negotiations were carried on in an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and mistrust of the white negotiators, acrimony between factions of Indians, and even an aborted plan by the Cayuse to massacre all the whites. It was not until between June 9 and 11 that three treaties were finally agreed upon and signed by the Indians, under considerable duress and pressure as well as recognition of the inevitable. Under the treaties the Indians ceded about 30,000 square miles of land in eastern Oregon and east-central Washington. In return they were given two reservations and promised up to $200,000 per tribe. Emphasis was placed on “civilizing” the Indians by having the government supply personnel and build mills, shops, schools, and hospitals. The majority of the Nez Perce remained faithful to the treaty. Other tribes, however, felt coerced and betrayed; moreover, they were convinced that whites would never live up to the terms of the treaty. They refused to accept the end of their traditional way of life. Almost immediately turmoil and war began; strife was to continue for more than twenty years before some tribes were finally subdued. See also: Cayuse War; Nez Perce War; Prehistory: Plateau. Laurence Miller
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Washita River Massacre Date: November 27, 1868 Locale: Washita River, Indian Territory Tribes involved: Cheyenne Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: A decisive step in opening the Indian Territory to white settlement. At dawn on November 27, l868, troops of the Seventh Regiment of the United States Cavalry, led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, attacked and massacred a Cheyenne village on the banks of the Washita River in the Indian Territory. In this village of fifty-one lodges were some of the survivors of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, including the great Cheyenne chieftain Black Kettle. Custer, having set out on an Indianhunting expedition and following what he thought was the trail of a large war party, had found the village, located on the south side of the river and surrounded by thick woods. Custer divided his force of seven hundred men into four groups; under cover of darkness, on the night of November 26, he positioned them to the north, south, east, and west of the village. All through the bitterly cold and snowy night, the soldiers waited in absolute silence, without fires, for Custer’s signal to attack. Troops G, H, and M, under Major Joel Elliott, were deployed to the north, while troops B and F were south of the village. Troops E and I were down the Washita River, to the right of Elliott’s command. Custer, with the regimental band, the color guard, a special sharpshooter company, all the scouts, and troops A, C, D, and K, waited in the center. Just before dawn, the soldiers crept closer to the village and, at first light, swept down upon the sleeping Cheyennes to the accompaniment of the strains of “Garry Owen,” the theme song of the Seventh Cavalry. Custer, on his black stallion, charged through the village and onto a knoll south, from where he watched the fighting. As the Cheyennes ran from their lodges, they were cut down by gunfire or saber, with no quarter given and no distinction made between men, women, or children. Chief Black Kettle and his wife were both shot as they attempted to escape on his pony. Caught entirely by surprise and with few weapons other than bows and arrows, the Cheyennes’ only hope was flight—but most were killed by the sharpshooters positioned among the trees. Some did escape by plunging into the icy waters and making their way down the river channel to the Arapaho village of Chief Little Raven. Within a short time, the village fell to
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the soldiers, who set about killing or capturing those Cheyennes who had taken up defensive positions in the woods. About 10:00 a.m., Custer noticed that warriors were beginning to gather atop the neighboring hills and, looking for an explanation, questioned one of the female captives. He learned that Black Kettle’s village was not the only one on the banks of the Washita River, as he had thought, but was one of many Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa villages in the area. Shortly after, an officer who had been supervising the roundup of Cheyenne ponies reported that he had seen a very large Arapaho village downriver. Even so, Custer directed his troops to gather up the spoils of war, which included saddles, buffalo robes, bows and arrows, hatchets, spears, a few revolvers and rifles, all the winter supply of food, most of the Cheyennes’ clothing, and all of their lodges. After making an inventory and choosing some personal souvenirs, including one of the lodges, Custer had all the rest burned. Almost nine hundred of the Cheyennes’ horses and mules had now been rounded up. Custer gave the best horses to his officers and scouts, provided mounts for the female captives, then ordered four companies of his men to
At dawn on November 27, 1868, U.S. troops led by George Armstrong Custer attacked and massacred a Cheyenne village on the banks of the Washita River in the Indian Territory. Some felt the Washita action was justified because of raids by Cheyenne warriors on white settlements; others insisted that an entire tribe should not be punished for the acts of a few and noted the United States’ failure to meet its obligations under the 1867 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty. In either case, the massacre marked an escalation in violence as a method of removing Indians to clear the way for white settlement of the Great Plains. (Library of Congress)
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slaughter the rest of the animals. He had no intention of leaving the horses behind for the warriors and reasoned that taking them along when he left the area would surely provoke attempts by the Cheyennes to recapture them. In the late afternoon, Custer was informed that Major Elliott, with seventeen men, had chased a small band of fleeing Cheyennes down the river and had not returned. Custer sent out a search party, but no trace of the missing men was found. Custer then called off the search—a decision that added to the growing resentment and anti-Custer sentiments among some of his officers. As night approached, Custer realized his command was in a precarious position. Besides being burdened with prisoners and their own wounded, his troops were cold and hungry, their mounts were exhausted, and warriors from the other villages had gathered in the surrounding hills. Thus unprepared for further battle, Custer knew that he could not simply retreat toward his supply train, left behind at a safe distance from the fighting, without alerting the warriors to its location and risking that they would reach it first. The stratagem he devised was to convince them that he was advancing downriver to attack again; at the head of his regiment, with band playing, he traveled east until darkness fell. Seeing this, the warriors hurried back to protect their villages, leaving only a few scouts behind. Custer then reversed back to the battlefield and up the Washita Valley, finally stopping at 2:00 a.m. to camp for the night. The next day, the troops rejoined the supply train and two days later reached Camp Supply, the fort from which Custer had started and at which General Philip Sheridan waited for news of the expedition. Custer’s Report. In his official report of the Washita action, Custer stated that 103 Cheyennes had been killed and 53 women and children, some of them wounded, had been taken prisoner. Among the dead were two Cheyenne chieftains, Black Kettle and Little Rock. During the fighting in the village, one officer and three enlisted men of the Seventh Cavalry had been killed. Custer also reported the deaths of Major Elliott and his seventeen men, although at the time he had no actual knowledge of their fate. Their bodies were discovered in the woods by a later expedition. Opinions differ as to whether Custer’s attack upon the Cheyenne was simply another unprovoked massacre such as that at Sand Creek four years earlier. General William T. Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer, among others, believed that the Washita action was justified because of Cheyenne raids on white settlements along the Saline and Solomon Rivers in Kansas in August, 1868. During a three-day rampage, two hundred Cheyenne warriors had committed murder and rape and abducted women and children.
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When Black Kettle and two chiefs of the Arapaho had arrived at Fort Cobb in mid-November, seeking sanctuary and subsistence for their people under the terms of the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, they had been refused because General Sheridan now considered both tribes to be hostile after the recent raids. They were told to leave the Indian Territory and warned that troops were in the field. On the other hand, Indian agent Edward Wynkoop and others insisted that an entire tribe should not be punished for the acts of a few. They further argued that the promises made at Medicine Lodge had led the Cheyenne and Arapaho to expect fair treatment at Fort Cobb, which had not been forthcoming. Furthermore, it has since been established that the trail Custer followed, which he later claimed was that of a Cheyenne war party, actually had been made by Kiowas returning from a raid against the Utes in Colorado. To place the Washita Massacre in historical perspective, scholars point out that the United States Army had failed to subdue the plains tribes in battle on the prairie, and efforts to achieve peace through treaty had been largely unsuccessful. Thus, the invasion of the Indian Territory, of which the Washita Massacre was a decisive first step, represented a change of tactics in the United States government’s efforts to achieve its ultimate goal: the removal of the plains tribes as an obstacle to white settlement of the Great Plains. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1831-1870; Little Bighorn, Battle of the; Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty; Sand Creek Massacre. LouAnn Faris Culley Sources for Further Study Barnitz, Albert Trovillo Siders, and Jennie Barnitz. Life in Custer’s Cavalry, Diaries and Letters of Albert and Jennie Barnitz, 1867-1868. Edited by Robert M. Utley. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, l977. An account of the massacre completed from the writings of one of Custer’s troop commanders and his wife. Brady, Cyrus. Indian Fights and Fighters. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, l971. A narrative of the Plains wars, including the Washita Massacre. Includes many eyewitness accounts not available elsewhere. Brill, Charles. Conquest of the Southern Plains. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1975. A fully illustrated account of all events related to the massacre, with the texts of both Sheridan’s and Custer’s reports. Custer, George Armstrong. My Life on the Plains. London: The Folio Society, l963. Contains Custer’s account of the events before, during, and after the Washita Massacre.
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Hoig, Stan. The Battle of the Washita. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, l976. A thoroughly documented account of the Sheridan-Custer campaign. Maps and photographs.
West Indian uprisings Date: 1495-c. 1510 Locale: Hispaniola, Greater Antilles Tribes involved: Taino Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: Spanish policy of coopting native West Indians ultimately resulted in rebellion. The island of Hispaniola (today, the two independent states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was the key site of the Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1492. Historians have not only Columbus’s own account of contacts with the native inhabitants of the Caribbean islands but also a number of descriptions by other explorers and missionaries who soon came to these early outposts in the Western Hemisphere. These accounts tended from the outset to distinguish two West Indian subgroups: Caribs and Arawaks. This conventional dualistic view gradually was reworked as ethnohistorians came to reserve the ethnolinguistic term “Arawak” for mainland populations, using the term “Taino” to refer to island groupings, including the native population of Hispaniola. The westernmost Tainos on Cuba and Jamaica appear to have been the most peaceful, both in their relations with other Taino groupings and in their reaction to the first Spaniards. Ciguayan and Borinquen Tainos of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico had a pre-Columbian tradition of warring, mainly against aggressive raids from groupings now known archaeologically as Island Caribs (from the Lesser Antilles, mainly Guadeloupe). They were, however, relatively receptive in the first ten years after 1492 to trying to adapt to Spanish colonial presence. It was among the eastern Tainos on the Virgin Islands that the Spaniards encountered the first signs of open hostility to their presence. After clashes with otherwise unidentifiable natives on St. Croix, whom Columbus called Caribs, a number of negative observations began to enter Spanish accounts, including presumed acts of cannibalism and enslavement of women captives (later identified as a ceremonial bride-capture tradition).
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These early violent encounters with eastern Tainos stemmed more from the natives’ fear of strangers than from a considered reaction against Spanish plans for colonization. However, by the time Columbus became Hispaniola’s first governor, a policy had been defined that called for direct methods of colonial control, including the encomienda system. The latter involved forced attachment of native laborers to Spanish colonial economic ventures, both in agriculture and in mining. By 1495, when the first West Indian revolt against the Spaniards broke out, the long-term movement of all of Hispaniola’s Tainos toward extinction had entered its first stage. Historians have noted that the native population of Hispaniola declined most dramatically by the first decade of the sixteenth century, mainly because of a lack of immunological resistance to diseases brought by the Spaniards. Scores of thousands died from infectious diseases, others from the overwork and undernourishment associated with the notorious encomienda system. A surprising number, however, fell victim to violent repression of resistance movements led by their tribal chiefs. First Uprisings. Between 1495 and 1500, there were at least two armed uprisings against Spanish control. Each of these (that of Caonabo, in 1495, and that of Guarionex, in 1498) was headed by a native tribal head, or cacique, who had been able to retain his leadership (in Caonabo’s case, as head of a chiefdom west and south of the island’s central mountains; in Guarionex’s case, local leadership in Magua, near the gold fields north of the mountains) by at first agreeing to cooperate with the main lines of Spanish colonial policy, including the encomienda. Especially after the appointment of Governor Nicolás de Ovando in 1502, however, the situation became worse, and Spanish excesses were bound to cause an escalation of violence. A final royal note to Ovando, dated in September, 1501, authorized Spaniards to take natives into labor service “in order to get gold and do . . . other labors that we order to have done,” probably presuming that reasonable wages would be paid for work carried out. In fact, this was the beginning of forced labor that reduced many natives to the status of slaves. The excessive actions of Ovando against any sign of the caciques‘ discontent with Spanish control set a pattern of violent conflict that took a high toll, especially among the native leadership. Much of the discontent after 1502 came from the sudden dramatic increase in the numbers of Spaniards on Hispaniola. Ovando had arrived with a contingent of about twenty-five hundred persons, including not only soldiers, missionaries (among them the later famous author of the History of the Indies, Father Bartolomé de Las
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Casas), and administrators, but also private settlers, more than tripling the Spanish population of the previous decade. This increased settler population was certain to demand more native forced labor under the encomienda system. The village chiefdom of Higüey, on the eastern tip of Hispaniola, was the first site of what became major clashes between Spanish troops and what seemed to be rebelling elements of the local population. Governor Ovando’s decision in 1502 to kill seven hundred Higüey Indians who had reacted violently to the killing of one of their chiefs by a Spanish dog was followed a year later by a wholesale massacre, in the western province of Xaragua (the former territory of Caonabo, the 1495 rebel leader), of some eighty district chiefs. In the 1503 massacre, Caonabo’s widow, Anacaona, assembled the chiefs to meet Ovando’s party. While the Spanish murdered the subchieftains brutally in a mass slaughter, Ovando’s “respect” for Anacaona compelled him to end her life by hanging. The future conquistador of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, at that time Ovando’s deputy commander, followed up the massacre by systematic conquest of the entire western half of Hispaniola. Broken Spanish Promises. From 1503 forward, it became obvious that no previously offered Spanish promises to recognize the local ruling authority of caciques in any part of Hispaniola would hold. In 1504, some local chieftains, such as Agüeybana in the Higüey region, began trying to organize serious resistance forces before the Spanish dared to carry out added systematic removals or massacres of the remaining caciques. Despite the fact that Agüeybana’s revolt was joined by diverse tribal elements, including groups the Spanish called Caribs, from the Lesser Antilles (more likely Eastern Tainos, not the traditional island Carib enemies of Hispaniola’s shores), it was brutally repressed. Agüeybana’s execution impelled any remaining potential leaders to leave Hispaniola, or at least to take refuge in the more remote eastern Taino region. Five years after the bloody events in the western region of Xaragua, and shortly after the failure of Agüeybana’s abortive efforts in the east, Chief Guarocuya, Anacaona’s nephew, tried in 1509 to go into hiding in the island’s mountain region of Baonuco. When local troops condemned this act as rebellion, the commanding authorities hunted him down and killed him. More out of fear than in active resistance, the neighboring provinces of Guahaba and Hanyguayaba rebelled, and immediately suffered violent repression by the hand of Diego Velázquez. With such harsh actions, the short and uneasy period of cooperation between the Spanish and the native West Indians was over. As the native pop-
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ulation died off under the overwhelming odds of disease, the process of importing African slave laborers began. They became the ancestors of most of today’s West Indian population—the inevitable consequence of this breakdown of the encomienda system. See also: Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial. Byron D. Cannon Sources for Further Study Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 14921797. New York: Methuen, 1986. Covers a longer time period than other listings here. Focuses on literary and anthropological approaches to understanding the psychological distances separating the colonial and colonized populations of the Caribbean. Keegan, William F., ed. Earliest Hispanic/Native American Interactions in the Caribbean. New York: Garland, 1991. A series of specialized studies of both Spanish and native Indian institutions, including methods of agriculture and local administration, before and during the Ovando governorate. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. History of the Indies. Edited and translated by Andrée Collard. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. A partial translation of the massive work (three volumes in the Spanish edition) of the Spanish missionary who, after coming to Hispaniola with Governor Ovando, turned critical of Ovando’s repressive policies. Rouse, Irving. The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Contains the most extensive coverage of the distant past of the native West Indian population, with a concluding chapter on their short history of contacts with Europeans before dying out. Tyler, S. Lyman. Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European, 14921509. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988. Provides the most concise history of the circumstances of West Indian revolts and repression in this period.
White Paper of Canada Date: Proposed 1969, withdrawn 1970 Locale: Canada Tribes involved: Pantribal in Canada
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Categories: National government and legislation, Native government, Twentieth century history Significance: This proposal by the Canadian government to revamp its relationships with, and obligations to, Native Canadians met with the near-unanimous disapproval of native groups. By the late 1960’s, it had long been recognized that Native Canadians had failed to share socially and economically in the general prosperity that followed World War II. They were frequently the victims of discrimination and lacked access to the economic, educational, medical, and social benefits available to the majority of Canadians. These issues were frequently lumped together in the popular media and by government bureaucrats as the “Indian problem.” The White Paper of 1969 was a policy statement and plan issued by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to resolve the problem. Running on the campaign slogan “The Just Society,” Trudeau led the Liberal Party to victory in the Canadian national elections in June of 1968. The slogan signified a social consciousness that had been growing among the Canadian populace throughout the 1960’s. The White Paper was part of a general attempt by Trudeau and his ministers, following that election, to review and reorder all Canadian social and economic policy. Trudeau and his followers firmly believed that the special status granted to natives by the Indian Act was at least partly to blame for the discrimination against them. According to the White Paper, The separate legal status of Indians and the policies which have flowed from it have kept the Indian people apart from and behind other. . . . The treatment resulting from their different status has been often worse, sometimes equal and occasionally better than that accorded to their fellow citizens. What matters is that it has been different.
The White Paper recommended the repeal of the Indian Act, the dissolution of the Indian Division of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), and the transfer to the provinces of all responsibility for the delivery of social services to natives. In order to gain native approval of its proposals, the government facilitated and funded the formation of a variety of native political organizations. The most prominent of these was the National Indian Brotherhood, which later became the Assembly of First Nations. Much to the surprise of the Trudeau government, these native political organizations were nearly unanimous in their rejection of the White Paper proposal. Their objections were many but hinged primarily on the failure of the Trudeau government
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to recognize native claims of aboriginal rights and sovereignty. These, they believed, would require the acceptance of long-ignored treaty obligations and the settlement of land claims. Faced with such outspoken and vocal opposition, the Trudeau government withdrew the White Paper in 1970 but continued in various other says to disavow the notion of distinct rights for natives and other cultural minorities. It was later to acknowledge a measure of “existing aboriginal and treaty rights” via the 1982 Constitution Act. Subsequent governments, while implementing some of the White Paper proposals (specifically the transfer of responsibility for social services to the provinces), have also negotiated land claims and aboriginal rights agreements with a number of native political entities. See also: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development; Indian Act of 1876; Indian Act of 1951; Indian Act of 1989; Indian-white relations: Canadian; Treaties and agreements in Canada. Pamela R. Stern
Wild west shows Date: 1883-1914 Locale: United States and Europe Tribes involved: Sioux, other Plains tribes Categories: Nineteenth century history, Twentieth century history Significance: Wild west shows, in re-creating events from the American frontier days, fixed the image of the American Plains Indian in the minds of European Americans and the world. From 1883 until World War I, hundreds of North American Indians— primarily from the Great Plains—took part in a variety of wild west shows that traveled throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Buffalo Bill Cody staged the first one in 1883, and it was immediately joined by many imitators. “Wild wests,” usually held outdoors in big arenas, were an entertaining combination of rodeo, circus, and stage play. Their intent was to present “a living picture of life on the frontier,” as one poster explained. In addition to trick riders, sharpshooters, and cowboy bands, these shows featured reenactments of famous events from the recent Plains Indian wars, even recruiting as performers some of the Indian people who had
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An 1899 poster advertising Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. (Library of Congress)
participated in the battles and events being portrayed. Many famous Indians of the day who were highly regarded by their own people as warriors, holy men, and wise men took part in these shows. Notable wild west participants included men who not many years before were considered to be “hostiles”—men such as Bull, Red Cloud, American Horse, Chief Joseph, Geronimo, and Rain in the Face. Many of the Indians who took part in the shows had already begun to gain notoriety as outspoken critics of federal Indian policy and were able to use the shows for public-relations purposes. Government policy of the time sought to assimilate Indians into mainstream society, reduce their land base, and erase many customs and traditions. Humanitarian Christian reformers and others who believed that Indians should shed their past and accept the civilization of whites vehemently opposed Indian participation in these shows, fearing that they glorified the warrior days and would thereby delay acceptance of the federal government’s assimilationist policies. Wild west shows, which emphasized Plains Indian lifeways, were thus attractive to many Indians because they placed a value on the older way of life and became a natural forum from which to speak out on Indian issues. Reservation life was difficult in the 1880’s and 1890’s, and the federal government sought to suppress most traditional cultural and religious expression. Now, suddenly, newspapers were carrying interviews with the Indian performers as they met and spoke with politicians, kings, queens, and presidents. Although Indian policy did not change drastically, an elo-
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quent Indian voice of opposition was heard. The wide popularity of the wild west shows made them influential in more lasting ways, as well. Because most shows recruited their Indian performers from the Sioux reservations, particularly Pine Ridge and Rosebud, the image of the Plains Sioux began to take its place in the popular imagination as the quintessential American Indian. Even though government officials voiced opposition to wild west shows, the secretary of the interior permitted Indians to tour and enforced a number of regulations to protect the performers, following a number of mishaps. Promoters were compelled to pay performers a fair wage for their time and services, usually fifteen to thirty dollars a month for women and twenty-five to ninety dollars a month for men. Additionally, the shows were required to provide all meals, transportation, and medical expenses. At the end of their contracts, all Indians were to be returned to their reservations at the show’s expense. Show owners posted bonds of two to twenty thousand dollars, based on the numbers of Indians employed. Wild west shows continued until World War I. After the war, films replaced wild wests but for the most part adhered to the image of the Indian the shows had created. The wild west shows were a fascinating chapter in white-Indian relations and contributed many potent symbols that are still prominent in American legend. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1934-2002; Wounded Knee Massacre. Carole A. Barrett
Winnebago Uprising Date: June 26-September 27, 1827 Locale: Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin Tribes involved: Winnebago Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: This uprising against white settlers resulted in the death of several whites, imprisonment and death of the warrior leader Red Bird, and seizure of Winnebago land. A combination of increasing traffic on the Mississippi River and a leadmining rush in 1821 brought thousands of miners and settlers from the east to Winnebago territory, and hostile incidents and confrontations between
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whites and Indians began almost immediately. They culminated in June of 1827, when two Winnebagos were arrested for murdering a white family. A false rumor circulated that the two Indians had been turned over to the Chippewa, hated enemies of the Winnebago, and beaten to death by them. Responding to this rumor, Red Bird, a warrior, was asked by tribal leaders to retaliate against the whites. On June 26, 1827, two men and a child were killed. Three days later two crewmen on keelboats were killed, and four wounded. The government threatened severe reprisals. On September 27, Red Bird surrendered to save his tribe and the Red Bird War or Winnebago Uprising ended. Red Bird died in prison shortly thereafter, and the government used the uprising as a pretext to seize the Winnebagos’ lead-mining lands. See also: Black Hawk War. Laurence Miller
Winters v. United States Date: 1908 Locale: Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana Tribes involved: Gros Ventre, Assiniboine Categories: Court cases, Nineteenth century history, Reservations and relocation, Twentieth century history Significance: The Supreme Court established the reserved water rights doctrine through the Winters decision, where it ruled that water bordering and running though reservations belongs to tribes, not states. In the late nineteenth century, non-Indian farmers in Montana began irrigating farms with water from the Milk River. Twenty years later, Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Indians on the Fort Belknap Reservation began farming operations on its lands near the Milk River. Non-Indian farmers claimed prior appropriation—that they used the water first—so they built dams and reservoirs to prevent tribal use of the water. The tribes appealed to federal court, saying that when they negotiated for their reservation they also had negotiated for rights to the water. Ultimately, the Supreme Court agreed with the tribes and clarified that reservation lands were not given to tribes by the federal government but were lands reserved by the tribes from lands ceded to the United States, and further, that the tribes have rights to
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water on or near their reservations. Other court cases made it clear that as needs for water change, tribes will continue to have access to adequate water supplies. This reserved water rights doctrine is controversial because it affects western states’ access to water and puts tribal needs ahead of the needs of states. Carole A. Barrett See also: Reservation system of the United States; United States v. Washington.
Wolf Mountains, Battle of Date: January 1-8, 1877 Locale: Wolf Mountains, Montana Tribes involved: Cheyenne, Oglala Sioux Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: This battle, the last fight between the U.S. Army and the Cheyenne and Sioux, ended in stalemate but sufficiently weakened the Indians that they sought peace shortly thereafter. After the U.S. Army’s resounding defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June, 1876, the United States redoubled its resolve to defeat the Indians. The Powder River expedition, under the command of General George Crook and Colonel Nelson A. Miles, soundly defeated the Cheyenne in the Wolf Mountains on November 6, 1876. The survivors joined the Oglala Sioux camp under Crazy Horse. In a series of skirmishes and running battles on January 1, 3, and 7, and a five-hour battle on January 8, 1877, in the Wolf Mountains, Miles was able to drive the Indians out. He was then stopped by fatigue and a shortage of supplies, but the damage to the Indians was already done. Their weakened condition, lack of food, and increasing desire for peace led to negotiations. On May 6, 1877, Crazy Horse and his followers surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency, essentially marking the end of the Plains Indians wars. See also: Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868; Little Bighorn, Battle of the; Rosebud Creek, Battle of; Sioux War. Laurence Miller
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Women of All Red Nations Date: Established 1978 Locale: United States Tribes involved: Pantribal in the United States Categories: Organizations, Twentieth century history Significance: WARN works for autonomy among Native American individuals and communities in areas of health care, legal issues, and economic matters. Women of All Red Nations (WARN) exists for the purpose of achieving autonomy for Native Americans, whatever their tribal affiliation. This Rosebud, South Dakota, association works to establish local chapters across the country. Many issues of importance to Native Americans fall within the focus of WARN activities. Health care, in particular women’s health matters and the misuse of sterilization practices on Indian women, is the group’s main concern. Other problems that WARN addresses include children’s foster care, adoption, political imprisonment, and juvenile justice. Inequities resulting from abuses of energy resources development on Indian-owned land is another concern. Since WARN is a grassroots organization, its efforts also include community education. Its focus is on self-reliance, whether it be for the individual or the local group affiliation. WARN also encourages Native American women to seek positions of leadership, both in and out of governments. WARN issues publications regarding health problems of Native American women and conducts an annual conference. See also: American Indian Movement; American Indian Religious Freedom Act; Indian Child Welfare Act; Indian Claims Commission; Longest Walk. Ruffin Stirling
World wars Date: 1914-1918, 1939-1945 Locale: Canada, United States Tribes involved: Pantribal Categories: Wars and battles
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Significance: The world wars, especially World War II, caused many North American Indians to have significant, and generally positive, contact with mainstream society; however, this contact led to national policies in Canada and the United states that sought to dissolve the Indian land base and force assimilation. World War I. In both Canada and the United States, World War I brought changes in the Indian relationship with their respective governments, and there was pressure in both countries to increase production in agriculture, stock-raising, and timber resources. In the United States, more Indian lands were approved for sale or lease to non-Indians, creating a gradual loss of tribal lands. In Canada, the Indian Act was amended to permit Indian lands to be put into production without band approval, and once this occurred, the band was forced to provide funds to finance the operation. Despite poverty, native people on both sides of the border raised money for the Red Cross, purchased war bonds, and knitted bandages and other items for the war effort. During the war, some Indian people moved to urban areas to work as shipbuilders or in factories. Indians in both countries were not citizens, so they were not subject to conscription into military service. However, large numbers of native men did join the military. In Canada, Indian men joined at a rate comparable to the non-Indian population, with about 35 percent of the total male Indian population serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Services. In the United States, large numbers enlisted in the military, primarily the Army, and Indians enlisted in greater proportion than any other population. Many Indians on reservations located in the northern United States joined the Canadian military because Canada entered the war against Germany earlier. In both countries, Indian and white soldiers served together in military units, and since the national goal for Indians in Canada and the United States was assimilation, this integration of troops was viewed as an opportunity for Indians to learn the white man’s ways. While in the military, Canadian Indians were permitted to vote; however, this right was rescinded at the end of the war as were other rights and veterans’ benefits. In the United States, in gratitude for service, any Indian honorably discharged from the military was granted citizenship through an Act of Congress on November 6, 1919. American citizenship in no way abridged rights as a tribal member. In 1924, the United States Congress extended citizenship to all Indians, partially in return for patriotism demonstrated by all Native people during World War I. World War II. In World War II, Indians in Canada and the United States were subject to military service because they had, by now, become citizens.
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Large numbers joined the military voluntarily in any case. Again, some Indians on northern reservations in the United States entered the Canadian military, because that country declared war before the United States. In the United States, over twenty-five thousand men joined the military and over two hundred women joined the WACS or WAVES. Unlike their Japanese and African American counterparts, Indians served in integrated units. There were a few all-Navajo training units for Indians who did not speak English, but once they learned the language, they joined white units. Tribes with strong warrior traditions volunteered in disproportionate numbers, and in the Northern Plains some Indian men brought their own rifles to induction stations. On all the reservations there was a great deal of enthusiasm and pride in the young men and women who volunteered for military service. It was common for family members or the tribal community to honor the new recruits by sponsoring a feast and having old men talk about the tribal traditions of warfare. On some Northern Plains reservations, old men who had participated in battles against the United States military in their youth recounted their deeds as a way to inspire this new generation of warriors. When these young men returned from the war, they were expected to recite their own exploits in order to carry forth the tribal warrior traditions. During the war, the media in both Canada and the United States carried many stories about Indian soldiers in World War II, and almost universally, the men were praised for natural fighting instincts, endurance, and ferocity. Additionally, many articles praised the Indian soldiers for their loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for their countries. More than once, Indians were proclaimed to be the perfect soldier. Partly as a result of these stereotypes, InThree reservists with the U.S. Marine Corps dians were assigned as scouts, during World War II (left to right): Minnie Spotted Wolf (Blackfoot), Celia Mix (Potawa- fought on the front lines, and tomi), and Viola Eastman (Chippewa). (Na- generally saw a good deal of combat action. Comanche, Sac tional Archives)
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In 1943 Ira Hayes, a Pima, was a paratrooper with the U.S. Marine Corps. He was one of four Marines who appeared in the famous photograph that shows them raising the U.S. flag over Iwo Jima. (National Archives)
and Fox, and most notably Navajo men were pressed into duty as code talkers in the Army and Marine signal corps. They used tribal languages to develop codes and communicate between units, and the enemy could not penetrate their coded messages. On the reservations, there was a great deal of support for the war effort. More tribal lands were put into production to raise crops for food. Reservation resources were made available to the federal government, and some reservation lands were turned into gunnery or bombing ranges. Tribal councils, as well as individual Indians, purchased war bonds and donated sums of money to the war effort. Indian youth in boarding and day schools contributed money and time to doing projects for the Red Cross. Due to the war and resulting personnel and monetary shortages, the United States government significantly cut back medical, educational, and other services on reservations. Thousands of Indians in Canada and the United States left their reservations for wartime jobs in urban areas. For the first time, large numbers of Indians came into contact with white society.
Impact of Wartime. World War II was a significant event in modern American Indian life. Indian servicemen enjoyed respect and freedom of association in the military, a contrast to the discrimination they often faced at home. Also, those Indians who moved to urban areas to work enjoyed a higher standard of living, and for the first time, large numbers of In-
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dian children attended public schools. In urban areas, as in the military, Indian people generally found acceptance. As a result, some Native Americans decided to reside permanently in urban areas. Canadian and American federal policies had always sought the assimilation of Indians as individuals into mainstream society. As a result, after World War II there was much talk of “freeing” or “emancipating” all Indians from the segregated environment of the reservations through the withdrawal or termination of federal obligations. In the United States, there were efforts to settle outstanding land claims through the Indian Claims Commission (1946) and then to terminate the federal relationship with tribes. A good deal of public attention was directed at ways to solve the so-called Indian problems in the United States. Conservatives supported the pullout of federal services as beneficial because it would mean less government regulation and interference, while liberals supported pullouts as a way to promote democratic ideals. Both groups sought to end the reservation system. From the Indian perspective, their reservations were homelands, not the outdoor prisons politicians described them as being. Tribal people on both sides of the border sought to preserve their aboriginal homelands because they were absolutely necessary to cultural survival and integrity as a people. Nonetheless, assimilationist policies prevailed throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, and there was steady erosion of tribal sovereignty, tribal land bases, and continuous attempts to dissolve the reservation system. However, as a result of service in World War II and full participation in the war effort, American Indians increasingly demanded a voice in their own affairs. They began to assert their rights under treaties, organize politically, and take advantage of greater opportunities for higher education, and in the end, they were able to guide development of new national policies of self-determination. Carole A. Barrett Sources for Further Study Bernstein, Alison R. American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Documents Indian participation in the war and the ongoing struggle for tribal sovereignty and self-determination. Dempsey, James. “Problems of Western Canadian Indian War Veterans after World War I.” Native Studies Review 5, no. 2 (1989): 1-18. Canadian Indian war veterans did not receive the same benefits as non-Indians, lost their right to vote, and were even encouraged to pursue hunting and trapping as a livelihood after the war.
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Hauptman, Laurence M. The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986. Provides a case study of Iroquois participation in World War II and analyzes the quest for tribal rights after the war. Nash, Gerald D. The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988. American Indian tribal life, always intimately connected to national trends and policies, underwent profound changes because American life, especially in the West, altered after the war. See also: Code talkers; Indian Act of 1951; Indian Citizenship Act; Indian Claims Commission; Indian New Deal; Termination Resolution.
Wounded Knee Massacre Date: December 29, 1890 Locale: Wounded Knee Creek, twenty miles east of Pine Ridge, South Dakota Tribes involved: Sioux Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: The last Indian war heralds the close of the American frontier and the end of traditional life for Native Americans. The Battle of Wounded Knee, on December 29, 1890, was preceded on December 15 by the slaying of Sitting Bull, the last great Sioux warrior chief. His death resulted from an effort to suppress the Ghost Dance religion, which had been begun by Wovoka. Wovoka’s admixture of American Indian and Christian beliefs inspired hope in an eventual triumph of the American Indians over the white settlers, who, Wovoka envisioned, would fall through the earth and disappear forever. Although Wovoka preached passivity and patience, some of his zealous disciples carried a slightly more aggressive message, among them a Minneconjou Sioux named Kicking Bear and his brother-in-law, Short Bull. They and other followers of Wovoka introduced the Ghost Dance to the Dakota reservations, including Standing Rock and Pine Ridge. In an effort to suppress Ghost Dancing, James McLaughlin, the government agent in charge of the Standing Rock reservation, first arrested Kicking Bear, then moved against Sitting Bull, an old adversary and, in McLaughlin’s mind, the cynosure of tribal unrest. McLaughlin was con-
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vinced that Ghost Dancing could be suppressed only if Sitting Bull were in prison. He called Sitting Bull a fomenter of disturbances, prompting General Nelson A. Miles, U.S. Army Commander of the Missouri Division, to send Buffalo Bill Cody to Standing Rock to persuade the chief to negotiate with Miles. However, McLaughlin complained to Washington and had Cody’s mission aborted. Death of Sitting Bull. What followed was a fiasco. Forty-three American Indian police, commanded by Lieutenant Bull Head, surrounded Sitting Bull’s cabin and ordered him outside. Sitting Bull obeyed, but one of the assembled Ghost Dancers, angered at the arrest, wounded Bull Head with a rifle. Attempting to hit his assailant, Bull Head accidentally shot Sitting Bull at the same time that another American Indian policeman fired a lethal shot through the old chief’s head. When news of Sitting Bull’s death reached Big Foot, chief of the Minneconjou at Cherry Creek, he decamped his followers and started a journey toward Pine Ridge, hoping to find protection under Chief Red Cloud. His band consisted of 120 men and 230 women and children. Big
The gruesome aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre: innocent victims buried in mass graves. (Library of Congress)
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Foot himself was ill with pneumonia and had to make the journey in a wagon. On December 28, near Porcupine Creek, the natives encountered troops of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry under the command of Major Samuel Whitside. Although near death, Big Foot arranged a meeting with Whitside, who informed the chief that his orders were to escort the American Indians to Wounded Knee Creek. Big Foot agreed to comply with the major’s directions, because Wounded Knee was on the way to Pine Ridge. Whitside then had his men move Big Foot to an Army ambulance to make the trip more comfortable. The combined trains reached Wounded Knee Creek before nightfall. Whitside saw to their encampment south of his military bivouac. He provided them with rations, some tents, and a surgeon to tend to Big Foot. He also took measures to ensure that none of the American Indians could escape, posting sentinels and setting up rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns in key positions. During the night, the remaining troops of the Seventh Cavalry arrived, and command of the operation passed from Major Whitside to Colonel James W. Forsyth. The colonel told the junior officer that he had received orders to accompany Big Foot’s bands to the Union Pacific Railroad for transport to a military prison in Omaha. The next morning, after issuing hardtack rations to the Indians, Colonel Forsyth ordered them to turn over their weapons. Soldiers stacked up the surrendered arms and ammunition. Not satisfied that all weapons had been turned in, Forsyth sent details to search the tipis. Then the searchers ordered the natives to remove their blankets, which, the soldiers assumed, masked some hidden weapons. The situation grew tense. The Indians were both humiliated and angry, but they were badly outnumbered and almost all of them had been disarmed. Only the Minneconjou medicine man, Yellow Bird, openly protested. He began Ghost Dance steps and chanted lines from the holy songs that assured the Indians that their Ghost Shirts would not let the soldiers’ bullets strike them. The soldiers found only two rifles during the last search, but one of them belonged to a deaf Sioux brave named Black Coyote, who resisted. Soldiers grabbed him and spun him around, attempting to disarm him, and at that point Black Coyote fired his Winchester, probably by accident. A debacle followed. The soldiers opened fire on the unarmed Minneconjou at once, slaughtering many of them with repeated volleys from their carbines. Most of the Indians tried to flee, but the Hotchkiss guns opened up on them from their hillside positions. Firing almost a round a second, the soldiers’ shots tore
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into the camp, indiscriminately killing braves, women, and children. The Hotchkiss guns turned the rout into a massacre. Slaughter of Indians. When it was over, Big Foot and more than half of his followers were either dead or seriously wounded. One hundred fifty-three lay dead on the ground, but many of the fatally wounded had crawled off to die elsewhere. One estimate claimed that there were barely more than fifty native survivors, only those transported after the massacre. Only twenty-five soldiers were killed, most of them having fallen to friendly fire, not to the Indians. After the wounded troopers were decamped and sent off toward Pine Ridge, a detail of soldiers rounded up the surviving Indians: four men and forty-seven women and children. Placed in wagons, they also set out for Pine Ridge, leaving their dead to a blizzard that prevented their immediate burial and froze them into grotesque, hoary reminders of the debacle. An inquiry followed the events at Wounded Knee, prompted by General Miles, who brought charges against Forsyth, but the colonel was exonerated and nothing else came of the investigation. The affair traditionally has been viewed as the last resistance of the Indians to reservation resettlement. It and the death of Sitting Bull, both in 1890, although not singled out, were certainly factors in the conclusions of Frederick Jackson Turner, who claimed in his renowned 1893 thesis that the U.S. frontier had closed in the year of the massacre. For American Indians, however, the infamous day did not die with the victims. On February 27, 1973, more than two hundred members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) took the reservation site at Wounded Knee by force, proclaiming it the Independent Oglala Sioux Nation and demanding that the federal government make amends for past injustices by reviewing all American Indian treaties and policies. Federal marshals immediately surrounded the group and after two months, coaxed them to surrender with promises of an airing of grievances. For American Indians, Wounded Knee has remained an important symbol of the Euro-American injustice and suppression of their people. See also: Indian-white relations: U.S., 1871-1933; Wounded Knee occupation. John W. Fiero Sources for Further Study Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. A very readable, popular account of the displacement and oppression of the American
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Indian nations by European settlers, from the beginning to 1890. Includes a helpful but dated bibliography. Gonzalez, Mario, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. An account of the Wounded Knee Survivors’ Association to obtain formal apology from the U.S. government for the massacre and to name the site a National American Monument. Jensen, Richard E., R. Eli Paul, and John E. Carter. Eyewitness at Wounded Knee. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Fine collection of photographs from the Wounded Knee battlefield and related sites, with essays on the American Indian perspective, the Army’s role, and the distorted media coverage. Klein, Christina.“‘Everything of Interest in the Late Pine Ridge War Are Held by Us for Sale’: Popular Culture and Wounded Knee.” Western Historical Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1994): 45-68. Argues that commercial exploitation of Wounded Knee in Cody’s Wild West show, photographs, and the dime novel played as significant a role as the military in defeating the Ghost Dancers’ dreams of American Indian autonomy. Includes photographs. Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. 1932. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. This classic work chronicles the spiritual odyssey of Black Elk, a holy man of the Oglala Sioux. Provides important insight into American Indian beliefs and an account of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Utley, Robert M. Last Days of the Sioux Nation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. A highly regarded, sensitive, evenhanded study that documents the events leading up to Wounded Knee. Contains a chapter on sources, making it invaluable for further study. Voices from Wounded Knee, 1973. Rooseveltown, N.Y.: Akwesasne Notes, 1974. With edited transcripts of interviews, documents the efforts of the Oglala Sioux to gain national sympathy for the plight of the American Indian by their stand at Wounded Knee Creek in 1973. Includes a chronicle of events from 1868 to 1973 and an account of the 1890 massacre.
Wounded Knee occupation Date: February 27-May 8, 1973 Locale: Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota
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Tribes involved: Lakota Sioux, Oglala Sioux Categories: Protest movements, Twentieth century history Significance: Native Americans highlight their grievances against the U.S. government by staging an armed occupation at an old battle site. Internal strife on the Oglala reservation had reached the explosive stage by February, 1973, when the village of Wounded Knee, site of the last massacre of the Indian Wars in 1890, became the focal point for another confrontation between American Indians and U.S. military forces. Tribal unemployment was at 54 percent, not counting those tribe members who lived in cities. Many of those with jobs worked for the government. One-third of the people were on welfare or similar pensions. Median income was around eight hundred dollars per year. Children were malnourished. Poverty, alcoholism, and suicide were widespread, and the average life span for Oglalas was forty-six years of age. In February, 1972, an elderly American Indian had died after a public beating by two white men, who were charged with only second-degree manslaughter and released without paying bail. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was called in to support the family, and a full investigation showed evidence of misdealing in this and other incidents. As AIM’s popularity increased nationally, the positions of Sioux tribal chairman Richard Wilson and other government-employed American Indians were being threatened. Wilson Stirs Controversy. The trouble at Wounded Knee began with the controversy over chairman Wilson, who had a heavy drinking habit, had been identified as a bootlegger, and nearly had been indicted on charges of misuse of federal funds. After his extravagantly funded campaign, Wilson awarded positions to more than nine hundred supporters, including his wife and sons, and had given a twenty-five thousand dollar job to his brother. He claimed that nothing was said in tribal law about nepotism. Wilson used federal highway funds to arm his private police force. Known as the “goon squad” because of their brutality, they called themselves Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOON) and suppressed with beatings or threats anyone who challenged Wilson. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Justice Department gave full support to Wilson when he offered his goon squad’s services to attack members of AIM. Several elder Oglala women had spoken out about Wilson’s incompetence. “[He] hasn’t got the backbone to stand up and protect his Indians,” declared Gladys Bissonnette. Grace Black Elk said, “He hates AIM people
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because they are doing what he should have been doing.” Ellen Moves Camp wondered, “Why is it that the government is backing him up so much?” Wilson had fired the tribal vice president for supporting AIM and had banned AIM leader Russell Means from the reservation, threatening to “personally cut his braids off.” Returning to his Pine Ridge home, Means was immediately arrested by BIA tribal police. Dennis Banks, with Means during the BIA takeover in Washington, D.C., was taken into custody upon his arrival. Both were released pending later trials. Citing suspicion of corruption, tribal members and AIM leaders began impeachment proceedings against Wilson, who illegally terminated the action. Attempts to speak out against this were quelled by further intimidation and violence. AIM Protests. In January, 1973, a young American Indian was stabbed to death by a white man. A riot ensued while AIM leaders were meeting with officials in the courthouse at Calico. In late February, traditional people marched on the Pine Ridge BIA building to protest Wilson’s actions and the illegal presence of U.S. marshals on their reservation. AIM again was summoned by spokesman Chief Fools Crow, and more than six hundred people were at the meeting led by Means and Banks. Lakota mothers pleaded for protection for the children by asking that the fighting spirit return. One by one, the chiefs stood up. The Lakota would gather at the most symbolic spot on the reservation, Wounded Knee, for what was expected to be a two- or three-day stand. A public statement, signed by A poster inviting participation in a demonstraeight Oglala chiefs and medtion sponsored by the American Indian Moveicine men, demanded treaty ment to support the struggle of Native Amerihearings and investigation of cans at Wounded Knee in 1973. (Library of the BIA. Congress)
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The next day, approximately two hundred Oglalas armed with hunting rifles were stationed at Wounded Knee. They were surrounded by the FBI, state police, and U.S. marshals armed with high-powered weapons and riding in armored personnel carriers. They were surrounded by BIA tribal police, while planes and helicopters circled the area. The media soon arrived. Many separate factions were involved at Wounded Knee II: Wilson, his corrupt government, his GOON, and some older leaders in the tribal council who did not condone Wilson’s methods, but were concerned about the possibility of losing federal support; the FBI, the BIA, U.S. marshals, and other government forces—all of whom were waging a war against AIM, the young militants, and the traditional elders who were trying to preserve the old ways. On the third day, Fools Crow had just begun talks with traditionalists, AIM people, and federal authorities, when shots were exchanged. With military planes flying overhead, there was much confusion and many people were injured. In the days and weeks that followed, much occurred at Wounded Knee: People hiked in at night to bring supplies and support; two U.S. senators visited; Wilson threatened to attack with nine hundred men; the Independent Oglala Nation (ION) was created; citizenships were granted; government agents were caught inside the compound; negotiations continued; a blizzard inundated the area; firefights continued; food and fuel ran out; airlifts arrived; medicine men Black Elk and Crow Dog led a Ghost Dance and pipe ceremonies; a wedding was performed by Black Elk; an Iroquois Six Nation delegation arrived; a child was born; the trading post burned; a U.S. marshal was disabled; and two American Indian men died. In spite of ongoing firefights, the leaders had helped to maintain the spiritual bonds of community. Wallace Black Elk or Leonard Crow Dog held prayer ceremonies with the sacred pipe before every meeting. Although Fools Crow went into Wounded Knee thirteen times, he remained neutral and continued to pray for peace throughout the long siege. He guided negotiations and carried in the peace document that finally ended the standoff. More than two hundred Lakotas had begun the occupation and others had joined. Nearly four hundred American Indians were arrested as a result. According to Peter Matthiessen, author of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, the U.S. Army was involved directly in behind-the-scenes operations as “military intelligence, and perhaps weapons and equipment, were provided to civilian authorities, with unofficial approval reportedly coming
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all the way from the White House.” He also cited reports that the FBI requested two thousand soldiers to seize control of the reservation so arrests could be made, but the request was refused. The eight volunteers who had airlifted food and medical supplies were later charged with conspiracy and interfering with the official duties of federal troops. Means and Banks were arrested later, but charges were dismissed because of evidence of perjury by government witnesses. In April, 1975, The New York Times reported that violence resulting from Wounded Knee II had continued. According to an FBI report, six people had been killed and sixty-seven assaulted on the Pine Ridge Reservation since January 1. The fighting spirit of the Lakota had returned. As Black Elk declared, “Now, this is a turning point. The hoop, the sacred hoop, was broken here at Wounded Knee, and it will come back again.” See also: American Indian Movement; Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings; Wounded Knee Massacre. Gale M. Thompson Sources for Further Study Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. 2d ed. New York: Viking Press, 1991. Covers Lakota struggles with the United States, including Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee I and II, and the 1975 Pine Lodge shootout that resulted in Leonard Peltier’s imprisonment. Personal accounts, trial records, chapter notes, index. Sayer, John William. Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. The first book-length study of the trials looks at the influence of media and legal institutions on the way the defendants and their cause were constrained in the presentation of their case. Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1997. A history of AIM focusing on its leadership. Voices from Wounded Knee, 1973: In the Words of the Participants. Rooseveltown, N.Y.: Akwesasne Notes, 1974. Includes daily events during occupation; logs kept by U.S. marshals; quotations, interviews, diaries, and taped radio conversations from a ten-day battle; negotiations; treaty meetings at Kyle; maps and photographs. Waldman, Carl. Atlas of the North American Indian. New York: Facts on File, 1985. Comprehensive coverage of history and culture; land cessions and wars; and contemporary issues. Maps and illustrations; historical chronology; locations of tribes and reservations; place names; museums and archaeological sites in the United States and Canada.
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Zimmerman, Bill. Airlift to Wounded Knee. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976. Chronicle of eight airlift participants who delivered food and medical supplies during the occupation and were subsequently indicted for conspiracy and interfering with official duties of federal troops. Photos, notes, comments by author’s attorney.
Yakima War Date: 1855-1856 Locale: South-central Washington State Tribes involved: Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Yakima Categories: Nineteenth century history, Wars and battles Significance: A gold strike in north-central Washington caused a major influx of European gold seekers to encroach on the isolated territories of the Yakima tribe, leading to the Yakima War. The Yakimas lived in an area that was relatively isolated until the mid-nineteenth century—the Columbia River Valley in south-central Washington. Conditions changed suddenly, however, when a gold strike in north-central Washington created an influx of white gold seekers. In general, relations between Indians and European-descended residents in the Northwest in the 1850’s were characterized by mutual suspicion and dislike, and the latest arrivals made things worse as isolated attacks and retaliations increased. Isaac Stevens, the newly appointed governor of the new Northwest Territory, arrived in Olympia in 1853 to take over his duties. Stevens was determined to persuade all the tribes in the territory to give up their lands and accept being moved to reservations. He ordered his treaty commission secretary, James Doty, to organize a grand treaty council in the Walla Walla area. It was attended by about a thousand Yakimas, including Chief Kamiakin, and members of other area tribes and bands. There was a disagreement among the tribes as to whether to agree to the treaty, but most tribes finally did. Kamiakin was among those leaders who refused. A treaty was signed on June 9, 1855. An Indian agent, Andrew Bolon, was killed by a band of Indians in Yakima country, however, and Major Granville O. Haller was sent to Yakima country from The Dalles. The purpose of his 102man expedition was to avenge Bolon’s death. The first major battle of the Yakima War occurred at the foot of Eel Trail on Toppenish Creek, where Haller and his forces suffered a substantial de-
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feat. Following this skirmish a full-scale war erupted when several tribes joined with the Yakimas in order to drive the European Americans from their country. Major Gabriel Rains was ordered to avenge Haller’s defeat in Yakima country. Rains’s forces pursued the Native Americans to Union Gap (near presentday Yakima). After the Yakimas escaped across the Yakima River, the Union forces proceeded to a nearby Catholic mission and razed it, believing that the mission’s Father Pandum had aided and abetted the Yakimas. During the spring of 1856 the fighting resumed with a Yakima attack at a blockade in the Cascades. Colonel George Wright was in command of the Northwest forces at the time. Wright intensified the campaign against the Yakimas, and a truce was agreed upon in 1856. The volunteers who had participated in the Yakima campaign were dismissed, and with the construction of Fort Simcoe, the U.S. military established control of the Yakima Valley. By September, 1856, Wright’s forces had established control of the area west of the Cascades. Since the original truce was not completely successful, a second Walla Walla Council was organized by Governor Stevens; he demanded unconditional surrender by the Native Americans. In spite of the fact that Chief Kamiakin and other band leaders did not participate, the 1855-1856 Yakima War was essentially terminated at the end of the second Walla Walla Council. See also: Walla Walla Council. Bruce M. Mitchell
Yamasee War Date: 1715-1728 Locale: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina Tribes involved: Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Yamasee Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: This largest Indian war of the eighteenth century American South destroyed the Yamasee as a tribe and significantly changed English-Indian relations in the South. Beginning in the 1680’s, the Yamasee conducted a large amount of trade with the English in South Carolina, trading deerskins and Indian slaves for English guns and rum. After the Tuscarora War of 1711-1713, however, the
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ability of the Yamasee to pay for English goods declined. White settlement on Indian lands had ruined the Yamasee deer hunting grounds. The English victory in the Tuscarora War removed most of the tribes from which the Yamasee abducted their slaves. By the 1710’s, the Yamasee were heavily indebted to Carolina traders. When they could not pay their debts, Carolina traders started to enslave Yamasee women and children as payment. The Yamasee made an alliance with the Creeks and Catawbas, who also had trade grievances with the English, and began a war against South Carolina in April of 1715. The Yamasee and their allies attacked Carolina traders and settlements, killing four hundred English and driving the English out of the Port Royal region. The South Carolinians fought back with a hastily constructed army of colonial militia and African slaves, who made up half of the Carolina troops. The English won a decisive advantage after 1717, when they made an alliance with the powerful and abundant Cherokees. The defeated Creeks signed a peace treaty with the Carolinians in November, 1717, and moved westward. The defeated Yamasee retreated to Florida, from which they continued to raid South Carolina for several years, killing whites and stealing black slaves for sale to the Spanish. South Carolina conducted a final expedition against the Yamasee in 1728. The Yamasee were destroyed and subsequently lost their identity as a tribe. The defeat of the Yamasee and the Creeks opened new lands to white settlement in Georgia and South Carolina. The war induced the Creeks to begin a policy of neutrality toward the English, French, and Spanish, playing the European powers against one another for maximum advantage. The Cherokees realized that the English were dependent upon them for military success, and began to make greater demands on them. See also: Cherokee War; Indian slave trade; Tuscarora War. Harold D. Tallant
Zuñi Rebellion Date: February 22-27, 1632 Locale: Zuñi pueblos, New Mexico Tribes involved: Zuñi, Pueblo peoples, Categories: Colonial history, Wars and battles Significance: A century after the first Spanish inroads into New Mexico, Puebloan peoples resist.
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Zuñi Indian contact with Spanish explorers began in violence. The Zuñi lived in six pueblos widely scattered across what is now western New Mexico. They occupied communities of apartment houses built on the sides or tops of mesas. They had no central government, and each pueblo spoke a distinct language. Spaniards first entered this territory in 1539. They came north from Mexico, hunting for great cities of gold reported to be in the area. The legend of the Seven Cities of Gold, called Cíbola, had spread through Spanish possessions in the New World three years earlier, when Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca—a sailor who had spent eight years wandering through Texas and the Southwest after a shipwreck on the Gulf coast—brought to Mexico City the story he had been told by native peoples. The governor of New Spain sent an expedition led by a Franciscan priest, Marcos de Niza, and a former slave named Estevanico into the region to verify the story. Estevanico reached a Zuñi pueblo a few days before the priest. By the time Fray Marcos arrived, the Zuñi had killed Estevanico reportedly for taking liberties with Zuñi women. The priest returned south and, contrary to all evidence, told the governor what the latter wanted to hear: that the Seven Cities of Cíbola did exist and were as magnificent as legend had held. In the summer of 1540, the Spanish launched an expedition of more than a hundred men, including several priests, led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the governor of Nueva Galicia, a state in western Mexico. After six months of travel, the explorers reached the Zuñi villages previously visited by Fray Marcos and were greatly disappointed by the poverty they discovered. The Zuñis, fearing that the invaders were looking for slaves, met the Spaniards in front of their village and warned that trying to enter their homes meant death. Coronado explained through an interpreter that he had come on a sacred mission to save souls for Christ. A priest then read the requerimiento, a statement read by a priest before all battles, warning the Zuñi that if they did not accept Spain’s king, Philip IV, as their ruler, and if they did not embrace Christianity, they would be killed or enslaved. Zuñi Resistance. The Zuñis responded with arrows, killing several Spaniards, but Spanish muskets and steel swords proved far superior to native weapons, and Coronado’s forces quickly destroyed much of the village. The Zuñis fled, leaving behind a large quantity of corn, beans, turkeys, and salt, but no gold. Coronado, who had traveled much of the way in full armor, received several wounds during the battle but survived. He concluded that Cíbola must be somewhere else. Before continuing his search, however, he destroyed the village, called Hawikuh by the Zuñis. Despite the victory, no Spaniard returned to Zuñi territory until 1629.
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Zuñi Pueblo, New Mexico, in 1879 as “Mud Head” dancers prepare for a ceremony. (National Archives)
By 1629, Franciscan missionaries had more than fifty churches in the area of New Mexico. Their headquarters in Santa Fe had been built by Pueblo Indian laborers in 1610. Most of the mission churches had been constructed by native labor, with women building the walls and the men doing the carpentry. The priests decided to reestablish contact with peoples living farther to the west. In 1629, eight priests traveled to Acoma, a village built on top of a four-hundred-foot mesa, where a church was built. The next year, Fray Esteván de Pereá, sixty-four years of age, was sent to Hawikuh, about sixty miles west of Acoma. He found a village of eight hundred people, who greeted him peacefully. An interpreter told the Zuñis that the expedition had come to free them from slavery and the “darkness of idolatry.” This was the same message brought to them a hundred years before by Coronado, and it had led to bloodshed. This time, however, the Zuñi allowed the Spanish to remain and build a church. Three years later it was completed. Zuñi religious leaders, called sorcerers by the Christian fathers, fought the new religion from the very beginning. In their religion, there were many gods, not just one, who lived on the earth in trees, mountains, plants, and various animals. Zuñis worshiped water gods, according to Coronado, because water made the corn grow and sustained life in a very harsh climate. Water seemed almost as valuable to them as gold did to the Span-
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iards, something the Spaniards could not understand. Zuñi priests taught that people should live in harmony with the earth and learn to live with nature, not conquer it as Christians seemed to believe. Zuñis sought harmony in every aspect of their lives, which to them meant compromise and getting along with everything. They did fight wars, especially with Apache raiders, but violence and aggression were generally to be avoided. The Spaniards found little of value in these teachings and believed their god had chosen them to conquer the heathen, bring light to those living in darkness—which meant anyone who was not Christianized—and then grow rich, as God meant them to do. Compromise meant weakness to them; conquest, the highest good. These conflicting values would finally lead to rebellion and violence. Another source of conflict between Zuñis and Spaniards was the system of labor that developed. Zuñis and other native peoples did most of the manual labor on construction projects; they also worked in mines and in the fields. Spanish nobles, government officials, and settlers simply did not work in these types of jobs; hard labor was beneath their dignity. Native Americans were forcibly recruited for this backbreaking labor. Wealthy Spanish landlords supposedly owned the right to the labor of all Indians living on their land under the encomienda system. They also received tribute from all families on their extensive properties, usually 1.6 bushels of maize (corn), and a cotton blanket or deer or buffalo hide each year. In times of drought, these payments were especially harsh and deeply resented. Native peoples also hated the compulsory labor demanded of them by Spanish authorities. Thousands of Pueblo Indians, including Zuñis, had built Santa Fe under this system. They were supposed to be paid for their work, but many were not. In other places, the native peoples were used largely as pack animals to carry logs and heavy mining equipment across the desert. Many mines used slaves captured on frequent slaving expeditions into tribal territory. Slavery and economic exploitation added to Native American resentment of the Europeans. Killing of Priests. On February 22, 1632, according to Spanish government records, Zuñi warriors killed Fray Francisco Letrado, the missionary at Hawikuh, during a mass he was celebrating to honor the completion of his church. The Zuñis then abandoned the pueblo and did not return for several years. Upon hearing of the killing, Governor Francisco de la Mora Ceballas sent a party of soldiers after the Zuñis. The soldiers found the Zuñi’s hiding place and took revenge on the population, killing some and enslaving others.
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Five days after the murder of Fray Letrado, Zuñis killed another priest, Fray Martín de Arvide, at a pueblo fifty miles west of Hawikuh. Two soldiers in Fray Martín’s party were killed also. The governor sent another military expedition to avenge these deaths. Several Zuñis were killed in battle, and at least one was later executed for participating in the murders. The rebellion spread no further at this time, although Christian missionaries did not return to the Zuñi pueblos until 1660. The missionaries remained in the area until the rebellion of 1680, when violence between Spaniards and Zuñi again broke out and the Zuñi mission churches again were destroyed. See also: Acoma, Battle of; Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial; Pueblo Revolt. Leslie V. Tischauser Sources for Further Study Crampton, C. Gregory. The Zuñis of Cíbola. Provo: University of Utah Press, 1977. A general history of the Zuñi people. Black-and-white photographs illustrate how the Pueblos have changed over time. Ganner, Van Hastings. “Seventeenth Century New Mexico.” Journal of Mexican American History 4 (1974): 41-70. Provides a pro-Indian view of tribal relations with the Spanish. Includes a brief description of the events leading up to 1632. Hodge, Frederick Webb. History of Hawikah, New Mexico, One of the So-Called Cities of Cíbola. Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 1937. Contains translations of Spanish mission records and early histories of Spanish-Zuñi relations. The only detailed history of the revolt. Scholes, France V. Church and State in New Mexico, 1610-1650. Historical Society of New Mexico Publications in History 7. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942. Takes a pro-Spanish point of view, treating Native Americans in a condescending manner. Based on translations of Spanish documents. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. A general overview and detailed history of the Spanish presence in North America, from the early 1500’s to the 1830’s. A balanced view of relations between Native Americans and the Spanish, with much useful information on religion, social structure, and culture.
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Gazetteer of Historic Places ACOMA PUEBLO, NEW MEXICO Location: Forty-five miles southwest of Albuquerque, off U.S. Interstate 40 in northwestern New Mexico Significance: This Native American village at the top of a mesa known as the Rock of Acuco is one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in the continental United States. The first inhabitants probably arrived between 1075 and 1200 c.e. ALCATRAZ ISLAND, CALIFORNIA Location: An island one and a half miles from the city of San Francisco Significance: This was the site of the first U.S. fort on the Pacific Coast. It was used as a federal maximum-security prison between 1934 and 1963, occupied repeatedly by Native American groups between 1964 and 1971, and absorbed into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a National Park, in 1972. ALKALI RIDGE, UTAH Location: Monticello, San Juan County Significance: This is a series of thirteen habitation sites along Alkali Mesa. Excavations helped clarify the development of Anasazi culture in the San Juan drainage, by defining the Pueblo II period (c. 9001100 c.e.). Local development from Basketmaker III (400-700) through Pueblo III (1100-1300) periods was shown to be a continuous growth influenced by neighboring peoples. ANGEL MOUNDS, INDIANA Location: Evansville, Vanderburgh County Significance: Covering a hundred-acre area, this site is the northeastern-most extension of the Mississippian culture, which flourished in the period 1000-1600 c.e. The mounds now form a state park. AWATOVI RUINS, ARIZONA Location: Keams Canyon, Navajo County Significance: Located on the Hopi Indian Reservation, Awatovi Ruins is the site of one of the most important Hopi Indian villages encountered by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s men in 1540. It contains the remains of a five-hundred-year-old pueblo and a seventeenth
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century Spanish mission complex. Excavations were conducted at the site by the Peabody Museum in the 1930s. AZTALAN, WISCONSIN Location: Aztalan State Park, near Lake Mills on Wisconsin 89, Jefferson County Significance: This large, stockaded temple mound site, first discovered in 1836, is the northernmost of the major Mississippian culture archaeological sites. It now forms Aztalan State Park. It represents an important northern extension of the Cahokia phase of the Middle Mississippi culture. AZTEC RUINS, NEW MEXICO Location: On the Animas River in northwestern New Mexico, just north of the town of Aztec; fourteen miles northeast of Farmington, New Mexico, or thirty-five miles southwest of Durango, Colorado, on U.S. Interstate 550 Significance: This monument, on twenty-seven acres, is devoted to Anasazi pueblo ruins dating from the twelfth through thirteenth centuries; it includes six major archaeological sites, partially excavated, and the only fully reconstructed Anasazi kiva (ceremonial chamber). BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT, NEW MEXICO Location: Nearly fifty square miles on the Pajarito Plateau west of the Rio Grande; the main part of the site is about forty-six miles west of Santa Fe on Route 4, while the separate Tsankawi section of the monument, a large unexcavated Indian ruin on a high mesa, is eleven miles north from Bandelier on Route 4 Significance: The Pajarito Plateau is an elevated area of volcanic rock called tuff (hardened volcanic ash) and basaltic lava thrown out thousands of years ago by a great volcano. The surface of the plateau is crossed by deep gorges cut by streams running east to the Rio Grande valley. One of the largest and most accessible of these valleys is Frijoles Canyon, the site of numerous ruined structures and cliff dwellings built mostly between 1200 and 1400 c.e. by the Anasazi, ancestors of modern-day Pueblo Indians. BAT CAVE, NEW MEXICO Location: On the plains of San Agustin in southwestern New Mexico Significance: The site of Bat Cave has provided some of the most complete evidence for manifestations of the Cochise culture, a regional
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variant of the more widespread Desert culture of the Archaic period in western North America. Archaeological remains at Bat Cave, excavated by archaeologist Herbert Dick, span a period of almost four thousand years, from 4000-200 b.c.e. The area in which Bat Cave is located was later the homeland of the Mogollon cultural tradition, which corresponds to the establishment of pottery-producing sedentary villages reliant on the rainfall cultivation of maize, squash, and other crops. BEAR BUTTE, SOUTH DAKOTA Location: Sturgis, Meade County Significance: Sacred to the Cheyenne, Bear Butte is the place where Maheo imparted to Sweet Medicine (a mythical hero) the knowledge from which the Cheyenne derive their religious, political, social, and economic customs. The site is in Bear Butte State Park. BEAR RIVER MASSACRE SITE, IDAHO Location: Southeastern Idaho Significance: On January 29, 1863, California Volunteers under the command of Colonel Patrick Edward Conner attacked a band of Northwestern Shoshone. The bloodiest encounter between Native American and white men to take place in the West in the years between 1848 and 1891, Bear River Massacre resulted in the deaths of almost three hundred Shoshone and fourteen soldiers. BIG AND LITTLE PETROGLYPH CANYONS, CALIFORNIA Location: China Lake, Inyo County Significance: First reported in 1938, this site deep within the Coso Mountains is one of the most spectacular petroglyph areas known in the western United States, exhibiting more than twenty thousand designs. It represents at least two cultural phases. BIG BEAD MESA, NEW MEXICO Location: Near Ojo del Padre, Sandoval County Significance: Occupied from about 1745 to 1812, this is an impressive fortified Navajo village site. After moving into the Big Bead Mesa region, the Navajos established a stronghold that menaced the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma and formed an alliance with the Gila Apaches. The site is an important representative of patterns of trade and raiding that characterized Navajo relations with Pueblos, Apache, and Hispanics.
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BLOOD RUN SITE, IOWA Location: Sioux Falls, Lyon County Significance: Blood Run Site is the only known mound group attributable to the Oneota culture, which is ancestral to many midwestern Native American groups. The archaeological complex consists of the remains of a village that once included more than 158 visible conical burial mounds and an effigy earthwork. Limited archaeological data indicate Native American occupation of this site in the early 1700’s extending back perhaps as far as 1300 c.e. CAHOKIA, ILLINOIS Location: The Cahokia Mounds State Historic and World Heritage Site is fifteen miles to the northeast, near Collinsville, extending just north of Route 40 and bordered on the east by U.S. Interstates 55 and 70, on the west by U.S. Interstate 255, and on the south by Routes 50 and 64 Significance: The Cahokia Mounds were built between 900 and 1300 by Mississippian Indians, who used the mounds as ceremonial centers. The largest and most famous of these structures is Monks Mound, which rises to a height of one hundred feet and has a base measuring eight thousand square feet. Sixty-eight of the estimated 120 mounds can still be viewed. The nearby town of Cahokia was founded in 1699 by French missionaries. It is the oldest permanent European settlement in Illinois and contains many historic French colonial buildings. CAMAS MEADOWS BATTLE SITES, IDAHO Location: Kilgore, Clark County Significance: On August 19, 1877, the military force led by Major General Oliver Otis Howard which had been pursuing the Nez Perce since their departure from Clearwater was in a position to intercept them in their flight to Canada. Here, on August 20, a predawn raid by Nez Perce warriors succeeded in capturing most of Howard’s pack mules, forcing the army to halt until more mules and supplies could be secured, which resulted in a time-consuming detour. The army’s delay made it possible for the Nez Perce to escape into Yellowstone Park and Montana. Their remarkable journey toward Canada continued six weeks longer as a result of this raid. CANYON DE CHELLY, ARIZONA Location: East of Chinle, on the Navajo reservation, in northeastern Arizona near the New Mexico border; ninety miles north of Interstate 40 on Arizona 191
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Significance: This National Monument, currently inhabited by Navajo farmers, includes well-preserved ruins of Anasazi cliff dwellings in sandstone canyons dating from 350-1300 c.e. CARLISLE INDIAN SCHOOL, PENNSYLVANIA Location: Carlisle, Cumberland County Significance: Founded in 1879 by Brigadier General Richard H. Pratt (1840-1924), a Civil War officer and veteran of the Indian campaigns in the West, the school pioneered federal programs for Indian education and was a model for similar schools built elsewhere. CARRINGTON OSAGE VILLAGE SITES, MISSOURI Location: Horton vicinity, Vernon County Significance: Occupied from about 1775 to 1825, this was the last dwelling place of the Big Osage Indians in southwest Missouri, prior to their removal to a reservation in Kansas. The site was visited in 1806 by Zebulon Pike. Because of the large number of trade goods found here, the site illustrates the rapid acculturation of the Big Osage. CASA GRANDE RUINS, ARIZONA Location: Approximately forty miles south of Phoenix on Highway 87 or U.S. Interstate 10; the monument is on Highway 87 about one mile north of Coolidge, approximately halfway between Phoenix and Tucson Significance: This is the site of a large, unusual multistoried structure, the Casa Grande, built by the Hohokam people around 1350 c.e. Now protected by a steel shelter, the thick walls of the Casa Grande are clearly visible in the distance as visitors approach the monument, which for centuries has been used by travelers as a landmark and meeting place. Surrounding the Casa Grande are the ruins of one or more Hohokam villages that are open to visitors. Park rangers are available on the site to answer questions about the monument and the daily lives and culture of the Hohokam. CASA MALPAIS SITE, ARIZONA Location: Springerville, Apache County Significance: Situated on terraces of a fallen basalt cliff along the upper Little Colorado River, the site dates from late Pueblo III to early Pueblo IV (1250-1325 c.e.) times. Casa Malpais appears to incorporate features of both early and late Mogollon culture settlement patterns.
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CATALDO MISSION, IDAHO Location: Cataldo, Kootenai County Significance: The oldest extant mission church in the Pacific Northwest, Cataldo was used by Jesuit missionaries (1850 or 1853) in their efforts to convert the Coeur d’Alene Indians. CHACO CANYON, NEW MEXICO Location: Northwestern New Mexico, about 175 miles northwest of Albuquerque; the southern entrance is located sixty-four miles north of Interstate 40 on Route 57 Significance: This large, prehistoric pueblo community, trading center, and ceremonial site flourished circa 900-1180 c.e. The thirty-foursquare-mile park contains one of the largest collections of ancient pueblo ruins in the southwestern United States. Chaco Canyon was the hub of a four-hundred-mile network of roads connecting it with numerous outlying communities, usually called outliers. The size and intricacy of its architecture, the sophistication of its agricultural irrigation system, and evidence of artistic, economic, and astronomical endeavors indicate this was an advanced ancient civilization, sometimes called the “Chaco Phenomenon.” Abandoned for unknown reasons in the twelfth century, its existence first became known to the outside world in 1849 when it was discovered by a U.S. Army expedition. CHIEF JOSEPH BATTLEGROUND OF BEAR’S PAW, MONTANA Location: Chinook, Blaine County Significance: This is the site of the battle in which Chief Joseph (c. 18401904) and more than four hundred Nez Perce Indians surrendered to the United States Army (1877). The Bear’s Paw surrender signaled the close of the Nez Perces’ existence as an “independent Indian people.” Henceforth, they lived as a group of displaced persons—in the white culture, but certainly not of it. CHIEF PLENTY COUPS HOME, MONTANA Location: 0.5 mile west of Pryor, at the intersection of BIA roads #5 and #8 (Edgar Road), Big Horn County Significance: This was the homestead of Chief Plenty Coups (c. 18491932), also called Aleekchea’ahoosh, one of the last and most celebrated traditional chiefs of the Crow Indians. It includes the house of Chief Plenty Coups, an adjacent log store operated by the chief, and the Plenty Coups Spring, a site of historic and cultural significance to
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the Crow people. Chief Plenty Coups established the homestead in 1884 and lived there until his death in 1932, making his political career of more than a half a century one of the longest of any chief. One of the most important Native American leaders of the transitional period and an ambassador and negotiator for the Crow, Chief Plenty Coups advocated the adoption of those aspects of American culture necessary to succeed on the reservation while maintaining traditional Crow religious beliefs and cultural values. CHUCALISSA SITE, TENNESSEE Location: Memphis, Shelby County Significance: Chucalissa is a Walls Phase (1400-1500) prehistoric mound and plaza complex, and the best known and preserved of such sites in the Central Mississippi River Valley. The site is known for its excellent preservation of architectural, floral, faunal, and human skeletal materials. CLOVER SITE, WEST VIRGINIA Location: Lesage, Cabell County Significance: These are the extraordinarily well preserved remains of an Indian town dating to about four hundred years ago. The site pertains to the Fort Ancient culture, descendants of the cosmopolitan Hopewell trading societies and related to the other great urbanizing mound builders of the Mississippian period. CORONADO NATIONAL MEMORIAL, ARIZONA Location: Twelve miles south of Sierra Vista Significance: This memorial commemorates Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s exploration of the United States Southwest (1540-1542). The memorial is located near his point of entry into the United States in his search for the Seven Cities of Cíbola. It was established four hundred years later. COUFAL SITE, NEBRASKA Location: Cotesfield, Howard County Significance: Coufal (1130-1350 c.e.) is a major village of the Central Plains tradition. Earth lodges of the prehistoric Indians of the Itskari Phase have been excavated here, bridging the gap between late prehistoric villagers and the origins of the Pawnee.
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CREEK NATIONAL CAPITOL, OKLAHOMA Location: 6th Street and Grand Avenue, Okmulgee, Okmulgee County Significance: This Victorian-style structure was used by the Creeks from 1878 to 1907, after their adoption of a representative form of government modeled on the United States Congress. DANCING RABBIT CREEK TREATY SITE, MISSISSIPPI Location: Macon, Noxubee County Significance: On September 27, 1830, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, a traditional gathering place of the Choctaw people, an infamous treaty was signed for the removal of the Choctaw people from their homeland. This treaty was the most important of the pacts between the United States and the Choctaw as it resulted in the removal of a large part of the tribe from their traditional Southeastern homeland in present-day Mississippi. The Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty served as a model for treaties of removal with the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole tribes. The treaty led to the extinguishing of all Choctaw title to land east of the Mississippi River owned by the Choctaw nation. It also led to the opening of a vast territory to American settlement. DANGER CAVE, UTAH Location: Wendover, Tooele County Significance: Results of excavations at this site formed the basis for definition of a long-lived Desert culture which existed in the Great Basin area. The earliest cave stratus (c. 9500-9000 b.c.e.) is characterized by crude chipped stone artifacts; Zone II (c. 8000-7000 b.c.e.) by milling stones, basketry, and notched projectile points characteristic of the Desert culture; and Zones III, IV, and V (c. 7000 b.c.e.-500 c.e.) by materials showing an elaboration of the same culture. EFFIGY MOUNDS NATIONAL MONUMENT, IOWA Location: In eastern Iowa, along the Mississippi River; Three miles north of Marquette, on Highway 76 Significance: The monument was founded to preserve and protect a representative example of prehistoric American Indian moundbuilding culture and the wildlife and scenic wildness around the area. While mound building was widespread throughout the eastern half of North America, only in the upper Mississippi Valley was a culture established that specialized in mounds built in the shape of living creatures such as eagles, falcons, bison, deer, turtles, lizards, and especially bears.
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EL CUARTELEJO, KANSAS Location: Scott City, Scott County Significance: This pueblo ruin is attributed to a group of Picuria Indians who left the Southwest because of friction with the Spanish. El Cuartelejo is a state park. EL MORRO, NEW MEXICO Location: Forty-two miles from the Grants exit of U.S. Interstate 40 to the site entrance via New Mexico State Road 53; fifty-six miles from the Gallup exit of U.S. Interstate 40 to the site entrance, also via New Mexico State Road 53 Significance: This natural outcropping or mesa of sandstone carries inscriptions dating from prehistoric times to the early twentieth century by people who have lived there and by those who passed by. It is also called Inscription Rock. One of El Morro’s mysteries is the identity of the prehistoric people who carved petroglyphs, or rock art, of mountain sheep, bear claws, and people into the rock some seven hundred years ago. Another mystery is how they built two fortified villages atop the rock. The Zuñi have named the larger mesa-top town A’ts’ina, meaning “writing on the rock.” The ruins suggest that the pueblos there rose as high as three stories and enclosed five hundred rooms. Some fifteen hundred people were housed there, and by 1990, sixteen rooms and two kivas, or sunken ceremonial chambers, had been excavated. One of the kivas is unusual because it is square (most extant kivas are round). EMERALD MOUND, MISSISSIPPI Location: Stanton Significance: The Emerald (Selzertown) Mound site is located on Fairchild’s Creek in the hardwood-covered löessial hills of southwestern Mississippi about six miles east of the Mississippi River, one mile north of Stanton Station, and nine miles northeast of Natchez. It was the last major ceremonial seat of the prehistoric Natchez Indians immediately before European contact. Emerald was occupied from circa 1300 to 1600 c.e., or during the late Anna or early Foster through the Emerald phases of the Late Mississippian period. ETOWAH, GEORGIA Location: Etowah River Valley, near Cartersville and Atlanta Significance: Etowah Mounds and village site, the largest Indian settlement in the Etowah Valley, occupied between 700 and 1650 c.e., was a
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political, religious, and trade center for several thousand people of the Mississippian or mound builder culture. Influences from the Adena and Hopewell periods are evident along with possible Mesoamerican influence. FALLEN TIMBERS BATTLEFIELD, OHIO Location: Maumee, Lucas County Significance: On August 20, 1794, General “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s victory here over the Indians at Fallen Timbers asserted American sovereignty in the Old Northwest and made possible the Treaty of Greenville. The battle and treaty insured a period of peaceful settlement in the Ohio Country long enough for the new nation to consolidate its hold on the Northwest Territory. FOLSOM SITE, NEW MEXICO Location: Folsom, Colfax County Significance: The archaeological discoveries at this site confirmed theories of the early advent of humans in America. FORT ANCIENT, OHIO Location: Lebanon, Warren County Significance: This hilltop area with large surrounding earthworks was built and inhabited by people of the Hopewell culture (c. 300 b.c.e.250 c.e.). Hundreds of years after the site had been abandoned by the Hopewell, the Fort Ancient people (1200-1600 c.e.) settled in the area, establishing villages on the south fort of the earthworks and the Anderson Village site. FORT BELKNAP, TEXAS Location: Newcastle, Young County Significance: Established in 1851 following the Mexican War when the Texas frontier was being ravished by Comanche-Kiowa raids, Fort Belknap was the anchor of a chain of outer border posts stretching from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Until 1865, it was the key post in the protection of the exposed frontier; it bore the brunt of Comanche-Kiowa assault, and during the Civil War it served as a base for campaigns against these raiders. FORT GIBSON, OKLAHOMA Location: Lee and Ash Streets, Fort Gibson, Muskogee County Significance: Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indians removed from the
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Southeast by the government were brought here between 1824 and 1840. The fort was abandoned in 1857 and turned over to the Cherokee Nation. During the Civil War, it was reoccupied by federal forces consisting of three Cherokee Regiments, four companies of Kansas Cavalry, and Hopkins Battery. After the war, the post was garrisoned intermittently until it was abandoned as a military post in 1890 and reverted to the Cherokee Nation. FORT OSAGE, MISSOURI Location: Sibley, Jackson County Significance: Established in 1808 by General William Clark (1770-1838) for the protection and promotion of trade with the Osage Indians, Fort Osage was one of the most successful of twenty-eight trading houses operated from 1795 to 1822 under the U.S. government’s factory system. The fort served as the point from which distances were measured by the Federal Survey of 1825. FORT PHIL KEARNY AND ASSOCIATED SITES, WYOMING Location: Story, Johnson County Significance: Established in 1866 to protect travelers along the Bozeman Trail, the fort was under virtual siege (1866-1868) in the “Red Cloud War” as Sioux groups fought successfully to prevent white invasion of their hunting grounds. This was one of the few times when the Army was forced to abandon a region it had occupied. FORT RICHARDSON, TEXAS Location: Jacksboro, Jack County Significance: Established in 1867 to replace the recently abandoned Fort Belknap as the northernmost fort in the Texas chain of fortifications, the fort played an important role in the protection of American lives and property during the days of the Kiowa-Comanche conflict of the post-Civil War period, particularly the Red River War of 1874. FORT ROBINSON AND RED CLOUD AGENCY, NEBRASKA Location: Crawford, Dawes County Significance: In 1873, the U.S. government moved Chief Red Cloud and his large band of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux to the White River area; nearby Fort Robinson was established in 1874 to protect government employees and property. The fort served as a base for Army campaigns against several groups of Native Americans, including
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the 1876 campaign against the Powder River Sioux. After 1919, the fort became a major quartermaster remount depot. FORT SHANTOK, CONNECTICUT Location: Montville, New London County Significance: From 1636 to 1682, this was the site of the main Mohegan town and the home of Uncas, the most prominent and influential Mohegan leader and statesman of his era. Uncas was first noted in European records as the leader of a small Indian community at “Munhicke” in 1636; within a few years of this, Uncas had emerged as the most prominent Indian client of the Connecticut authorities at New Haven and Hartford. Attracted by his success and influential connections, substantial numbers of Connecticut Indian people joined his community. FORT SILL, OKLAHOMA Location: Fort Sill, Comanche County Significance: Troops stationed here were active in campaigns against Southern Plains tribes in the late 1800’s. Virtually all the original fort survives; it has expanded and continued to play a significant role for the Army in modern times. FORT THOMPSON MOUNDS, SOUTH DAKOTA Location: Fort Thompson, Buffalo County Significance: This large group of low burial mounds dating from PlainsWoodland times (c. 800 c.e.) contains evidence of the first potterymaking peoples in the area. It is situated on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation. FORT WASHITA, OKLAHOMA Location: Nida, Bryan County Significance: This fort was established in 1842 (reportedly by Zachary Taylor) because of treaty commitments to the Chickasaws and Choctaws and to serve as a way station for travelers on the Southern Overland Trail. GATLIN SITE, ARIZONA Location: Gila Bend, Maricopa County Significance: Probably first occupied sometime before 900 c.e., the Gatlin Site contains one of the few documented Hohokam platform mounds. Associated with the mound are pit houses, ball courts, mid-
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dens, and prehistoric canals. The mound is one of the only excavated and documented Sedentary Period platform mounds that is still relatively intact. GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS, NEW MEXICO Location: On Route 15, forty-two miles north of Silver City Significance: These five caves were inhabited by the Mogollon people until the thirteenth century. GRAHAM CAVE, MISSOURI Location: Mineola, Montgomery County Significance: At the time of the 1949 excavations of the site, remains found here, dating to 8000 b.c.e., were among the earliest known for the Archaic Period. The remains from Early and Middle Archaic times give the site its importance and illustrate a merging of Eastern and Plains influence in Missouri. GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA Location: Encompasses 178 miles of the Colorado River in northwestern Arizona Significance: There is evidence of human habitation in and around the Grand Canyon dating back about five thousand years. The early residents, the Anasazi, hunted large and small animals and gathered native plant foods in season. About two thousand years ago, they adopted maize and squash farming. Later Anasazi were known as Pueblo Indians after the communal structures in which they lived. The region’s Pueblo Indians made pottery, grew cotton, traded over large distances, and practiced elaborate ceremonies. More than five hundred Pueblo ruins have been found in the vicinity of the Grand Canyon, but none is of the size or complexity of better-known ruins like those at Mesa Verde. The Pueblo Indians abandoned the Grand Canyon about 1200. Since then the canyon has been frequented by the Hopi, who are descended from the Pueblo Indians, and occupied by the Havasupai and Hualipai south of the river and the Paiute to the north. The most recent arrivals on the scene were the Navajo. In the twentieth century, Indian lands in and around the Grand Canyon were reduced to designated reservations. GRAVE CREEK MOUND, WEST VIRGINIA Location: Moundsville, Marshall County Significance: Dating to c. 500 b.c.e., this is one of the largest and oldest
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mounds in the United States representative of the burial mound tradition of the Adena culture, which preceded the Hopewell culture. GUNTHER ISLAND SITE 67, CALIFORNIA Location: Eureka, Humboldt County Significance: One of the largest Wiyot villages, this site (900 c.e.) typifies the late prehistoric period and was instrumental in outlining the prehistory of the Northern California coast. The site is a shell mound encompassing approximately six acres and attaining depths of up to fourteen feet. HARDAWAY SITE, NORTH CAROLINA Location: Badin, Stanly County Significance: During the Paleo-Indian to Early Archaic Periods (12,0006,000 b.c.e.), prehistoric Indian populations came here to exploit the lithic resources of the area to manufacture projectile points and stone tools; these activities created stratified cultural deposits as much as four feet in depth. This site has played a significant role in the development of archaeological method and theory, by advancing knowledge and understanding of the sequential development of prehistoric cultures in the eastern United States, particularly with regard to the earliest periods of human occupation. HASKELL INSTITUTE, KANSAS Location: Lawrence, Douglas County Significance: Founded in 1884, this was one of the first large off-reservation boarding schools for Indian students established by the federal government. It served students from the southern Plains and upper Midwest; in 1965, it became Haskell Indian Junior College. HAWIKUH, NEW MEXICO Location: Zuñi, Valencia County Significance: Established in the 1200’s and abandoned in 1680, the Zuñi pueblo of Hawikuh, largest of the “Cities of Cíbola,” was the first pueblo seen by Spanish explorers. In 1539, the black scout Estevan (also known as Estevanico) became the first non-Indian to reach this area; he was killed by the people of Hawikuh as he entered their city. The next year, when the Coronado Expedition reached the fabled pueblo, they found not gold but a small, crowded, dusty sandstone village.
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HOLLY BLUFF SITE, MISSISSIPPI Location: Holly Bluff, Yazoo County Significance: This is the type of site for the Lake George phase of the prehistoric Temple Mound period of the area. The site is important in that it is on the southern margin of the Mississippian cultural advance down the Mississippi River and on the northern edge of that of the Cole’s Creek and Plaquemine cultures of the South. HORNER SITE, WYOMING Location: Cody, Park County Significance: This site has yielded evidence that several distinctive weapons and tools found in the Plains region were all part of a single prehistoric flint tool industry of Early Hunter origin. Initial age estimates place occupation of this site at approximately 5000 b.c.e. HUBBELL TRADING POST, ARIZONA Location: Ganado, Apache County Significance: This still-active trading post represents the varied interactions of Navajos and the white traders who ran trading posts on the Navajo Reservation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. HUFF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE, NORTH DAKOTA Location: Huff, Morton County Significance: By 1500 c.e., the Middle Missouri agricultural villages were the principal focus for social organization of the Mandan people, who had developed extensive trading networks over the previous two hundred years. The Huff Village is one of the best-known and best-preserved sites of this period. Its bastioned fortification system, dense and regular arrangement of houses, and wide variety in material culture attest to the extraordinary regional impacts of their way of life. The remains of a large central house facing an open plaza preserve evidence about the ritual space, which corresponds to the complex spiritual and ideological world that the Mandan have maintained since historic times. JAKETOWN SITE, MISSISSIPPI Location: Belzoni, Humphreys County Significance: Located in northwestern Mississippi, Jaketown Site is the remains of a complex regional trade center dating from 2000-600 b.c.e., an era known as the Poverty Point period within the Late Archaic
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prehistory of the United States. Significant as a settlement important in trade in raw materials and manufacture of finished items distributed throughout the Eastern United States, it consists as deeply stratified archaeological deposits, well-preserved earthen mounds, and hidden features which represent extensive and intensive occupation over a long period. KATHIO SITE, MINNESOTA Location: Vineland and vicinity, Mille Lacs County Significance: Occupied from Archaic to historic times (3000 b.c.e.1750 c.e.), this was the ancestral homeland of the Dakota Sioux at the beginning of the historic period. In 1679, French explorer Sieur Duluth noted the existence of forty Sioux villages in the vicinity. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Chippewa, pressured by the westward expansion of European settlers, drove the Sioux from this area to the west and south, where the Sioux later figured prominently in the history of the Plains and Rocky Mountain states. KEY MARCO, FLORIDA Location: West coast of Florida Significance: Key Marco (also called Marco Island) is the largest of the group of islands off the southwest coast of Florida called the Ten Thousand Islands; it lies a few miles south of the mainland city of Naples. Beginning in 1895, a site at the north end of the island—a sort of courtyard surrounded by shell mounds—was excavated by Frank Hamilton Cushing and others, and a variety of artifacts were uncovered. The culture reconstructed from the finds at Key Marco was sophisticated and technologically advanced. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the Key Marco site was occupied from about 750 until just before Spanish exploration of the area, about 1500. The Indians of Key Marco were probably part of the Calusa empire that covered south Florida. KNIFE RIVER INDIAN VILLAGES, NORTH DAKOTA Location: One-half mile north of Stanton Significance: An important hub of intertribal and later international trade, the Knife River Indian Villages also played an important role in Plains Indian agricultural and cultural development. Many archaeological sites are preserved at the site. A reconstructed earth lodge re-creates aboriginal life. In addition, the site preserves important native prairie and riverine habitats.
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KOSTER, ILLINOIS Location: Lower Illinois Valley Significance: Koster is one of the most intensively investigated sites in the midwestern United States. Excavations conducted under the direction of archaeologist Stuart Streuver revealed thirteen sequential strata dating from the Early Archaic through the Mississippian traditions, beginning around 6400 b.c.e. The last occupation was a Mississippian village dating from 900 to 1200 c.e. LANDERGIN MESA, TEXAS Location: Vega, Oldham County Significance: A ruin consisting of a series of buildings atop a steepsided mesa on the east side of East Alamosa Creek, this is one of the largest, best-stratified, least-damaged, and most spectacularly located ruins of Panhandle culture. LANGDEAU SITE, SOUTH DAKOTA Location: Lower Brule, Lyman County Significance: Possibly the earliest reliably dated village of the Missouri Trench, Langdeau Site represents the full emergence of the Plains Village traditions in the Middle Missouri cultural area. It is also a cultural intrusion of organized village people with highly adaptive strategies, including horticulture, into an area previously occupied by hunter-gatherers. LEARY SITE, NEBRASKA Location: Rulo, Richardson County Significance: This large prehistoric village and burial area of the Oneota Culture was first noted by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804. LEHNER, ARIZONA Location: Southern Arizona Significance: Lehner is one of the best-documented mammoth kill sites of the Llano complex in the southwestern United States, with Clovis projectile points found in direct association with the bones of extinct animals. Occupied between 10,000-9000 b.c.e., Lehner represents a kill site and butchering locality. Animals were trapped at a watering hole by hunters, who took advantage of the steep and slippery sides of the arroyo to isolate and kill young mammoths. Butchering took place on the spot, and the location was subsequently used for trapping other animals.
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LEMHI PASS, TENDOY, IDAHO Location: On the Idaho-Montana border, twelve miles east of Tendoy, Idaho Significance: Lemhi Pass was the highest point reached by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their epic journey across the American West. At this mountainous site, the Corps of Discovery first glimpsed the headwaters of the Columbia River and realized that a water passage across the continent was impossible. For the Shoshone and Nez Perce, the route was especially important for seasonal migrations between hunting areas, and the Blackfoot frequented the trail and pass so often that it was locally known as the “Blackfoot Road.” LITTLE BIGHORN, MONTANA Location: Within the Crow Reservation in southeastern Montana, one mile east of Route 1-90 (U.S. 87) and eighteen miles north of Hardin; connected with the Black Hills and Yellowstone National Park on U.S. Route 212 Significance: The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument includes the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25, 1876), Custer National Cemetery, the Reno-Benteen Battlefield, Medicine Tail Ford, and the site of an Indian village. LONG ISLAND OF THE HOLSTON, TENNESSEE Location: Kingsport, Sullivan County Significance: Located just east of the junction of the North and South Forks of the Holston River, Long Island was a sacred council and treaty ground surrounded by the vast hunting territory of the Cherokee Nation. Starting at Long Island in March, 1775, Daniel Boone (1734-1820) led a team of thirty axmen to open the trail through Cumberland Gap that was to gain fame as the Wilderness Road. Between 1775 and 1795, this trail was used by more than two hundred thousand emigrants. LOWRY RUIN, COLORADO Location: Pleasant View, Montezuma County Significance: This pueblo (c. 1100 c.e.) of fifty rooms is unusual in that it has a great kiva, a large ceremonial structure more commonly found in Arizona and New Mexico.
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LUBBOCK LAKE SITE, TEXAS Location: Lubbock, Lubbock County Significance: Excavations at the site in Yellow House Canyon, discovered in the 1930’s, have revealed a stratified sequence of human habitation spanning eleven thousand to twelve thousand years and providing evidence for occupation during Clovis, Folsom, Plainview, Late Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Ceramic, and historic periods. MARMES ROCKSHELTER, WASHINGTON Location: Lyons Ferry, Franklin County Significance: This is one of the most outstanding archaeological sites yet discovered in the Northwest. Excavations at the site have revealed the earliest burials in the Pacific Northwest (c. 5500-4500 b.c.e.) and possibly the oldest human remains yet encountered in the Western Hemisphere (c. 11,000-9,000 b.c.e.). The eight strata at the site all contain cultural materials. MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT RESERVATION ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISTRICT, CONNECTICUT Location: Ledyard, New London County Significance: The Mashantucket Pequot Reservation Archaeological District comprises nearly 1,638 acres of archaeologically sensitive land in the northern portion of the uplands historically called Wawarramoreke by the Pequots, and within territory first chronicled as Pequot land in the earliest known surviving map (1614) of the region. MEDICINE LODGE PEACE TREATY SITE, KANSAS Location: Medicine Lodge, Barber County Significance: Here, near the confluence of Medicine Lodge and Elm Creeks, members of a Peace Commission created by Congress met with about five thousand Kiowa, Comanche, Plains Apache, Arapaho, and Southern Cheyenne Indians in October, 1867. Under the terms of the Medicine Lodge Treaty, the first to include provisions aimed at “civilizing” the Indian, Plains Indians were to give up nomadic ways and relinquish claims to ancestral lands, in return for federal economic and educational help. MEDICINE WHEEL, WYOMING Location: Kane, Big Horn County Significance: This represents one of the most interesting and mysteri-
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ous remains of late period aboriginal culture. Its builders and function are unknown. Composed of loose, irregularly shaped, whitish flat stones placed in a circle, it is apparently little modified since its construction (c. 1800); twenty-eight linear spokes, seventy to seventy-five feet in length, radiate from the hub. MENOKEN INDIAN VILLAGE SITE, NORTH DAKOTA Location: Menoken, Burleigh County Significance: This site shows certain structural and artifactual similarities to historic and prehistoric earthlodge villages along the upper Missouri River. Pottery and projectile point styles are indicative of the prehistoric period, and the cultural/temporal affinity is suggested to be Initial Middle Missouri Tradition from about 950 to 1300 c.e. MESA VERDE, COLORADO Location: In the high plateau or mesa country of southwestern Colorado, in the Four Corners area where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet; the park entrance is midway between Cortez on the west and Mancos on the east on U.S. 160 Significance: The first area in the United States to be declared a national treasure for the preservation of the works of humanity: the ruins of an ancient people referred to as Anasazi (from the Navajo, meaning “ancient ones”). Evidence of a civilization growing in complexity in its toolmaking, agriculture, and architecture is to be found at numerous sites in Mesa Verde. MINISINK ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE, PENNSYLVANIA Location: Bushkill, Pike County Significance: Minisink was the most important Munsee Indian community for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Archaeological resources located here have yielded information on historic contact between Indian and European people in Munsee Country, a region stretching from southern New York across northern New Jersey to northeastern Pennsylvania. Today, Minisink remains one of the most extensive, best-preserved, and most intensively studied archaeological locales in the Northeast. MISSION SAN GABRIEL ARCANGEL, CALIFORNIA Location: Two miles north of the San Bernardino Freeway (Interstate 10) on South Mission Drive in the city of San Gabriel Significance: Heralded as the first European settlement of the Los An-
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geles basin, this mission was the most prosperous of the California missions and served as a way station for the colonization of Alta (Upper) California. In addition to its status as one of only two Spanish colonial-era stone churches of Alta California located south of Monterey, the church is singularly unique for its Moorish-inspired architectural characteristics and its unique collection of via cruces paintings crafted by an Indian artisan of Mission San Fernando. MISSION SANTA INES, CALIFORNIA Location: South of State Highway 246, Solvang, Santa Barbara County Significance: Mission Santa Ines is one of the best-preserved Spanish mission complexes in the United States, containing an unrivaled combination of landscape setting, original buildings, extant collections of art and interior furnishings, water-related industrial structures, and archaeological remains. The property is also important as the location of the start of the Chumash Revolt of 1824, one of the largest and most successful revolts of Native American neophytes in the Spanish West, representing indigenous resistance to European colonization. The intact archaeological remains of the two mission wings, a portion of the convent, and the Native American village are rare survivors and have been demonstrated to contain the potential for exceptional information on the critical period of accommodation between native peoples and European colonial powers. MOCCASIN BEND ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISTRICT, TENNESSEE Location: Chattanooga, Hamilton County Significance: This is the best-preserved and most important compact, yet diverse, sample of archaeological remains known in the Tennessee River Valley, indicative of Chattanooga’s pivotal status in trade, communications, economics, and political importance in the interior Southeast. The site includes evidence of occupation by Native American groups of the Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods; because of sixteenth century Spanish trade and gift items found there, the site provides significant opportunities to study the early contact period in the Southeast. Also included are Civil War earthworks associated with the Battle of Chattanooga. MOHAWK UPPER CASTLE HISTORIC DISTRICT, NEW YORK Location: Danube, Herkimer County Significance: Archaeological and architectural resources located in this district are associated with Nowadaga, the most westerly part of the
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major eighteenth century Mohawk Indian community of Canajoharie. During the eighteenth century, Mohawk people regarded Canajoharie as the most important community in the western half of Kanienke, their name for the Mohawk River Valley heartland. Included in the district is the still-standing Indian Castle Church, a wooden-framed Anglican chapel built in 1769. MOLSTAD VILLAGE, SOUTH DAKOTA Location: Mobridge, Dewey County Significance: A tiny fortified prehistoric village site containing five circular house rings enclosed by a ditch, Molstad appears to represent a period of transition, when Central Plains and Middle Missouri cultural traits were combining to form the basis for Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara cultures as they existed at the time of the first contact with Europeans. MOUNDVILLE SITE, ALABAMA Location: Moundville, Hale County Significance: Settled first in the tenth century, Moundville is situated on a level area overlooking the Black Warrior River and consists of thirty-four mounds, the largest of which is over fifty-eight feet high. The site represents a major period of Mississippian culture in the southern portion of its distribution and acted as the center for a southerly diffusion of this culture toward the Gulf Coast. NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI Location: Southwestern Mississippi, along the banks of the Mississippi River Significance: This Southern city is rich in history. It was originally occupied by the Natchez Indians and later colonized by France, England, and Spain. The Natchez Indians were a tribe of the Mississippians, who lived all along the river from mouth to source. By 1200 the Mississippians had developed the most advanced Indian civilization located north of Mexico, and by the mid-sixteenth century the Natchez culture had reached its height. The Natchez, like other Mississippian peoples, excelled at agriculture, raising maize, pumpkins, melons, and tobacco. The Natchez also were highly skilled at pottery making. The Natchez had a socially stratified society, with clear distinctions between aristocrats and common people. The Natchez constructed their Grand Village, the ceremonial and religious center of their culture, along the banks of St. Catherine Creek, within the present-day
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city limits of Natchez. The tribe was very much entrenched in the area when the first Europeans arrived early in the eighteenth century. NAVAJO NATIONAL MONUMENT, ARIZONA Location: On the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona, about fifty miles northeast of Tuba City and twenty-two miles southwest of Kayenta, off U.S. Interstate 160, via Route 564, a nine-mile paved road that leads to the visitors’ center Significance: Site of Betatakin, Kiet Seel, and Inscription House, three Anasazi dwellings built between 1250 and 1280 and abandoned around 1300. The sites, in what is today Navajo land, were excavated in the early twentieth century and made a National Monument in 1909. The monument’s visitors’ center is open year round and offers cultural exhibits about Anasazi life; between late May and midSeptember, the staff offers guided tours on foot and horseback (guides must accompany all visitors to the ruins). Because of its extreme fragility, Inscription House is no longer open to tourists. NEZ PERCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK, IDAHO Location: Clearwater, Idaho, Lewis, and Nez Perce Counties in northcentral Idaho, as well as southeastern Washington, northeastern Oregon, and western Montana Significance: This National Historical Park does not focus on one location but rather comprises a unique cooperative arrangement of public and private lands administered by the National Park Service, state, tribal, local, or other federal agencies. The complete route of thirty-eight sites in four states includes locations of important encampments, missions, battles, trails, and other areas significant to Nez Perce and related U.S. history; the Idaho route alone comprises about four hundred miles of travel. The park sites’ varying topographic and climatic features exemplify the wide diversity of Nez Perce country, which is largely still wilderness. NORTON MOUND GROUP, MICHIGAN Location: Grand Rapids, Kent County Significance: This site contains well-preserved Hopewell mounds of the western Great Lakes region. Norton Mound Group was the center of Hopewellian culture in that area, c. 400 b.c.e. to 400 c.e.
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OBSIDIAN CLIFF, WYOMING Location: Mammoth, Park County Significance: Obsidian Cliff occupies a unique position in national prehistory as a singularly important source of lithic materials for prehistoric peoples of interior western North America. It is recognized as an exceptionally well preserved, heavily utilized lithic source that served the utilitarian needs and ceremonial requirements or early indigenous peoples over a large area of North America for twelve thousand years. OCONTO SITE, WISCONSIN Location: Oconto, Oconto County Significance: At this prehistoric burial ground, implements of the Old Copper Culture people, who occupied the northern Midwest about 2500 b.c.e., have been found in association with human burials. The site forms the Copper Culture State Park. OLD ORAIBI, ARIZONA Location: Oraibi, Navajo County Significance: Located on the westernmost of the Hopi mesas, this is probably the oldest continuously inhabited pueblo in the Southwest. Old Oraibi documents Hopi culture and history from before European contact to the present day. The village is on the present Hopi Indian Reservation. OZETTE, WASHINGTON Location: Olympic Peninsula Significance: The Ozette site, located on the westernmost point of the Olympic Peninsula on the Pacific coast of Washington, represents the remains of a large, late prehistoric whaling village. Portions of the site that were buried by catastrophic mudslides have provided a large number of organic remains, preserved by their rapid burial and the site’s waterlogged condition. Ozette has provided information that is invaluable for the reconstruction of ways of life on the Northwest Coast that predate the arrival of Europeans. The village is believed to have been occupied by ancestors of the Makah Indians, modern indigenous residents of the region who still occupied parts of Ozette as recently as the 1920’s. PEMAQUID ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE, MAINE Location: New Harbor, Lincoln County Significance: Pemaquid contains the remains of a large English town
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occupied throughout the early period of contact on the Maine Coast along the frontier separating French Acadia from New England. European settlement of the area dates to around 1628, when New England colonists erected their first houses at the site; these first English colonists fished, farmed, and traded food and manufactured goods for furs with their Indian neighbors. As the first and most important early center for intercultural relations between Indian people and English settlers in Maine, the large amounts of artifacts and other materials preserved in Pemaquid’s fieldstone foundations, cellar-holes, chimney-bases, hearths, and other features have yielded much valuable information associated with this time period. PICOTTE MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, NEBRASKA Location: Walthill, Thurston County Significance: This hospital was built by Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte (1865-1915), the first Native American physician, who pioneered in providing health care for Native Americans. Picotte was born on the Omaha Indian Reservation, the youngest child of Chief Joseph La Flesche (Iron Eye), the last recognized chief of his tribe and a strong advocate of integration. Picotte was educated at the Hampton Institute in Virginia and received her medical degree from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She returned to the Omaha Reservation in 1890 as physician at the government boarding school, ultimately becoming physician for the entire tribe, serving as well as teacher, social worker, adviser, and interpreter. Picotte was an active advocate for temperance and Omaha Indian rights. PICTOGRAPH CAVE, MONTANA Location: Billings, Yellowstone County Significance: This is one of the key archaeological sites used in determining the sequence of prehistoric occupation on the northwestern Plains. The deposits indicate occupation from 2600 b.c.e. to after 1800 c.e. PIKE PAWNEE VILLAGE SITE, NEBRASKA Location: Guide Rock, Webster County Significance: This is generally accepted as the Pawnee village where Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, on his mission to secure the new territory in the Plains acquired under the Louisiana Purchase, caused the American flag to be raised and the Spanish flag lowered in late September, 1806. Archaeological evidence corroborates the identification.
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PIPESTONE QUARRIES, MINNESOTA Location: Southwest Minnesota Significance: The quarries, located in southwest Minnesota, were being worked in the seventeenth century with metal tools acquired from European traders. From the beginning, the area was considered a sacred place where peoples from various tribes could quarry stone in peace.The earliest diggers were the Iowa and Oto. By the 1700’s, the Dakota Sioux had acquired a monopoly, trading pipestone extensively throughout North America. The stone, prized for its color and softness, was ideal for carving ceremonial pipes, including calumets. Today an interpretive center housing displays of carvings and quarrying techniques is on the site and open to public view. POVERTY POINT, LOUISIANA Location: Delhi, West Carroll County Significance: The largest and most complex ceremonial earthworks of its kind yet found in North America, the site is dominated by the huge Poverty Point Mound, which is 640 feet by 710 feet in base dimension and rises to a height of nearly 70 feet. PUEBLO GRANDE RUIN AND IRRIGATION SITES, ARIZONA Location: Pueblo Grande City Park, Phoenix, Maricopa County Significance: The prehistoric platform mound and associated archaeological remains at Pueblo Grande represent one of the last surviving urban architectural sites of its kind in the southwestern United States. There is evidence that between 1100 and 1400 c.e., Pueblo Grande served as a Hohokam administration center for a major irrigation canal system. Due to its prehistoric significance, preeminent archaeologists have conducted research at Pueblo Grande since the 1880’s. SALINAS PUEBLO MISSIONS, NEW MEXICO Location: Mountainair, one block west of the U.S. 60 and New Mexico 55 junction; about eighty miles south of Albuquerque Significance: Administered by the National Park Service, this was once a major trading center and is now the site of mission ruins and Indian pueblo ruins that have survived since the villages were abandoned in the 1600’s.
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SAN ANTONIO MISSIONS, TEXAS Location: On the Mission Trail in the south central portion of San Antonio, south of Interstate 35, west of Interstate 37, and north of the south section of Interstate 410 Significance: This site consists of four Spanish missions: Mission Concepción, Mission San José, Mission San Juan, and Mission Espada. All four are prime examples of Spanish Mission architecture as adapted for use in the New World. The construction of these historic missions was a joint effort of skilled craftsmen from Spain and Mexico and the local Coahuiltecan Indians. SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION, ARIZONA Location: Tucson, Pima County Significance: Founded in 1700 by the Jesuits, Bac then formed the extreme northern thrust of Nueva Espana. The present structure is the third, perhaps the fourth, church on the site. Consecrated by Franciscans, it was begun in 1783 and completed in 1797. One of the finest Spanish Colonial churches in the country, it is a synthesis of Baroque design and the desert materials from which it was built by Papago Indian laborers supervised by Spanish-American master craftsmen. SEQUOYAH’S CABIN, OKLAHOMA Location: Akins, Sequoyah County Significance: This frontier house of logs was occupied (1829-1843) by Sequoyah (c. 1770-1843), the teacher who in 1821 invented a syllabary which made it possible to write and read the Cherokee language. The giant California sequoia trees are named for him. SERPENT MOUND, OHIO Location: Locust Grove, Adams County Significance: This giant, earthen snake effigy, the largest and finest in America, probably dates from the Adena period (1000 b.c.e.-200 c.e.). The site is one of the first in the United States to be set aside because of its archaeological value. SHAWNEE MISSION, KANSAS Location: Fairway, Johnson County Significance: From 1839 to 1862, Indian children of many nearby tribes were taught English, manual arts, and agriculture at the school established in 1830 by the Reverend Thomas Johnson. Also, the first terri-
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torial governor of Kansas had his executive offices here in 1854, and the first territorial legislature met here in 1855. SHILOH, TENNESSEE Location: If traveling on Interstate 40, south at Jackson, Tennessee, on U.S. 45 and then east on Tennessee Route 142; if traveling east from Memphis, approximately eighty miles on Highway 72 to Corinth, Mississippi, then northeast twenty-five miles on U.S. Highway 45 Significance: Shiloh is the site of one of the earliest and most decisive full-scale battles in the western theater of operations during the Civil War. Within the park also are thirty Indian burial mounds, which were excavated by the Smithsonian Institution in 1934. SITKA, ALASKA Location: The seaward side of Baranof Island, an extinct volcano in southeast Alaska’s island chain; approximately one hundred miles from the coast of North America Significance: Originally an Alaskan Indian village, Sitka was the center of the northwest international fur trade, the site of the first recorded contact between Eurasians and Alaskan Indians, and the site of several battles between Indians and Russians; the capital of Russian America, the first capital of Alaska under U.S. rule, and the site of transfer for Alaska’s sale to the United States by Russia in 1867. SNAKETOWN, ARIZONA Location: Near the city of Phoenix in Southern Arizona Significance: The site of Snaketown, in southern Arizona, was the largest of the early pit house villages. With occupations dating from between 300 and 1150, it remains the best-known center of Hohokam culture. It is situated on an upper river terrace in the Phoenix Basin, near the confluence of the Salt and the Gila rivers. The site was excavated by archaeologist Emil Haury in 1934-1935 and again in 19641965. This research provided detailed information on the Southwest’s first irrigation farmers. SPIRO, OKLAHOMA Location: Eastern Oklahoma Significance: Spiro was the most important western center of Caddoan culture in the Late Prehistoric period (1200-1350). It is situated within an area of escarpments along the Arkansas River, in a location that was strategic for contacts between the southern Plains and the low-
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lands of the Mississippi Valley. The site covers an area of 80 acres, although not all of this area was occupied simultaneously. It is best known for its elaborate burials and thousands of art objects of shell and copper. The site was first occupied during the Late Archaic period (circa 2500 to 500 b.c.e.), but its most spectacular features date between 900 and 1350 c.e. SUNKEN VILLAGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE, OREGON Location: Portland, Multnomah County Significance: Sunken Village is the archaeological remains of a Chinook settlement (1250-1750 c.e.) which is extraordinarily well preserved. The Chinooks who lived there were a cosmopolitan people and practiced a successful, complex hunter-gatherer economy that permitted densely occupied villages and extensive trade relations. SUNWATCH SITE, OHIO Location: Dayton, Montgomery County Significance: Sunwatch, formerly known as the Incinerator Site, is located on the west bank of the Great Miami River within the city limits of Dayton. Ceramics, radiocarbon dates, and other evidence indicate that this open village site is a discrete Fort Ancient period, Anderson phase village probably occupied for not more than twenty-five years during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The site is one of the best preserved and most completely excavated and analyzed archaeological village sites associated with the Post Archaic Eastern Farmers. SYCAMORE SHOALS, TENNESSEE Location: Elizabethton, Carter County Significance: A treaty signed by the Cherokee here in 1775 allowed the United States to purchase twenty million acres of Cherokee land. Also, in 1780, the site served as the rendezvous point for the Overmountain Men on their way to Kings Mountain, where they contributed to the defeat of the British army. TAHLEQUAH, OKLAHOMA Location: Cherokee County in the Ozark plateau area of eastern Oklahoma, sixty-seven miles southeast of Tulsa Significance: This is the site where the Eastern and Western branches of the Cherokees came together to sign the Cherokee Constitution on September 6, 1839. Tahlequah functioned as the Cherokee na-
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tional capital until the Curtis Act of 1898 abolished tribal authority in the Indian Territory. Following Oklahoma’s admission as a state, Tahlequah became the seat of Cherokee County. The town remains the administrative headquarters for the Cherokee tribal government. TAOS, NEW MEXICO Location: Northern New Mexico, at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains; seventy miles northeast of Santa Fe Significance: This artists’ and ski resort town in New Mexico was inhabited originally by Native Americans and later by Spanish settlers. The Taos Pueblo has been home to Taos-Tiwa Indians for one thousand years. By 1200 c.e. the Pit House People had started organizing their buildings into pueblos to avert the constant attacks by Plains Indians for food and slaves, and to serve as a site for trading with other tribes. The Taos Pueblo serves as a reminder of those early settlers; it is one of the oldest continually inhabited communities in the United States, one of New Mexico’s nineteen Native American pueblos still in existence. TIPPECANOE BATTLEFIELD, INDIANA Location: Lafayette, Tippecanoe County Significance: In response to the efforts of Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet, to unite the Indian nations of the northwest and southwest territories to resist American expansion, Indiana Territory governor William Henry Harrison led a force of about one thousand men to the Shawnee settlement at the Great Clearing, where Tippecanoe Creek flows into the Wabash. On November 7, 1811, Harrison’s army defeated the Shawnee led by the Prophet and sacked their village, in the process destroying all hope that Tecumseh had for an Indian confederacy. The American victory here was also an important cause of the second war with Britain (1812-1815). TOBIAS-THOMPSON COMPLEX, KANSAS Location: Geneseo, Rice County Significance: The complex is composed of a cluster of eight village sites along the Little Arkansas River, all of which relate to the Little River Focus of the Great Bend Aspect dating from 1500 to 1700. These sites have been related to a historic culture, the Wichita Tribe, and may have been among the villages visited by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in Quivira in 1542.
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TOLTEC MOUNDS SITE, ARKANSAS Location: Scott, Lonoke County Significance: A large ceremonial complex and village site, Toltec Mounds represents the northhernmost occupation during the Coles Creek Period (c. 700-1000 c.e.) and may yield information about the interaction between Lower and Central Mississippi Valley cultures. It is part of Toltec Mounds Archaeological State Park. TOOLESBORO MOUND GROUP, IOWA Location: Toolesboro, Louisa County Significance: First excavated in 1875, this is the best-preserved Hopewell site in Iowa, representing an extension of the “classic” Hopewellian mortuary practices of the Illinois River Valley. UTZ SITE, MISSOURI Location: Marshall, Saline County Significance: Located on bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, this site was occupied from c. 1400 c.e. to the late 1700’s. Probably the principal village area occupied by the Missouri Indians at the time of their first contact with Europeans, Utz is noted by French explorers, beginning with PÍre Jacques Marquette, whose 1673 map placed “Messourit” Indians here. VANDERBILT ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE, SOUTH DAKOTA Location: Pollock, Campbell County Significance: Archaeological information about the earliest culture history of today’s Mandan and Hidatsa peoples is preserved in the Vanderbilt Village Site. They began to transform their environment along the Missouri River floodplain near the Cannonball River around 1000 c.e. by expanding their horticultural economy with permanent villages, substantial houses, and more complex technologies. By 1400, the Vanderbilt Village was a well-established, dynamic community within which its people lived comfortably, traded, hunted, fished, and created a highly developed clan tradition with neighboring villages. WALLOWA LAKE SITE, OREGON Location: Joseph, Wallowa County Significance: This site, commanding an excellent view of a high, glaciated lake and mountain country, preserves a traditional Nez Perce ancestral campground associated with religious and cultural values that have persisted for more than the century that has elapsed since
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the band of nontreaty Nez Perce led by Young Chief Joseph was driven out. WASHITA BATTLEFIELD, OKLAHOMA Location: Cheyenne, Roger Mills County Significance: This was the scene of an 1868 attack by George Armstrong Custer’s troops on the village of Black Kettle, peace chief of the southern Cheyenne. It demonstrated the effectiveness of winter campaigns against Southern Plains Indian groups. WEIPPE PRAIRIE, IDAHO Location: Weippe, Clearwater County Significance: On the morning of September 20, 1805, an advance party of the Lewis and Clark Expedition came out of the Bitterroot Mountains onto the southeastern corner of Weippe Prairie, the western terminus of the Lolo Trail and long a favored source of camas root for the Nez Perce Indians. Here, the expedition first met the Nez Perce, who had never before seen white men. The Nez Perce gave the explorers food as well as much-needed help and directions during the twoand-a-half-week period spent in their territory. WOUNDED KNEE BATTLEFIELD, SOUTH DAKOTA Location: Batesland, Shannon County Significance: On December 29, 1890, this was the scene of the last major clash between Native Americans and U.S. troops in North America. In the period following the introduction of the Ghost Dance among the Lakota and the killing of Sitting Bull, a band of several hundred led by Big Foot left the Cheyenne River Reservation. Intercepted by U.S. troops, they had given themselves up and had been escorted to an army encampment on Pine Ridge Reservation when shooting suddenly started. The ensuing struggle, short but bloody, resulted in seventy-five army casualties and the virtual massacre of Big Foot’s band. WUPATKI NATIONAL MONUMENT, ARIZONA Location: Thirty-two miles north of Flagstaff, between Flagstaff and Cameron, off U.S. Interstate 89 via a thirty-six-mile driving loop that leads directly to Wupatki as well as to the adjacent Sunset Crater National Monument Significance: The thirty-six-thousand-acre National Monument is the site of Indian ruins dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
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The most famous ruins are Wukoki, the Citadel, Lomaki, and Wupatki Pueblo. The structures were built after a nearby volcanic eruption blanketed the area with volcanic ash, attracting a variety of Indian groups—the Sinagua, Cohonino, Anasazi, Hohokam, Mogollon, and Cíbola—to the newly arable land. The site was abandoned in the thirteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, the site was inhabited by Navajo and Hopi Indians. By the turn of the century, archaeological excavations had begun there. YELLOWSTONE, WYOMING Location: Northwestern Wyoming, extending into Montana and Idaho Significance: Yellowstone National Park, dedicated by Congress on March 1, 1872, was the first national park in the United States and the first step toward the creation of a National Park Service. Cultural sites show human occupation dating back twelve thousand years. The park embraces the area traversed by the fleeing Nez Perce Indians in 1877. YUMA CROSSING, ARIZONA AND ASSOCIATED SITES Location: Yuma Significance: First used by Native Americans, this natural crossing served as a significant transportation gateway on the Colorado River during the Spanish Colonial and U.S. westward expansion periods. The surviving buildings of the Yuma Quartermaster Depot and Arizona Territorial Prison are the key features on the Arizona side of the border; across the river, in California, stand the surviving buildings of Fort Yuma, an Army outpost that guarded the crossing from 1850 to 1885. ZUÑI-CÍBOLA COMPLEX, NEW MEXICO Location: Zuñi, Valencia County Significance: A series of sites on the Zuñi Reservation, containing house ruins, kivas, pictographs, petroglyphs, trash mounds, and a mission church and convent. They have proven to be an important source of material for ethnological studies of the early Zuñi, Mogollon, and Anasazi cultures. They include the Village of the Great Kivas, Yellow House, Hawikuh, and Kechipbowa.
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Historic Native Americans Adams, Hank: Assiniboine-Sioux negotiator during the Trail of Broken Treaties Agüeybana: chief in the Higüey region during the West Indian uprisings Alokut (1842-1877): Joseph the Younger’s brother, a tribal war leader during the Nez Perce exile Anacaona: chieftainess in the western provinces during the West Indian uprisings Arpeika, also known as Sam Jones (c. 1760-1860): Mikasuki shaman during the Seminole Wars Atotarho: Onondaga chief of the Iroquois Confederacy Attakullakulla (1714?-1781?): Cherokee diplomat during the Cherokee War Banks, Dennis (born 1935?): co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) Barboncito (c. 1820-1871): Navajo war chief during the Long Walk of the Navajos Bean, Lou: sister of Buddy Lamont at the Wounded Knee Occupation Big Bear, also known as Mistahimaskwa (1825-1888): Cree chief who sought peace during the second Riel rebellion Big Foot (c. 1825-1890): chief of the Minneconjou Sioux at the Battle of Wounded Knee Big Warrior (died 1825): mico of the Upper Creeks, leader of the progressive peace party during the Creek War Bissonnette, Gladys: tribal elder at the Wounded Knee Occupation Black Elk, Wallace (born 1921): Oglala medicine man at the Wounded Knee Occupation Black Kettle (1803?-1868): chief of the Southern Cheyenne during the Sand Creek massacre, Cheyenne chieftain at the Washita River massacre, and leading Cheyenne chief at Medicine Lodge Creek Blue Jacket, also known as Weyapiersenwah (1764?-1810): Shawnee war chief at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and led the native troops against General Anthony Wayne during Little Turtle’s War Blunt, King Tom (died 1739?): leader of hostile Tuscarora towns during the Tuscarora War Boudinot, Elias (Buck Watie, c. 1803-1839): nephew of Major Ridge and editor of the Cherokee Phoenix
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Bowlegs, Billy, also known as Holatamico (c. 1810-1864): Seminole war leader during the Seminole Wars Brant, Joseph, also known as Thayendanegea (1742-1807): Mohawk leader who fought with the British during the Revolutionary War Caonabo: 1495 rebel leader during the West Indian uprisings Clearwater, Frank (died 1973): Indian casualty of the confrontation at the Wounded Knee Occupation Coacoochee, also known as Wildcat (c. 1810-1857): Seminole war leader during the Seminole Wars Cochise, also known as Goci, or His Nose (c. 1812-1874): principal chief of the eastern Chiricahua during the Apache Wars. Colbert, Levi (1790?-1834): Chickasaw chief who tried to ease the burden of removal during the Trail of Tears Cornplanter, also known as John O’Bail (c. 1732-1836): principal Seneca chief during the American Revolution, half brother of Handsome Lake Cornstalk (c. 1720-1777): Shawnee leader who tried to negotiate with Dunmore during Lord Dunmore’s War Crazy Horse (c. 1842-1877): key Sioux strategist in the Fetterman battle during the Bozeman Trail War Crow Dog, Leonard (born 1942): Oglala medicine man on the Rosebud Reservation at the Wounded Knee Occupation Deganawida, also known as Peacemaker (c. 1550-c. 1600): Huron or Mohawk prophet or holy man of the Iroquois Confederacy Drew, John (1796-1865): Confederate Cherokee who led a regiment of fullblooded Cherokees in the Civil War Elk, John: American Indian who voluntarily separated from his tribe; he sued for the right to vote in Elk v. Wilkins Fools Crow, Frank (born 1890): Teton Sioux ceremonial chief at the Wounded Knee Occupation Geronimo (c. 1827-1909): shaman and important leader of the western Chiricahua during the Apache Wars Gray Beard (died 1875): Cheyenne war chief during the Red River War Guarionex: 1495 rebel leader during the West Indian uprisings Guarocuya (died 1509): nephew of Anacaona in the West Indian uprisings
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Hall, Louis, also known as Karoniaktajeh (c. 1920-1993): Mohawk leader of Warrior Society; twentieth century critic of Handsome Lake Hancock, King Tom (died 1712): leader of hostile Tuscarora towns during the Tuscarora War Handsome Lake, also known as Ganeodiyo (c. 1735-1815): Seneca founder of the Code of Handsome Lake Hendrick (c. 1680-1755): Mohawk leader at the Albany Congress Hiawatha (c. 1525-c. 1575): Mohawk chief of the Iroquois Confederacy Iroquet: Algonquian chief during the Beaver Wars Japasus or Iopassus: king of the Potomacs in the Powhatan Confederacy Joseph the Elder (1786-1871): chief of the Wallamwatkins during the Nez Perce exile Joseph the Younger (c. 1832-1904): chief of the Wallamwatkins after his father during the Nez Perce exile Kekataugh: the ruler of the village of Pamunkey in the Powhatan Confederacy Kiala: war chief during the most brutal period of repression of Fox tribes fleeing French and other tribes’ assaults during the Fox Wars Kiotsaeton: Mohawk orator who presented wampum belts at peace council during the Beaver Wars Lamont, Buddy (died 1973): Pine Ridge resident who died in the confrontation at the Wounded Knee Occupation Lavelle, Jeannette (born 1942): Ojibwa woman who fought the enfranchisement provision of the Indian Act of 1876 (Canada) Little Crow, also known as Taoyateduta (c. 1820-1863): principal war chief of the Santee Sioux in the Sioux War Little Six, also known as Shakopee (died 1865): Santee leader of the “blanket” Sioux, hanged at Fort Snelling in the Sioux War Little Turtle, also known as Michikinikwa (c. 1752-1812): Miami war chief at the Battle of Fallen Timbers Logan, John, also known as Tachnechdorus, the Great Mingo (c. 17231780): Mingo war chief during Lord Dunmore’s War Lone Wolf (c. 1820-c. 1879): Kiowa chief, leader of the Kiowa war faction during the Red River War, and the principal complainant in the Supreme Court case Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock Looking Glass (c. 1823-1877): Nez Perce tribal chief and warrior during the Nez Perce exile
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McQueen, Peter (died 1818): mixed-blood planter, mico, and a leader of the Red Stick faction during the Creek War Main Poc (1760?-1816): Potawatomi shaman and war chief at Prophetstown Mangas Coloradus, or Red Sleeves (c. 1791-1863): father-in-law to Cochise and an important chief of the eastern Chiricahua during the Apache Wars Mankato (c. 1830-1862): Santee chief killed at the Battle of Wood Lake in the Sioux War Manuelito (c. 1818-1894): Navajo resistance leader and war chief during the Long Walk of the Navajos Massasoit, also known as Ousamequin (c. 1580-1661): one of three paramount Wampanoag sachem during Metacom’s War Means, Russell (born 1939): Lakota cofounder of American Indian Movement (AIM) Mekaga: minor chief who negotiated the 1738 “pardon” of the remaining tribal groups in the Rock River Valley during the Fox Wars Menewa (c. 1765-1865): Creek chief who strongly defended his people’s rights during the Trail of Tears Metacom, also known as King Philip (c. 1640-1676): one of three paramount Wampanoag sachem during Metacom’s War Miantonomo (c. 1600-1643): chief of the Narragansetts during the Pequot War Micanopy (c. 1780-1849): Seminole chief during the Seminole Wars Moves Camp, Ellen: tribal elder at the Wounded Knee Occupation Nutimus (c. 1660-c. 1742): chief of the Lenni Lenape in the Walking Purchase Oconostota (c. 1710-1783): Cherokee military leader during the Cherokee War Opechancanough (c. 1544-1644): chief of the Pamunkey Indians and a Powhatan successor in the Powhatan Confederacy Opitchapam: Powhatan’s successor in the Powhatan Confederacy Osceola, also known as Billy Powell (c. 1804-1838): Seminole war leader during the Seminole Wars Ote-emathla, also known as Jumper: Seminole war leader during the Seminole Wars Parker, Ely Samuel (1828-1895): Seneca leader and President Grant’s commissioner of Indian affairs
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Parker, Quanah (c. 1845-1911): Comanche war chief during the Red River War Peltier, Leonard (born 1944): Ojibwa-Sioux security director during the Trail of Broken Treaties; later accused of murdering two FBI agents in the Pine Ridge shootings Pocahontas, or Matoaka (c. 1596-1617): daughter of Powhatan, wife of John Rolfe Pontiac, also known as Obwandiag (c. 1720-1769): Ottawa war chief who organized pan-Indian resistance to the British during the French and Indian War Popé (died 1688): major instigator of the Pueblo Revolt Poundmaker (1842-1886): Cree chief who joined in the second Riel rebellion Powhatan, also known as Wahunsonacock (c. 1550-1618): leader of the Powhatan Confederacy Pushmataha (1764-1824): principal chief of the Choctaws and an able negotiator during the Trail of Tears Red Cloud (1822-1909): chief opponent to the Bozeman Trail Red Jacket, also known as Sagoyewatha (1751?-1830): principal Seneca chief; nephew of Handsome Lake Reifel, Benjamin (born 1906): South Dakota congressman and member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe Ridge, John (c. 1803-1839): son of Major Ridge and a Cherokee leader and lobbyist against the Indian Removal Act Ridge, Major (c. 1770-1839): influential Cherokee leader who signed the removal treaty of the Indian Removal Act after resisting it for years Riel, Louis-David (1844-1885): leader of the Metis and second president of the government of Assiniboia in the Riel rebellions Roman Nose (c. 1830-1868): Cheyenne warrior who opposed the agreements of the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty Ross, John (1790-1866): elected principal chief of the Cherokees during the debate over the Indian Removal Act Sacagawea (c. 1788-1812): Shoshoni woman whose presence with the expedition facilitated the Rocky Mountain portage of the Lewis and Clark expedition Sassacus (c. 1560-1637): sachem of the Pequots during the Pequot War Satank, also known as Sitting Bear (c. 1801-1871): Kiowa chief and orator at Medicine Lodge Creek Satanta, also known as White Bear (c. 1830-1878): Kiowa chief and orator at Medicine Lodge Creek
Historic Native Americans / 653
Sequoyah (1770-1843): Cherokee author of the syllabary that made the written language of the Cherokees possible Sitting Bull (c. 1831-1890): last great Sioux warrior chief at the Battle of Wounded Knee Spotted Eagle Black Elk, Grace (1919-1987): tribal elder and wife of Wallace Black Elk at the Wounded Knee Occupation Tandihetsi: Huron chief married to an Algonquian woman during the Beaver Wars Tecumseh (1768-1813): Shawnee war chief and diplomat, advocate of a Native American alliance to stop the European advance in the Ohio Valley and nearby areas during Little Turtle’s War Ten Bears (1792-1872): Comanche chief and orator who led peace efforts between the Native Americans and the U.S. government that led to the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty Tenskwatawa, also known as the Prophet (1768-1837): religious leader who reportedly inspired Pontiac’s resistance, founder of Prophetstown Tomasito: Taos Indian rebel who was believed to have murdered New Mexico governor Charles Bent Tupatú, Luis: successor to Popé and a principal aid during the Pueblo Revolt Uncas (c. 1606-c. 1682): relative of Sassacus, who rebelled during the Pequot War Wamsutta, also known as Alexander (died 1661): one of three paramount Wampanoag sachem during Metacom’s War Ware, Ralph: Kiowa negotiator for the Indians during the Trail of Broken Treaties Watie, Stand (1806-1871): Confederate general who led a regiment of mixed-blood American Indians in the Civil War Weatherford, William (c. 1780-1822): mixed-blood son of a Scots trader and a leader of the Red Stick faction during the Creek War Wilson, Richard: chairman of the Bureau of Indian Affairs tribal council at the Wounded Knee Occupation Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson (c. 1858-1932): Paiute messiah of the Ghost Dance religion
654
Museums, Archives, and Libraries Select list of museums, archives, and libraries in four parts: museums in the United States; museums in Canada; libraries and archives in the United States; libraries and archives in Canada. Each part is arranged alphabetically, first by state, territory, or province, then by city.
Museums in the United States ALABAMA Alabama Museum of Natural History Smith Hall, University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, 35487-0340 Resource center of Southeastern Indians; ties with Moundville Archaeological Park. ALASKA Alaska State Museum 395 Whittier Street Juneau, 99801-1718 Alaskan Native Gallery; Subarctic and Northwest Coast items. Totem Heritage Center 601 Deermount (mailing address: 629 Dock Street) Ketchikan, 99901 Programs and artifacts in Northwest Coast arts; index to all Alaska totem poles. ARIZONA Arizona State Museum University of Arizona Tucson, 85721 Extensive collections from the historic and prehistoric peoples of the area. Colorado River Indian Tribes Museum Route 1, Box 23B Parker, 85344 Artifacts from Mojave, Chemehuevi, Hopi, and Navajo as well as prehistoric cultures.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 655
Gila River Arts and Crafts Center P.O. Box 457 Sacaton, 85247 Museum and crafts reflect all tribes of the area. Heard Museum 22 E. Monte Vista Road Phoenix, 85004-1480 Southwest emphasis; inventory of 8,200 Native American artists. Library of 40,000 volumes includes Fred Harvey Company documents and photo archives. Museum of Northern Arizona Fort Valley Road (mailing address: Route 4, P.O. Box 720) Flagstaff, 86001 Southwest Anglo and Indian art, with Hopi and Navajo emphasis. Harold S. Colton Memorial Library of 24,000 volumes. Navajo Tribal Museum Highway 264 (mailing address: P.O. Box 308) Window Rock, 86515 Four Corners archaeology and ethnography, including re-creation of 1870-1930 era trading post. ARKANSAS Arkansas State Museum P.O. Box 490 State University, 72467 Emphasizes northeastern Arkansas tribes such as the Osage, Caddo, Chickasaw, and others. CALIFORNIA Bowers Museum of Cultural Art 2002 North Main Street Santa Ana, 92706 Collection of 85,000 items focuses on the fine arts of indigenous peoples, including pre-Columbian and Native American.
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Fowler Museum of Cultural History University of California, Los Angeles 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, 90024-1549 Extensive archaeological and ethnographic collections include Native American materials. Maturango Museum 100 E. Las Flores (mailing address: P.O. Box 1776) Ridgecrest, 93556 A small regional museum focusing on one of the richest petroglyph areas in the United States at China Lake. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Times-Mirror Hall of Native American Cultures; Hall of Pre-Columbian Cultures 900 Exposition Boulevard Los Angeles, 90007 Excellent permanent displays, with changing exhibitions on contemporary issues in art and culture. The Pre-Columbian Hall covers cultures from Mexico to Peru. Southwest Museum 234 Museum Drive (mailing address: P.O. Box 558) Los Angeles, 90065 Collections range from Alaska to South America, with permanent displays focusing on the Southwest, Great Plains, California, and Northwest Coast. Braun Research Library contains 50,000 volumes, 100,000 photos, 900 recordings, and archival material. COLORADO Denver Art Museum 100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway Denver, 80204 Art collection includes Indian clothing, Southwest pottery and kachinas, and Northwest Coast carvings. Frederick H. Douglas Library includes 6,000 volumes.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 657
Denver Museum of Natural History 2001 South Colorado Boulevard Denver, 80205 Strong on Paleo-Indian culture, including the original Folsom spear point; a 24,000-volume library. Southern Ute Cultural Center and Gallery Highway 172 (mailing address: P.O. Box 737) Ignacio, 81137 Early history; contemporary bead and leather work. CONNECTICUT American Indian Archaeological Institute (AIAI) 38 Curtis Road (mailing address: P.O. Box 1260) Washington Green, 06793-0260 Continental coverage, but focus is on Northeast Woodlands. Reconstructed Indian village, with Indian Habitats Trail; 250,000 artifacts and a 2,000-volume library. Peabody Museum Yale University 170 Whitney New Haven, 06511-8161 Extensive holdings include both archaeological and ethnographic materials of the Americas. DELAWARE Delaware State Museum 316 South Governors Avenue Dover, 19901 Eastern prehistory; 1,000-volume library; State Archaeological Collection. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA U.S. National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC 20560
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FLORIDA Ah-Tha-Thi-Ki Museum 3240 North 64th Avenue Hollywood, 33024 Artifacts and activities document and preserve Seminole traditions; village, burial site, nature trails. Florida State Museum University of Florida Gainesville, 32601 Pearsall Collection of ethnographic items ranges from Seminole to Inuit. GEORGIA New Echota Route 3 Calhoun, 30701 Restoration of Cherokee capital of 1825-1838. Trail of Tears material. IDAHO Nez Perce National Historic Park Highway 95 (mailing address: P.O. Box 93) Spalding, 83551 Prehistoric as well as historic regional items. Park notes sites of IndianU.S. battles. A 600-volume library and archive of 3,000 photos. ILLINOIS Field Museum of Natural History Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive Chicago, 60605 Extensive Native American collections, including Pawnee earth lodge replica. Webber Resource Center houses books and audio-visual materials on indigenous cultures.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 659
INDIANA Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art 500 West Washington Street Indianapolis, 46204 Extensive collection that emphasizes Northeast Woodlands, great Plains, and Southwest culture areas. IOWA Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science 1717 West 12th Street Davenport, 52804 Regional ethnographic collections and important Mississippian materials. KANSAS Indian Center Museum 650 North Seneca Wichita, 67203 Collection reflects Indian art and religion. KENTUCKY J. B. Speed Art Museum 2035 South Third Street (mailing address: P.O. Box 2600) Louisville, 40201-2600 Collection emphasizes regional materials and the Great Plains, complemented by a 14,000-volume art library that includes the Frederick Weygold Indian Collection. LOUISIANA Tunica-Biloxi Regional Indian Center and Museum Highway 1 (mailing address: P.O. Box 331) Marksville, 71351 Focuses on descendants of the mound builders. The tribal museum is built in a classic Mississippian style. Collections include colonial IndianEuropean materials returned to the tribe under the Indian Graves and Repatriation Act.
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MAINE Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Studies Center Hubbard Hall, Bowdoin College Brunswick, 04011 MacMillan collection of Inuit and Subarctic material culture. MASSACHUSETTS Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 11 Divinity Avenue Harvard University Cambridge, 02138 Worldwide collection of 2,000,000 artifacts has a North and South American focus; 180,000-volume library. MICHIGAN Cranbrook Institute of Science 500 Lone Pine Road (mailing address: P.O. Box 801) Bloomfield Hills, 48303-0801 Collection reflects all North American culture areas. MINNESOTA Mille Lacs Indian Museum HCR 67 (mailing address: P.O. Box 95) Onamia, 56359 Ojibwa and Dakota artifacts illustrate traditional lifeways. Minnesota Historical Society’s Grand Mound and Interpretive Center Route 7 (mailing address: P.O. Box 453) International Falls, 56649 Burial mounds with extensive exhibits of Woodland, Laurel, and Blackduck cultures.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 661
MISSISSIPPI Grand Village of the Natchez Indians 400 Jefferson Davis Boulevard Natchez, 39120 Artifacts explore the culture of the descendants of the Mississippian mound builders. MISSOURI St. Louis Science Center 5050 Oakland Avenue St. Louis, 63110 MONTANA Museum of the Plains Indian and Crafts Center U.S. 89 (mailing address: P.O. Box 400) Browning, 59417 Northern Plains material culture; reconstruction of 1850’s Blackfeet camp. NEBRASKA Fur Trade Museum East Highway 20, HC 74 (mailing address: P.O. Box 18) Chadron, 69337 Museum of Nebraska History 131 Centennial Mall North Lincoln, 68508 Anthropology and art of the central Plains tribes. NEVADA Lost City Museum 721 South Highway 169 Overton, 89040 Reconstructed pueblo and kiva; archaeological museum; 400-volume library.
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NEW JERSEY Montclair Art Museum 3 South Mountain Avenue Montclair, 07042 Rand Collection of Native American art. Art history library of 13,000 volumes. New Jersey State Museum 205 West State Street Trenton, 08625 Local material as well as Plains, Arctic, Southwest, and Northeast collections. NEW MEXICO Maxwell Museum of Anthropology University of New Mexico Roma and University, N.E. Albuquerque, 87131-1201 Extensive Southwest collections. Library of 12,500 volumes and photo archives. Museum of Indian Arts and Culture 708 Camino Lejo (mailing address: P.O. Box 2087) Santa Fe, 87504 Exhibits focus on Pueblo, Apache, and Navajo cultures. A 20,000volume library on the anthropology of the Southwest. Western New Mexico University Museum (mailing address: P.O. Box 43) Silver City, 88061 Eisele collection of classic Mimbres pottery. NEW YORK American Museum of Natural History 79th Street and Central Park West New York, 10024-5192 Exhibitions are especially strong on the cultures of the Arctic and Pacific Northwest.
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National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center Alexander Hamilton Custom House 3753 Broadway at 155th Street New York, 10032 The first of three planned facilities of the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian Institution, opened in New York in 1994. Seneca Iroquois National Museum Broad Street Extension (mailing address: P.O. Box 442) Salamanca, 14779 Special wampum belt exhibit; typical nineteenth century elm-bark longhouse reconstruction; contemporary art. NORTH CAROLINA Indian Museum of the Carolinas 607 Turnpike Road Laurinburg, 28352 Exhibits feature Southeast cultures and lifeways. Native American Resource Center Pembroke State University Pembroke, 28372 Eastern Woodlands materials; North and South America. NORTH DAKOTA North Dakota Heritage Center 612 East Boulevard Bismarck, 58505 Plains cultures. A 100,000-volume library on ethnology and history. Turtle Mountain Chippewa Heritage Center Highway 5 (mailing address: P.O. Box 257) Belcourt, 58316 Promotes tribal history and traditions. Contemporary art gallery.
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OHIO Cincinnati Museum of Natural History 1301 Western Avenue Cincinnati, 45203 Good selection of mound builder artifacts from the Ohio Valley. Cleveland Museum of Natural History 1 Wade Oval Drive University Circle Cleveland, 44106-1767 Research fields include archaeology and physical anthropology. A 50,000-volume natural history library. OKLAHOMA Cherokee Heritage Center Willis Road (mailing address: P.O. Box 515) Tahlequah, 74465 Reconstructed village; contemporary arts and crafts. Museum of the Great Plains 601 Ferris Avenue Lawton, 73502 Artifacts, library, and photo archives relating to Plains tribes. The Philbrook Museum of Art, Inc. 2727 South Rockford Road Tulsa, 74114 Clark Field Basket Collection; Lawson Collection of Indian clothing; Philbrook Collection of American Indian paintings; Lawson Indian library. Seminole Nation Museum and Library 6th and Wewoka (mailing address: P.O. Box 1532) Wewoka, 74884 OREGON High Desert Museum 59800 South Highway 97 Bend, 97702
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 665
Museum of Natural History University of Oregon 1680 East 15th Avenue Eugene, 97403-1224 Collection includes 13,000-year-old Fort Rock Cave artifacts. PENNSYLVANIA Carnegie Museum of Natural History 4400 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, 15213-4080 Wide coverage, including Arctic and Northwest Coast collections. RHODE ISLAND Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology Brown University Bristol, 02809 Arctic and Subarctic materials, including Archaic Period remains of the Red Paint People of Maine. SOUTH CAROLINA McKissick Museum University of South Carolina Columbia, 29208 Catawba pottery and baskets. Folk Art Resource Center. SOUTH DAKOTA Indian Museum of North America Avenue of the Chiefs, Black Hills Crazy Horse, 57730 Sioux Indian Museum and Crafts Center 515 West Boulevard Rapid City, 57709 W. H. Over State Museum 414 East Clark Vermillion, 57069-2390 Plains material culture and contemporary painting.
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TENNESSEE Frank H. McClung Museum University of Tennessee 1327 Circle Park Drive Knoxville, 37996-3200 Tennessee State Museum 505 Deaderick Street Nashville, 37243-1120 Strong in prehistoric Mississippian culture. TEXAS Alabama-Coushatta Museum U.S. Highway 190 Route 3 (mailing address: P.O. Box 540) Livingston, 77351 Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum 2401 Fourth Avenue Canyon, 79016 Hall of the Southern Plains. South and Southwest Indian focus; 10,000volume library. Texas Memorial Museum University of Texas 24th and Trinity Austin, 78705 Broad focus on the anthropology of the American Indian. Witte Memorial Museum 3801 Broadway San Antonio, 78209 Samples most North American culture areas. UTAH College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum 451 East 400 North Price, 84501 Focuses on Anasazi and Fremont cultures.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 667
Utah Museum of Natural History University of Utah Salt Lake City, 84112 Regional, Great Basin, and Southwestern materials. VIRGINIA Jamestown Settlement (mailing address: P.O. Box JF) Williamsburg, 23187 Reconstruction of Indian village and Powhatan’s lodge. Mattaponi Museum West Point, 23181 Important collection of archaeological materials. Pamunkey Indian Museum (mailing address: P.O. Box 2050) King William, 23086 Contemporary and prehistoric art and artifacts. WASHINGTON The Burke Museum University of Washington, DB-10 Seattle, 98195 Northwest Coast and Pacific Rim collections. Makah Cultural and Research Center (mailing address: P.O. Box 160) Neah Bay, 98257 Features remains from the Ozette site, a Late Period pre-contact Makah village buried and preserved in a mudslide. Magnificent Northwest Coast Tradition assemblage of 60,000 artifacts. Seattle Art Museum 100 University Street (mailing address: P.O. Box 22000) Seattle, 98122-9700 Excellent collection of Northwest Coast art. Yakima Nation Cultural Heritage Center Toppenish, 98948
668 / Museums, Archives, and Libraries
WEST VIRGINIA Grave Creek Mound State Park Moundsville, 26041 Largest mound produced by the Adena ceremonial complex, which flourished around 500 b.c.e. to 100 c.e. WISCONSIN Lac du Flambeau Chippewa Museum (mailing address: P.O. Box 804) Lac du Flambeau, 54538 Eighteenth century dugout canoe, artifacts, and seasonal activities displays. Logan Museum of Anthropology 700 College Street Beloit College Beloit, 53511-5595 Physical and cultural anthropological materials from the Great Lakes, Plains, and Southwest culture areas. Milwaukee Public Museum 800 West Wells Street Milwaukee, 53233 Collections cover North America. A 125,000-volume library. Neville Public Museum 129 South Jefferson Street Green Bay, 54301 Archaic Period materials from the Old Copper and Red Ochre cultures. WYOMING Anthropology Museum University of Wyoming Laramie, 82071
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 669
Museums in Canada ALBERTA Glenbow Museum 130 Ninth Avenue, S.E. Calgary, AB T2G 0P3 Provincial Museum of Alberta 12845 102nd Avenue Edmonton, AB T5N 0M6 Regional materials; Inuit; northern Plains. BRITISH COLUMBIA Campbell River Museum 1235 Island Highway Campbell Island, BC V9W 2C7 Arts of the Indian groups of northern Vancouver Island. ’Ksan Indian Village (mailing address: P.O. Box 326) Hazelton, BC B0J 1Y0 A center for the display, preservation, and promotion of Gitksan arts and crafts skills. Seven traditional buildings. Museum of Anthropology University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 Major Northwest Coast collections. Center for promotion of traditional arts and customs. Museum of Northern British Columbia (mailing address: P.O. Box 669) Prince Rupert, BC V8J 3S1 Northwest Coast artifacts. Promotes contemporary carving and craft skills. Royal British Columbia Museum 675 Belleville Street Victoria, BC V8V 1X4 Traditional Kwakiutl dance houses; Thunderbird Park totem pole exhibits; art demonstrations.
670 / Museums, Archives, and Libraries
MANITOBA Eskimo Museum La Verendrye Street (mailing address: P.O. Box 10) Churchill, MB R0B 0E0 Inuit materials include kayaks dating back hundreds of years. Also, Subarctic materials from Chippewa and Cree cultures. Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature 190 Rupert Avenue Winnipeg, MB R3B 0N2 NEW BRUNSWICK New Brunswick Museum 277 Douglas Avenue Saint John, NB F2K 1E5 Regional and pre-Algonquian artifacts. NEWFOUNDLAND Newfoundland Museum 285 Duckworth Street St. John’s, NF A1C 1G9 Exhibits cover the six major tribal groups of Labrador and Newfoundland. NORTHWEST TERRITORIES Dene Cultural Institute (mailing address: P.O. Box 207) Yellowknife, NT X1A 2N2 Northern Life Museum 110 King Street (mailing address: P.O. Box 420) Fort Smith, NT X0E 0P0 Arctic and Subartic tools and artifacts.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 671
NOVA SCOTIA Nova Scotia Museum 1747 Summer Street Halifax, NS B3H 3A6 Artifacts of the Micmac. ONTARIO Museum of Indian Archaeology and Lawson Prehistoric Village 1600 Attawandaron Road London, ON N6G 3M6 Exhibits cover five phases of culture dating back to Paleo-Indian times. On-site excavation. North American Indian Travel College The Living Museum RR 3 Cornwall Island, ON K6H 5R7 Royal Ontario Museum 100 Queen’s Park Crescent Toronto, ON M5S 2C6 Ontario prehistory. Thunder Bay Art Gallery 1080 Keewatin Street (mailing address: P.O. Box 1193) Thunder Bay, ON P7C 4X9 Traditional items as well as contemporary art. PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND Micmac Indian Village (mailing address: P.O. Box 51) Cornwall, PEI C0A 1H0 QUEBEC Abenakis Museum Route 226 Odanak, PQ J0G 1H0 Displays reflect tribal traditions and lore.
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Canadian Museum of Civilization 100 Laurier Street Hull, PQ J8X 4H2 Spectacular collection of national cultural materials. McCord Museum McGill University 690 Sherbrook Street W. Montreal, PQ H3A 1E9 SASKATCHEWAN Regina Plains Museum 1801 Scarth Street Regina, SK S4P 2G9 Metis history and the Riel Rebellions are covered in addition to Plains material. Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History Wascana Park Regina, SK S4P 3V7 Native Peoples Gallery focusing on Subarctic tribes. YUKON TERRITORY MacBride Museum (mailing address: P.O. Box 4037) Whitehorse, YT Y1A 3S9 Artifacts of the Yukon region.
Libraries and Archives in the United States ALABAMA Alabama Department of Archives and History 624 Washington Avenue Montgomery, 36130
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 673
ARIZONA Navajo Nation Library System Drawer K Window Rock, 86515 Collection has 23,000 books, 1,000 manuscripts, and films and tapes. Files of the Navajo Times. Two libraries in Window Rock and one in Navajo, New Mexico. Smoki People Library P.O. Box 123 Prescott, 86302 Library of 600 volumes covers North and South American Indian ceremonials and dances. Tohono Chul Park, Inc. 7366 North Paseo del Norte Tucson, 85704 Nature center, ethnic art exhibitions, and 800-volume library on Southwest culture and environment. Western Archaeological and Conservation Center 1415 North Sixth Avenue (mailing address: P.O. Box 41058, Tucson, 85717) Tucson, 85705 Focus on Southwest prehistory and ethnography: 17,000-volume library, 100 periodicals, and 160,000-item photo archive. ARKANSAS Southwest Arkansas Regional Archives (SARA) P.O. Box 134 Washington, 71862 History of Caddo Indians and Southwest Arkansas. CALIFORNIA American Indian Resource Center Public Library of Los Angeles County 6518 Miles Avenue Huntington Park, 90255 Special collections on Indians of North America; 9,000 volumes.
674 / Museums, Archives, and Libraries
Malki Museum Archives 11-795 Fields Road Banning, 92220 Oral history project tapes; field notes of J. P. Harrington and others; manuscript and photo archives. Native American Studies Library University of California at Berkeley 103 Wheeler Berkeley, 94720 Reports of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; Indian Claims Commission materials; special California Indian collection; extensive holdings. Rupert Costo Library UCR Library Special Collections University of California at Riverside Riverside, 92517 The 15,000-volume collection is countrywide in scope with a California concentration. Houses the American Indian Historical Society Archives, donated by the Costos. Manuscripts, field notes, and 300 books cover the customs and medicines of the Chinantec Indians of Oaxaca. Scientific Library San Diego Museum of Man Balboa Park 1350 El Prado San Diego, 92101 Wide coverage of the Americas, including physical anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology. COLORADO Koshare Indian Museum, Inc. 115 West 18th Street La Junta, 81050 The 10,000-volume Special Koshare Collection focuses on Native America and Western United States. National Indian Law Library Native American Rights Fund 1522 Broadway Boulder, 80302-6296 Documents, periodicals, and 7,500 books on U.S.-Indian relations and law.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 675
Taylor Museum Reference Library Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center 30 West Dale Street Colorado Springs, 80903 Art of the Southwest; Hispanic and colonial folk art. Collection houses 30,000 volumes; extensive biographies of folk artists. Ute Mountain Tribal Research Archive and Library Tribal Compound (mailing address: P.O. Box CC) Towaoc, 81334 Includes 2,500 books as well as 30,000 archival items, including tribal government documents. CONNECTICUT Mashantucket Pequot Research Library Indiantown Road Ledyard, 06339 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA American Folklife Center U.S. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building - G152 Washington, DC 20540 Biggest collection of early Indian recordings, including the Frances Densmore Collection of 3,600 cylinders and the Helen Heffron Roberts Collection from the Northwest Coast and California. National Anthropological Archives Natural History Museum MRC 152 10th and Constitution Avenue Washington, DC 20560 Extensive collections of recordings, photographs, field notes, and manuscripts of the Bureau of Ethnology. Natural Resources Library U.S. Department of the Interior Mail Stop 1151 18th and C Streets, N.W. Washington, DC 20240 More than 600,000 volumes and extensive periodicals and archival items, including materials on American Indians.
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GEORGIA Hargrett Rare Books and Manuscript Library University of Georgia Athens, 30602 ILLINOIS Newberry Library D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian 60 West Walton Street Chicago, 60610 More than 100,000 volumes, including the E. E. Ayer Collection. INDIANA Fulton County Historical Society Library Route 3 (mailing address: P.O. Box 89) Rochester, 46975 Collection houses 4,000 volumes, including coverage of Potawatomi removal to Kansas in 1838 (the Trail of Death). Lilly Library Indiana University Bloomington, 47405 Collection includes Indian accounts of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. KANSAS Mennonite Library and Archives Bethel College 300 East 27th Street North Newton, 67117-9989 Includes 26,000 books. Petter Manuscript Collection on the Cheyenne; H. R. Voth Manuscript and Photo Collection on the Hopi. Mid-America All Indian Center Library 650 North Seneca Wichita, 67203 Includes 3,000 books and 200 bound periodical volumes on Indian art, history, and culture. Blackbear Bosin Collection of publications and personal papers.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 677
LOUISIANA Grindstone Bluff Museum Library (mailing address: P.O. Box 7965) Shreveport, 71107 Contains 6,000 books and 2,000 periodical volumes on regional archaeology and ethnology; emphasis on Caddo Indians. MASSACHUSETTS Fruitlands Museums and Library 102 Prospect Hill Road Harvard, 01451 Mashpee Archives Building Mashpee, 02649 MICHIGAN Custer Collection Monroe County Library System Monroe, 48161 Contains 4,000 books and archival materials on Custer and the West. MINNESOTA Minnesota Historical Society Divison of Archives and Manuscripts 345 Kellogg Boulevard West St. Paul, 55102-1906 Materials relating to the Ojibwa and Dakota. MISSOURI Missouri Historical Society Library Jefferson Memorial Building Forest Park St. Louis, 63112 Northern Plains; papers of William Clark from Lewis and Clark expedition.
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MONTANA Dr. John Woodenlegs Memorial Library Dull Knife Memorial College P.O. Box 98 Lame Deer, 59043-0098 Cheyenne history; oral history collection. Contains 10,000 volumes. NEBRASKA Joslyn Art Museum Art Reference Library 2200 Dodge Street Omaha, 68102 Native American art covered in collection of 25,000 volumes, 3,000 bound periodicals, and 20,000 slides. Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium Library P.O. Box 83111 Lincoln, 68501 Special Collection of Native American video programs (171 titles). Audio program “Spirits of the Present.” NAPBC quarterly newsletter. Materials available by mail. Nebraska State Historical Society Library P.O. Box 82554 Lincoln, 68501 Anderson Collection of Brule Sioux photographs. Library has 70,000 volumes. NEW JERSEY Firestone Library Collections of Western Americana Princeton University Princeton, 08544 NEW MEXICO Mary Cabot Wheelwright Research Library 704 Camino Lejo Santa Fe, 87502 Contains 10,000 volumes; archives on Navajo religion and sandpainting.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 679
Millicent Rogers Museum Library P.O. Box A Taos, 87571 Registry of New Mexico Hispanic artists, including a number of Indian artists. Museum of New Mexico Photo Archives P.O. Box 2087 Santa Fe, 87504 NEW YORK Akwesasne Library Route 37-RR 1 (mailing address: P.O. Box 14-C) Hogansburg, 13655 Iroquois Indian Museum Library P.O. Box 9 Bowes Cave, 12042-0009 Contains 1,500 volumes; 500 archival items; exhibition catalogs. Museum of the American Indian Library 9 Westchester Square Bronx, 10461 Contains 40,000 volumes; archives. Seneca Nation Library Allegany Branch P.O. Box 231 Salamanca, 14779 Cattaraugus Branch Irving, 14981 NORTH CAROLINA State Archives 109 East Jones Street Raleigh, 27601-2807 OHIO Ohio Historical Society Archives and Library 1982 Velma Avenue Columbus, 43211
680 / Museums, Archives, and Libraries
OKLAHOMA Chickasaw Nation Library Arlington and Mississippi Streets Ada, 74830 Gilcrease Library 1400 Gilcrease Museum Road Tulsa, 74127 John Ross (Cherokee chief) and Peter Pitchlynn (Choctaw chief) papers; 50,000 volumes. Oklahoma Historical Society Archives and Manuscript Division 2100 North Lincoln Boulevard Oklahoma City, 73105 State Indian Agency records; Dawes Commission papers; 125,000 photographs. OREGON Siletz Library and Archives 119 East Logsden Road, Building II Siletz, 97380 PENNSYLVANIA Free Library of Philadelphia Logan Square Philadelphia, 19103 University Museum Library 33rd and Spruce Streets University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, 19104 Brinton Collection on Indian linguistics; Delaware materials. SOUTH DAKOTA Center for Western Studies Augustana College P.O. Box 727 Sioux Falls, 57197 Great Plains history. Collection has 30,000 volumes, 1,500 linear feet of manuscripts.
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 681
TEXAS Fikes Hall of Special Collections DeGolyer Library Southern Methodist University Dallas, 75275 National Archives Southwest Region 501 Felix at Hemphill, Building 1 P.O. Box 6216 Fort Worth, 76115 Bureau of Indian Affairs records for Oklahoma. UTAH Ute Tribal Museum, Library, and Audio-Visual Center Fort Duchesne, 84026 WASHINGTON Jamestown Klallam Library Blyn, 98382 Special Collections University of Washington Seattle, 98195 WEST VIRGINIA ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools (CRESS) Library 1031 Quarrier Street (mailing address: P.O. Box 1348) Charleston, 25325 Microfiche containing 300,000 documents. Indian/Hispanic issues. WISCONSIN Fairlawn Historical Museum Harvard View Parkway Superior, 54880 George Catlin lithographs; David F. Berry Collection of Indian photographs and portraits.
682 / Museums, Archives, and Libraries
Hoard Historical Museum Library 407 Merchant Avenue Fort Atkinson, 53538 Rare Black Hawk War materials. WYOMING McCracken Research Library Buffalo Bill Historical Center P.O. Box 1000 Cody, 82414
Libraries and Archives in Canada ALBERTA Canadian Circumpolar Library University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2J8 University of Lethbridge Library Special Collections 4401 University Drive Lethbridge, AB T1K 3M4 Native American studies; English literature; education. BRITISH COLUMBIA Alert Bay Library and Museum 199 Fir Street Alert Bay, BC B0N 1A0 Kamloops Museum and Archives 207 Seymour Street Kamloops, BC V2C 2E7 Interior Salish and Shuswap material. University of British Columbia Library 1956 Main Hall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
Museums, Archives, and Libraries / 683
MANITOBA Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Regional Library 275 Portage Avenue Winnipeg, MB R3B 3A3 People’s Library Manitoba Indian Cultural Education Centre 119 Sutherland Avenue Winnipeg, MB R2W 3C9 NEW BRUNSWICK Education Resource Centre University of New Brunswick D’Avray Hall P.O. Box 7500 Fredericton, NB E3B 5H5 NORTHWEST TERRITORIES Thebacha Campus Library Arctic College Fort Smith, NT X0E 0P0 NOVA SCOTIA Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission Library P.O. Box 2221 Halifax, NS B3J 3C4 Rights of indigenous peoples, women, and others; 4,000 books. ONTARIO Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Departmental Library Ottawa, ON K1A 0H4 University of Sudbury Library and Jesuit Archives Sudbury, ON P3E 2C6
684 / Museums, Archives, and Libraries
QUEBEC Canadian Museum of Civilization Library 100 Laurier Street Hull, PQ J8X 4H2 SASKATCHEWAN Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research Library 121 Broadway Regina, SK S4N 0Z6 Indian History archives; 30,000 volumes. Indian Federated College Library University of Regina Regina, SK S4S 0A2 Collection has 15,000 volumes. Branch library of 4,000 volumes on Saskatoon campus. Saskatchewan Provincial Library 1352 Winnipeg Street Regina, SK S4P 3V7 Has a 4,000-volume Indian collection. Strong in languages.
685
Organizations, Agencies, and Societies All Indian Pueblo Council Founded: 1958 P.O. Box 3256 Albuquerque, NM 87190
American Indian Horse Registry Founded: 1961 Route 3, Box 64 Lockhart, TX 78644
American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers Founded: 1976 P.O. Box 230685 Tigard, OR 97223
American Indian Liberation Crusade Founded: 1952 4009 S. Halldale Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90062
American Indian Culture Research Center Founded: 1967 Box 98 Blue Cloud Abbey Marvin, SD 57251
American Indian Library Association Founded: 1979 50 E. Huron Street Chicago, IL 60611
American Indian Graduate Center Founded: 1969 4520 Montgomery Boulevard NE Ste. 1-B Albuquerque, NM 87109 American Indian Health Care Association Founded: 1975 245 E. 6th Street Ste. 499 St. Paul, MN 55101 American Indian Heritage Foundation Founded: 1973 6051 Arlington Boulevard Falls Church, VA 22044 American Indian Higher Education Consortium Founded: 1972 513 Capitol Court NE Ste. 100 Washington, DC 20002
American Indian Lore Association Founded: 1957 960 Walhonding Avenue Logan, OH 43138 American Indian Movement (AIM) Founded: 1968 710 Clayton Street Apartment 1 San Francisco, CA 94117 American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts Founded: 1983 1717 N. Highland Avenue Ste. 614 Los Angeles, CA 90028 American Indian Research and Development Founded: 1982 2424 Springer Drive Ste. 200 Norman, OK 73069
686 / Organizations, Agencies, and Societies American Indian Science and Engineering Society Founded: 1977 1630 30th Street Ste. 301 Boulder, CO 80301 Americans for Indian Opportunity Founded: 1970 3508 Garfield Street NW Washington, DC 20007 Arrow, Incorporated (Americans for Restitution and Righting of Old Wrongs) Founded: 1949 1000 Connecticut Avenue NW Ste. 1206 Washington, DC 20036 Associated Community of Friends on Indian Affairs Founded: 1869 Box 1661 Richmond, IN 47375 Association of American Indian Physicians Founded: 1971 Building D 10015 S. Pennsylvania Oklahoma City, OK 73159
Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Founded: 1874 2021 H Street NW Washington, DC 20006 Cherokee National Historical Society Founded: 1963 P.O. Box 515 Tahlequah, OK 74465 Coalition for Indian Education Founded: 1987 3620 Wyoming Boulevard NE Ste. 206 Albuquerque, NM 87111 Concerned American Indian Parents Founded: 1987 CUHCC Clinic 2016 16th Avenue S Minneapolis, MN 55404 Continental Confederation of Adopted Indians Founded: 1950 960 Walhonding Avenue Logan, OH 43138 Council for Indian Education Founded: 1970 517 Rimrock Road Billings, MT 59102
Association of Community Tribal Schools Founded: 1982 c/o Dr. Roger Bordeaux 616 4th Avenue W Sisseton, SD 57262-1349
Council for Native American Indians Founded: 1974 280 Broadway Ste. 316 New York, NY 10007
Association on American Indian Affairs Founded: 1923 432 Park Ave. S. New York, NY 10016
Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) Founded: 1975 1999 Broadway Ste. 2600 Denver, CO 80202
Organizations, Agencies, and Societies / 687 Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation Founded: 1948 The Black Hills Avenue of the Chiefs Crazy Horse, SD 57730 Creek Indian Memorial Association Founded: 1923 Creek County House Museum Town Square Okmulgee, OK 74447 Dakota Women of All Red Nations (DWARN) Founded: 1978 c/o Lorelei DeCora P.O. Box 423 Rosebud, SD 57570 First Nations Development Institute Founded: 1980 69 Kelley Road Falmouth, VA 22405 Gathering of Nations Founded: 1984 P.O. Box 75102 Sta. 14 Albuquerque, NM 87120-1269 Indian Arts and Crafts Association Founded: 1974 122 La Veta Drive NE Ste. B Albuquerque, NM 87108 Indian Heritage Council Founded: 1988 Henry Street Box 2302 Morristown, TN 37816 Indian Law Resource Center Founded: 1978 508 Stuart Street Helena, MT 59601
Indian Rights Association Founded: 1882 1801 Market Street Philadelphia, PA 19103-1675 Indian Youth of America Founded: 1978 609 Badgerow Building Sioux City, IA 51101 Institute for American Indian Studies Founded: 1971 38 Curtis Road P.O. Box 1260 Washington, CT 06793-0260 Institute for the Development of Indian Law Founded: 1971 c/o K. Kirke Kickingbird Oklahoma City University School of Law 2501 Blackwelder Oklahoma City, OK 73106 Institute for the Study of American Cultures Founded: 1983 The Rankin 1004 Broadway Columbus, GA 31901 Institute for the Study of Traditional American Indian Arts Founded: 1982 P.O. Box 66124 Portland, OR 97290 Institute of American Indian Arts Founded: 1962 P.O. Box 20007 Santa Fe, NM 87504
688 / Organizations, Agencies, and Societies International Indian Treaty Council Founded: 1974 710 Clayton Street Number 1 San Francisco, CA 94117 Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association Founded: 1921 Box 1 Church Rock, NM 87311 Lone Indian Fellowship and Lone Scout Alumni Founded: 1926 1104 St. Clair Avenue Sheboygan, WI 53081 National American Indian Court Clerks Association Founded: 1980 1000 Connecticut Avenue NW Ste. 1206 Washington, DC 20036 National American Indian Court Judges Association Founded: 1968 1000 Connecticut Avenue NW Ste. 401 Washington, DC 20036 National Center for American Indian Alternative Education Founded: 1960 941 E. 17th Ave. Denver, CO 80218 National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development Founded: 1969 953 E. Juanita Avenue Mesa, AZ 85204
National Congress of American Indians Founded: 1944 900 Pennsylvania Avenue SE Washington, DC 20003 National Council of BIA Educators Founded: 1967 6001 Marble NE Ste. 10 Albuquerque, NM 87110 National Indian Council on Aging Founded: 1976 6400 Uptown Boulevard NE City Centre Ste. 510-W Albuquerque, NM 87110 National Indian Counselors Association Founded: 1980 Learning Research Center Institute of American Indian Arts P.O. Box 20007 Santa Fe, NM 87504 National Indian Education Association Founded: 1970 1819 H Street NW Ste. 800 Washington, DC 20006 National Indian Health Board Founded: 1969 1385 S. Colorado Boulevard Ste. A-708 Denver, CO 80222 National Indian Social Workers Association Founded: 1970 410 NW 18th Street Number 101 Portland, OR 97209
Organizations, Agencies, and Societies / 689 National Indian Training and Research Center Founded: 1969 2121 S. Mill Avenue Ste. 216 Tempe, AZ 85282
Native American Policy Network Founded: 1979 Barry University 11300 2nd Avenue NE Miami, FL 33161
National Indian Youth Council Founded: 1961 318 Elm Street SE Albuquerque, NM 87102
Native American Rights Fund (NARF) Founded: 1970 1506 Broadway Boulder, CO 80302
National Native American Cooperative Founded: 1969 P.O. Box 1030 San Carlos, AZ 85550-1000 National Urban Indian Council Founded: 1977 10068 University Station Denver, CO 80210 Native American (Indian) Chamber of Commerce Founded: 1990 c/o Native American Cooperative P.O. Box 1000 San Carlos, AZ 85550-1000 Native American Community Board Founded: 1984 P.O. Box 572 Lake Andes, SD 57356-0572 Native American Educational Services College Founded: 1974 2838 West Peterson Chicago, IL 60659 Native American Indian Housing Council Founded: 1974 900 2nd Street NE Ste. 220 Washington, DC 20002
North American Indian Association Founded: 1940 22720 Plymouth Road Detroit, MI 48239 North American Indian Chamber of Commerce Founded: 1983 P.O. Box 5000 San Carlos, AZ 85550-1000 North American Indian Museums Association Founded: 1979 c/o George Abrams 260 Prospect Street Number 669 Hackensack, NJ 07601-2608 North American Indian Women’s Association Founded: 1970 9602 Maestor’s Lane Gaithersburg, MD 20879 North American Native American Indian Information and Trade Center Founded: 1991 P.O. Box 1000 San Carlos, AZ 85550-1000
690 / Organizations, Agencies, and Societies Order of the Indian Wars Founded: 1979 P.O. Box 7401 Little Rock, AR 72217 Pan-American Indian Association Founded: 1984 P.O. Box 244 Nocatee, FL 33864 Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development Founded: 1977 P.O. Box 10 Forestville, CA 95436 Smoki People Founded: 1921 P.O. Box 123 Prescott, AZ 86302 Survival of American Indians Association Founded: 1964 7803-A Samurai Drive SE Olympia, WA 98503
Tekakwitha Conference National Center Founded: 1939 P.O. Box 6768 Great Falls, MT 59406-6768 Tiyospaya American Indian Student Organization Founded: 1986 P.O. Box 1954 St. Petersburg, FL 33731 United Indians of All Tribes Foundation Founded: 1970 Daybreak Star Arts Center Discovery Park P.O. Box 99100 Seattle, WA 98199 United Native Americans Founded: 1968 2434 Faria Avenue Pinole, CA 94564 United South and Eastern Tribes Founded: 1969 1101 Kermit Drive Ste. 302 Nashville, TN 37217
691
Time Line c. 15,00013,000 b.c.e.
Possible years of migration to the Americas by the ancestors of present-day Native Americans.
c. 12,000 b.c.e.
Estimate of when Paleo-Indians begin to migrate southward through ice-free corridors into the American interior.
c. 11,000 b.c.e.
Clovis Period begins across native North America; centers on hunting mega-fauna, especially the woolly mammoth.
c. 9,000 b.c.e.
Folsom Period emerges, centering on bison hunting.
c. 8,000 b.c.e.
Plano Period replaces Folsom, representing a transitional cultural period culminating in the Archaic.
c. 6,000 b.c.e.
Archaic Period begins, signaling a reliance on a variety of flora and fauna. Cultural innovations such as pottery, the bow and arrow, and the domestication of plants begin to appear across North America.
c. 1,000 b.c.e.
Agriculture appears in the Southwest; it gradually diffuses across North America.
c. 1,000 b.c.e.
Woodland Period emerges in eastern North America.
c. 1-500 c.e.
Complex societies flourish across North America.
c. 825-900
Athapaskan people, ancestors of the Navajo and Apache, invade the Southwest from the north, altering the cultural landscape of the Puebloan people.
c. 1007
Norsemen invade native North America along the eastern seaboard and establish a short-lived colony.
1050-1250
Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, is established as a great Mississippian trading and ceremonial center. The city may have contained as many as thirty thousand people.
1492
Christopher Columbus lands on Guanahani (the island of San Salvador), launching Europe’s exploration and colonization of North America.
692 / Time Line
c. 1500
European-introduced diseases, warfare, and slavery begin to reduce native populations (from an estimated ten to eighteen million to approximately 250,000 in 1900).
1519-1521
Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire.
1582-1598
Spanish conquistadores invade and settle in the Southwest.
1585
Roanoke Colony is founded by the British (it lasts only until approximately 1607).
1599
Massacre at Acoma Pueblo. Vincente de Zaldivar attacks Acoma on January 21 because of its resistance to Spanish authority; eight hundred Acomas are killed.
1607
British Virginia Company establishes colony of Jamestown, affecting local indigenous populations.
1609
Henry Hudson opens the fur trade in New Netherlands.
1620
The Pilgrims colonize present-day Massachusetts.
1622-1631
Powhatan Confederacy declares war on the Jamestown colonists.
1629
The Spanish begin establishing missions among the Pueblos, leading to a 1633 revolt at Zuni.
1630
The Puritans colonize New England, carrying with them a religious belief that Native Americans are “children of the Devil.”
1636-1637
Pequot War. The Pequot and their allies attempt to defend their homelands against the Puritans.
c. 1640
The Dakota (Sioux), forced in part by hostilities initiated by the fur trade, begin to migrate westward onto the Great Plains.
1642-1685
Beaver Wars. As the supply of beaver is exhausted in the Northeast, the Iroquois Confederacy launches a war against neighboring Native American nations to acquire their hunting territories.
Time Line / 693
c. 1650
Period of widespread migrations and relocations. Prompted by the diffusion of the gun and the horse, and by the increasing hostility of Europeans, many Native Americans migrate westward.
1655
Timucua Rebellion. Timucuan mission residents rebel against Spanish cruelty in Florida.
1655-1664
Peach Wars. The Dutch launch a war of extermination against the Esophus nation after an Esophus woman is killed for picking peaches.
1670
Hudson’s Bay Company is chartered, launching a westward expansion of the fur trade.
1670-1710
South Carolinians in Charleston encourage the development of a Native American slave trade across the Southeast.
1675-1676
King Philip’s War. In response to English maltreatment, Metacomet (King Philip) launches a war against the English.
1676-1677
Bacon’s Rebellion. Native Americans in Virginia fight a war of resistance but find themselves subject to Virginia rule.
1680
Pueblo (Popé’s) Revolt. After decades of Spanish oppression, a Pueblo confederacy expels the Spanish from the Rio Grande region.
1682
Assiniboine and Cree begin to trade at York Factory, initiating European mercantile penetration of the Canadian west as far as the Rocky Mountains.
1689-1763
French and Indian Wars. King William’s War initiates conflicts between the French and English that involve Native Americans and disrupt traditional patterns and alliances.
1692
Spanish reconquest of the Southwest (Nueva Mexico).
1695
Pima Uprising. Pimas burn missions in response to Spanish oppression.
c. 1700-1760
The horse diffuses across the Great Plains, prompting massive migrations and a cultural revolution.
694 / Time Line
1715-1717
Yamasee War. The Yamasee and their allies fight against the English for trading and other abuses.
1729
Natchez Revolt. Resisting French attempts to exact tribute, the Natchez go to war; the tribe is essentially destroyed, and many are sold into slavery.
1730
Articles of Agreement signed between the Cherokee Nation and King George II.
1740
Russia explores the Alaskan coast and begins trading operations.
1755
Some Iroquois settle near the Catholic mission of St. Regis, forming the nucleus of the Akwesasne Reserve.
1763
Proclamation of 1763. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 declares that Native Americans have title to all lands outside established colonies until the Crown legally purchases further land cessions.
1763-1764
Pontiac’s War. Ottawa leader Pontiac constructs a multitribal alliance to resist the British.
1765
Paxton Riots (Paxton Boys Massacre). On December 14, 1765, seventy-five Europeans from Paxton, Pennsylvania, massacre and scalp six innocent Conestoga Mission Indians.
1768
Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The Iroquois Confederacy cedes lands south of the Ohio River (a later Fort Stanwix Treaty, 1784, changes the agreement).
1769
The California mission system is established.
1771
Labrador Inuit show missionaries where to build a trading post.
1774
Lord Dunmore’s War. Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, leads a fight against Shawnee led by Cornstalk.
1774-1775
The first Continental Congress establishes an Indian Department.
1777-1783
The Iroquois Confederacy is dispersed by the American Revolution.
Time Line / 695
1787
Northwest Ordinance. The U.S. Congress establishes a legal mechanism to create states from territories.
1789
The Indian Department becomes part of the U.S. Department of War.
1790
First of the Trade and Intercourse Acts enacted; they attempt to regulate trade between Europeans and Native Americans.
1790-1794
Little Turtle’s War. Shawnee and their allies under Little Turtle defeat Anthony St. Clair’s troops in 1791 but eventually are defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, 1794, by General Anthony Wayne.
1795
Treaty of Fort Greenville. Native Americans of the Old Northwest are forced to treat with the United States after Britain refuses to assist them in their resistance efforts.
1796
Trading Houses Act. On April 18, 1796, the United States establishes government-operated trading houses.
1799
Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet, founds the Gaiwiio, “the Good Word,” also known as the Longhouse religion; it becomes a strong force among the Iroquois.
1803
Louisiana Purchase. The United States acquires 800,000 square miles of new territory.
1804-1806
Lewis and Clark expedition. President Jefferson launches an expedition to collect information of national interest about the Louisiana territory purchased from the French in 1803.
1809
Treaty of Fort Wayne. The Delaware are forced to relinquish approximately 3 million acres.
1809-1811
Tecumseh’s Rebellion. Shawnee leader Tecumseh leads a multitribal force to resist United States incursions into their lands.
1811
Battle of Tippecanoe. William Henry Harrison and his forces attack and defeat Tecumseh’s forces in Tecumseh’s absence.
696 / Time Line
1812
War of 1812. Tribes of the Old Northwest are drawn into the European conflict.
1812
In August, the Hudson’s Bay Company establishes the Red River Colony.
1813-1814
Red Stick civil war. Creeks fight a bloody civil war over disagreements about what their political relations with the United States should be.
1817-1818
First Seminole War. U.S. forces under General Andrew Jackson attack and burn Seminole villages.
1821
Sequoyah creates the Cherokee syllabary, the first system for writing an Indian language.
1823
Johnson v. M’Intosh. On February 28, 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Native American tribes have land rights.
1823
Office of Indian Affairs is created within the War Department.
1827
Cherokee Nation adopts a constitution.
1830
Indian Removal Act. At the urging of President Andrew Jackson, Congress orders the removal of all Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Removal proceeds from the 1830’s to the 1850’s.
1830
Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Choctaws cede more than 10 million acres in Alabama and Mississippi.
1830
Upper Canada establishes a system of reserves for Canadian natives.
1831
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. U.S. Supreme Court rules that Native American tribes are “domestic dependent nations.”
1832
Black Hawk War. Black Hawk, the Sauk and Fox leader, leads a war to preserve their land rights.
1832
Worcester v. Georgia. U.S. Supreme Court rules that only the federal government has the right to regulate Indian affairs.
1834
Department of Indian Affairs is reorganized.
1835
Texas Rangers begin raids against the Comanche.
Time Line / 697
1835-1842
Second Seminole War. The Seminole resist removal to Indian Territory.
1838-1839
Forced removal of Cherokees to Indian Territory becomes a “Trail of Tears” marked by thousands of deaths.
1839
Upper Canadian judge James Buchanan submits a report suggesting that Canadian natives should be assimilated into larger Canadian society.
1839
Taos Revolt. Taos Pueblos struggle against U.S. domination.
1848
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. United States acquires southwestern lands from Mexico.
1848-1849
California Gold Rush. Emigrants cross Native American lands, resulting in ecological destruction and spread of diseases.
1849
Metis Courthouse Rebellion. Metis resist Canadian domination.
1850
Period of genocide against California Indians begins and continues for some thirty years; thousands are killed.
1851
First Treaty of Fort Laramie. Great Plains Native Americans agree to allow emigrants safe passage across their territories.
1853
Gadsden Purchase. U.S. government purchases portions of Arizona, California, and New Mexico from Mexico.
1854-1864
Teton Dakota Resistance. The Teton Dakota and their allies resist U.S. intrusions into their lands.
1855
In the Northwest, Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens holds the Walla Walla Council and negotiates a series of treaties with Native American tribes.
1855-1856
Yakima War. Led by Kamiakin, who refused to sign the 1855 treaty, Yakimas fight U.S. forces after the murder of a government Indian agent initiates hostilities.
698 / Time Line
1855-1858
Third Seminole War. Seminoles react to the surveying of their lands.
1858
British Columbia Gold Rush precipitates large-scale invasion of Indian lands.
1858
Navajo War. Manuelito leads the Navajo against U.S. forces to fight against whites’ grazing their horses on Navajo lands.
1860
The British transfer full responsibility for Canadian Indian affairs to the Province of Canada.
1862
Minnesota Uprising. Little Crow carries out a war of resistance against federal authority because of ill treatment.
1863-1868
Long Walk of the Navajo. In a violent campaign, U.S. forces remove the Navajo from their homeland and take them to Bosque Redondo.
1864
Sand Creek Massacre. Colorado militiamen under John Chivington massacre a peaceful group of Cheyennes at Sand Creek.
1866-1868
Bozeman Trail wars. Teton Dakota and their allies resist the building of army forts in their lands.
1867
U.S. government purchases Alaska.
1867
Canadian Confederation. The Dominion of Canada is created.
1867
Commission Act. Legislation calls for the U.S. president to establish commissions to negotiate peace treaties with Native American nations.
1868
Second Treaty of Fort Laramie pledges the protection of Indian lands.
1868
Canadian government adopts an Indian policy aimed at the assimilation of Indians into Canadian society.
1868
Washita River Massacre. A peaceful Cheyenne camp is massacred by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry.
1869
First Riel Rebellion. Louis Riel leads the Metis in resisting Canadian domination; partly triggered by white surveying of Metis’ lands.
Time Line / 699
1870
Grant’s Peace Policy. President Ulysses S. Grant assigns various Christian denominations to various Indian reservation agencies in order to Christianize and pacify the Indians.
1871
Congress passes an act on March 3 that ends treaty negotiations with Native American nations.
1871
McKay v. Campbell. U.S. Supreme Court holds that Indian people born with “tribal allegiance” are not U.S. citizens.
1871
Canada begins negotiating the first of eleven “numbered” treaties with Native Canadians.
1871-1890
Wholesale destruction of the bison on the Plains.
1872-1873
Modoc War. The Modoc resist removal to the Klamath Reservation.
1874
Canadian Northwest Mounted Police move to establish order in the Canadian West.
1874-1875
Red River War. Forced by starvation and Indian agent corruption, Kiowa, Plains Apache, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho raid European American farms and ranches to feed their families.
1876
First Indian Act of Canada. The act consolidated Canadian policies toward its indigenous people.
1876
Battle of the Little Bighorn. General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry are annihilated by the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho camped along the Little Bighorn River.
1877
The Nez Perce are exiled from their homeland and pursued by U.S. forces as they unsuccessfully attempt to escape into Canada.
1877
Battle of Wolf Mountain. The last fight between the Cheyenne and the U.S. Army.
1877-1883
The Northern Cheyenne are forcibly removed to Indian Territory but escape north to their homelands.
1878
Bannock War. Because of settler pressures, the Bannock are forced to raid for food.
700 / Time Line
1879
Carlisle Indian School, a boarding school with the goal of “civilizing” Indian youth, is founded by Captain Richard H. Pratt.
1880
Canadian officials modify the 1876 Indian Act, empowering it to impose elected councils on bands.
1885
Second Riel Rebellion. Louis Riel leads a second protest, then armed revolt, among the Canadian Metis and Cree; defeated, Riel is executed after the rebellion.
1887
General Allotment Act (Dawes Severalty Act). Provides for the dividing of reservation lands into individual parcels to expedite assimilation. (By the early twentieth century, the allotment policy is viewed as disastrous.)
1890
Wounded Knee Massacre. The Seventh Cavalry intercepts a group of Sioux Ghost Dancers being led by Big Foot to the Pine Ridge Reservation. When a Sioux warrior, perhaps accidentally, fires his rifle, the army opens fire; hundreds of Sioux, most unarmed, are massacred.
1897
Education Appropriation Act mandates funding for Indian day schools and technical schools.
1897
Indian Liquor Act bans the sale or distribution of liquor to Native Americans.
1903
Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. U.S. Supreme Court rules that Congress has the authority to dispose of Native American lands.
1906
Burke Act. Congress amends the General Allotment Act to shorten the trust period for individual Native Americans who are proven “competent.”
1906
Alaskan Allotment Act. Allows Alaska Natives to file for 160-acre parcels.
1910
Omnibus Act. Establishes procedures to determine Native American heirship of trust lands and other resources.
Time Line / 701
1912
Classification and Appraisal of Unallotted Indian Lands Act. Permits the Secretary of the Interior to reappraise and reclassify unallotted Indian lands.
1924
General Citizenship Act. As a result of Native American participation in World War I, Congress grants some Native Americans citizenship.
1928
Meriam Report outlines the failure of previous Indian policies and calls for reform.
1932
Alberta Metis Organization is founded by Joseph Dion.
1934
Indian Reorganization Act. Implements the Meriam Report recommendations, reversing many previous policies.
1934
Johnson-O’Malley Act replaces the General Allotment Act.
1936
Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act. Extends many of the rights provided by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 to Oklahoma Indian nations.
1944
National Congress of American Indians is founded to guard Native American rights.
1946
Indian Claims Commission Act. Provides a legal forum for tribes to sue the federal government for the loss of lands.
1950
Navajo and Hopi Rehabilitation Act is passed to assist the tribes in developing their natural resources.
1951
Indian Act of 1951. A new Canadian Indian Act reduces the powers of the Indian Affairs Department but retains an assimilationist agenda.
1951
Public Law 280 allows greater state jurisdiction over criminal cases involving Native Americans from California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska (extended to Alaska Natives in 1959).
1953
Termination Resolution. Congress initiates a policy (which continues into the early 1960’s) of severing the federal government’s relationships with Native American nations.
702 / Time Line
1955
Indian Health Service is transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
1961
Chicago Indian Conference, organized by anthropologist Sol Tax, mobilizes Indian leaders to reassert their rights.
1961
National Indian Youth Council is founded by Clyde Warrior and others.
1963
State of Washington rules against Native American fishing rights.
1964
American Indian Historical Society is founded to research and teach about Native Americans.
1966
Hawthorn Report examines the conditions of contemporary Canadian natives and recommends that Indians be considered “citizens plus.”
1968
American Indian Civil Rights Act guarantees reservation residents many of the civil liberties other citizens have under the U.S. Constitution.
1968
American Indian Movement (AIM) is founded in Minneapolis by Dennis Banks and Russell Means.
1969
Canadian government’s White Paper of 1969 rejects the Hawthorn Report’s recommendations, arguing that Canadian natives’ special status hinders their assimilation and urging the abolition of the Indian Affairs Department and Indian Act.
1969
Occupation of Alcatraz Island by Native American people begins (continues through 1971).
1971
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act marks the beginning of the self-determination period for Alaska Natives.
1972
Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan proceeds to Washington, D.C., to protest treaty violations.
1972
Native American Rights Fund (NARF) is founded to carry Indian issues to court.
Time Line / 703
1972
Indian Education Act enacted; it is intended to improve the quality of education for Native Americans (the act is revised in 1978).
1973
Wounded Knee occupation. More than two hundred Native American activists occupy the historic site to demonstrate against oppressive Sioux reservation policies.
1974
Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act facilitates negotiation between the two nations over the disputed Joint Use Area.
1975
Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act expands tribal control over tribal governments and education.
1975
Political violence increases on the Pine Ridge Reservation; two FBI agents are killed in a shootout on June 26.
1975
James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement is signed; Quebec Cree, Inuit, Naskapi, and Montagnais groups cede tribal lands in exchange for money and specified hunting and fishing rights.
1977
American Indian Policy Review Commission Report is released by Congress, recommending that Native American nations be considered sovereign political bodies.
1978
American Indian Freedom of Religion Act protects the rights of Native Americans to follow traditional religious practices.
1978
Federal Acknowledgment Program is initiated to provide guidelines for and assist tribes seeking official recognition by the federal government.
1978
Indian Child Welfare Act proclaims tribal jurisdiction over child custody decisions.
1978
The Longest Walk, a march from Alcatraz Island to Washington, D.C., protests government treatment of Indians.
704 / Time Line
1980
United States v. Sioux Nation. U.S. Supreme Court upholds a $122 million judgment against the United States for illegally taking the Black Hills.
1981
Hopi-Navajo Joint Use Area is partitioned between the Navajo and Hopi nations.
1982
Canada’s Constitution Act (Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms) is passed despite the protests of Indian, Metis, and Inuit groups.
1982
Indian Claims Limitation Act limits the time period during which claims can be filed against the U.S. government.
1985
Coolican Report declares that little progress is being made to settle Canadian native land claims.
1988
Indian Gaming Regulatory Act officially legalizes certain types of gambling on reservations and establishes the National Indian Gaming Commission.
1989
U.S. Congress approves construction of the National Museum of the American Indian, to be part of the Smithsonian Institution.
1989
Violence erupts on St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in dispute over whether to allow gambling; under guard by state and federal law enforcement officers, the tribe votes to allow gambling on the reservation.
1990
The U.S. Census finds the Native American population to be 1,959,234.
1990
In Duro v. Reina, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that tribes cannot have criminal jurisdiction over nonIndians on reservation lands.
1990
Canada’s proposed Meech Lake Accord (amendments to the 1982 Constitution Act) is sent to defeat in Canada by native legislator Elijah Harper; the accord provided no recognition of native rights.
1991
Tribal Self-Governance Act extends the number of tribes involved in the self-governance pilot project.
1992
Native Americans protest the Columbian Quincentenary.
Time Line / 705
1992
In a plebiscite, residents of Canada’s Northwest Territories approve the future creation of Nunavut, a territory to be governed by the Inuit.
1993
The International Year of Indigenous People.
1994
National Museum of the American Indian opens its first facility in New York’s Heye Center (a larger museum is planned for the National Mall in Washington, D.C.).
1994
The National Congress of American Indians and the National Black Caucus of State Legislators ally themselves, agreeing that they face similar political and economic forces of oppression.
1998
Canadian minister of Indian Affairs formally apologizes to Indian and Inuit peoples for past government attempts to destroy native cultures.
1999
Eastern portion of Canada’s Northwest Territories becomes new territory of Nunavut.
2000
U.S. secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt announces that the remains of Kennewick Man will be turned over to Washington State Native American tribes under the provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
2001
Native Americans sue Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton over approximately $10 billion they claim was bilked from Native American trust funds of Indian land use royalties, administered by the Department of the Interior since 1887.
Culture Areas of North America
ARCTIC SUBARCTIC
PL
AT E
AU
NORTHWEST COAST
CALIFORNIA
GREAT BASIN
PLAINS
NORTHEAST
SOUTHEAST SOUTHWEST
707
Tribes by Culture Area Major tribal groups are listed below their geographical culture areas; language groups represented appear after the culture-area heading.
Arctic Language groups: Eskimo-Aleut (Aleut, Inuit-Iñupiaq, Yupik) Aleut Inuit
Yupik
California Language groups: Athapaskan, Chimariko, Chumashan, Esselen, Karok, Maiduan, Palaihnihan, Pomoan, Salinan, Shastan, Uto-Aztecan, Wintun, Wiyot, Yanan, Yokutsan, Yukian, Yuman, Yurok Achumawi Atsugewi Cahuilla Chemehuevi Chumash Costano Cupeño Diegueño Esselen Fernandeño Gabrielino Hupa Juaneño Kamia Karok Kato Luiseño Maidu Mattole
Miwok Patwin Pomo Quechan Salinan Serrano Shasta Tolowa Tubatulabal Wailaki Wappo Wintun Wiyot Yahi Yana Yokuts Yuki Yurok
708 / Tribes by Culture Area
Great Basin Language groups: Hokan, Numic (Shoshonean) Bannock Gosiute Kawaiisu Mono (Monache) Numaga (Northern Paiute)
Panamint Paviotso (Northern Paiute) Shoshone Ute Washoe
Northeast Language groups: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan Abenaki Algonquin Cayuga Erie Fox Huron Illinois Kaskaskia Kickapoo Lenni Lenape Mahican Maliseet Massachusett Menominee Miami Micmac Mohawk Nanticoke Narragansett Neutral Nottaway
Oneida Onondaga Ottawa Pamlico Passamaquoddy Pennacook Penobscot Pequot Petun Piankashaw Potawatomi Sauk Secotan Seneca Shawnee Susquehannock Tuscarora Wampanoag Wappinger Winnebago
Tribes by Culture Area / 709
Northwest Coast Language groups: Athapaskan, Chinook, Penutian, Salish Alsea Bella Bella Bella Coola Chehalis Chinook Coast Salish Coos Eyak Gitksan Haida Klamath
Klikitat Kwakiutl Nootka (Nuu-Chah-Nulth) Quileute Quinault Siuslaw Takelma Tillamook Tlingit Tsimshian Umpqua
Plains Language groups: Algonquian, Athapaskan, Caddoan, Kiowa-Tanoan, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan Apache of Oklahoma Arapaho Arikara Assiniboine Atsina Blackfoot (Blood, Piegan, Siksika) Caddo Cheyenne Comanche Crow Hidatsa Iowa Kansa (Kaw) Kiowa
Mandan Missouri Omaha Osage Oto Pawnee Ponca Quapaw Sarsi Sioux (Santee, Teton, Yankton) Tonkawa Waco Wichita
710 / Tribes by Culture Area
Plateau Language groups: Penutian, Sahaptin, Salishan Coeur d’Alene Colville Flathead Kalispel Klamath Klikitat Kutenai Lake Lillooet Methow Mical Modoc Molala Nez Perce
Okanagan Palouse Sanpoil Shuswap Spokane Tenino Thompson Tyigh Umatilla Walla Walla Wanapam Wauyukma Wenatchi Yakima
Southeast Language groups: Algonquian, Atakapa, Caddoan, Chitimacha, Iroquoian, Muskogean, Natchez, Siouan, Timucuan, Tunican, Yuchi Ais Alabama Anadarko (Hasinai Confederacy) Apalachee Apalachicola Atakapa Bayogoula Biloxi Calusa Cape Fear Catawba Cheraw Cherokee Chiaha Chickasaw
Chitimacha Choctaw Coushatta Creek Guale Guasco (Hasinai Confederacy) Hitchiti Houma Jeaga Manahoac (Mahock) Mobile Nabedache (Hasinai Confederacy) Natchez Ocaneechi Ofo
Tribes by Culture Area / 711
Pamlico Pawokti Powhatan Confederacy Seminole Texas (Hasinai Confederacy) Timucua Tiou Tohome
Tunica Tuscarora Tuskegee Tutelo Waccamaw Yamasee Yazoo Yuchi
Southwest Language groups: Athapaskan, Keres, Kiowa-Tanoan, Uto-Aztecan, Yuman, Zuni Acoma Apache (including Chiricahua, Jicarilla, and Mescalero) Cochiti Havasupai Hopi Isleta Jemez Karankawa Laguna Nambe Navajo Picuris Pima Pojoaque
San Felipe San Ildefonso San Juan Sandia Santa Ana Santa Clara Santo Domingo Taos Tesuque Tohono O’odham Walapai Yaqui Yavapai Zia Zuñi
Subarctic Language Groups: Algonquian, Athapaskan, Eskimo-Aleut Ahtna Beaver Carrier Chilcotin Chipewyan
Cree Dogrib Haida Han Hare
712 / Tribes by Culture Area
Ingalik Inland Tlingit Koyukon Kutchin Montagnais Mountain Naskapi
Saulteaux Slave Tagish Tanaina Tanana Tsetsaut Yellowknife
713
Bibliography Acrelius, Israel. A History of New Sweden. 1759. Reprint. Translated by William M. Reynolds. Philadelphia: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1874. Adair, Mary J. Prehistoric Agriculture in the Central Plains. University of Kansas Publications in Anthropology 16. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988. Adams, Howard. Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View. Toronto: New Press, 1975. Adkison, Norman B. Indian Braves and Battles with More Nez Perce Lore. Grangeville: Idaho County Free Press, 1967. ____________. Nez Perce Indian War and Original Stories. Grangeville: Idaho County Free Press, 1966. Adler, Michael A., ed. The Prehistoric Pueblo World, A.D. 1150-1350. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. Alden, John R. “The Albany Congress and the Creation of the Indian Superintendencies.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27, no. 2 (September, 1940): 193-210. Describes how the Albany Congress led British officials to create the Indian superintendent system. Allen, Charles W., and Richard E. Jensen. From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee: In the West That Was. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Allen, Robert S. His Majesty’s Indian Allies. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992. Presents material from British sources neglected by U.S. historians. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 13 (1989). Special issue on contemporary issues in Native American health, edited by Gregory R. Campbell. A collection of articles that focus on issues revolving around American Indians’ health in the later 1980’s. American Indian Policy Review Commission Task Force. Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977. Amsden, Charles. “The Navajo Exile at Bosque Redondo.” New Mexico Historical Review 8 (1933): 31-50. A dated but still significant article concerning the Navajo on the Bosque Redondo reservation. ____________. Prehistoric Southwesterners from Basketmaker to Pueblo. Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 1949. Anders, Gary C. “Social and Economic Consequences of Federal Indian Policy.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 37, no. 2 (January, 1989): 285-303. Includes discussion of the effects of the ANCSA on the Alaskan Natives.
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Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Presents the French and Indian War as a conflict in and of itself, rather than merely as a prelude to the Revolutionary War. ____________. A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. This illustrated regional study reveals how average colonists experienced and affected the war. Anderson, Gary Clayton. Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986. A carefully researched and documented biography of the most important Native American war leader; sympathetic to both Little Crow and the Santee Sioux. Provides a detailed description of the war. Anderson, Gary Clayton, and Alan R. Woolworth, eds. Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 1988. Carefully edited, readable first-person accounts of the war, some sympathetic to the blanket Sioux, some to the farmer Sioux who opposed the war. Anderson, Terry Lee. Sovereign Nations or Reservations? An Economic History of American Indians. San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1995. Armstrong, Virginia Irving, comp. I Have Spoken: American History Through the Voices of the Indians. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971. Includes three orations by Red Cloud, including the Powder River exhortation (1866) and the complete Cooper Institute speech (1870). Arnold, Robert D., et al. Alaska Native Land Claims. Anchorage: Alaska Native Foundation, 1978. A comprehensive discussion of the act and its significance. Auth, Stephen F. The Ten Years War: Indian-White Relations in Pennsylvania, 1755-1765. New York: Garland, 1989. Includes Native American perspectives missing in many studies. Final chapter shows the war’s implications for later treatment of Native Americans. Axelrod, Alan. Chronicle of the Indian Wars: From Colonial Times to Wounded Knee. New York: Prentice Hall General Reference, 1993. This work provides a useful and detailed overview of the armed struggles of the Indians and the whites. Axtell, James. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Many of the essays in this book were previously published; together they provide a good introduction to the study of ethnohistory and Anglo-Indian relations in the colonial period.
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Bachman, Van Cleaf. Peltries or Plantations: The Economic Policies of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland, 1623-1639. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Bakeless, John. Lewis and Clark: Partners in Discovery. New York: William Morrow, 1947. One of the most reliable sources on Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Based on both of their journals. Bamforth, Douglas B. Ecology and Human Organization on the Great Plains. New York: Plenum Press, 1988. Barbour, Philip L. Pocahontas and Her World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. A good synthesis of seventeenth century accounts of Jamestown’s founding, including much information on Powhatan. Barnitz, Albert Trovillo Siders, and Jennie Barnitz. Life in Custer’s Cavalry: Diaries and Letters of Albert and Jennie Barnitz, 1867-1868. Edited by Robert M. Utley. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, l977. An account of the massacre completed from the writings of one of Custer’s troop commanders and his wife. Barrington, Linda, ed. The Other Side of the Frontier: Economic Explorations into Native American History. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999. Barsh, Russel. “Indian Land Claims Policy in the United States.” North Dakota Law Review 58 (1982): 1-82. Bartlett, Richard H. Indian Reserves and Aboriginal Lands in Canada. Saskatoon, Canada: University of Saskatchewan, Native Law Center, 1990. Beal, Bob, and Rod Macleod. Prairie Fire: The 1885 North-West Rebellion. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1984. Emphasizes the Native Canadian perspective. Beal, Merrill D. I Will Fight No More Forever: Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963. Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Jay’s Treaty. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962. Berger, Thomas R. Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission. New York: Hill & Wang, 1985. A critical account of the effects of the ANCSA on Native Alaskans. Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response 1787-1862. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965. This work focuses on how missionaries portrayed white culture to the Indians and on the policy behind these presentations. Berry, Mary Clay. The Alaska Pipeline: The Politics of Oil and Native Land Claims. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. Describes the influence of the construction of the pipeline on the passage of the ANCSA.
716 / Bibliography
Beverly, Robert. The History and Present State of Virginia. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. A study of Indian life and customs in the seventeenth century, first published in 1705. Biddle, Nicholas, and Paul Allen, eds. History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1961. Prepared by Biddle, a young Philadelphia lawyer, between 1810 and 1814, this work is based on both Lewis’s and Clark’s journals. Billington, Ray Allen. Westward Expansion. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Blegen, Theodore C. Minnesota: A History of the State. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1975. The standard history of Minnesota. Its chapter on the Sioux War is solid and balanced. Borden, Charles E. Origins and Development of Early Northwest Coast Culture to About 3000 B.C. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975. Boudinet, Elias. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinet. Edited by Theda Perdue. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Collects nearly all of Boudinet’s writings, with a biographical introduction and thorough annotations. Bourne, Russell. The Red King’s Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675-1678. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A detailed treatment of the war that is especially critical of the motives and acts of the colonists. Maps, illustrations, and index. Bowsfield, Hartfield. Louis Riel: The Rebel and the Hero. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971. A good introductory book. Brady, Cyrus. Indian Fights and Fighters. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, l971. A narrative of the Plains wars, including the Washita Massacre. Includes many eyewitness accounts not available elsewhere. Brandao, Jose. Your Fyre Shall Burn No More: Iroquois Policy Toward New France and Its Allies to 1701. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Offers a revisionist stance toward the Beaver Wars, arguing that the Iroquois were more interested in taking captives to replenish their diseaseravaged populations than in obtaining beaver skins for trade. Brandon, William. The Indian in American Culture. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. A massive volume covering Indian-white relations since the beginning; includes an interesting discussion of reservation policy. Good index. Brasser, Ted J. “The Coastal New York Indians in the Early Contact Period.” In Neighbors and Intruders: An Ethnohistorical Exploration of the Indians of Hudson’s River, edited by Laurence M. Hauptman and Jack Campisi. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1978. Argues that the coastal Algonquians were probably in the process of forming a coalition when the Dutch purchased Manhattan.
Bibliography / 717
Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Describes the competitors, pricing, credit policies, markets, and distribution of the Muscogee deerskin trade; provides a detailed look at Muscogee life. Brill, Charles. Conquest of the Southern Plains. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1975. A fully illustrated account of all events related to the incursion of European Americans into Indian lands of the southern Plains during the second half of the nineteenth century. Britten, Thomas A. American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War. Albuquerque: University of Alabama Press, 1997. ____________. A Brief History of the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. A very readable, popular account of the displacement and oppression of the American Indian nations by European settlers, from the beginning to 1890. Includes a helpful but dated bibliography. Brown, Jennifer S. H. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980. Discusses the development of the Metis people in eastern Canada and the Great Plains from the 1600’s to the twentieth century. Illustrations and index. Brown, Jennifer S. H., and Elizabeth Vibert, eds. Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 1996. Burt, Larry W. Tribalism in Crisis: Federal Indian Policy, 1953-1961. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ____________. Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. ____________. First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. ____________. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ____________. The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600-1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
718 / Bibliography
____________, ed. The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Campbell, Gregory R. “The Politics of Counting: Critical Reflections About the Depopulation Question of Native North America.” In Native Voices on the Columbian Quincentenary, edited by Donald A. Grinde. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California, 1994. An examination of the European manipulation of Native American population counts as justification for continued colonial expansion. Canada Communication Group. Looking Forward, Looking Back; Restructuring the Relationship; Gathering Strength; Perspectives and Realities; and Renewal: A Twenty Year Commitment. 5 vols. Ottawa: Author, 1996. The final report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Canby, William C. American Indian Law in a Nutshell. Minneapolis: West, 1981. Provides simple explanations of complex legal issues that inhere in dealings between the federal government, states, and tribal nations. Carter, Harvey Lewis. The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Includes a detailed description of the battle with St. Clair’s troops from Little Turtle’s perspective. Carter, Sarah. Lost Harvest: Prairies Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. Critically exposes the agricultural policies of the Canadian government. Case, David S. Alaska Natives and American Laws. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1984. A detailed description of the historical interaction of Native Alaskans and U.S. law. Cave, Alfred A. The Pequot War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. The first in-depth study of the Pequot War, emphasizing the motives behind the hostilities through archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological analysis. Chalfant, William Y. Cheyennes at Dark Water Creek: The Last Fight of the Red River War. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. A thorough study of the final encounter of the Red River War and the circumstances leading up to it. Chalmers, Harvey, II. The Last Stand of the Nez Perce. New York: Twayne, 1962. Chamberlain, Kathleen P. Under Sacred Ground: A History of Navajo Oil, 1922-1982. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. An ethnography and history of the effect of oil production on the formation and expansion of Navajo tribal government. Chevigny, Hector. Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741-1867. New York: Viking Press, 1965.
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Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1988. Clark, Blue. “Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock”: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. A short but comprehensive study of the background and implications of the most significant turn-of-the-century Native American court case. Clarkin, Thomas. Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961-1969. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Cleland, Charles E. Rites of Conquest: The History and Culture of Michigan’s Native Americans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. A multiethnic, regional approach to the history of the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, from precontact to the late twentieth century. Maps, photographs, biographical sketches, chapter notes, bibliography, index. Cochran, Thomas C. Pennsylvania: A Bicentennial History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Coe, Joffre L., and Thomas D. Burke. Town Creek Indian Mound: A Native American Legacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Cohen, Fay G. Treaties on Trial: The Continuing Controversy over Northwest Indian Fishing Rights. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Shows the continuing importance of treaties and the bitterness still evoked by pre-1871 agreements. Cohen, Felix. Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942. The most complete sourcebook for American Indian legal issues. Cole, D. C. The Chiricahua Apache, 1846-1876: From War to Reservation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. A general history of the Chiricahua Apaches with special attention to cultural conflicts with Euro-Americans. Coleman, Michael C. “Problematic Panacea: Presbyterian Missionaries and the Allotment of Indian Lands in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Pacific Historical Review 54, no. 2 (1985): 143-159. Shows that the Presbyterians were not united about allotment of tribal lands. Condon, Thomas J. New York Beginnings: The Commercial Origins of New Netherland. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Monograph examining the Dutch purchase decision as part of a wider commercial policy. Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Sweeping yet detailed look at the effect of disease in the European colonization of the Americas.
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Cook, Noble David, and W. George Lovell, eds. Secret Judgments of God: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. A collection of symposium papers, presented from a wide range of disciplines, assessing the impact of European diseases and epidemics on the Native American population. Cook, Sherburne F. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Cordell, Linda S. Prehistory of the Southwest. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1984. Corkran, David H. The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival 1740-1762. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. A detailed account of the complex relations between the Cherokees and English colonists during the mid-1700’s. Costo, Rupert, and Jeannette Henry Costo, eds. The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1987. A collection that vigorously indicts the evils of the mission system. Covington, James W. The Seminoles of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. The most thorough history of the Seminoles in Florida; devotes six chapters to the Seminole Wars. Coward, John M. The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820-90. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Cowger, Thomas W. The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Crampton, C. Gregory. The Zuñis of Cíbola. Provo: University of Utah Press, 1977. A general history of the Zuñi people. Black-and-white photographs illustrate how the Pueblos have changed over time. Crane, Verner. The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1929. A classic work on relations between European settlers and American Indians in the South. Cressman, Luther S. The Sandal and the Cave: The Indians of Oregon. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1981. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill & Wang, 1983. Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. ____________. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 33 (1976): 289299. This essay is considered a classic examination of the effect of disease on Indian populations in North America. Crutchfield, James Andrew. Tragedy at Taos: The Revolt of 1847. Plano, Tex.: Republic of Texas Press, 1995. First comprehensive narrative of the
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events at Taos. Contains valuable appendices concerning the participants, a chronology of events, casualty figures, and other items of interest. Cummings, Byron. The First Inhabitants of Arizona and the Southwest. Tucson, Ariz.: Cummings Publication Council, 1953. Cunningham, Frank. General Stand Watie’s Confederate Indians. 1959. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. A full account of Stand Watie’s efforts during the Civil War and his political life within the Cherokee Nation. Many photographs of that era. Curtis, Edward S. In a Sacred Manner We Live. Barre, Mass.: Barre Publishers, 1972. Custer, George Armstrong. My Life on the Plains. London: The Folio Society, l963. Contains Custer’s account of the events before, during, and after the Washita Massacre. Dale, Edward Everett, and Morris L. Wardell. History of Oklahoma. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948. Contains a thorough chapter on the Civil War in Oklahoma by two outstanding Oklahoma historians. Danky, James P., ed. Native American Periodicals and Newspapers, 1828-1982. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. Overview of the history of Native American newspapers. Dary, David A. The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974. Detailed account of bison in North America. Black-and-white photos, index, bibliography. Davidson, Gordon Charles. The North West Company. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967. A history of the development and expansion of the second largest fur company in North America. Maps, illustrations, and index. Deardorff, Merle H. The Religion of Handsome Lake: Its Origins and Development. American Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 149. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1951. Presents a detailed analysis of the Handsome Lake religion from an ethnographic perspective. Debo, Angie. A History of the Indians in the United States. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. A comprehensive, in-depth historical survey of Indians of the United States, emphasizing tribal relations with the U.S. government. ____________. The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. De Forest, John W. History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850. Hartford, Conn.: W. J. Hammersley, 1851. Reprint. Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1988. A classic study of the native peoples of Connecticut.
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Deloria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1987. Lawyertheologian Deloria discusses the doctrine of discovery, treaty-making, civil rights, American Indian activism, sovereignty, and the Trail and Wounded Knee occupations. ____________, ed. American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Several essays deal with the impact of the Indian Civil Rights Act on American Indian tribal governments. Also explores larger constitutional issues and tribal governments. ____________, ed. The Indian Reorganization Act: Congresses and Bills. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. A collection of primary source documents assembled by the noted Native American legal scholar. Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Raymond J. DeMallie. Documents of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, and Conventions, 1775-1979. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. American Indians, American Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. A clearly written study focusing on the development of the Native American judicial system as it existed in the early 1980’s. Explains the complexities of Native American legal and political rights as they are understood by the tribes and by the federal government. ____________. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. An important discussion of the impact of legal and legislative measures on tribal autonomy and self-rule. Dempsey, Hugh A. Big Bear: The End of Freedom. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1984. DeRosier, Arthur. The Removal of the Choctaw Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970. Discusses removal circumstances. Includes maps and portraits. De Voto, Bernard. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. A one-volume condensation of the Original Journals of Lewis and Clark Expedition. Includes maps. Dickason, Olive. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. An unparalleled legal, political, and social history of Canadian Indians. ____________. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984. Dickerson, Mark O. Whose North? Political Change, Political Development, and Self-Government in the Northwest Territories. Vancouver: University of
Bibliography / 723
British Columbia Press, 1992. Discusses the contemporary political issues facing the Dene, Metis, Inuit, and non-native residents of northern Canada. Dillehay, Thomas D. The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Offers the archaeological and anthropological evidence for population of the Americas prior to the glaciation 20,000 years ago. Dillehay, Tom D., and David J. Meltzer. The First Americans: Search and Research. Boca Raton, Fla.: Chemical Rubber Company Press, 1991. A set of papers written to explore and encourage exploration of the total context of migrations into North America. Illustrations, reference lists. Dillon, Richard H. Meriwether Lewis: A Biography. New York: CowardMcCann, 1965. A full-length study of Meriwether Lewis’s life. ____________. North American Indian Wars. New York: Facts on File, 1983. Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. Dixon, E. James. Quest for the Origins of the First Americans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. An archaeologist discusses the first Americans in the context of his own research. Illustrations, index, bibliography. Dobyns, Henry F. Their Number Became Thinned. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. A comprehensive volume addressing the population dynamics of eastern North America. Donck, Adriaen van der. A Description of the New Netherlands. Translated by Jeremiah Johnson. 1841. Reprint. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968. Douville, Raymond, and Jacques Casanova. Daily Life in Early Canada. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Although this carefully documented study concentrates on various conditions affecting French colonial life in Gallia Nova (transportation, religious life, trapping, and trading), each chapter includes useful information on relations with Indian populations. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. A useful short survey of American Indian affairs. Downes, Randolph C. Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley Until 1795. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940. Discusses the relations between settlers and various tribes in the Ohio Valley, including those at Fort Stanwix. Drake, Benjamin. Life of Tecumseh. 1858. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Biography using primary documents and interviews with individuals who knew Tecumseh.
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Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and EmpireBuilding. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. The author explores the intellectual process which defines indigenous tribal groups as primitive and leads to violence between nations and tribes. Includes many helpful illustrations and an extensive bibliographic essay. Drucker, Phillip. Indians of the Northwest Coast. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1963. ____________. “Sources of Northwest Coast Culture.” In New Interpretations of Aboriginal American Culture History. Seventy-fifth anniversary volume of the Anthropological Society of Washington. Seattle: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1955. Echo-Hawk, Walter E. “Loopholes in Religious Liberty: The Need for a Federal Law to Protect Freedom of Worship for Native American People.” NARF Legal Review 14 (Summer, 1991): 7-14. An important analysis of what AIRFA should provide in the way of legal protection of religious freedoms for American Indian peoples. Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. An insightful study of the Shawnee society that produced Tecumseh and his alliance. Argues that Tecumseh’s brother, Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, originated the alliance, which Tecumseh took over as Tenskwatawa’s influence faded. Maps, illustrations, and index. ____________. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. A brief treatment that concentrates on the warrior brother. Map, illustrations, and index. Edmunds, R. David, and Joseph L. Peyser. The Fox Wars: The Mesquaki Challenge to New France. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. The most complete study to date of the specific events of the Fox Wars. Ehle, John. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Covers Cherokee history from 1770 to 1840. Details the intratribal conflicts relating to removal policy. Eid, Leroy V. “American Indian Military Leadership: St. Clair’s 1791 Defeat.” Journal of Military History 57 (January, 1993): 71-88. Eisler, Kim Isaac. The Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small Native American Tribe Created the World’s Most Profitable Casino. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. A journalistic account of the effect of IGRA on one tribe. Ellis, Richard N. General Pope and U.S. Indian Policy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970. Ellis’s detailed account provides insight into the policy of punishment and containment that grew out of the war.
Bibliography / 725
____________. The Western American Indian. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Englehardt, Zephyrin. The Missions and Missionaries of California. 4 vols. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Mission Santa Barbara, 1929. The monumental standard reference work on the missions, giving an overall positive evaluation of the system. Enterline, James Robert. Viking America: The Norse Crossings and Their Legacy. Epilogue by Thor Heyerdahl. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Fagan, Brian M. Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent. Rev. ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. A consideration of the first Americans in the context of North American archaeology. Illustrations, index, bibliography. Falkowski, James E. Indian Law/Race Law: A Five-Hundred-Year History. New York: Praeger, 1922. Places the subject of U.S. government policy toward Indians in a wider context both of historical and contemporary international legal models. Faulk, Odie B. Crimson Desert: Indian Wars of the American Southwest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Faulk presents a fine and detailed description of the campaigns of this region. Fausz, J. Frederick. “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake.” In Colonial Chesapeake Society, edited by Lois Green Carr et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Details the changing English view of the Native Americans in the Chesapeake from “noble savages” to important trading partners. Fenton, William Nelson. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. A massive work—over eight hundred pages—on the history and culture of the Iroquois Confederacy. Fey, Harold E., and D’Arcy McNickle. Indians and Other Americans: Two Ways of Life Meet. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Good account of the Collier years from a pro-IRA perspective. McNickle, a Montana Blackfoot, was a BIA employee during this era. Fisher, Don C. The Nez Perce War. Thesis. Moscow: University of Idaho, Department of History, 1925. Fixico, Donald L. The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998. ____________. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. Detailed discus-
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sion, from World War II through 1981. Discusses the Menominee and Klamath, as well as smaller tribes. Useful analysis of Dillon Myer and PL 83-280. ____________. The Urban Indian Experience in America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. An ethnography of the urban Indian experience, especially in third- and fourth-generation urban dwellers who are increasingly distanced from the reservation experience. Fladmark, Knut R. “The Feasibility of the Northwest as a Migration Route for Early Man.” In Early Man from a Circum-Pacific Perspective, edited by Alan Bryan. University of Alberta Department of Anthropology Occasional Papers 1. Edmonton, Alberta: Archaeological Researchers International, 1978. ____________. “Getting One’s Berings.” Natural History 95, no. 11 (November, 1986): 8-19. The first of thirteen articles on the peopling of North America published in Natural History between November, 1986, and January, 1988. Illustrations. ____________. “The Patterns of the Culture.” In Indians of the North Pacific Coast, edited by Tom McFeat. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966. Flanagan, Thomas. Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered. 2d ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Provides a revisionist perspective. Flanders, Nicholas E. “The ANCSA Amendments of 1987 and Land Management in Alaska.” The Polar Record 25, no. 155 (October, 1989): 315-322. Discusses the modifications of the ANCSA by the 1991 Amendments. Font Obrador, Bartolome. Fr. Junipero Serra: Mallorca, Mexico, Sierra Gorda, Californias. Palma, Mallorca, Spain: Comissio de Cultura, 1992. A biography of Serra that depends on, but summarizes well, the work of many earlier authors. Foreman, Grant. Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. 2d ed. 1953. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. The classic and most comprehensive history of removal. Foster, John, ed. Buffalo. Edmonton, Canada: University of Alberta Press, 1992. A short collection of papers by specialists in ecology and sociology detailing the relationship between the Plains Indians and the American bison. Illustrations. Francis, Lee. A Historical Time Line of Native America. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996. Francis, Peter, Jr. “The Beads That Did Not Buy Manhattan Island.” New York History 67, no. 1 (January, 1986): 4-22. Asserts that the trinkets the Dutch paid for the island were much more valuable than common assumptions hold.
Bibliography / 727
Franco, Jere B. Crossing the Pond: The Native American Effort in World War II. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1999. Frantz, Klaus. Indian Reservations in the United States: Territory, Sovereignty, and Socioeconomic Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. A thorough, detailed cultural-geographic study of life on American Indian reservations. Franz, George W. Paxton: A Study of Community Structure and Mobility in the Colonial Pennsylvania Backcountry. New York: Garland, 1989. Focuses on political and socioeconomic development of the Paxton community. Frazier, Ian. On the Rez. New York: Picador, 2001. A depiction of contemporary Ogalala Sioux life on the Pine Ridge reservation. Written by an Anglo, somewhat controversial among American Indians. Frideres, James. Canada’s Indians: Contemporary Conflicts. Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall of Canada, 1974. Fried, Morton H. The Notion of Tribe. Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings, 1975. An exploration of the development and meaning of the concept of tribe. Frink, Maurice. Fort Defiance and the Navajos. Boulder, Colo.: Pruett, 1968. This text is directed toward a middle school or high school audience. Chapter 7, “Lost Cause, Long Walk,” covers the relocations. Frison, George C. Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains. 2d ed. San Diego: Academic Press, 1991. Fritz, Henry E. The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963. A comprehensive analysis of government policy in the critical period when assimilation policy was the order of the day. Gaines, W. Craig. The Confederate Cherokees: John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Rifles. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Concentrates on Colonel John Drew’s regiment and contrasts it with Stand Watie’s more successful regiment. Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. The first book to focus specifically on the Indian slave trade and its effects on the development of the plantation system in the American South. Ganner, Van Hastings. “Seventeenth Century New Mexico.” Journal of Mexican American History 4 (1974): 41-70. Provides a pro-Indian view of tribal relations with the Spanish. Includes a brief description of the events leading up to 1632. Gehring, Charles. “Peter Minuit’s Purchase of Manhattan Island: New Evi-
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dence.” De Halve Maen 54 (Spring, 1980): 6ff. Discusses a letter from Minuit suggesting his intention to buy Manhattan Island. Geiger, Maynard J. The Life and Times of Fray Junipero Serra, OFM. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1959. A large, sympathetic biography that relies heavily on original sources. George, Noah Jackson. A Memorandum of the Creek Indian War. Meredith, N.H.: R. Lothrop, 1815. 2d ed. Edited by W. Stanley Hoole. University, Ala.: Confederate Publishing Company, 1986. Based on General Jackson’s reports and correspondence, this pamphlet gives a battle-by-battle account of the campaign from the U.S. perspective. Written amid the passions of the War of 1812, it asserts that the Red Sticks were tools of the British. Getty, Ian, and Antoine Lussier, eds. As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983. Includes essays on issues of self-determination, treaty negotiation, and use of natural resources. Gibson, Arrell Morgan. “The Centennial Legacy of the General Allotment Act.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 65, no. 3 (1987): 228-251. Examines the longrange effects of the Dawes Act on Native Americans. ____________. The Chickasaws. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Puts removal in context with Chickasaw history from the eighteenth century to 1907. Gibson, James R. Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America, 1784-1867. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Gilpin, Alec R. The War of 1812 in the Old Northwest. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1958. A scholarly, well-written study that puts Harrison’s 1813 campaign and the Battle of the Thames into context of the entire war in the Northwestern theater. Maps, illustrations, and index. Gipson, Lawrence Henry. “The Drafting of the Albany Plan of Union: The Problem of Semantics.” Pennsylvania History 26, no. 4 (October, 1959): 291-316. Argues that Thomas Hutchinson was responsible for writing the Albany Plan of Union. Giraud, Marcel. The Metis in the Canadian West. Translated by George Woodcock. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. A primary source on the Metis, originally published in French in 1945. Volume 2 deals with the period of the rebellion. Some of the language suggests racial determinism. Gleach, Frederic W. Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Bibliography / 729
Gluckman, Max. Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society. 1966. Reprint. New York: Blackwell, 1977. This book studies tribal organization and the ways tribal groups develop and maintain their integrity. Though not focused specifically on American Indian tribes, it provides a comprehensive conceptual basis for investigation of the concept. Illustrated in the original. Gonzalez, Mario, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. An account of the Wounded Knee Survivors’ Association attempt to obtain a formal apology from the U.S. government for the massacre and to name the site a National American Monument. Grant, John Webster. Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter Since 1543. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Examines Indian-white contact through the eyes of missionaries and through their cultural legacy. Gray, John S. Centennial Campaign. Ft. Collins, Colo.: Old Army Press, 1976. Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois. New York: Chelsea House Press, 1988. Graymont is an expert on the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois; this precise, concise text is essential for scholars of the Longhouse culture. ____________. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972. An excellent, highly detailed account of the Iroquois during the American Revolution. ____________, ed. Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard. Reprint. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Introduction includes information about Tuscarora history. Main text chronicles the life of Chief Clinton Rickard (1882-1971) and his work for American Indian rights. Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Well-researched history of removal as it affected the Creek nation. Greene, Jerome A. Lakota and Cheyenne: Indian Views of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Collects firsthand accounts from Indians at the Battle of Little Big Horn. ____________, ed. Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877: The Military View. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Greenwald, Emily. Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, the Jicarilla Apache, and the Dawes Act. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Griffen, William B. Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750-1858. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Details the emer-
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gence of the Mexican presidio system and the subsequent relocation and resettlement of various Apache groups in southern New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico. ____________. Utmost Good Faith: Patterns of Apache-Mexican Hostilities in Northern Chihuahua Border Warfare, 1821-1848. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Summarizes historical accounts of hostilities between the Chiricahua Apache and Mexican military forces in Northern Mexico. Griffith, Benjamin W., Jr. McIntosh and Weatherford, Creek Indian Leaders. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988. A highly readable account of the war. Argues that Weatherford was a most reluctant Red Stick, knowing from the outset that the movement was doomed. Grinde, Donald A., Jr. The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1977. Provides cultural and historical background; discusses Iroquois relationships with colonists before and after the American Revolution. Photographs, maps, illustrations, references, sources. Constitution of the Five Nations and Albany Plan of Union are included as appendices. Grinnell, George Bird. The Fighting Cheyennes. 1915. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956. An author who observed the Cheyenne at first hand presents their history up to 1890. Gummerman, George J., ed. Exploring the Hohokam: Prehistoric Desert Peoples of the American Southwest. Dragoon, Ariz.: Amerind Foundation, 1991. Gurko, Miriam. Indian America: The Black Hawk War. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970. Guttmann, Allen. States’ Rights and Indian Removal: “The Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia.” Boston: D. C. Heath, 1965. Brief documentary history of the Cherokees’ legal struggle to keep their land. Hackett, Charles W. Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Otermín’s Attempted Reconquest, 1680-1682. Translated by Charmion Shelby. 2 vols. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942. The definitive report on the subject to date. Hafen, LeRoy, and Francis Young. Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West, 1834-1890. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1938. Hagan, William T. American Indians. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. ____________. The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years, 18821904. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. An account of the organization that participated in the litigation of the Lone Wolf case.
Bibliography / 731
____________. The Sac and Fox Indians. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. A general history, including cultural and religious topics. ____________. United States-Comanche Relations. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. The most complete coverage of the council and treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek. Hait, Pam. “The Hopi Tricentennial: The Great Pueblo Revolt Revisited.” Arizona Highways 56, no. 9 (September, 1980): 2-6. The entire issue is a beautifully illustrated exploration of Hopi culture, the persistence of which is a tribute to the Pueblo Revolt. Halbert, Henry Sale, and T. H. Ball. The Creek War of 1813 and 1814. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1895. Reprint with introduction and annotation by Frank L. Owsley, Jr. University: University of Alabama Press, 1969. Provides a lengthy discussion of the causes of the war, presenting it as an intertribal difference that would have been resolved had whites not interfered. Haley, James L. The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Provides substantial background information and military analysis. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Hamilton, Charles, ed. Cry of the Thunderbird. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Extensive quotations from some of Little Turtle’s speeches. Hamilton, Edward P. The French and Indian Wars: The Story of Battles and Forts in the Wilderness. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962. The first chapters of this narrative history discuss the role played by George Washington. Hamilton, Raphael N. Marquette’s Explorations: The Narratives Reexamined. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. This scholarly monograph not only describes the experiences of Father Marquette before and during his famous exploration of the 1670’s but also provides a critical analysis of the authenticity of manuscript sources ascribed to Marquette. Handsome Lake. The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet. New York State Museum Bulletin 163. Albany: University of the State of New York, 1913. Outlines the Handsome Lake religion and discusses the historical circumstances of its creation. Hanke, Lewis. Aristotle and the American Indians. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959. ____________. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Historical study of the Spanish debate concern-
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ing the treatment of Indians, with emphasis on the work of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Hann, John. Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1988. An in-depth synthesis of a crucial area in Indian-Spanish relations based on thorough research and thoughtful analysis. Hardorff, Richard G. Hokahey! A Good Day to Die! The Indian Casualties of the Custer Fight. Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark, 1993. Harvey, Karen D., and Lisa D. Harjo. Indian Country: A History of Native People in America. Golden, Colo.: North American Press, 1994. Written and illustrated by American Indians. Presents ten culture areas, historical perspectives, contemporary issues, major ceremonies, and time lines from 50,000 b.c.e. to the twentieth century. Summaries, lesson plans, resources, and index; appendices include “Threats to Religious Freedom,” the text of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and a list of Indian activist organizations and events. Hatley, Tom. The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Focuses on the multicultural aspects of the Cherokee War, including a discussion of the roles of women and African slaves. Hawke, David. The Colonial Experience. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Chapter 13 brilliantly places Pontiac’s resistance in the context of Great Britain’s halting steps toward imperial reorganization. Hawley, Donna L. The Annotated 1990 Indian Act. 3d ed. Toronto: Carswell, 1990. Hays, Robert G. A Race at Bay: New York Times Editorials on “the Indian Problem,” 1860-1900. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Hedren, Paul. Fort Laramie and the Great Sioux War. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Focuses on the events of 1876 at Fort Laramie. ____________. Fort Laramie in 1876. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Heizer, Robert F. The Destruction of California Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. ____________. “Treaties.” In California. Vol. 8 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978. A brief description of treaty making before 1871. Henry, Thomas R. Wilderness Messiah: The Story of Hiawatha and the Iroquois. New York: W. Sloane, 1955. Defines the line between legend and history in the founding of the Iroquois league, and in the stories of Hiawatha, Deganawida, and Atotarho. Highsaw, Robert B. Edward Douglass White: Defender of the Conservative
Bibliography / 733
Faith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. An analysis of the judicial record of the writer of the Supreme Court opinion in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. Hilger, M. Inez. Chippewa Families: A Social Study of White Earth Reservation, 1938. St, Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998. Hill, Joseph. “The Pueblo Revolt.” New Mexico Magazine 58 (June, 1980): 38. An overview of the subject, with nine illustrations. Hindle, Brooke. “The March of the Paxton Boys.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 3 (October, 1946): 461-486. Still one of the best narrative accounts of the massacres. Hodge, Frederick Webb. History of Hawikah, New Mexico, One of the So-Called Cities of Cíbola. Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 1937. Contains translations of Spanish mission records and early histories of Spanish-Zuñi relations. The only detailed history of the revolt. Hoig, Stan. The Battle of the Washita. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, l976. A thoroughly documented account of the Sheridan-Custer campaign. Maps and photographs. ____________. Night of the Cruel Moon: Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears. New York: Facts on File, 1996. An account of Cherokee removal relying on first-person accounts. ____________. The Peace Chiefs of the Cheyennes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. This short work paints the Cheyenne in general, and Black Kettle in particular, as men of peace. Includes many interesting photographs. Hopkins, Stephen. A True Representation of the Plan Formed at Albany. Providence, R.I.: Sidney S. Rider, 1880. Hopkins, who represented Rhode Island at the Albany Congress, details the issues that delegates discussed concerning Indian affairs. Horn, James. Adapting to a New World: English Society in the SeventeenthCentury Chesapeake. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. A scholarly but lively study of the extent to which English colonists in the Chesapeake were influenced by their homeland in their attitudes about race, authority, and other matters. Horsman, Reginald. Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967. Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Hoxie, Frederick E., and Peter Iverson. Indians in American History: An Introduction. 2d ed. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1998. Hoxie, Frederick E., Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert. Native Americans and the Early Republic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
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Hoxie, Frederick E., James Merrell, and Peter C. Mancall, eds. American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, 1850-Present. New York: Routledge, 2001. A series of essays on aspects of Indian-U.S. relations and cultural encounters. Huddleston, Lee Eldridge. Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Hudson, Charles M. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976. Places the Muscogee within the larger framework of the native population of the area. One of several excellent volumes on Southeastern American Indians by ethnologist Hudson. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 14921797. New York: Methuen, 1986. Covers a longer time period than other listings here. Focuses on literary and anthropological approaches to understanding the psychological distances separating the colonial and colonized populations of the Caribbean. Hutton, Paul Andrew. Phil Sheridan and His Army. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. An expansive study of Sheridan’s post-Civil War career, including his role as the Red River War’s chief architect. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Hyde, George E. “Red Cloud’s War.” In Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians. Rev. ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. Originally published in 1937 and revised in 1957, this is considered to be a definitive history of the Oglala Sioux. Includes extensive background for the events on the Bozeman Trail. Thirteen illustrations, two maps. Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada. Native Rights in Canada. Calgary: Author, 1970. Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A study of the human and ecological factors leading to the near-extinction of the bison. Jackson, Donald, ed. Black Hawk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964. Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. 1880. Reprint. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993. This volume is a reprint of an 1880 history of Indian-white relations from earliest colonial times through 1871, with many excellent quotations from official documents. ____________. The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879-1885. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
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Jackson, Robert H., and Edward Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. An ethnohistory of Indian life under the mission system. Jacob, John J. A Biographical Sketch of the Life of the Late Captain Michael Cresap. Cincinnati: J. F. Uhlhorn, 1866. John Jacob worked for Michael Cresap and later married Cresap’s widow. His book challenges the notion that Cresap was responsible for the Yellow Creek Massacre. Jacobs, Wilbur R. “British Indian Policies to 1783.” In History of IndianWhite Relations, edited by Wilcomb E. Washburn. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians, edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. As the title indicates, this essay details British policy toward the Indians. It covers the formal relations between Indians and colonists and is particularly good at examining the role of land in the Indian-English experience. ____________. Dispossessing the American Indian: Indians and Whites on the Colonial Frontier. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. ____________. The Paxton Riots and the Frontier Theory. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967. A brief booklet that includes many primary documents produced during the episode. Jaenen, Cornelius J. Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Jennings, Francis. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Offers a detailed explanation of the duplicitous tactics used by Pennsylvania officials to acquire the Walking Purchase acreage. ____________. Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. A comprehensive study by a major scholar; offers easily accessible information on all aspects of the war. Illustrations, maps, and indices. ____________. The Founders of America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. An excellent general history of the Indian population of all regions of North America from precolonial to contemporary times. The colonial section contains essential facts of French and Indian relations. ____________. The Invasion of America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. ____________, ed. The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1985. Extensive discussion of treaty negotiations, terms, and results. Jennings, Jesse D. Prehistory of North America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
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Jensen, Richard E., R. Eli Paul, and John E. Carter. Eyewitness at Wounded Knee. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Fine collection of photographs from the Wounded Knee battlefield and related sites, with essays on the American Indian perspective, the Army’s role, and the distorted media coverage. Johansen, Bruce E. Life and Death in Mohawk Country. Golden, Colo.: North American Press, 1993. Details conflicts involving followers of Handsome Lake’s code and Louis Hall’s Warriors at Akwesasne in the late twentieth century. Johansen, Bruce, and Roberto Maestas. Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979. John, Elizabeth A. H. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of the Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1975. Readable overview of the confrontations involving the Indians, Spanish, and French in the American Southwest from 1540 to 1795. Heavy emphasis on the Native Americans’ responses. Johnson, F. Roy. The Tuscaroras. Vols. 1 and 2. Murfreesboro: Johnson, 1967. Discusses history, traditions, culture, mythology, and medicine. Maps, illustrations, index, and many footnotes. Provides listings of numerous original resources. Johnson, Paul C., et al., eds. The California Missions: A Pictorial History. Menlo Park, Calif.: Lane, 1985. A colorful, popular, accessible, and reliable work. Jones, Dorothy V. License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Discusses abuses of the system and how native peoples failed to understand the process. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Civil War in the American West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Discusses the Civil War battles that were fought west of the Mississippi River. ____________. Five Hundred Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. A well-illustrated history of North America from its original inhabitants’ viewpoint; pages 371-374 cover the treaty, including direct quotations from Indian leaders. ____________. The Indian Heritage of America. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. Examines the clash of cultures in words and illustrations. ____________. Now That the Buffalo’s Gone: A Study of Today’s American Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984. Contains a chapter on American Indian efforts to retain their spirituality and provides American Indian perspective on this issue.
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____________. The Patriot Chiefs: A Chronicle of American Indian Resistance. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Gives an account of the precursors to the revolt, but presents no consideration of the aftermath. Kan, Sergei. Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity Through Two Centuries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Kappler, Charles, ed. Indian Treaties, 1778-1883. New York: Interland, 1972. Provides the texts of most of the actual treaties. Keegan, William F., ed. Earliest Hispanic/Native American Interactions in the Caribbean. New York: Garland, 1991. A series of specialized studies of both Spanish and native Indian institutions, including methods of agriculture and local administration, before and during the Ovando governorate. Keenan, Jerry. The Wagon Box Fight: An Episode of Red Cloud’s War. Conshohocken, Pa.: Savas, 2000. A thorough account of this encounter, with detailed appendices of the official army reports and results of recent archaeological excavation at the site. Keleher, William A. Turmoil in New Mexico, 1846-1868. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Rydal Press, 1952. Details the events leading up to the U.S. invasion of New Mexico and the subsequent occupation of the province. Keller, Robert H. American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869-82. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Kelley, Joseph J., Jr. Pennsylvania: The Colonial Years, 1681-1776. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980. Describes the Walking Purchase and many other episodes in Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Kelley, Robert. American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Discusses how Protestant reformers influenced Indian policy and Indian-white relations. Kelly, Lawrence C. “The Indian Reorganization Act: The Dream and the Reality.” Pacific Historical Review 44 (August, 1975): 291-312. Balanced look at what the IRA failed to achieve in contrast to the claims of some proponents. Discusses Collier’s strong points and shortcomings as American Indian commissioner during the New Deal era. ____________. Navajo Roundup: Selected Correspondence of Kit Carson’s Expedition Against the Navajo, 1863-1865. Boulder, Colo.: Pruett, 1970. A collection of personal letters and U.S. Army general orders, especially those of General E. R. S. Canby, Brigadier General James Carleton, and Colonel Kit Carson. Kelly, William H., ed. Indian Affairs and the Indian Reorganization Act: The Twenty Year Record. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1954. A collection of scholarly essays on this subject.
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Kennedy, John H. Jesuit and Savage in New France. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950. Kessler, Donna J. The Making of Sacagawea: A Euro-American Legend. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Kinney, J. P. A Continent Lost, a Civilization Won: Indian Land Tenure in America. 1937. Reprint. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Klein, Christina.“‘Everything of Interest in the Late Pine Ridge War Are Held by Us for Sale’: Popular Culture and Wounded Knee.” Western Historical Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1994): 45-68. Argues that commercial exploitation of Wounded Knee in Cody’s Wild West show, photographs, and the dime novel played as significant a role as the military in defeating the Ghost Dancers’ dreams of American Indian autonomy. Includes photographs. Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Kohn, Richard H. Eagle and Sword. New York: Free Press, 1975. Kraft, Louis. Gatewood and Geronimo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Focuses on the events leading up to Geronimo’s surrender. Krech, Shepard, III. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Kroeber, Alfred Louis. Handbook of the Indians of California. New York: Dover, 1976. A large anthropological tome. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. A highly readable account of the evolutions of Indian-English relations along the East Coast of North America. Kvasnicka, Robert M. “United States Indian Treaties and Agreements.” In History of Indian-White Relations, edited by Wilcomb E. Washburn. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. A short discussion of the debate over treaties and how the process was ended. La Farge, Oliver. “Termination of Federal Supervision: Disintegration and the American Indians.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 311 (May, 1957): 41-46. Summarizes arguments against termination, except when tribes request it and members are ready to handle their own affairs. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. History of the Indies. Edited and translated by Andrée Collard. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. A partial translation of
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the massive work (three volumes in the Spanish edition) of the Spanish missionary who, after coming to Hispaniola with Governor Ovando, turned critical of Ovando’s repressive policies. Lass, William E. Minnesota: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Chapter 5 is a concise but insightful statement of the war’s effect on Minnesota. Lavender, David. The Great West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Suggests that Black Kettle may have been more interested in handouts than in peace. Lazarus, Edward. Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Includes the full text of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Leach, Douglas E. Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607-1763. New York: Macmillan, 1973. A formidable study that details the increasingly impossible task Great Britain faced in trying to devise an effective military defense for a vast colonial empire against France and Spain, British colonists, and Native Americans. The latter chapters provide excellent background on Pontiac’s resistance. ____________. “Colonial Indian Wars.” In History of Indian-White Relations, edited by Wilcomb B. Washburn. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. More specific in its focus than the Leach study, this article combines British and American Indian politics and perspectives in the context of colonial wars. ____________. Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War. New York: Norton Library Edition, 1966. This elegantly written study, long considered the standard modern account of the war, indicts English land hunger as a cause of the war. Maps, illustrations, and index. Leckie, William H. The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Discusses the considerable role played by African Americans in the frontier Army, devoting an entire chapter to the Red River War. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Legters, Lyman, and Fremont J. Lyden, eds. American Indian Policy: SelfGovernance and Economic Development. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. A series of articles detailing current trends in Native American life and law. Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Random House, 1998. A very well-received history of Metacom’s war, arguing that the conflict between Europeans and Indians served to crystallize a sense of American self-identity on the part of the colonists.
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Liebersohn, Harry. Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lincoln, Charles A., ed. Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699. New York: Scribner’s, 1913. Reprint. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1941. Contains a number of contemporaneous accounts of the war, including The Soveraignty & Goodness of God . . . the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Rowlandson’s account of her capture in the attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1676. Her often reprinted classic is the earliest American captivity narrative. Rowlandson reports firsthand exchanges with Metacom, who at times traveled with the mixed band that held her prisoner. Little Bear, Leroy, and Menno Boldt, eds. Pathways to Self-Determination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Long, Carolyn N. Religious Freedom and Indian Rights: The Case of “Oregon v. Smith.” Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Part of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series, this is the first booklength study of Oregon v. Smith, focusing on the case’s sharp differences from previous opinions on First Amendment freedom of religion rights. Long, J. Anthony, and Menno Boldt, eds., in association with Leroy Little Bear. Governments in Conflict? Provinces and Indian Nations in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Addresses aboriginal-provincial relations focusing on self-government, provincial jurisdiction, land claims, and financial responsibility. ____________. The Quest for Justice: Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal Rights. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Presents a broad cross section of tribal, geographic, and organizational perspectives. The authors discuss constitutional questions such as land rights, concerns of Metis, nonstatus Indians and Inuit, and historical, legal/constitutional, political, regional, and international rights issues. Longhena, Maria. Ancient Mexico: The History and Culture of the Maya, Aztecs, and Other Pre-Columbian Peoples. New York: Tabori & Chang, 1998. Luebke, Barbara P. “Elias Boudinot, Indian Editor: Editorial Columns from the Cherokee Phoenix.” Journalism History 6 (1979): 48-51. Discusses Boudinot’s conflicts as editor of the Cherokee Phoenix. Lyons, Oren, et al. Exiled in the Land of the Free. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Clear Light Publishers, 1992. Lyons, faithkeeper of the Six Nations Confederacy, is distinctive in his understanding of the role of the American Indian in U.S. history. McAlister, Lyle. Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Includes a clearly written ac-
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count of Spain’s general imperial policies such as the encomienda and the repartimiento. McCary, Ben C. Indians in Seventeenth Century Virginia. Williamsburg: Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957. Reviews the history of seventeenth century Native Americans in Virginia. McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Discusses colonial expansion from the eighteenth century Native American perspective. McConnell sees the Treaty of Fort Stanwix as a deciding factor in the coming of Lord Dunmore’s War. McCormick, Anita L. Native Americans and the Reservation in American History. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1996. McCutchen, David, ed. The Red Record: The Wallam Olum, the Oldest Native North American History. Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery, 1993. McDermott, John D. “Price of Arrogance: The Short and Controversial Life of William Judd Fetterman.” Annals of Wyoming 63, no. 2 (Spring, 1991): 42-53. A look at Fetterman’s character and its fatal consequences. ____________, ed. “Wyoming Scrapbook: Documents Relating to the Fetterman Fight.” Annals of Wyoming 63, no. 2 (Spring, 1991): 68-72. Gives details of the most significant Army loss in the war. McDonnell, Janet A. The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. McDougall, John. In the Days of the Red River Rebellion. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1983. Memoir of a Methodist missionary during the time of the rebellion. MacFarlan, Allan A. Book of American Indian Games. New York: Associated Press, 1958. Discusses and describes various games, including gambling games, played by a variety of North American tribes. McGrath, Patrick. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Morristown, N.J.: Silver Burdett, 1985. A simple but complete telling of the Lewis and Clark adventure for younger readers. McHugh, Tom. The Time of the Buffalo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. A factual, readable revision of a professional wildlife biologist’s dissertation. Illustrations, index, and detailed bibliography. McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Cherokee history up through the removal crisis. ____________. Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. Discusses missionary support for the Cherokees.
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McMillan, Alan D. Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada: An Anthropological Overview. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988. Chapter 12 discusses both the Indian Act and issues related to the status of Canadian Indians. McMurtry, Larry. Crazy Horse. New York: Viking Press, 1999. McPherson, Robert S. The Northern Navajo Frontier, 1860-1900: Expansion Through Adversity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. A well-documented study of the clash of cultures in the Four Corners area. Magnusson, Magnus, and Hermann Palsson, eds. and trans. The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America. New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842. Rev. ed. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1985. Describes the battles and leaders, the problems of military organization and ordnance, and Seminole culture and history in the period of the Second Seminole War. Mails, Thomas E. “Transformation of a Culture.” In The Cherokee People: The Story of the Cherokees from Earliest Origins to Contemporary Times. Tulsa, Okla.: Council Oak Books, 1992. Describes the history of relations between Cherokees and Europeans up to the Trail of Tears. Malone, Patrick M. The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Study of Native American military tactics and their evolution under the influence of European weapons and methods. Argues that New England’s natives adopted the more ruthless methods of total war through English influence and example. Map, illustrations, and index. Mancall, Peter C., and James H. Merrell. American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal. New York: Routledge, 1999. Mangusso, Mary Childers, and Stephen W. Haycox, eds. Interpreting Alaska’s History: An Anthology. Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press, 1989. Marshall, Samuel L. A. Crimsoned Prairie. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Details the Indian campaigns of the West. The author is an excellent military historian, although slightly biased in the direction of preserving the honor of the military. Martin, James Kirby. In the Course of Human Events: An Interpretive Exploration of the American Revolution. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1979. Links the Proclamation of 1763 with other British decisions to control the colonies, such as stationing ships in American waters. Martin, Joel. Sacred Revolt: The Muscogees’ Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Emphasizes the importance of spirituality in Musco-
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gee life, in the evolution of the Red Sticks’ back-to-our-culture campaign, and in their war making. Matthews, Anne. Where the Buffalo Roam. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992. Describes a plan to restore the Great Plains to their natural condition and the bison to their former numbers. Illustrations and index. Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. 2d ed. New York: Viking Press, 1991. Mayer, Brantz. Tah-Gah-Jute, or Logan and Cresap, an Historical Essay. Albany: Munsell, 1867. The most famous study of the Cresap-Logan controversy written in the nineteenth century. Merwick, Donna. Possessing Albany, 1630-1710: The Dutch and English Experiences. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Middlekauff, Robert. Bacon’s Rebellion. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. A good collection of the primary documents associated with the uprising, beginning with Berkeley’s American Indian policy and concluding with the official report submitted to London. Milanich, Jerald T., and Susan Milbruth, eds. First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492-1570. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989. Miller, J. R. Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada. 3d ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. An excellent study of Indians as politicians and cultural survivors. ____________. Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Contains key, previously published articles concerned with regional developments from the days of New France to the present. Miller, Jay, Colin G. Calloway, and Richard A. Sattler. Writings in Indian History, 1985-1990. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Milling, Chapman J. “The Cherokee War.” In Red Carolinians. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940. A detailed, carefully documented account of the war. An important reference despite its age. Mintz, Steven, ed. Native American Voices. St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 1995. Contains part of the Dawes Act and a complaint by a Cherokee farmer in 1906. Mitchell, Donald Craig. Take My Land, Take My Life: The Story of Congress’s Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, 1960-1971. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2000. Discusses the legal and regulatory history of ANCSA. Moeller, Bill, and Jan Moeller. Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces: A Photographic History. Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 1995.
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Mooney, James. Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians. 1898. Reprint. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979. Provides a chronology of the tribe. ____________. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. 1896. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. ____________. Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. Chicago: Aldine, 1975. Valuable study by a contemporary who interviewed people involved. Morris, Alexander. The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-west Territories. Toronto: Belfords, Clark & Co., 1880. Reprint. Toronto: Coles, 1971. An account by one of the negotiators of Treaties 3 through 6. Morris, Glenn T., and Ward Churchill. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Left-Wing Revolution, Right-Wing Reaction, and the Destruction of Indigenous People.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1987): 17-24. Morrison, Andrea P., with Irwin Cotler, eds. Justice for Natives Searching for Common Ground. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. A volume that came together around the Oka crisis between aboriginal people in Quebec and the government. Its thirty-five essays and stories provide helpful discussions on native women and the struggle for justice, self-determination, title and land claims, the Oka crisis, and legal relations and models for change. Morrison, Kenneth M. The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Morse, Bradford W. Aboriginal Peoples and the Law: Indian, Metis, and Inuit Rights in Canada. Rev. ed. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989. Provides a basic resource for cases and materials on the original inhabitants of Canada. Morton, W. L. Manitoba: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. One chapter is devoted to the importance of the Red River colony. Presents a decidedly old-fashioned view of the métis, referring to them as “halfbreeds” and “savages.” Maps, illustrations, and index. Moses, L. G. Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Moulton, Gary E. John Ross, Cherokee Chief. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978. Biography of the Cherokee leader at the time of removal. Mowat, Farley. Westviking: The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Muench, David. Anasazi, Ancient People of the Rock. Palo Alto, Calif.: American West, 1975. Mullin, Michael J. “The Albany Congress and Colonial Confederation.”
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Mid-America 72, no. 2 (April-July, 1990): 93-105. Discusses the role of Indian affairs at the Congress. Munroe, John A. History of Delaware. 2d ed. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984. Murphy, James E., and Sharon M. Murphy. Let My People Know: American Indian Journalism, 1828-1978. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. A history of Native American journalism, with some discussion of the Cherokee Phoenix. Nagler, Mark. Natives Without a Home. Don Mills, Ontario, Canada: Longman, 1975. Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Native American Rights Fund. Annual Report. Boulder, Colo.: Author, 1993. ____________. Legal Review 19, no. 1 (Winter/Spring, 1994). Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. 1932. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. This classic work chronicles the spiritual odyssey of Black Elk, a holy man of the Oglala Sioux. Provides important insight into American Indian beliefs and an account of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Nelson, Paul D. Anthony Wayne: Soldier of the Early Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. The best biography of Wayne to date. ____________. “Anthony Wayne’s Indian War in the Old Northwest, 17921795.” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 56 (1984): 115-140. An excellent short account of this war. Nester, William R. Haughty Conquerors: Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763. Greenwood, Conn.: Praeger, 2000. An up-to-date history of Pontiac’s resistance. Newbold, Robert C. The Albany Congress and Plan of Union of 1754. New York: Vantage Press, 1955. A summation of the scholarship on Albany at the time. Newcomb, William. North American Indians: An Anthropological Perspective. Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear, 1974. Nichols, Roger L. Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992. Noble, David G., ed. The Hohokam: Ancient People of the Desert. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School of American Research Press, 1991. Oberg, Michael Leroy. Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Focuses
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on English interactions with Algonquian groups in the Chesapeake Bay area. O’Donnell, James H. Southern Indians in the American Revolution. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973. Focusing on the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Choctaws, O’Donnell describes the attitudes of both the British and the Americans toward their Indian allies and Indian enemies. Indexed, annotated, with bibliography. Oliphant, John. Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 1756-1763. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Focuses on the clashes of individual personalities that fomented the war. Olson, James S., and Raymond Wilson. Native Americans in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. A good text for interpreting major trends, events, and attitudes affecting American Indian peoples, including the myriad issues involved in the citizenship debate. Orr, Charles, ed. History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent, and Gardener. Cleveland, Ohio: Helman-Taylor, 1897. A valuable anthology of eyewitness reporting on the Pequot War from the Puritan perspective, drawing on the recollections of major English participants. Oswalt, Wendell H. Mission of Change in Alaska. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1963. Otis, Delos S. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. Edited by Francis Paul Prucha. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Owram, Doug. Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Chapter 4 discusses the politics of the Canadian response to the rebellion. Owsley, Frank Lawrence, Jr. Struggle for the Borderlands: The Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans, 1812-1815. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. Considers the Creek War in the larger context of the War of 1812. Page, James K., Jr. “Rebellious Pueblos Outwitted Spain Three Centuries Ago.” Smithsonian 11 (October, 1980): 221. Tells the story through Padre Pio’s last day. Good observations on the revolt’s modern significance. Palmer, Dave R. 1794. America, Its Army, and the Birth of the Nation. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1994. A helpful study of early U.S. military policy. Parker, Arthur. Parker on the Iroquois. Edited by William Fenton. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968. A detailed description of the Handsome Lake religion by a noted Seneca ethnologist.
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Parker, Arthur C. Red Jacket: Seneca Chief. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Parkman, Francis. The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada. 1874. Reprint. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Despite minor inaccuracies, this remains the classic study of the subject. Based on original documents and written by one of the greatest of American historians. ____________. Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV. 1877. Reprint. New York: Library of America, 1983. A pioneering work providing background on French interests in the Great Lakes area just before dealings with the Foxes became focal. Parman, Donald L. The Navajos and the New Deal. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. A study of the troubled relations between the American Indian policy reformers in the Roosevelt administration and the nation’s largest tribe. Peale, Arthur L. Memorials and Pilgrimages in the Mohegan Country. Norwich, Conn.: Bulletin Company, 1930. Peale, author of a groundbreaking study of Uncas, was celebrated for his knowledge of the Mohegans and the Pequots. Remarkably readable reflections. Peckham, Howard. Pontiac and the Indian Uprising. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947. Corrects Parkman’s inaccuracies, updates the subject, and provides fresh insights into American Indian attitudes. Perdue, Theda, ed. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Brief biographical introduction to Boudinot, with reproductions of important documents in the history of the Cherokee Phoenix and Boudinot’s fund-raising. Peroff, Nicholas C. Menominee Drums. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. A case study of one of the most important examples of tribal termination actions. Philbrick, Francis S. The Rise of the West, 1754-1830. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Philp, Kenneth R. John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. A detailed, objective account of Collier’s achievements and shortcomings as a policy critic, activist, reformer, and administrator. ____________. Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to Self-Determination, 1933-1953. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. A history of termination policy, with useful emphasis on the ambivalent attitudes of Native Americans themselves toward U.S. policy. Pommersheim, Frank. “Economic Development in Indian Country: What Are the Questions?” American Indian Law Review 12 (1987): 195-217. Ex-
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plains the need for revenue in American Indian country and the possibilities gaming provides tribes. Porter, C. Fayne. Our Indian Heritage: Profiles of Twelve Great Leaders. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964. Little Turtle is one of the twelve leaders discussed. Preucel, Robert, ed. Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. A collection of essays exploring the light archaeology and material culture can shed on the historical understanding of the Pueblo Revolt. Priest, Loring Benson. Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1865-1887. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1942. Pritchett, John Perry. Red River Valley, 1811-1849: A Regional Study. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942. Contains an almost minute-byminute account of the Seven Oaks Massacre. “Proclamation of 1763: Governor Henry Ellis’ Plan May 5, 1763.” In The American Revolution, 1763-1783: A Bicentennial Collection, edited by Richard B. Morris. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970. Demonstrates the thinking by one colonial official that prompted the Proclamation of 1763. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. The full story of treaty making and how it was ended in 1871. Index and list of treaties. ____________. “Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy: A Reassessment.” Journal of American History 56, no. 3 (1969): 527-539. A discussion of Jackson’s Indian policy from a sympathetic viewpoint, describing the pressures leading to Indian removal. ____________. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. An extensive, fully annotated, indexed, and illustrated history of Indianwhite relations from the founding of the United States to the 1980’s by one of the premier authorities on Indian-white relations. ____________. The Sword of the Republic. New York: Macmillan, 1969. ____________, ed. Americanizing the American Indians: Writings of the “Friends of the Indian” 1880-1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. Section 2 provides a representative sampling of primary source writings about the Dawes Act. ____________, ed. Documents of United States Indian Policy. 3d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. General policy and issues for specific tribes.
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Purich, Donald J. The Inuit and Their Land: The Story of Nunavut. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1992. Contains a thorough discussion of each of the Inuit land claims agreements, paying special attention to the Eastern Arctic Agreement and the preparations for native self-government in the proposed New Nunavut Territory. ____________. The Metis. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1988. Highly readable treatment of the Metis. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with the 1869 and 1885 rebellions and their outcomes. Rawls, James J. Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History of Native America Since 1945. Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996. Ray, Arthur J. Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Ray, Dorothy Jean. The Eskimos of Bering Strait, 1650-1898. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. Redmond, Elsa M., ed. Chiefdoms and Chieftaincy in the Americas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Reman, Edward. The Norse Discoveries and Explorations in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking, 2001. An acclaimed biography of Jackson in the context of his ideas about and policies toward Indians. Attempts to show the underlying motives for Indian removal. ____________. The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essays on Democracy, Indian Removal, and Slavery. Reprint. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. The leading biographer of Andrew Jackson reflects on his significance to these issues. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Presents early American history from an Indian perspective, focusing on the figures of Pocohontas, Blessed Catherine Tekawitha, and Metacom, a.k.a. King Philip. ____________. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, this study of the Iroquois League demonstrates the influence of factionalism on an Indian people as they dealt with the Europeans. It synthesizes much scholarship on the Six Nations and their relationship with the French, Dutch, and English. It is particularly strong on seventeenth century relations.
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Riel, Louis. The Collected Writings of Louis Riel. Edited by George F. G. Stanley. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1985. Shows that Riel was a thinker as well as a political leader. Riley, Carroll L. Rio Del Norte: People of the Upper Rio Grande from Earliest Times to the Pueblo Revolt. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995. Riley, Sam G. “The Cherokee Phoenix: The Short, Unhappy Life of the First American Indian Newspaper.” Journalism Quarterly 53, no. 4 (Winter, 1976): 666-671. Discusses Boudinot’s editorial dilemmas and political pressure. Rink, Oliver A. Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Robbins, Rebecca L. “Self-Determination and Subordination: The Past, Present, and Future of American Indian Governance.” In The State of Native America, edited by M. A. Jaimes. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Robinson, Charles M. Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie. Austin, Tex.: State House Press, 1993. A comprehensive study that treats Mackenzie’s pivotal role in the Red River War in suitable detail. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Rollings, Willard H. The Comanche. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Describes the change in Comanche life after the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty. Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark Among the Indians. Bicentennial edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. A detailed look at the Indian cultures encountered by the Lewis and Clark expedition. Rosenberg, Bruce A. Custer and the Epic of Defeat. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. Ross, Norman A., ed. Index to the Expert Testimony Before the Indian Claims Commission: The Written Reports. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Information Service, 2001. Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Written by an ethnohistorian and anthropologist, this is one of the best studies of Jamestown and the settlement’s relationship to the Powhatan Confederacy. ____________. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. A comprehensive study of all aspects of life among the Powhatan Confederacy tribes. ____________, ed. Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500-1722. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Rouse, Irving. The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Contains the most
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extensive coverage of the distant past of the native West Indian population, with a concluding chapter on their short history of contacts with Europeans before dying out. Rozema, Vicki. Footsteps of the Cherokees: A Guide to the Eastern Homelands of the Cherokee Nations. Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1995. Devotes several pages to American Indian slavery, helping to correct the previously small amount of attention given to this topic. Russell, Don. Custer’s Last. Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1968. ____________. The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. A detailed examination of the Army scout and bison hunter. Footnotes, extensive bibliography, index, illustrations. Rutledge, Joseph Lister. Century of Conflict. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. A comprehensive account of American Indian relations with both French and British colonial regimes from the early to the late eighteenth century, including the key Seven Years’ War period. Sachese, Julius F. History of the German Role in the Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement of the New World. Reprint. Germany and America, 1450-1700. Edited by Don H. Tolzman. New York: Heritage Books, 1991. Sagard, Gabriel. The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons. Translated by Hugh H. Langton. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1939. This is a translation of the French explorer’s original travel logs, published in 1632. Sahlins, Marshall D. Tribesmen. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968. This book has illustrations which represent tribal life in all its diversity. St. Germain, Jill. Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867-1877. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Explores and contrasts the “civilizing” efforts of the United States and Canada through their Indian treaty policies. Salisbury, Albert, and Jane Salisbury. Two Captains West. Seattle: Superior Publishing, 1950. Descriptions of the Lewis and Clark trail, with maps and photographs. Designed for the lay reader. Salisbury, Neal. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Sando, Joe S. Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo Indian History. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Clear Light, 1992. ____________. “The Pueblo Revolt.” In Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 9, edited by Alfonso Ortiz. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1979. A brief article that gives details on the planning of the revolt.
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Sandos, James. “Junípero Serra’s Canonization and the Historical Record.” American Historical Review 93 (December, 1988): 1253-1269. An important article on the controversies surrounding the early California missions. Sandos, James A., and Larry E. Burgess. The Hunt for Willie Boy: Indian-Hating and Popular Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Santoni, Roland J. “The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act: How Did We Get Here? Where Are We Going?” Creighton Law Review 26 (1993): 387-447. Provides a comprehensive chronology of the legislation, pertinent legal cases, suggested amendments, and a table of tribal-state compacts. Satz, Ronald N. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. Excellent coverage of the Cherokee cases; also clarifies the complex political climate in which the cases developed around conflicts between the Jackson administration, Georgia, and the Cherokees. ____________. Indian Treaty Rights. Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin Academy, 1991. Provides a fascinating pro-Indian account of the fishing-rights controversy in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Satzewich, Vic, and Terry Wotherspoon. First Nations: Race, Class, and Gender Relations. Scarborough, Ont.: Nelson Canada, 1993. Contains a thoughtful discussion of the impact of the Indian Act on native women in Canada. Sayer, John William. Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. The first book-length study of the trials looks at the influence of media and legal institutions on the way the defendants and their cause were constrained in the presentation of their case. Scholes, France V. Church and State in New Mexico, 1610-1650. Historical Society of New Mexico Publications in History 7. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1942. Takes a pro-Spanish point of view, treating Native Americans in a condescending manner. Based on translations of Spanish documents. Schulz, Eric, and Michael Tougias. King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict. Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman, 1999. A detailed history of Metacom’s war, as well as a guide to the sites of conflict. Schwartz, Sally. “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania. New York: New York University Press, 1987. A general history that describes the various tensions within colonial Pennsylvania and how the colony dealt with them. Schwartz, Seymour. The French and Indian War, 1754-1763: The Imperial
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Struggle for North America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. A concise, well-illustrated study that provides a thoughtful, readable overview. Shannon, Timothy J. Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Argues that the Albany congress was actually the moment of shifting European-Indian relationships from independent commerce to an imperialist model, based on hierarchy and governed by a distant authority rather than face-to-face. Shattuck, Petra T., and Jill Norgren. Partial Justice: Federal Indian Law in a Liberal Constitutional System. New York: Berg, 1991. This study carefully analyzes the relationship of U.S. Indian law and policy to the U.S. constitutional order and governmental administrative policy. Sheehan, Bernard W. Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ____________. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973. Sherrow, Victoria. “Cherokee Nation v. Georgia”: Native American Rights. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1997. Sherwood, Morgan B., ed. Alaska and Its History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967. ____________. Exploration of Alaska, 1865-1900. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Siggins, Maggie. Riel: A Life of Revolution. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994. Readable, lively narrative account. Silverberg, Robert. The Pueblo Revolt. Introduction by Marc Simmons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. An account based mainly on Hackett’s earlier work. Introduction considers the revolt’s legacy three centuries later. Simmons, Marc. New Mexico: An Interpretive History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Chapter 4 covers the events of the occupation of New Mexico and briefly discusses the Taos Rebellion. Skimin, Robert. Apache Autumn. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. A historical novel that describes the Apache Wars. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Considers the effect of Indian women married to French men upon the early colonial fur trade. Slotkin, Richard, and James K. Folsom, eds. So Dreadful a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676-1677. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. Six contemporaneous accounts, including Rowlandson’s narrative and the liveliest, best contemporary description of
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the fighting, Thomas Church’s Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War (1716), based on the recollections of his father, Captain Benjamin Church. Smith, Dwight L. “Wayne and the Treaty of Green Ville.” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 63 (January, 1954): 1-7. Careful analysis of the treaty. Smith, John. The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles. Philadelphia: Kimber and Conrad, 1812. An account of life in Virginia by the first Englishman to meet Chief Powhatan. Smith, Michael T. “The History of Indian Citizenship.” In The American Indian Past and Present. 2d ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1981. Traces the major factors that made it difficult for American Indians to obtain citizenship. Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1997. Snow, Dean R. The Iroquois. The Peoples of America series. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Follows the development of the Iroquois Confederacy. Extensive bibliography, index. Sosin, Jack M. Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760-1775. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Detailed examination of royal decisions leading to the Proclamation of 1763. Spicer, Edward H. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1553-1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962. Broad study of the impact of several generations of outside cultural, economic, and military invasions on the Indian peoples. Somewhat dated by more recent research but contains much useful material. Stagg, Jack. Anglo-Indian Relations in North America to 1763 and an Analysis of the Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763. Ottawa: Research Branch, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1981. Provides a detailed interpretation of the text of the Proclamation of 1763 and the Crown’s motives. Stanley, George F. G. The Birth of Western Canada: History of the Riel Rebellions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960. Argues that the rebellions were the defining event in western Canadian history. Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Starkey, Armstrong. European and Native American Warfare, 1675-1815. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Steele, Ian K. Warpaths: Invasions of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Places the decisions for the Proclamation of 1763
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within the context of the military actions of the recent war and earlier treaties. Stefon, Frederick J. “The Irony of Termination: 1943-1958.” The Indian Historian 11, no. 3 (Summer, 1978): 3-14. A thorough chronological review that begins with 1887 and ends in 1968. Copiously documented, with many quotations from congressional documents and policymakers. Stern, Theodore. Chiefs and Change in the Oregon Country: Indian Relations at Fort Nez Perces, 1818-1855. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1996. Stockel, Henrietta H. Survival of the Spirit: Chiricahua Apaches in Captivity. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, c. 1993. Describes the history of Chiricahua captivity. Stone, William L. Life of Joseph Brant. Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell, 1864. A source for quotations of early colonial documents. Contains some historical inaccuracies; for example, this is the source of the erroneous information that Brant was in North America at the time of the Philadelphia meeting. Stoutenburgh, John L., Jr. Dictionary of the American Indian. New York: Philosophical Library, 1960. A concise resource with excellent brief biographies and summary descriptions of key events in Native American history. Strachey, William. The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612). Edited by Louis Wright and Virginia Freund. 1953. Reprint. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967. A contemporaneous account of Virginia’s Native Americans. Strohmeyer, John. Extreme Conditions: Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Illustrates the impact of the petroleum industry and law on native peoples. Sugden, John. Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. A biography of one of the main Indian leaders in the conflict. ____________. Tecumseh: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. ____________. Tecumseh’s Last Stand. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Detailed analysis of the battle and the campaign that preceded it. Examines the question of who killed Tecumseh. Maps, illustrations, and index. Sword, Wiley. President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Discusses the struggle for the northwest frontier. Szasz, Margaret C. Education and the American Indian: The Road to SelfDetermination Since 1928. 3d ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
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____________. Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Tanner, Helen Hornbeck, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. This monograph traces Shawnee history through cartographic evidence. Contains a discussion of Lord Dunmore’s War. Tanner, Helen Hunt. “The Glaize in 1792: A Composite Indian Community.” Ethnohistory 25 (Winter, 1978): 15-39. Tate, Thad W., and David L. Ammerman. The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on the Anglo-American Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. An essential collection of articles addressing race relations, class structure, and the demographics of the seventeenth century Chesapeake. Includes a historiographic discussion of Bacon’s Rebellion. Taylor, Colin F., ed. The Native Americans: The Indigenous People of North America. New York: Smithmark, 1991. Companion book to a 1990’s televised series on Native Americans. Taylor, Graham D. The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934-1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Argues that the IRA, although enlightened compared to previous policies, was weakened by its emphasis on tribal reorganization and its mistaken assumptions about contemporary American Indian societies. Tebbel, John W. The Battle of Fallen Timbers, August 20, 1794. New York: Franklin Watts, 1972. Useful history of the battle. Tebeau, Charlton W. “The Wars of Indian Removal.” In A History of Florida. Rev. ed. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1980. This chapter in a standard Florida history covers the Seminole Wars. Tennant, Paul. Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990. A thorough discussion of the history of Canadian Indian policy and relations between Canadian Indians and whites in the province of British Columbia. Several sections deal specifically with the Indian Act. Thomas, David Hurst. Exploring Ancient Native America: An Archaeological Guide. New York: Macmillan, 1994. An outline of Native American prehistory and a guide to accessible sites. Illustrations, index, appendix of sites to visit, bibliography. Thomas, David Hurst, et al. The Native Americans: An Illustrated History. Atlanta, Ga.: Turner Publishing, 1993. A colorful history that includes a concise accounting of the purchase.
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Thompson, Scott. I Will Tell My Story: A Pictorial Account of the Nez Perce War. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Provides an overview of Native American population and recovery from European contact to 1980. Tobias, John L. “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy.” In Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, edited by J. R. Miller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. This article, reprinted from the Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology, provides a critical overview of legislation and policy making with regard to Canadian Indians. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Translated by Richard Howard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Investigates the cultural clash between Spanish and Native American mentalities and explores the European conquest of North America as a semiotic process. Tolles, Frederick B. James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1957. Details the life and career of James Logan, including his role in the Walking Purchase. Tourtelott, Jonathan B., ed. “Meriwether Lewis/William Clark.” In Into the Unknown: The Story of Exploration. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1987. A thirty-four-page chapter devoted to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Trafzer, Clifford. The Kit Carson Campaign: The Last Great Navajo War. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. The definitive text on the Long Walk of the Navajos. Well researched and thoroughly annotated, although with some turgid language, especially when describing landscape. Three maps and sixty-eight illustrations. Trail of Broken Treaties: BIA, I’m Not Your Indian Anymore. Rooseveltown, N.Y.: Akwesasne Notes, 1973. Contains articles published during and after the Trail events; text of the Twenty Points; the White House response; replies suggested by Trail leadership; and an update on the BIA one year later. Trelease, Allen W. Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960. Trennert, Robert A., Jr. Alternative to Extinction: Federal Indian Policy and the Beginnings of the Reservation System, 1846-51. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Trigger, Bruce G. Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985.
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____________, ed. Northeast. Vol. 15 in Handbook of North American Indians, edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. Discusses Native Americans from the Northeast in considerable detail, including language, history, customs, culture, and religion. Tucker, Glenn. Tecumseh: Vision of Glory. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. Turner, Allen C. “Evolution, Assimilation, and State Control of Gambling in Indian Country: Is Cabazon v. California an Assimilationist Wolf in Preemptive Clothing?” Idaho Law Review 24, no. 2 (1987-1988): 317-338. Explores the seminal case that influenced involvement of states in the compacting process. Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico from 1846 to 1851 by the Government of the United States. 1909. Reprint. Chicago: Rio Grande Press, 1963. Quotes extensively from government documents; provides biographical sketches of the principal participants. Tyler, S. Lyman. A History of Indian Policy. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973. A brief chronological guide to Indian policy. Illustrated, containing maps, time lines, and bibliography. ____________. Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European, 14921509. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988. Provides the most concise history of the circumstances of West Indian revolts and repression in this period. U.S. Indian Claims Commission. Indian Claims Commission, August 13, 1946-September 30, 1978: Final Report. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978. Utley, Robert M. Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. An essential study of the frontier Army and the Indian Wars. Includes a chapter on the Red River War and a wealth of other pertinent information. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. ____________. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Chapter 3 includes a good partial discussion of the events leading to the Long Walk. ____________. Last Days of the Sioux Nation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. A highly regarded, sensitive, evenhanded study that documents the events leading up to Wounded Knee. Contains a chapter on sources, making it invaluable for further study. Utley, Robert Marshall, and Wilcomb E. Washburn. Indian Wars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. A comprehensive survey of the wars, battles,
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and conflicts between European Americans and Indians, written by two well-respected historians. Vance, John T. “The Congressional Mandate and the Indian Claims Commission.” North Dakota Law Review 45 (1969): 325-336. Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Examines relations between white traders and Indian/ Metis women. Vaughan, Alden T. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. This helpful study of a half-century of relationships between Native Americans and European settlers is a fine starting point for research. Vaughn, Jesse W. Indian Fights. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. Verano, John W., and Douglas H. Ubelaker, eds. Disease and Demography in the Americas. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. A collection of articles assessing the health and demography of precontact and post-contact Native American populations. Viola, Herman J. Diplomats in Buckskin: A History of the Indian Delegations in Washington City. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981. ____________. Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816-1830. Chicago: Sage Books, 1974. Informative biography of McKenney, superintendent of Indian trade and the first director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and description of his Indian policy under the administrations of presidents James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson. Illustrated and indexed. Bibliography. Voices from Wounded Knee, 1973: In the Words of the Participants. Rooseveltown, N.Y.: Akwesasne Notes, 1974. Includes daily events during occupation; logs kept by U.S. marshals; quotations, interviews, diaries, and taped radio conversations from a ten-day battle; negotiations; treaty meetings at Kyle; maps and photographs. Waddell, Gene. Indians of the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1562-1751. Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1980. Describes how enslavement was one of several major factors in the extinction of South Carolina’s lowcountry tribes. Wahlgren, Erik. The Vikings and America. London: Thames & Hudson, 1986. Walch, Michael C. “Terminating the Indian Termination Policy.” Stanford Law Review 35, no. 6 (July, 1983): 1181-1215. Well-documented survey of
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the rise of termination, its effects, and the impact of the fact that Congress did not repeal the termination acts. Waldman, Carl. Atlas of the North American Indian. New York: Facts on File, 1985. Comprehensive coverage of history and culture, land cessions, wars, and contemporary issues. Maps, illustrations, and appendices. ____________. Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. New York: Facts On File, 1988. One page summarizes events leading to Fort Neoheroka and gives some details about tribal life. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. A classic work on the history of the Seneca at the time of Handsome Lake. ____________. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. ____________. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993. Brief overview of the removal policies, the Trail of Tears, and the implications of both for U.S. history. Wallace, Paul A. W. Indians in Pennsylvania. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1981. Survey of Native Americans, including a general description of the Walking Purchase. Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975. ____________. The Governor and the Rebel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957. A classic study of the small details of the uprising; generous in its forgiveness of Governor Berkeley. ____________. Red Man’s Land/White Man’s Law. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. An older but still useful account. ____________, ed. History of Indian-White Relations. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians, edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. Extensive coverage of relations between American Indians and whites across the United States, from first contact to 1987. ____________, ed. The Indian in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Arguably the best one-volume survey of the Indian experience in North America, with many useful insights and comments concerning the reservation system. Contains an extensive bibliography and comprehensive index. ____________, ed. Indian-White Relations. Vol. 4 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. Discusses the American Indian in the complex federal-tribal context and contains information on citizenship.
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Waters, Frank. Brave Are My People: Indian Heroes Not Forgotten. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Clear Light Publishers, 1992. Weatherford, Jack. Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991. One chapter is devoted to American Indian slaves, with a section describing the important part played by Charleston merchants in Indian slavery. Weaver, Sally M. Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda, 196870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Places the rebellion in a larger context, as a prerevolutionary condition, while providing a detailed study of the events of 1676-1677. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. A comprehensive overview of the Mexican borderlands before the Mexican War. Discusses the economic impact of the Santa Fe Trade, American Indian relations, the church, society, and culture. ____________. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. A general overview and detailed history of the Spanish presence in North America, from the early 1500’s to the 1830’s. A balanced view of relations between Native Americans and the Spanish, with much useful information on religion, social structure, and culture. ____________. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Wedel, Waldo C. Central Plains Prehistory: Holocene Environments and Culture Change in the Republican River Basin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ____________. “The Prehistoric Plains.” In Ancient North Americans, edited by Jesse D. Jennings. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1983. Weslager, C. A. Delaware’s Buried Past: A Study of Archaeological Adventure. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1968. ____________. “Did Minuit Buy Manhattan Island from the Indians?” De Halve Maen 43 (October, 1968): 5-6. Questions whether Minuit actually purchased the island and suggests that Verhulst did instead. Weyler, Rex. Blood of the Land: The U.S. Government and Corporate War Against the First Nations. 2d ed. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Discusses how both Europeans and American Indians sought accommodation and common meaning. Places Lord Dunmore’s War within this context in his analysis of the event.
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____________. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Paw-nees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Wickman, Patricia R. Osceola’s Legacy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. A study of the life and myth of Osceola, based on a survey of artifacts and documents. Wilkins, David E. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Close analysis of legal cases that Wilkins argues “mask questionable federal and administrative activities against tribes and individual Indians.” Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. Rev. ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Discusses the prominent family of Cherokee leaders. Wilkinson, Charles F. American Indians, Time, and the Law: Native Societies in a Modern Constitutional Democracy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Discusses tribal sovereignty as a preconstitutional right and how this inherent right can be diminished. Williams, Jeanne. “The Cherokees.” In Trails of Tears: American Indians Driven from Their Lands. Dallas: Hendrick-Long, 1992. Puts Cherokee removal in the context of the similar experiences of the Comanche, Cheyenne, Apache, and Navajo. Williams, Robert A. Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600-1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ____________. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. This book deals with earlier times in white-Indian relations but is vital reading for anyone who wishes to understand the philosophical and traditional bases of American Indian law. Wilson, Edmund. Apologies to the Iroquois. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1959. Contains a chapter on Tuscarora history. Also discusses land disputes at Niagara Falls in the 1960’s. Wilson, Frazer. The Treaty of Greenville. Pigua, Ohio: Correspondent Press, 1894. The only work specifically devoted to the treaty ending the campaign. Wilson, James. The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999. Winger, Otho. Last of the Miamis: Little Turtle. North Manchester, Ind.: O. Winger, 1935. Concise sketch of Little Turtle’s life and his attempts to forge a Native American confederation in the Ohio Valley. Wise, Jennings C. The Red Man in the New World Drama, edited by Vine Deloria, Jr. New York: Macmillan, 1971. The key words “new world
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drama” provide a clue to the American Indian perspective of this author and editor. Woodward, Grace Steele. “’The King, Our Father.’” In The Cherokees. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. A history of the Cherokee people from the start of the Yamasee War until the end of the Cherokee War. Woodward, Thomas S. Woodward’s Reminiscences of the Creek, or Muscogee Indians, Contained in Letters to Friends in Georgia and Alabama. Tuscaloosa: Alabama Book Store, 1859. Reprint. Mobile, Ala.: Southern University Press, 1965. A veteran of the war, Woodward knew many Muscogee leaders and their culture. Although written with the wisdom and common sense of later years, this entertaining little volume has its errors and must be read with a critical eye. Woodworth, S. E. Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990. Discusses Jefferson’s top military men and their leadership on the Western front during the Civil War. Wooster, Robert. Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Includes a chapter on the controversial soldier’s extensive Red River War operations. Wright, J. Leitch, Jr. “Brands and Slave Cords.” In The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South. New York: Free Press, 1981. Gives details on the Carolina slave trade in American Indians, with emphasis on historical details. ____________. Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. An examination of the culture of the Creeks and Seminoles, and their Spanish, British, and African connections. Wright, J. Leitch, Jr., and James H. Merrell. The Only Land They Knew: American Indians in the Old South. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Wright, Ronald. Stolen Continents. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. A wideranging study of North America since the voyages of Columbus. Contains extensive treatment of the Iroquois Confederacy; describes Handsome Lake and his religion in the general context of the subjugation of the confederacy after the Revolutionary War. Wunder, John R. “Retained by the People”: A History of American Indians and the Bill of Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Chronicles the history of the relationship between American Indians and the Bill of Rights. Presents a detailed assessment of the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act.
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Wuorinen, John H. The Finns on the Delaware, 1638-1655: An Essay in Colonial American History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938. Young, Calvin M. Little Turtle. 1917. Reprint. Fort Wayne, Ind.: Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, 1956. A sketch of Little Turtle’s life, including the St. Clair battle. Zimmerman, Bill. Airlift to Wounded Knee. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976. Chronicle of eight airlift participants who delivered food and medical supplies during the occupation and were subsequently indicted for conspiracy and interfering with official duties of federal troops. Photos, notes, comments by author’s attorney.
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Web Resources AcademicInfo http://academicinfo.net/index.html An invaluable resource for all academic online research. Offers guides to Internet resources on just about every discipline, from all perspectives. American Indian History and Related Issues http://www.csulb.edu/projects/ais/ A wide-ranging list of links to sites dealing with mostly modern American Indian history. Contains links to tribal home pages, federal departments, image banks, cultural resources, and much more. American Indian History as Told by American Indians http://www.manataka.org/page10.html Links to over one hundred U.S. and Canadian Native American sites with information on American Indian history from a native perspective. American Indian Resources http://jupiter.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~krkvls/naindex.html A collection of links for academic research in Native American studies. Includes links to oral and written tribal histories, primary source documents, maps, and bibliographies. American Indian Tribal Directory http://www.indians.org/tribes/tribes.html Site of the American Indian Heritage Foundation, with a useful directory to all federally recognized tribes and resource library. Black-Indian History Resources http://anpa.ualr.edu/f_black_indian.htm A very interesting site on the intermixing of African Americans and the Five Civilized Tribes. CodeTalk http://www.codetalk.fed.us/ A federal web site that covers subjects of interest to Native American communities, with links to most federal government offices dealing with Indian Affairs.
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Diversity and Ethnic Studies: Recommended American Indian Web Sites http://www.public.iastate.edu/~savega/amer_ind.htm A list of academically reliable web sites, including links to a number of online journals and newspapers. First Nation Information Project http://www.johnco.com/firstnat/index.html A very thorough resource for information on all aspects of life among the Canadian First Nations. First Nations Histories http://www.tolatsga.org/Compacts.html Provides short histories of all Canadian First Nations, along with bibliographies and maps. Index of Native American Resources on the Internet http://www.hanksville.org/NAresources/ A comprehensive index to Internet resources, frequently updated. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/index.htm A digitized edition of Charles J. Kappler’s 1904 work on the relations between the U.S. government and Native American tribes. Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains http://libmuse.msu.montana.edu:4000/NAD/nad.home A searchable photographic database. Indian Trusts Assets Management http://www.doi.gov/indiantrust/index.html The U.S. Department of the Interior’s web site covering issues regarding Indian Trusts, with updates on the ongoing legal disputes. Internet Law Library: Indian Nations and Tribes http://www.nsulaw.nova.edu/library/ushouse/31.htm Links to numerous sites with information on legal relations between the U.S. government and Native American tribes. Includes a number of links dealing with treaties.
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Library of Congress: American Indians of the Pacific Northwest http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/wauhtml/aipnhome.html A virtual museum of photographs and archive of texts relating to the history of the Plateau and Northwest Coast Native Americans. May be browsed by keyword, subject, and geographic location. Native American Documents Project http://www.csusm.edu/nadp/ Provides primary source documentation of the allotment system, published reports of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1870’s, and information on the Rogue River War and the Silitz reservation. Native American History and Studies http://www.tntech.edu/www/acad/hist/nativam.html A collection of historical links hosted by the history department at Tennessee Technological University. Native American Research Page http://maple.lemoyne.edu/~bucko/indian.html A collection of links to resources on all aspects of Native American culture and life. Native American Sites http://www.nativeculture.com/lisamitten/indians.html A web site maintained by a Native American librarian and editor, dedicated to providing academically sounds links to the web sites of Native American organizations and nations. NativeWeb History Resources http://www.nativeweb.org/resources/history/ A page on the larger NativeWeb site offers links to pages on many events in Native American history, with each link identified for the tribe and geographic location it covers. Office of Tribal Justice http://www.usdoj.gov/otj/ The web site of the division of the U.S. Department of Justice that deals with Native American issues. Includes a statement of the Department of Justice’s sovereignty policy.
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On This Date in North American Indian History http://americanindian.net/ A site dedicated to timelines of Native American historical events. Smithsonian Institution: Native American History and Culture http://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmai/start.htm Links to Native American resources at the Smithsonian, including a number of online museum exhibits. The “Native American Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery” exhibit features many historically important Native Americans. Treaty Negotiations Office of the Attorney General of British Columbia http://www.gov.bc.ca/tno/ Contains information about treaties between Canada and First Nations, with updates on current legislation and negotiations. Tribal Law and Policy Institute http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/tlpi.htm The site of a Native American nonprofit institute dedicated to increasing resources for tribal judicial systems and operations. Leslie Ellen Jones
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Categorized Index Civil Rights Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, 5 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 29 Colliflower v. Garland, 109 Indian Civil Rights Act, 193 Indian preference, 206 National Congress of American Indians, 375 Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council, 382 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 504 Colonial History Acoma, Battle of, 2 Albany Congress, 11 Articles of Agreement, 38 Bacon’s Rebellion, 40 Beaver Wars, 46 Boarding and residential schools, 64 California missions, 76 Cherokee War, 94 Epidemics and diseases, 125 Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 132 Fort Greenville Treaty, 141 Fox Wars, 156 French and Indian War, 160 Fur trade, 166 Indian slave trade, 220 Indian-white relations: Canadian, 226 Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial, 235 Indian-white relations: English colonial, 237 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 246 Indian-white relations: Russian colonial, 257
Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial, 268 Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Jay’s Treaty, 313 Lord Dunmore’s War, 346 Manhattan Island purchase, 353 Metacom’s War, 366 Natchez Revolt, 374 Pavonia Massacre, 403 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Peach Wars, 408 Pequot War, 409 Pima uprisings, 413 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Proclamation of 1763, 455 Pueblo Revolt, 465 Saybrook, Battle of, 504 Treaties and agreements in Canada, 549 Tuscarora War, 566 Walking Purchase, 574 West Indian uprisings, 583 Yamasee War, 608 Zuñi Rebellion, 609 Court Cases Cherokee legal cases, 83 Cherokee Tobacco case, 92 Colliflower v. Garland, 109 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 117 Duro v. Reina, 122 Elk v. Wilkins, 123 Employment Division, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith, 124 Ex parte Crow Dog, 130
772 / Categorized Index Indian trust fund lawsuits, 225 Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 336 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350 Major Crimes Act, 352 Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council, 382 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 402 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 504 Standing Bear v. Crook, 520 United States v. Kagama, 570 United States v. Washington, 570 Winters v. United States, 591 Education American Indian Higher Education Consortium, 24 Boarding and residential schools, 64 Carlisle Indian School, 80 Cherokee Phoenix, 87 Indian Education Acts, 198 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 219 Kennedy Report, 317 Meriam Report, 364 National Congress of American Indians, 375 National Indian Education Association, 379 Eighteenth Century History Boarding and residential schools, 64 Code of Handsome Lake, 101 Epidemics and diseases, 125 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 151 Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830, 272 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Jay’s Treaty, 313 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Lord Dunmore’s War, 346 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Trade and Intercourse Acts, 538 Treaties and agreements in the United States, 555 Wabash, Battle of the, 572
National Government and Legislation Aboriginal Action Plan, 1 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 6 Albany Congress, 11 Allotment system, 18 American Indian Movement, 25 American Indian Policy Review Commission, 27 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 29 Boarding and residential schools, 64 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 73 Burke Act, 75 Declaration of First Nations, 116 Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 119 Federally recognized tribes, 136 Fifteen Principles, 137 Gadsden Purchase, 169 General Allotment Act, 169 Indian Act of 1876, 178 Indian Act of 1951, 181 Indian Act of 1989, 183 Indian Appropriation Act, 184 Indian Child Welfare Act, 188 Indian Citizenship Act, 189 Indian Civil Rights Act, 193 Indian Claims Commission, 196 Indian Education Acts, 198 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 200 Indian New Deal, 204 Indian Offenses Act, 205 Indian preference, 206 Indian Removal Act, 207 Indian Reorganization Act, 213 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 219 Indian trust fund lawsuits, 225 Indian-white relations: Canadian, 226 Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830, 272 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870, 278 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933, 285 Indian-white relations: U.S., 19342002, 292
Categorized Index / 773 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Jay’s Treaty, 313 Keeler Commission, 315 Kennedy Report, 317 Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Maine Indian Claims Act, 351 Major Crimes Act, 352 Meech Lake Accord, 362 Menominee Restoration Act, 363 Meriam Report, 364 National Indian Education Association, 379 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 383 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Navajo Rehabilitation Act, 388 Nisga’a Agreement in Principle, 395 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Nunavut Territory, 398 Oka crisis, 399 Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, 401 Proclamation of 1763, 455 Public Law 280, 464 Reservation system of the United States, 478 Reserve system of Canada, 484 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 494 Termination Resolution, 528 Trade and Intercourse Acts, 538 Treaties and agreements in Canada, 549 Treaties and agreements in the United States, 555 Walla Walla Council, 578 White Paper of Canada, 587 Native Government All-Pueblo Council, 17 American Indian Movement, 25 Cherokee legal cases, 83 Declaration of First Nations, 116 Duro v. Reina, 122 Ex parte Crow Dog, 130 Fifteen Principles, 137 General Allotment Act, 169
Indian Appropriation Act, 184 Indian Citizenship Act, 189 Indian Civil Rights Act, 193 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 200 Indian Offenses Act, 205 Indian preference, 206 Indian Reorganization Act, 213 Indian Rights Association, 218 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 219 Indian-white relations: Canadian, 226 Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830, 272 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870, 278 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933, 285 Indian-white relations: U.S., 19342002, 292 International Indian Treaty Council, 300 Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Longest Walk, 345 Major Crimes Act, 352 Meech Lake Accord, 362 Native American Rights Fund, 385 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Nisga’a Agreement in Principle, 395 Oka crisis, 399 Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, 401 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 402 Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Public Law 280, 464 Reservation system of the United States, 478 Reserve system of Canada, 484 Treaties and agreements in Canada, 549 Treaties and agreements in the United States, 555 Tribal courts, 560 Walla Walla Council, 578 White Paper of Canada, 587
774 / Categorized Index Nineteenth Century History Adobe Walls, Battles of, 4 Allotment system, 18 Apache Wars, 34 Bannock War, 43 Bear River Campaign, 45 Bison slaughter, 55 Black Hawk War, 60 Boarding and residential schools, 64 Bozeman Trail War, 69 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 73 California missions, 76 Carlisle Indian School, 80 Cayuse War, 82 Cherokee legal cases, 83 Cherokee Phoenix, 87 Cherokee Tobacco case, 92 Civil War, 98 Code of Handsome Lake, 101 Creek War, 110 Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty, 115 Elk v. Wilkins, 123 Epidemics and diseases, 125 Fort Atkinson Treaty, 140 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 145 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, 147 Fort Mims, Battle of, 149 Fort Wayne Treaty, 155 Friends of the Indian organizations, 165 Gadsden Purchase, 169 General Allotment Act, 169 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 174 Horseshoe Bend Treaty, 176 Indian Act of 1876, 178 Indian Appropriation Act, 184 Indian Offenses Act, 205 Indian Removal Act, 207 Indian Rights Association, 218 Indian trust fund lawsuits, 225 Indian-white relations: Canadian, 226 Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830, 272 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870, 278 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933, 285
Irish Potato Famine, 302 Keetoowah Society, 316 Kickapoo Resistance, 323 Kickapoo uprisings, 324 Lewis and Clark expedition, 325 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 330 Long Walk, 340 Major Crimes Act, 352 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Minnesota Uprising, 370 Modoc War, 372 National Indian Association, 378 Navajo War, 390 Nez Perce War, 391 Prophetstown, 460 Red River Raids, 469 Red River War, 473 Reservation system of the United States, 478 Reserve system of Canada, 484 Riel Rebellions, 488 Rosebud Creek, Battle of, 492 Sand Creek Massacre, 500 Seminole Wars, 506 Sioux War, 511 Snake War, 515 Standing Bear v. Crook, 520 Taos Rebellion, 521 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Trade and Intercourse Acts, 538 Trail of Tears, 544 Treaties and agreements in Canada, 549 Treaties and agreements in the United States, 555 Tribal courts, 560 United States v. Kagama, 570 Walla Walla Council, 578 Washita River Massacre, 579 Wild west shows, 588 Winnebago Uprising, 590 Winters v. United States, 591 Wolf Mountains, Battle of, 592 Wounded Knee Massacre, 598 Yakima War, 607
Categorized Index / 775 Organizations Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, 5 All-Pueblo Council, 17 American Indian Defense Association, 22 American Indian Higher Education Consortium, 24 American Indian Movement, 25 Carlisle Indian School, 80 Council of Energy Resource Tribes, 110 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty, 121 Friends of the Indian organizations, 165 Indian Claims Commission, 196 Indian Health Service, 203 Indian Rights Association, 218 International Indian Treaty Council, 300 Keetoowah Society, 316 National Congress of American Indians, 375 National Council of American Indians, 376 National Indian Association, 378 National Indian Education Association, 379 National Indian Youth Council, 380 Native American Rights Fund, 385 Prophetstown, 460 Society of American Indians, 516 Women of All Red Nations, 593 Pre-Columbian History Bering Strait migrations, 50 Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Prehistory: California, 428 Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Prehistory: Plateau, 444 Prehistory: Southeast, 447
Prehistory: Southwest, 449 Prehistory: Subarctic, 454 Protest Movements Alcatraz Island occupation, 16 American Indian Movement, 25 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty, 121 Fish-ins, 138 Longest Walk, 345 Menominee Restoration Act, 363 Oka crisis, 399 Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings, 414 Prophetstown, 460 Trail of Broken Treaties, 540 Wounded Knee occupation, 603 Religion and Missionary Activities Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, 5 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 29 Boarding and residential schools, 64 California missions, 76 Carlisle Indian School, 80 Cherokee legal cases, 83 Cherokee Phoenix, 87 Code of Handsome Lake, 101 Employment Division, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith, 124 Friends of the Indian organizations, 165 Indian Rights Association, 218 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 246 Indian-white relations: Russian colonial, 257 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350 National Indian Education Association, 379 Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council, 382 Prophetstown, 460
776 / Categorized Index Reservations and Relocation Allotment system, 18 Bannock War, 43 Bozeman Trail War, 69 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 73 Burke Act, 75 Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty, 115 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty, 121 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 151 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 200 Indian Removal Act, 207 Indian trust fund lawsuits, 225 Irish Potato Famine, 302 Kickapoo uprisings, 324 Long Walk, 340 Maine Indian Claims Act, 351 Major Crimes Act, 352 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Menominee Restoration Act, 363 Minnesota Uprising, 370 Modoc War, 372 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Nez Perce War, 391 Oka crisis, 399 Trail of Tears, 544 Winters v. United States, 591 Terminology American Indian, 21 Amerind, 33 Federally recognized tribes, 136 Indian, 177 Indian preference, 206 Native American, 381 Tribe, 561 Treaties Articles of Agreement, 38 Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty, 115 Fort Atkinson Treaty, 140 Fort Greenville Treaty, 141 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 145 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, 147 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 151 Fort Wayne Treaty, 155
Gadsden Purchase, 169 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 174 Horseshoe Bend Treaty, 176 Indian Appropriation Act, 184 Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830, 272 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870, 278 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933, 285 International Indian Treaty Council, 300 Jay’s Treaty, 313 Kickapoo Resistance, 323 Maine Indian Claims Act, 351 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Meech Lake Accord, 362 Nunavut Territory, 398 Treaties and agreements in Canada, 549 Treaties and agreements in the United States, 555 United States v. Washington, 570 Walla Walla Council, 578 Twentieth Century History Aboriginal Action Plan, 1 Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, 5 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 6 Alcatraz Island occupation, 16 All-Pueblo Council, 17 Allotment system, 18 American Indian Defense Association, 22 American Indian Higher Education Consortium, 24 American Indian Movement, 25 American Indian Policy Review Commission, 27 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 29 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 73 Burke Act, 75 Carlisle Indian School, 80 Code talkers, 105
Categorized Index / 777 Colliflower v. Garland, 109 Council of Energy Resource Tribes, 110 Declaration of First Nations, 116 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 117 Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 119 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty, 121 Duro v. Reina, 122 Employment Division, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith, 124 Epidemics and diseases, 125 Federally recognized tribes, 136 Fifteen Principles, 137 Fish-ins, 138 Friends of the Indian organizations, 165 Indian Act of 1951, 181 Indian Act of 1989, 183 Indian Child Welfare Act, 188 Indian Citizenship Act, 189 Indian Civil Rights Act, 193 Indian Claims Commission, 196 Indian Education Acts, 198 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 200 Indian Health Service, 203 Indian New Deal, 204 Indian preference, 206 Indian Reorganization Act, 213 Indian Rights Association, 218 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 219 Indian trust fund lawsuits, 225 Indian-white relations: Canadian, 226 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933, 285 Indian-white relations: U.S., 19342002, 292 International Indian Treaty Council, 300 Irish Potato Famine, 302 Keeler Commission, 315 Kennedy Report, 317 Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 336 Longest Walk, 345
Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350 Maine Indian Claims Act, 351 Meech Lake Accord, 362 Menominee Restoration Act, 363 Meriam Report, 364 National Congress of American Indians, 375 National Council of American Indians, 376 National Indian Education Association, 379 National Indian Youth Council, 380 Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council, 382 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 383 Native American Rights Fund, 385 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Navajo Rehabilitation Act, 388 Nisga’a Agreement in Principle, 395 Nunavut Territory, 398 Oka crisis, 399 Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, 401 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 402 Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings, 414 Public Law 280, 464 Reservation system of the United States, 478 Reserve system of Canada, 484 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 494 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 504 Society of American Indians, 516 Sports mascot controversies, 518 Termination Resolution, 528 Trail of Broken Treaties, 540 Treaties and agreements in Canada, 549 Treaties and agreements in the United States, 555 Tribal courts, 560 United States v. Washington, 570 White Paper of Canada, 587 Wild west shows, 588 Winters v. United States, 591
778 / Categorized Index Women of All Red Nations, 593 Wounded Knee occupation, 603 Wars and Battles Acoma, Battle of, 2 Adobe Walls, Battles of, 4 Apache Wars, 34 Bacon’s Rebellion, 40 Bannock War, 43 Bear River Campaign, 45 Beaver Wars, 46 Black Hawk War, 60 Bozeman Trail War, 69 Cayuse War, 82 Cherokee War, 94 Civil War, 98 Creek War, 110 Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 132 Fort Mims, Battle of, 149 Fox Wars, 156 French and Indian War, 160 Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830, 272 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870, 278 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933, 285 Kickapoo Resistance, 323 Kickapoo uprisings, 324 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 330 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Metacom’s War, 366 Minnesota Uprising, 370 Modoc War, 372 Natchez Revolt, 374
Navajo War, 390 Nez Perce War, 391 Pavonia Massacre, 403 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Peach Wars, 408 Pequot War, 409 Pima uprisings, 413 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Powhatan Wars, 425 Pueblo Revolt, 465 Red River Raids, 469 Red River War, 473 Riel Rebellions, 488 Rosebud Creek, Battle of, 492 Sand Creek Massacre, 500 Saybrook, Battle of, 504 Seminole Wars, 506 Sioux War, 511 Snake War, 515 Taos Rebellion, 521 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Tuscarora War, 566 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Washita River Massacre, 579 West Indian uprisings, 583 Winnebago Uprising, 590 Wolf Mountains, Battle of, 592 World wars, 593 Wounded Knee Massacre, 598 Yakima War, 607 Yamasee War, 608 Zuñi Rebellion, 609
779
Geographical Index Alabama. See also South and Southeast Creek War, 110 Fort Mims, Battle of, 149 Horseshoe Bend Treaty, 176 Indian Removal Act, 207 Alaska. See also Arctic; Northwest Territories; Subarctic Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, 5 Bering Strait migrations, 50 Indian-white relations: Russian colonial, 257 Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Arctic. See also Alaska; Greenland; Northwest Territories; Subarctic Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Arizona. See also Southwest Duro v. Reina, 122 Gadsden Purchase, 169 Long Walk, 340 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Navajo Rehabilitation Act, 388 Pima uprisings, 413 Arkansas. See also South and Southeast Civil War, 97 British Columbia. See also Canada Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 117 Prehistory: Plateau, 444
California. See also Great Basin; Pacific Northwest; West Alcatraz Island occupation, 15 California missions, 76 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350 Modoc War, 372 Prehistory: California, 428 Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 United States v. Kagama, 570 Canada. See also specific provinces Aboriginal Action Plan, 1 American Indian (term), 21 American Indian Higher Education Consortium, 23 Amerind (term), 33 Beaver Wars, 46 Boarding and residential schools, 64 Declaration of First Nations, 116 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 117 Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 119 Epidemics and diseases, 125 Fifteen Principles, 137 fur trade, 166 Indian (term), 177 Indian Act of 1876, 178 Indian Act of 1951, 181 Indian Act of 1989, 182 Indian-white relations: Canadian, 226 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 International Indian Treaty Council, 300 Jay’s Treaty, 313
780 / Geographical Index Meech Lake Accord, 362 Native American (term), 381 Nisga’a Agreement in Principle, 395 Nunavut Territory, 398 Oka crisis, 399 Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Prehistory: Plateau, 444 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Proclamation of 1763, 455 Red River Raids, 469 Reserve system of Canada, 484 Riel Rebellions, 488 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 494 Sports mascot controversies, 518 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Treaties and agreements in Canada, 549 Tribe (term), 561 White Paper of Canada, 586 World wars, 593 Colorado. See also Great Plains; Southwest Sand Creek Massacre, 500 Connecticut. See also Northeast Pequot War, 409 Saybrook, Battle of, 504 Dakotas. See also Great Plains Bozeman Trail War, 69 Ex parte Crow Dog, 130s Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings, 414 Wounded Knee Massacre, 598 Wounded Knee occupation, 602 Eastern Seaboard. See also Connecticut; Maine; New Jersey; Northeast; Pennsylvania; Virginia Indian-white relations: English colonial, 237 Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial, 268 Metacom’s War, 365
Pavonia Massacre, 403 Powhatan Wars, 424 Florida. See also South and Southeast Seminole Wars, 506 Yamasee War, 608 Georgia. See also South and Southeast Cherokee legal cases, 83 Cherokee Phoenix, 87 Cherokee Tobacco case, 92 Indian Removal Act, 207 Yamasee War, 608 Great Basin. See also Arizona; California; Idaho; Nevada; Oregon; Utah; Wyoming Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Great Plains. See also Colorado; Dakotas; Kansas; Minnesota; Missouri; Montana; New Mexico; Oklahoma; Texas; West; Wyoming Bison slaughter, 55 Bozeman Trail War, 69 Civil War, 97 Colliflower v. Garland, 109 Elk v. Wilkins, 123 Ex parte Crow Dog, 130 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 329 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 336 Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings, 414 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Red River War, 473 Rosebud Creek, Battle of, 492 Sand Creek Massacre, 500 Standing Bear v. Crook, 520 Washita River Massacre, 579 Wild west shows, 588 Wolf Mountains, Battle of, 592 Wounded Knee Massacre, 598 Wounded Knee occupation, 602 Greenland. See also Arctic; Subarctic Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453
Geographical Index / 781 Idaho. See also Great Basin; Plateau Bannock War, 43 Bear River Campaign, 45 Nez Perce War, 391 Prehistory: Plateau, 444 Snake War, 515 Illinois. See also Midwest; Northeast Black Hawk War, 60 Kickapoo Resistance, 323 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Indiana. See also Midwest; Northeast Fort Wayne Treaty, 155 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Kansas. See also Great Plains Fort Atkinson Treaty, 140 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Red River War, 473 Maine. See also Eastern seaboard; Northeast Main Indian Claims Act, 351 Manitoba. See also Canada; Great Plains; Subarctic Red River Raids, 469 Riel Rebellions, 488 Michigan. See also Midwest; Northeast Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Fox Wars, 156 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Midwest. See also Northeast; specific states Black Hawk War, 60 Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 131 Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Fort Wayne Treaty, 155 Fox Wars, 156 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245
Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Kickapoo Resistance, 323 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Lord Dunmore’s War, 346 Minnesota Uprising, 370 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prophetstown, 460 Sioux War, 511 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Winnebago Uprising, 590 Minnesota. See also Great Plains; Midwest Minnesota Uprising, 370 National Indian Education Association, 379 Sioux War, 511 Mississippi. See also South and Southeast Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty, 115 Indian Removal Act, 207 Natchez Revolt, 374 Missouri. See also Great Plains Civil War, 97 Montana. See also Great Plains; Plateau Colliflower v. Garland, 109 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 329 Nez Perce War, 391 Rosebud Creek, Battle of, 492 Winters v. United States, 591 Wolf Mountains, Battle of, 592 Nebraska. See also Great Plains Elk v. Wilkins, 123 Standing Bear v. Crook, 520 Nevada. See also Great Basin Prehistory: Great Basin, 430
782 / Geographical Index New Jersey. See also Eastern seaboard; Northeast Pavonia Massacre, 403 New Mexico. See also Southwest Acoma, Battle of, 2 All-Pueblo Council, 17 Gadsden Purchase, 169 Long Walk, 340 Navajo Rehabilitation Act, 388 Navajo War, 390 Pueblo Revolt, 465 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 503 Taos Rebellion, 521 Zuñi Rebellion, 609 New York. See also Eastern seaboard; Northeast Albany Congress, 11 Code of Handsome Lake, 101 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty, 121 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 151 Fur trade, 166 Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial, 234 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Manhattan Island purchase, 353 Peach Wars, 408 North America (colonial). See also Canada; United States; specific states; provinces; regions Articles of Agreement, 38 French and Indian War, 160 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Manhattan Island purchase, 353 Metacom’s War, 365 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Proclamation of 1763, 455 North Carolina Tuscarora War, 566
Northeast. See also specific states and provinces Beaver Wars, 46 Fur trade, 166 Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Manhattan Island purchase, 353 Metacom’s War, 365 Peach Wars, 408 Pequot War, 409 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Saybrook, Battle of, 504 Walking Purchase, 574 Northwest Territories. See also Arctic; Nunavut Territory; Subarctic Nunavut Territory, 398 Nunavut Territory. See also Arctic; Northwest Territories; Subarctic Nunavut Territory, 398 Ohio. See also Midwest; Northeast Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 131 Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Lord Dunmore’s War, 346 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Oklahoma. See also Great Plains Civil War, 97 Irish Potato Famine, 302 Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, 401 Red River War, 473 Washita River Massacre, 579 Ontario. See also Canada; Northeast Beaver Wars, 46 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty, 121 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Oregon. See also Pacific Great Basin; Northwest; Plateau Bannock War, 43
Geographical Index / 783
Pacific Northwest. See also Plateau Bannock War, 43 Cayuse War, 82 Fish-ins, 138 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Modoc War, 372 Nisga’a Agreement in Principle, 395 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 402 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 United States v. Washington, 570 Walla Walla Council, 577 Yakima War, 607
South and Southeast. See also specific states Adobe Walls, Battles of, 4 Cherokee legal cases, 83 Cherokee Phoenix, 87 Cherokee Tobacco case, 92 Cherokee War, 94 Civil War, 97 Creek War, 110 Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty, 115 Fort Mims, Battle of, 149 Horseshoe Bend Treaty, 176 Indian Removal Act, 207 Indian slave trade, 220 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Kickapoo uprisings, 324 Natchez Revolt, 374 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Seminole Wars, 506 Trail of Tears, 544 Tuscarora War, 566 Yamasee War, 608
Pennsylvania. See also Eastern seaboard; Northeast Carlisle Indian School, 80 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Walking Purchase, 574
South Carolina. See also Eastern seaboard; South and Southeast Cherokee War, 94 Indian slave trade, 220 Yamasee War, 608
Plateau. See also Great Basin; Idaho; Montana; Oregon Nez Perce War, 391 Prehistory: Plateau, 444 Snake War, 515
Southwest. See also Arizona; New Mexico; Texas Acoma, Battle of, 2 All-Pueblo Council, 17 Apache Wars, 34 Duro v. Reina, 122 Gadsden Purchase, 169 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 174 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Kickapoo uprisings, 324 Long Walk, 340 Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council, 382 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Navajo Rehabilitation Act, 388 Navajo War, 390
Employment Division, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith, 124 Fish-ins, 138 Modoc War, 372 Nez Perce War, 391 Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Prehistory: Plateau, 444 Snake War, 515
Quebec. See also Canada; Northeast Beaver Wars, 47 Fifteen Principles, 137 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Meech Lake Accord, 362 Oka crisis, 399 Saskatchewan. See also Canada; Great Plains; Subarctic Riel Rebellions, 488
784 / Geographical Index Pima uprisings, 413 Prehistory: Southwest, 449 Pueblo Revolt, 465 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 503 Taos Rebellion, 521 Zuñi Rebellion, 609 Subarctic. See also Arctic; Greenland; Northwest Territories Indian-white relations: Russian colonial, 257 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Tennessee. See also South and Southeast Indian Removal Act, 207 Texas. See also South and Southeast; Southwest Adobe Walls, Battles of, 4 Kickapoo uprisings, 324 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Red River War, 473 United States. See also specific states and regions Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 6 Allotment system, 18 American Indian (term), 21 American Indian Defense Association, 22 American Indian Higher Education Consortium, 23 American Indian Movement, 25 American Indian Policy Review Commission, 27 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 29 Amerind (term), 33 Boarding and residential schools, 64 Burke Act, 75 Cherokee legal cases, 83 Cherokee Tobacco case, 92 Code talkers, 105 Colliflower v. Garland, 109 Council of Energy Resource Tribes, 109 Duro v. Reina, 122
Elk v. Wilkins, 123 Employment Division, Dept. of Human Resources of the State of Oregon et al. v. Smith, 124 Epidemics and diseases, 125 Ex parte Crow Dog, 130 Federally recognized tribes, 136 Friends of the Indian organizations, 165 General Allotment Act, 169 Indian (term), 177 Indian Appropriation Act, 184 Indian Child Welfare Act, 188 Indian Citizenship Act, 189 Indian Civil Rights Act, 193 Indian Claims Commission, 196 Indian Education Acts, 198 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 200 Indian Health Service, 203 Indian New Deal, 204 Indian Offenses Act, 205 Indian preference, 206 Indian Removal Act, 207 Indian Reorganization Act, 213 Indian Rights Association, 218 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 219 Indian trust fund lawsuits, 224 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Indian-white relations: U.S., 17751830, 272 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18311870, 278 Indian-white relations: U.S., 18711933, 284 Indian-white relations: U.S., 19342002, 292 International Indian Treaty Council, 300 Jay’s Treaty, 313 Keeler Commission, 314 Keetoowah Society, 316 Kennedy Report, 317 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 336 Longest Walk, 345 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350
Geographical Index / 785 Major Crimes Act, 352 Meriam Report, 364 National Congress of American Indians, 375 National Council of American Indians, 376 National Indian Association, 378 National Indian Youth Council, 380 Native American (term), 381 Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council, 382 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 383 Native American Rights Fund, 385 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 402 Public Law 280, 464 Reservation system of the United States, 478 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 503 Society of American Indians, 516 Sports mascot controversies, 518 Standing Bear v. Crook, 520 Termination Resolution, 528 Trade and Intercourse Acts, 538 Trail of Broken Treaties, 540 Treaties and agreements in the United States, 555 Tribal courts, 560 Tribe (term), 561 United States v. Kagama, 570 United States v. Washington, 570 Wild west shows, 588 Women of All Red Nations, 593 World wars, 593
Washington State. See also Pacific Northwest; Plateau Cayuse War, 82 Fish-ins, 138 Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 402 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 United States v. Washington, 570 Walla Walla Council, 577 Yakima War, 607
Utah. See also Great Basin Bear River Campaign, 45 Prehistory: Great Basin, 430
Wisconsin. See also Midwest Black Hawk War, 60 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Menominee Restoration Act, 363 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Winnebago Uprising, 590
Virginia. See also Eastern seaboard; Northeast Bacon’s Rebellion, 40 Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424
West. See also Great Basin; Great Plains; Plateau; Southwest; specific states California missions, 76 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 329 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350 Prehistory: California, 428 United States v. Kagama, 570 West Indies. See also South and Southeast American Indian (term), 21 Amerind (term), 33 Epidemics and diseases, 125 Indian (term), 177 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Tribe (term), 561 West Indian uprisings, 583
Wyoming. See also Great Basin; Great Plains Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 145 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, 147
786
Personages Index Aberle, Sophie, 296 Adams, Hank, 648 Agüeybana, 585, 648 Alexander. See Wamsutta Allen, William, 575 Alokut, 648 Amariton, François, 158 American Horse, 589 Amherst, Jeffery, 240 Amherst, Jeffrey, 95, 417, 456 Anacaona, 648 Anderson, Mad Bear, 543 Aquash, Anna Mae, 416 Armijo, Manuel, 522 Armistead, Walker K., 509 Arpeika, 508, 648 Arthur, Chester A., 387 Arvide, Martín de, 613 Atkins, J. D. C., 289 Atkinson, Henry, 63 Atotarho, 305, 648 Attakullakulla, 94, 648 Bacon, Nathaniel, Jr., 41 Banks, Dennis, 25, 604, 648 Barboncito, 341, 648 Barlow, Arthur, 240 Barnwell, John, 567 Barsh, Russel, 197 Bascom, George, 34 Baude, Louis de, 248 Bean, Lou, 648 Bear Hunter, 46 Beasley, Daniel, 150 Beauharnais, Charles de, 158 Benally, John, 107 Benavides, Alonso de, 264 Bennett, Robert, 296 Bent, Charles, 522 Benteen, Frederick, 331
Bering, Vitus, 257 Berkeley, William, 41 Big Bear, 490, 551, 648 Big Foot, 599, 648 Big Warrior, 112, 648 Bissonnette, Gladys, 648 Black Coyote, 600 Black Dog, 418 Black Elk, Wallace, 648 Black Hawk, 61 Black Kettle, 359-360, 501, 579, 648 Blackmun, Harry, 339 Blatchford, Herbert, 380 Blue Jacket, 133, 333, 572, 648 Blunt, King Tom, 568, 648 Boldt, George, 139, 571 Bonnichsen, Robson, 320 Bonnin, Gertrude, 376, 517 Boudinot, Elias, 87, 648 Boudinot, Elias Cornelius, 92 Bowlegs, Billy, 510, 649 Bozeman, John M., 69 Braddock, Edward, 162 Bradstreet, John, 418 Brant, Joseph, 102, 310, 649 Brant, Molly, 244 Bruce, Louis, 541 Brunot, Felix R., 185 Buckongahelas, 333, 572 Buell, George P., 475 Buffalo Bill. See Cody, William F. Buffalo Horn, 286 Bull, William, 95 Burke, Charles Henry, 75 Bursum, Holm O., 17 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 297 Butler, Dino, 26, 140 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 610 Cabrillo, Juan Rodríguez, 77
Personages Index / 787 Calhoun, John C., 73, 548 Callières, Louis-Hector de, 157 Canby, Edward R. S., 372 Caonabo, 584, 649 Carleton, James H., 340 Carmichael, Stokely, 543 Carrington, Henry B., 70 Carson, Hampton L., 338 Carson, Kit, 4, 340, 391 Cartier, Jacques, 166, 246 Champlain, Samuel de, 47, 166, 246, 307 Charbonneau, Toussaint, 327 Chatters, James C., 319 Chekika, 509 Chicken, George, 39 Chisholm, Shirley, 543 Chivington, John M., 500 Chrétien, Jean, 180 Church, Benjamin, 368 Clark, William, 323, 325 Clearwater, Frank, 649 Coacoochee, 509, 548, 649 Cobell, Elouise, 225 Cochise (Chiricahua chief), 34, 649 Cody, William F. (Buffalo Bill), 57, 588, 599 Coffee, John, 547 Colbert, Levi, 649 Collier, John, 17, 22, 30, 74, 107, 204, 214, 292, 364, 377, 481, 529 Colliflower, Madeline, 109 Columbus, Christopher, 177, 583 Connolly, John, 348 Connor, Patrick Edward, 45, 70 Cook, George, 36 Coolidge, Calvin, 191 Coowescoow. See Ross, John Cornplanter, 649 Cornstalk, 349, 649 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 444, 610 Crazy Horse, 149, 330, 493, 592, 649 Cresap, Michael, 348 Croix, Francisco de, 77 Crook, George, 44, 492, 516, 592 Crow, John, 315 Crow Dog, 130, 289 Crow Dog, Leonard, 415, 649
Cumming, Alexander, 39, 94 Custer, George Armstrong, 287, 331, 492, 579 Dade, Francis, 508 Davidson, John W., 475 Davis, Jefferson, 98, 510 Dawes, Henry L., 172, 186, 190 Deganawida, 305, 649 De Lancey, James, 12 Delgadito, 341 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 26, 198 Demere, Paul, 96 Denonville, marquis de, 248 Dinwiddie, Robert, 95 Dodge, Henry, 63 Don Luis, 237 Doolittle, James, 190 Drew, John, 98, 649 Drouillard, George, 326 Dull Knife, 286 Dumont, Gabriel, 490 Dundy, Elmer S., 288, 520 Dunmore, Lord, 346 Durham, Jimmie, 300 Duro, Albert, 122 Ecuyer, Simon, 418 Edwards, “Junior”, 122 Egan, Chief, 44, 286 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 295, 465 Elder, John, 405 Elk, John, 123, 190, 649 El Ollita, Francisco, 467 Emmons, Glenn, 296 Endecott, John, 409 Erasmus, George, 362 Eric the Red, 255 Eriksson, Leif. See Leif Eiriksson Errett, Russell, 172 Ervin, Sam, 194 Estevanico, 610 Evans, John, 500 Fall, Albert B., 17 Fetterman, William, 71 Fillmore, Millard, 146 Fitzpatrick, Thomas, 140, 145
788 / Personages Index Fools Crow, Frank, 543, 604, 649 Forbes, John, 252 Forsyth, James W., 600 Francis, Josiah, 112 Franklin, Benjamin, 12, 239, 406 Gadsden, James, 169, 507 Gage, Thomas, 347, 458 Gaines, Edmund P., 62, 507 Galbraith, Thomas, 370 Gall, 332 Gallup, John, 409 Gálvez, José de, 77, 266 Ganeodiyo. See Handsome Lake Garcia, Alonso, 467 George II (king of England), 11 George III (king of England), 310, 549 George, Frank, 296 Geronimo, 36, 287, 589, 649 Gibbon, John, 393, 492 Gibson, Alexander, 133 Gibson, James, 406 Gilmer, George, 84 Gladwin, Henry, 418 Goci. See Cochise Golikov, Ivan, 258 Gomez, Stephan, 166 Grant, James, 96 Grant, Ulysses S., 185, 288, 478 Gravier, Jacques, 250 Gray Beard, 476, 649 Gray Eagle, 83 Greathouse, Daniel, 347 Guarionex, 584, 649 Guarocuya, 649 Hall, Louis, 103, 650 Haller, Granville O., 607 Hamilton, Andrew, 575 Hancock, King Tom, 568, 650 Handsome Lake, 102, 305, 650 Harmar, Josiah, 132, 143, 333, 572 Harper, Elijah, 233, 363 Harris, LaDonna, 543 Harrison, William Henry, 155, 274, 463, 525, 532, 537 Hasanoanda. See Parker, Ely S.
Hawkins, Benjamin, 111 Head, Bull, 599 Henderson, John B., 360 Hendrick, 11, 650 Hennepin, Louis, 250 Herjolfsson, Bjarni, 255 Hernandez, Joseph, 508 Hiawatha, 305, 650 Hickel, Walter, 8 Hicks, Elijah, 90 Hinachuba, Patricio de, 263 Hinmaton Yalatkit. See Joseph the Younger His Nose. See Cochise Holatamico. See Bowlegs, Billy Holcomb, Thomas, 105 Hoover, Herbert, 365 Howard, Oliver O., 44, 286, 393 Hudson, Henry, 353 Hull, William, 525 Humphreys, Gilbert, 239 Hutchinson, Thomas, 13 Hyde, Edward, 567 Ickes, Harold, 216 Iopassus. See Japasus Iroquet, 650 Jack, Captain, 286, 372 Jackson, Andrew, 84, 113, 115, 176, 274, 276, 506, 548 Japasus, 650 Jay, John, 144, 314 Jefferson, Thomas, 325, 397, 547 Jesup, Thomas S., 508 Jogues, Father, 48 Johnson, Andrew, 343 Johnson, John, 311 Johnson, Richard Mentor, 534 Johnson, William, 243-244, 310, 346, 456 Johnston, Albert Sydney, 45 Johnston, Philip, 106, 108 Jolliet, Louis, 250 Jones, Sam. See Arpeika Joseph the Elder, 392, 650 Joseph the Younger, 286, 589, 650 Jumper. See Ote-emathla
Personages Index / 789 Kagama, Pactah Billy, 570 Kamiakin, 607 Kansekoe, 159 Karoniaktajeh. See Hall, Louis Kayenhtwanken. See Cornplanter Kearny, Stephen Watts, 521 Keeler, Wayne, 315 Kekataugh, 650 Kennedy, Archibald, 239 Kennedy, Edward, 317 Kennedy, John F., 315 Kennedy, Robert F., 317 Kennekuk, 323 Keshena, Gordon, 294 Kiala, 159, 650 Kicking Bear, 598 Kieft, Willem, 356, 408 Killsright, Joseph Stuntz, 140 Kintpuash, 372 Kiotsaeton, 48, 650 Kirkland, Samuel, 243, 311 Knox, Henry, 274 Lagasse, Jean, 487 Lalawethika. See Tenskwatawa Lamont, Buddy, 650 La Mothe, Antoine de, 157 Lane, Joseph, 83 Langlade, Charles, 252 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 262, 585 Lausen, Fermín de, 78 Lavelle, Jeannette, 180, 182, 650 LeFlore, Greenwood, 115, 546 Leif Eriksson, 255 Le Jau, Francis, 221 Le Seur, Jean-Paul, 374 Letrado, Francisco, 612 Leupp, Francis E., 290 Lewis, Meriwether, 325 Lincoln, Abraham, 359, 514 Little Crow, 370, 512, 650 Little Six, 650. See also Shakopee Little Turtle, 132, 274, 333-335, 419, 462, 572, 650 Little Wolf, 286 Loesch, Harrison, 541 Logan, James (adviser to Thomas Penn), 575
Logan, John (Tachnechdorus, the Great Mingo), 347, 650 Logan, John J. (congressman from Illinois), 185 Lone Wolf, 5, 337, 474, 650 Looking Glass, 286, 393, 650 Lovelace, Sandra, 182 Lyttelton, William Henry, 95 McCloud, Janet, 140 MacComb, Alexander, 509 McDonald, Angus, 348 Macdonald, John A., 178, 488 MacDonald, Peter, 110 Macdonell, Miles, 470 McGillivray, Alexander, 111, 244 McKenney, Thomas L., 275 McKenzie, Fayette A., 516 Mackenzie, R. S., 475 McKinley, William, 338 McLaughlin, James, 598 McQueen, Peter, 112, 651 Madigan, La Verne, 296 Magoffin, James Wiley, 521 Main Poc, 461, 651 Makhpia-sha. See Red Cloud Malacate, Antonio, 467 Mangas Coloradus, 651 Mankato, 513, 651 Manuelito (Navajo leader), 107, 343, 390, 651 Marquette, Jacques, 250 Marshall, John, 83, 184, 547 Martinez, Antonio Jose, 523 Mason, John, 410 Massasoit, 367, 651 Matoaka. See Pocahontas May, Cornelius, 354 Meacham, Albert, 172 Means, Bill, 301 Means, Russell, 25, 300, 345, 604, 651 Mechkilikishi, 575 Mecina, Chief, 323 Meeker, Nathan, 286 Mekaga, 159, 651 Menewa, 651 Menneville, Ange Duquesne de, 252 Meriam, Lewis, 364, 481
790 / Personages Index Metacom, 367, 651 Meyer, Dillon S., 482 Miantonomo, 410, 651 Micanopy, 651 Micco, Eneah, 546 Michikinikwa. See Little Turtle Miles, Nelson A., 37, 394, 475, 592, 599 Mills, Anson, 493 Mills, Sid, 140 Minuit, Peter, 236, 269, 355 Mistahimaskwa. See Big Bear Mitchell, D. D., 145 Mitchell, George, 25 Montcalm, marquis de, 162 Montgomery, Archibald, 95 Montoya, Pablo, 523 Monts, Sieur de (Pierre de Guast), 166 Moore, James, 568 Morgan, Thomas J., 289 Moves Camp, Ellen, 651 Mulroney, Brian, 362 Myer, Dillon, 529 Myrick, Andrew, 370, 511 Nash, Philleo, 315 Necotowance, 426 Niza, Marcos de, 610 North, Robert, 500 Nutimus, 575, 651 Oacpicagigua, Luis, 414 O’Bail, John. See Cornplanter Obwandiag. See Pontiac Oconostota, 95, 651 Officer, James, 315 Okimaoussen, 158 Oldham, John, 409, 505 Oñate, Juan de, 2, 264, 465 Opechancanough, 423, 425, 651 Opitchapam, 651 Opossunoquonuske, 423 Osceola, 508, 548, 651 Ote-emathla, 508, 651 Otermín, Antonio de, 467 Ouchala, 158 Ousamequin. See Massasoit Ovando, Nicolás de, 584 Oytes, 286
Panacoast, Henry, 218 Parker, Arthur C., 517 Parker, Ely S., 185, 651 Parker, Quanah, 5, 286, 474, 652 Paul, William, 6 Paxton Boys, 404 Peacemaker. See Deganawida Peltier, Leonard, 26, 140, 414-415, 652 Pemberton, Israel, 252 Penn, John, 404 Penn, Thomas, 574 Penn, William, 574 Perrot, Nicholas, 248 Perry, David, 393 Pfeiffer, Albert, 341 Philip, King. See Metacom Pike, Albert, 98 Pike, Zebulon, 134 Pipe, Captain, 349 Pitt, William, 162 Pocahontas, 244, 423, 425, 652 Polk, James K., 174 Pollock, Thomas, 567 Pontgravé, Francis, 166 Pontiac, 163, 273, 417, 456, 652 Popé, 265, 466, 652 Pope, John, 513 Portolá, Gaspar de, 77 Poundmaker, 490, 652 Powell, Billy. See Osceola Powhatan, 237, 420, 425, 652 Pratt, Richard Henry, 80, 476 Price, Sterling, 522 Price, William, 134, 475 Procter, Henry, 532 Prophet. See Tenskwatawa Pushmataha, 652 Pyke, Mathew, 122 Rain in the Face, 332, 589 Rains, Gabriel, 608 Ralegh, Walter, 239 Ramsey, Alexander, 513 Red Bird, 591 Red Cloud, 70, 148, 589, 652 Red Cloud, Charlie, 543 Red Eagle, 150
Personages Index / 791 Red Jacket, 652 Red Sleeves. See Mangas Coloradus Reifel, Benjamin, 194, 652 Reno, Marcus, 331 Rhoads, Charles J., 365 Ridge, John, 652 Ridge, Major, 547, 652 Riel, Louis, Jr., 231, 488, 652 Rising, Johan, 271 Roberts, Hollis E., 303 Robertson, Colin, 471 Roberval, Sieur de, 246 Robideau, Bob, 26 Robinson, Mary, 303 Robinson, William B., 485, 550 Rolfe, John, 244, 423, 425 Roman Nose, 652 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 107, 214, 481 Ross, John, 90, 99, 282, 547, 652 Ross, William P., 91 Rutherford, Griffith, 272 Ryan, W. Carson, Jr., 364 Sacagawea, 327, 652 Sagard, Gabriel, 249 Sagoyewatha. See Red Jacket St. Clair, Arthur, 132, 142, 153, 314, 334, 573 Sassacus, 409, 505, 652 Sassamon, John, 367 Satank, 360, 652 Satanta, 360, 652. See also White Bear Scalia, Antonin, 125 Schuyler, Philip, 312 Scott, Thomas, 489 Scott, Winfield, 508 Selkirk, earl of (Thomas Douglas), 469, 550 Sells, Cato, 480 Semple, Robert, 471 Sequin, 505 Sequoyah, 88, 653 Serra, Junípero, 77, 266 Shakopee, 512. See also Little Six Shelburne, earl of (William Petty), 416, 456 Shelekhov, Grigory, 258 Sheridan, Philip, 58, 474, 581
Sherman, William T., 58, 343, 474, 581 Shirley, William, 12 Sibley, Henry, 371, 513 Sitting Bear. See Satank Sitting Bull, 149, 287, 330, 493, 589, 598, 653 Smith, Matthew, 406 Snyder, Homer P., 191 Soto, Hernando de, 94, 449 Spauldings, H. H., 280 Spock, Benjamin, 543 Spotted Eagle Black Elk, Grace, 653 Spotted Tail, 130 Springer, William McKendree, 337 Squanto, 237 Standing Bear, 520 Stevens, Isaac, 392, 578, 607 Stewart, William, 186 Stone, John, 409, 505 Stuyvesant, Peter, 356, 408 Sullivan, John, 102, 273 Swayne, Noah, 92 Tachnechdorus, the Great Mingo. See Logan, John Tandihetsi, 48, 653 Tashunca-uitko. See Crazy Horse Taoyateduta. See Little Crow Tatanka Iyotake. See Sitting Bull Taylor, Nathaniel, 147, 360 Taylor, Zachary, 509 Tecumseh, 112, 156, 274, 333, 419, 462, 526, 653 Teller, Henry M., 172, 288 Ten Bears, 359-360, 653 Tenskwatawa, 101, 112, 156, 274, 526, 536, 653 Terry, Alfred, 492 Thayendanegea. See Brant, Joseph Thom, Mel, 381 Thompson, Wiley, 507 Tomasito, 523, 653 Tracy, marquis de, 249 Trudeau, Pierre, 587 Truman, Harry S., 389 Tupatú, Luis, 467, 653
792 / Personages Index Udall, Stewart, 8, 296, 315 Uncas, 409, 653 Underhill, John, 410 Van Devanter, William, 338 Van Rensselaer, Kiliaen, 236 Vaudreuil, marquis de, 157 Velázquez, Diego, 585 Veniaminov, Ivan, 259 Verhulst, Willem, 355 Victorio, 287 Vigil, Donaciano, 522 Vizcaíno, Sebastián, 77 Vogel, Clayton, 105 Wahunsonacock. See Powhatan Wakens, Arthur V., 529 Wamsutta, 367, 653 Ware, Ralph, 653 Warrior, Clyde, 381 Washington, George, 161, 273, 311, 573 Watie, Stand, 92, 98, 653 Watkins, Arthur, 293 Wayne, “Mad” Anthony, 132, 143, 155, 274, 333, 573 Weatherford, William, 112, 150, 653 Webster, Daniel, 84 Welsh, Herbert, 218 Weyapiersenwah. See Blue Jacket Wheeler, John F., 90 White, Edward, 338 White Bear, 360. See also Satanta White Bird, 393
White Cat, 159 White Eyes, George, 349 Whitman, Marcus, 82, 280 Whitman, Narcissa, 280 Whitside, Samuel, 600 Wiggins, Eleazer “Old Rabbit”, 39 Wildcat. See Coacoochee Williams, Roger, 239, 410, 506 Wilson, Eugene M., 186 Wilson, Jack. See Wovoka Wilson, Richard, 415, 603, 653 Windom, William, 185 Winthrop, John, Jr., 505 Winthrop, John, Sr., 239, 505 Wirt, William, 84 Wolfe, James, 162 Worcester, Samuel, 88 Work, Hubert, 292, 364 Worth, William J., 509 Wovoka, 101, 288, 598, 653 Wright, George, 608 Wyeapiersenwah. See Blue Jacket Wynkoop, Edward, 582 Yates, Richard, 186 Yellow Bird, 600 York (member of Lewis and Clark expedition), 326 Zaldivar, Juan de, 2 Zaldivar, Vicente de, 2 Zimmerman, William, 315, 529 Zitkala-Sa. See Bonnin, Gertrude
793
Tribes Index Abenaki Fifteen Principles, 137 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Accohannock Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Accomac Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Achumawi California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Acoma (Keres) Acoma, Battle of, 2 Adena Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Alabama Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Aleut People Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 6 Indian-white relations: Russian colonial, 257 Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Algonquian Peoples. See also Fox; Kickapoo; Lenni Lenape; Mascouten; Miami; Pequot; Powhatan Confederacy; Sac; Shawnee Beaver Wars, 47 Fifteen Principles, 137
French and Indian War, 160 Fur trade, 166 Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 Manhattan Island purchase, 353 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Alsea Fish-ins, 138 Anasazi Culture Prehistory: Southwest, 449 Apache Apache Wars, 34 Fort Atkinson Treaty, 140 Gadsden Purchase, 169 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Taos Rebellion, 521 Apalachee Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Appomattoc Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Arapaho Bozeman Trail War, 69 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 145 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 329 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Red River War, 473 Rosebud Creek, Battle of, 492
794 / Tribes Index Arawak West Indian uprisings, 583 Arikara Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 329 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Arrohattoc Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Asseteque Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial, 268 Assiniboine Prehistory: Plains, 439 Riel Rebellions, 488 Winters v. United States, 591 Atakapa Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Athapaskan Declaration of First Nations, 117 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Atsina Prehistory: Plains, 439 Atsugewi California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Bannock Bannock War, 43 Bear River Campaign, 45 Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Bella Bella Fish-ins, 138 Bella Coola Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Biloxi Prehistory: Southeast, 447
Blackfoot Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Caddo Prehistory: Plains, 439 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Cahuilla California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Calusa Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Carib West Indian uprisings, 583 Catawba Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Cayuga French and Indian War, 160 Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Cayuse, 280 Cayuse War, 82 Walla Walla Council, 578 Yakima War, 607 Chehalis Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Chemehuevi California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Cherokee Articles of Agreement, 38 Cherokee legal cases, 83 Cherokee Phoenix, 87 Cherokee Tobacco case, 92 Cherokee War, 94 Civil War, 97
Tribes Index / 795 Indian Removal Act, 207 Keetoowah Society, 316 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Trail of Tears, 544 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Yamasee War, 608 Chesapeake Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Cheyenne Adobe Walls, Battles of, 4 Bison slaughter, 55 Bozeman Trail War, 69 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 145 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 329 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Red River War, 473 Rosebud Creek, Battle of, 492 Sand Creek Massacre, 500 Washita River Massacre, 579 Wolf Mountains, Battle of, 592 Chickahominy Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Chickasaw Civil War, 97 Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 131 Indian Removal Act, 207 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Trail of Tears, 544 Chinook Fish-ins, 138 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Chippewa Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Fox Wars, 156 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416
Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Chiricahua Apache Apache Wars, 34 Chiskiack Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Chitimacha Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Choctaw Civil War, 97 Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty, 115 Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 131 Indian Removal Act, 207 Irish Potato Famine, 302 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Trail of Tears, 544 Yamasee War, 608 Chumash California missions, 76 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Prehistory: California, 428 Coeur d’Alene Prehistory: Plateau, 444 Colville Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Comanche Adobe Walls, Battles of, 4 Fort Atkinson Treaty, 140 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Red River War, 473 Taos Rebellion, 521 Coos Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435
796 / Tribes Index Copper Culture Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Costano California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Coushatta Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Cree Fifteen Principles, 137 Riel Rebellions, 488 Creek Civil War, 97 Creek War, 110 Fort Mims, Battle of, 149 Horseshoe Bend Treaty, 176 Indian Removal Act, 207 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Trail of Tears, 544 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Yamasee War, 608 Crow Bison slaughter, 55 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 145 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 329 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Cupeño California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428
Erie Beaver Wars, 49 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Eskimo People Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 6 Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Esophus Peach Wars, 408 Esselen California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Eyak Fish-ins, 138 Fernandeño California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Five Civilized Tribes. See Cherokee; Chickasaw; Creek; Choctaw; Seminole Five Nations. See Iroquois Confederacy Flathead. See also Salish Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Plateau, 444
Delaware. See Lenni Lenape
Fox Black Hawk War, 60 Fox Wars, 156 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Thames, Battle of the, 532
Diegueño California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428
Gabrielino California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428
Doeg Bacon’s Rebellion, 40
Gitksan Fish-ins, 138
Cuttatawomen Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424
Tribes Index / 797 Gosiute Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Gros Ventre Winters v. United States, 591 Hackensack Pavonia Massacre, 403 Haida Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, 5 Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Hasinai Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Haudenosaunee. See Iroquois Confederacy Hidatsa Prehistory: Plains, 439 Hitchiti Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Hoh United States v. Washington, 570 Hohokam Culture Prehistory: Southwest, 449 Hopewell Tradition Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Hopi People Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Navajo Rehabilitation Act, 388 Hupa California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435
Huron. See also Wyandot Beaver Wars, 46 Fifteen Principles, 137 Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Fox Wars, 156 French and Indian War, 160 Fur trade, 166 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Illinois Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Inugsuk Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 Inuit People Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 6 Fifteen Principles, 137 Indian Act of 1951, 181 Indian Act of 1989, 183 Indian-white relations: Russian colonial, 257 Nunavut Territory, 398 Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Iowa Prehistory: Plains, 439 Iroquois Confederacy. See also Cayuga; Mohawk; Oneida; Onondaga; Seneca; Tuscarora Albany Congress, 11 Beaver Wars, 46 Code of Handsome Lake, 101 Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 151 Fur trade, 166
798 / Tribes Index Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Walking Purchase, 574 Juaneño California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Kamia California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Kansa Prehistory: Plains, 439 Karok California missions, 76 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350 Prehistory: California, 428 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Kato California missions, 76 Kaw Prehistory: Plains, 439 Kawaiisu Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Kecoughtan Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Kickapoo Fox Wars, 156 Kickapoo Resistance, 323 Kickapoo uprisings, 324 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536
Kiowa Adobe Walls, Battles of, 4 Fort Atkinson Treaty, 140 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 357 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Red River War, 473 Klamath Fish-ins, 138 Modoc War, 372 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Klatsop Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Klikitat Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Kwakiutl Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Lakota Sioux. See also Oglala Sioux; Santee Sioux; Sioux Bison slaughter, 55 Ex parte Crow Dog, 130 Wounded Knee occupation, 603 Lenni Lenape Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Fort Wayne Treaty, 155 Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial, 234 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial, 268 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Peach Wars, 408 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536
Tribes Index / 799 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Walking Purchase, 574 Luiseño California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Lummi United States v. Washington, 570 Mahican Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial, 234 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Maidu California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Makah United States v. Washington, 570 Maliseet Maine Indian Claims Act, 351 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Mandan Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Mascouten Fox Wars, 156 Massachusett Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Mattapanient Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Mattole California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Menominee Fox Wars, 156 Menominee Restoration Act, 363 Prehistory: Northeast, 432
Metis Indian Act of 1951, 181 Indian Act of 1989, 183 Indian-white relations: Canadian, 228 Red River Raids, 469 Riel Rebellions, 488 Miami Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 131 Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Fort Wayne Treaty, 155 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Micmac Fifteen Principles, 137 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Mingo Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial, 268 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Minnataree Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Missouri Prehistory: Plains, 439 Miwok California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Mobile Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Modoc Modoc War, 372 Mogollon Culture Prehistory: Southwest, 449
800 / Tribes Index Mohawk Albany Congress, 11 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty, 121 Fifteen Principles, 137 French and Indian War, 160 Indian-white relations: Dutch colonial, 234 Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Oka crisis, 399 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Mono Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Montagnais Fifteen Principles, 137 Morattico Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Moraughtacund Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Muckleshoot United States v. Washington, 570 Muscogee. See Creek Nandtaughtacund Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Nansemond Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Nanticoke Indian-white relations: Swedish colonial, 268 Prehistory: Northeast, 432
Narragansett Metacom’s War, 365 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Naskapi Fifteen Principles, 137 Natchez Natchez Revolt, 374 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Navajo Code talkers, 105 Long Walk, 340 Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council, 382 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Navajo Rehabilitation Act, 388 Navajo War, 390 Pueblo Revolt, 465 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 503 Neutral Beaver Wars, 49 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Nez Perce Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Nez Perce War, 391 Prehistory: Plateau, 444 Walla Walla Council, 578 Nipmuck Metacom’s War, 365 Nisga’a Nisga’a Agreement in Principle, 395 Nootka Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Oglala Sioux. See also Lakota Sioux; Santee Sioux; Sioux Pine Ridge shootout and Peltier killings, 414
Tribes Index / 801 Wolf Mountains, Battle of, 592 Wounded Knee occupation, 603 Ojibwa Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Omaha Prehistory: Plains, 439 Onawmanient Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Oneida French and Indian War, 160 Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Onondaga Albany Congress, 11 French and Indian War, 160 Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Opiscopank Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Osage Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Oto Prehistory: Plains, 439 Ottawa Beaver Wars, 47 Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Little Turtle’s War, 333
Northwest Ordinance, 397 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Owasca Culture Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Paiute Bannock War, 43 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 387 Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Snake War, 515 Paleo-Indians Bering Strait migrations, 50 Prehistory: Arctic, 427 Prehistory: California, 428 Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Prehistory: Plateau, 444 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Prehistory: Southwest, 449 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Pamunkey Bacon’s Rebellion, 40 Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Paspahegh Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Passamaquoddy Maine Indian Claims Act, 351 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Patawomeck Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425
802 / Tribes Index Patwin California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Pawnee Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Plains, 439 Penobscot Maine Indian Claims Act, 351 Pensacola Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Pequot Pequot War, 409 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Saybrook, Battle of, 504 Petun Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Piankatank Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Pima-Maricopa Duro v. Reina, 122 Pima Pima uprisings, 413 Pissaseck Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Pocasset Metacom’s War, 365 Pokanoket. See Wampanoag
Potawatomi Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Fort Wayne Treaty, 155 Fox Wars, 156 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Powhatan Confederacy Powhatan Wars, 424 Pueblo peoples Acoma, Battle of, 2 All-Pueblo Council, 17 Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Pueblo Revolt, 465, 609 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 503 Quapaw Prehistory: Plains, 439 Quechan California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Queet United States v. Washington, 570 Quileute Fish-ins, 138 United States v. Washington, 570
Pomo California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428
Quinault Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 United States v. Washington, 570
Ponca Prehistory: Plains, 439 Standing Bear v. Crook, 520
Quiyoughcohannock Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425
Tribes Index / 803 Rappahannock Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Sac. See also Sauk Fox Wars, 156 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Sakonnet Metacom’s War, 365 Salinan California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Salish. See also Flathead Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Santee Sioux. See also Lakota Sioux; Oglala Sioux; Sioux Minnesota Uprising, 370 Sarsi Prehistory: Plains, 439 Sauk. See also Sac United States v. Washington, 570 Black Hawk War, 60 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Sekakawon Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Seminole Civil War, 97 Indian Removal Act, 207 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Seminole Wars, 506 Trail of Tears, 544 Seneca Code of Handsome Lake, 102 Fox Wars, 156 French and Indian War, 160 Iroquois Confederacy, 304
Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Serrano California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Shasta California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Shawnee Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 131 Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Indian-white relations: French colonial, 245 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Lord Dunmore’s War, 346 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Pontiac’s Resistance, 416 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Wabash, Battle of the, 572 Sheepeater Bannock War, 43 Shoshone Bear River Campaign, 45 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 145 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Sioux. See also Lakota Sioux; Oglala Sioux; Santee Sioux Bozeman Trail War, 69 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 145 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, 147 Fox Wars, 156 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Little Bighorn, Battle of the, 329 Prehistory: Plains, 439
804 / Tribes Index Rosebud Creek, Battle of, 492 Sioux War, 511 Wild west shows, 588 Wounded Knee Massacre, 598 Siuslaw Fish-ins, 138 Six Nations. See Iroquois Confederacy Skagit United States v. Washington, 570 Skokomish United States v. Washington, 570
Tenino Cayuse War, 82 Thule Indian-white relations: Norse, 254 Tillamook Fish-ins, 138 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Timucua Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Prehistory: Southeast, 447
Squaxin Island United States v. Washington, 570
Tlingit Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, 5 Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453
Stillaguamish United States v. Washington, 570
Tobaccos Beaver Wars, 49
Suiattle United States v. Washington, 570
Tohono O’odham Gadsden Purchase, 169
Suquamish Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 402
Tolowa California missions, 76 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350 Prehistory: California, 428
Spokane Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Plateau, 444
Susquehannock Bacon’s Rebellion, 40 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Taino West Indian uprisings, 583 Takelma Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Taos People Taos Rebellion, 521
Tonkawa Prehistory: Plains, 439 Tsimshian Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, 5 Fish-ins, 138 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Prehistory: Subarctic, 453 Tubatulabal California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428
Tribes Index / 805 Tuscarora French and Indian War, 160 Indian slave trade, 220 Iroquois Confederacy, 304 Iroquois Confederacy-U.S. Congress meeting, 309 Paxton Boys’ Massacres, 403 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Tuscarora War, 566 Tuskegee Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Umatilla Bannock War, 43 Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Walla Walla Council, 578 Yakima War, 607 Umpqua Fish-ins, 138 Ute Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Waco Prehistory: Plains, 439 Wailaki California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Walapai Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Walla Walla Walla Walla Council, 578 Yakima War, 607 Walpapi Snake War, 515 Wampanoag Metacom’s War, 365 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Wanapum Kennewick Man controversy, 318
Wappo California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Warraskoyack Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Washoe Prehistory: Great Basin, 430 Weanoc Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Wecquaesgeek Pavonia Massacre, 403 Werowocomoco Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Wiccocomico Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 425 Wichita Prehistory: Plains, 439 Winnebago Black Hawk War, 60 Fox Wars, 156 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Prehistory: Northeast, 432 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Winnebago Uprising, 590 Wintun California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Wiyot California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435
806 / Tribes Index Woodland tradition Prehistory: Northeast, 432
Yana California missions, 76
Wyandot. See also Huron Fort Greenville Treaty, 140 Little Turtle’s War, 333 Northwest Ordinance, 397 Prophetstown, 460 Tecumseh’s Rebellion, 525 Thames, Battle of the, 532 Tippecanoe, Battle of, 536 Wabash, Battle of the, 572
Yokuts California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428
Yahi California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Yahuskin Snake War, 515 Yakima Kennewick Man controversy, 318 Lewis and Clark expedition, 324 Prehistory: Plateau, 444 United States v. Washington, 570 Walla Walla Council, 578 Yakima War, 607 Yamasee Indian slave trade, 220 Prehistory: Southeast, 447 Yamasee War, 608
Youghtanund Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Powhatan Wars, 424 Yuki California missions, 76 Prehistory: California, 428 Yuma Indian-white relations: Spanish colonial, 260 Yupik Indian-white relations: Russian colonial, 257 Yurok California missions, 76 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, 350 Prehistory: California, 428 Prehistory: Northwest Coast, 435 Zuñi People Zuñi Rebellion, 609
807
Subject Index Please refer to the Tribes Index, which precedes this Subject Index, for names of bands, nations, and other Native American groups. Names of historical figures will be found in the Personages Index, which precedes the Tribes Index. AAIA. See Association on American Indian Affairs Aboriginal Action Plan (1998), 1 Aboriginal Canadians, 1. See also First Nations Aboriginal peoples (term), 494 Abourezk Commission. See American Indian Policy Review Commission Acoma, Battle of (1598-1599), 2-4 Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, 615 Adams-Onís Treaty (1819), 507, 548 Adena tradition, 433 Adobe Walls, Battles of (1864, 1874), 4-5, 474 Agriculture, 433, 437, 448, 450 AIDA. See American Indian Defense Association AIHEC. See American Indian Higher Education Consortium AIM. See American Indian Movement AIPRC. See American Indian Policy Review Commission Akansa people, 250 Akwesasne Mohawk reservation, 121 Alabama. See Geographical Index Alaska. See Geographical Index Alaska Federation of Natives, 7 Alaska Native Brotherhood (est. 1912), 5-6, 8 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), 6-10, 553 Alaska Native Sisterhood (est. 1915), 5-6 Albany Congress (1754), 11-15, 163, 308, 455 Albany Group, 310 Alcatraz Island, California, 615
Alcatraz Island occupation (19691971), 15-17, 540 Alcoholism, 460; Handsome Lake, 102 Aleutian Islands, 257 Algonquian peoples, 157, 236-237, 269, 305, 307, 409, 421, 446, 566, 572 Alkali Ridge, Utah, 615 All-Pueblo Council (est. 1922), 17-18 Allotment system (1887-1934), 18-20, 74-75, 288, 292, 364. See also General Allotment Act Altithermal period, 440 American Indian (term), 21-22, 177, 382 American Indian Defense Association (est. 1923), 22-23, 481 American Indian Higher Education Consortium (est. 1972), 23-24 American Indian Movement (est. 1968), 25-26, 140, 345, 415, 540, 601, 603 American Indian Policy Review Commission (est. 1975), 27-28 American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), 29-32, 297, 351, 386, 482 American Indian Trust Reform Management Act (1994), 225 American Revolution (1775-1783), 272; Cherokees in, 96; Iroquois in, 151, 308-312; Senecas in, 102 Amerind (term), 22, 33, 177 Anasazi culture, 452 ANB. See Alaska Native Brotherhood ANCSA. See Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act Angel Mounds, Indiana, 615 Animism, 563
808 / Subject Index Antiquities Act (1906), 384 Apache Wars (1861-1886), 34-37, 287 Archaic culture, 53 Archaic tradition, 447 Arctic. See Geographical Index Arctic Small Tool tradition, 428 Arizona. See Geographical Index Arkansas. See Geographical Index Articles of Agreement (1730), 38-40 Assembly of First Nations, 232, 362, 587 Association on American Indian Affairs, 23 Athapaskan-speaking people, 437 Awatovi Ruins, Arizona, 615 Aztalan, Wisconsin, 616 Aztec Ruins, New Mexico, 616 Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), 40-42 Bad Axe, Battle of (1832), 63 Bagot Commission (1842), 230 Band (term), 562 Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico, 616 Bannock War (1878), 43-45, 286 Bat Cave, New Mexico, 616 Bear Butte, South Dakota, 617 Bear River Campaign (1863), 45-46, 70 Bear River Massacre Site, Idaho, 617 Beaver Wars (1642-1685), 46-49 Bering Strait migrations (c. 10,000), 5054; map, 52 BIA. See Bureau of Indian Affairs Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons, California, 617 Big Bead Mesa, New Mexico, 617 Bill of Rights, 194 Billy Bowlegs’ War (1855-1856), 510 Bison; hunting, 439, 470; slaughter, 5559, 473, 500 Black Hawk War (1832), 60-64, 323 Blood Run Site, Iowa, 618 Boarding schools, 64-68 Boldt decision (1974), 571 Borinquen, 583 Bosque Redondo, 341, 391 Boudinot v. United States (1871), 92-93 Bozeman Trail War (1866-1868), 69-72
British Columbia. See Geographical Index British North America Act (1867), 178, 550 Buffalo. See Bison Bureau of Indian Affairs (est. 1824), 20, 25, 73-74, 107, 204-205, 214, 220, 281, 293, 315, 364, 387, 415, 481, 517, 528 Burke Act (1906), 20, 75-76, 290 Bursum bill (1922), 17 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 200 Cabin Creek, Battle of (1864), 100 Cahokia, Illinois, 443, 618 California. See Geographical Index California Indian Self-Reliance Initiative (2000), 202 California missions (1769-1824), 76-79 Camas Meadows Battle Sites, Idaho, 618 Camp Charlotte Agreement (1774), 349 Camp Grant Massacre, 36 Canada. See Geographical Index Canada-Ontario Indian Reserve Lands Agreement (1924), 486 Canadian Metis Society (est. 1968), 117 Canarsee, 355 Canoe, role of, 227 Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, 341, 618 Carlisle Indian School (est. 1879), 66, 80-81, 476, 619 Carrington Osage Village Sites, Missouri, 619 Casa Grande Ruins, Arizona, 619 Casa Malpais Site, Arizona, 619 Cataldo Mission, Idaho, 620 Caughnawaga Mohawk, 249 Cayuse War (1847-1850), 82-83 CERT. See Council of Energy Resource Tribes Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, 620 Cherokee, 560 Cherokee Advocate, 91 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), 85 Cherokee Phoenix (1828-1839), 84, 87-91
Subject Index / 809 Cherokee Tobacco case (1871), 92-93, 288 Cherokee tribe, trade with, 241 Cherokee War (1761), 94-97 Cherokee War (1776), 272 Chief Joseph Battleground of Bear’s Paw, Montana, 620 Chief Plenty Coups Home, Montana, 620 Chiefdom (term), 562 Chippewa tribe, 550 Christianization, 65, 218, 229, 242, 249, 262, 611. See also Franciscan missionaries; Jesuit missionaries; Missions and missionaries; Religion; Religious freedom Chucalissa Site, Tennessee, 621 Cíbola, Seven Cities of, 465, 610 Ciguayan, 583 Civil Rights Act (1964), 206 Civil Rights movement, 194 Civil War (1861-1865), 97-100, 282, 316, 340, 500 Civilization Fund Act (1819), 65, 275 Clover Site, West Virginia, 621 Clovis culture, 54 Clovis points, 430, 439 Cobell v. Norton, 225 Cochise people, 449 Cockarouses, 422 Code of Handsome Lake, 101-104 Code talkers, 105-108 Colleges (tribal), 24 Colliflower v. Garland (1964), 109 Colonialism. See Dutch colonialism; English colonialism; French colonialism; Indian-white relations; Norse colonialism; Russian colonialism; Spanish colonialism; Swedish colonialism Colorado. See Geographical Index Connecticut. See Geographical Index Constitution Act of 1867. See British North America Act Contract schools, 65 Corn, introduction of, 433, 442, 451 Coronado National Memorial, Arizona, 621 Coufal Site, Nebraska, 621
Council of Energy Resource Tribes (est. 1975), 109-110 Courts. See Courts of Indian Offenses; Tribal courts Courts of Indian Offenses, 205, 561 Cree tribe, 550 Creek National Capitol, Oklahoma, 622 Creek War (1813-1814), 110-114, 149 Crown Lands Protection Acts (1837), 230 Curtis Act (1898), 290, 560 Dakotas. See Geographical Index Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of (1830), 115-116, 302, 546 Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty Site, Mississippi, 622 Danger Cave, Utah, 622 Dawes Commission, 316 Dawes Severalty Act. See General Allotment Act Declaration of First Nations (1981), 116-117 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), 117-119 Dene group, 552 Dene-Metis Land Claims Agreement, 554 Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (est. 1967), 119-121, 182, 497, 587 Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders, 363 Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty (est. 1974), 121-122 DIAND. See Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Discrimination in favor of Native Americans, 206 Diseases, 125-129, 204, 240; Quebec, 48; in schools, 66. See also Epidemics Doak’s Stand, Treaty of (1820), 115, 545 Doaksville, Treaty of (1837), 547 Dorset tradition, 428
810 / Subject Index DRUMS. See Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders and Determined Residents United for Mohawk Sovereignty Duro v. Reina (1984-1990), 122-123, 298 Dutch colonialism, 234-236, 270; Manhattan Island purchase, 353356 Earth lodges, 443 Eastern seaboard. See Geographical Index Economic development, 205 Education, 482; boarding schools, 6468; early twentieth century, 204; higher, 23-24, 296; Indian Act of 1989, 183; Iroquois comments, 239; nineteenth century, 80-81, 289 Edwardsville, Treaty of (1819), 323 Effigy Mounds National Monument, Iowa, 622 El Cuartelejo, Kansas, 623 El Morro, New Mexico, 623 Eleventh Amendment, 202 Elk v. Wilkins (1884), 123, 190, 289 Emerald Mound, Mississippi, 623 Empire (term), 562 Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon et al. v. Smith (1990), 32, 124-125 Encomienda system, 261, 466, 584, 612 Endangered Species Act (1973), 558 Enfranchisement Acts (1869), 231 English colonialism, 237-244; Canada, 226-233; vs. Spanish, 263 Epidemics, 125-129, 240, 418, 466; Aleuts, 259; California, 266; Canada, 229. See also Diseases Etowah, Georgia, 623 Ex parte Crow Dog (1883), 130-131, 289, 352 Factory system of trade regulation (1796), 275 Fallen Timbers, Battle of (1794), 131135, 144, 274, 333, 573 Fallen Timbers Battlefield, Ohio, 624
Federal Acknowledgment Program, 136 Federally recognized tribes, 136, 564 Fifteen Principles (1983), 137 Finn colonists, 270 First Nations. See Aboriginal Canadians Fish-ins, 138-140, 381, 571 Five Civilized Tribes, 98, 290; during Civil War, 282 Florida; Franciscans, 262. See also Geographical Index Folsom points, 439 Folsom Site, New Mexico, 624 Folsom tradition, 447 Fort Ancient, Ohio, 624 Fort Atkinson Treaty (1853), 140 Fort Belknap, Texas, 624 Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, 624 Fort Greenville Treaty (1795), 135, 140144, 155, 274, 398, 525 Fort Harmar Treaty (1789), 154 Fort Harrison, Treaty of (1819), 323 Fort Industry, Treaty of (1805), 334 Fort Jackson, Treaty of. See Horseshoe Bend Treaty Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, 69, 140, 145-146 Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, 147-149, 330 Fort Mims, Battle of (1813), 149-151 Fort Neoheroka, Battle of (1713), 568 Fort Osage, Missouri, 625 Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, 625 Fort Richardson, Texas, 625 Fort Robinson and Red Cloud Agency, Nebraska, 625 Fort Shantok, Connecticut, 626 Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 626 Fort Stanwix Treaty (1768), 347, 419, 459, 572 Fort Stanwix Treaty (1784), 141, 151154, 397 Fort Thompson Mounds, South Dakota, 626 Fort Washita, Oklahoma, 626 Fort Wayne Treaty (1809), 155-156, 463, 527, 537
Subject Index / 811 Fourteenth Amendment, 190 Fox Wars (1714-1741), 156-159, 251 Franciscan missionaries, 262, 465, 611 French and Indian War (1754-1763), 94, 160-164, 252, 272, 403, 416, 455, 485 French colonialism, 243, 245-253; Canada, 226-233 Friends of the Indian organizations, 18, 165-166, 171 Frog Lake Massacre (1885), 490 Frontier, closing of, 601 Fur trade, 46-49, 166-168, 227, 458, 469; Dutch, 235, 356; English, 241; French, 248, 251; impact on Iroquois nations, 307; Russian, 257 Gadsden Purchase (1854), 169 Gambling. See Gaming Gaming, 200-202, 298 Gatlin Site, Arizona, 626 General Allotment Act (1887), 18, 73, 75, 165, 169-173, 190, 225, 289, 292, 336, 364, 378, 480, 528. See also Allotment system Georgia. See Geographical Index Ghost Dance religion, 101, 287, 598, 605 Gift-giving, 243 Gila Cliff Dwellings, New Mexico, 627 GOON. See Guardians of the Oglala Nation Graham Cave, Missouri, 627 Grand Canyon, Arizona, 627 Grave Creek Mound, West Virginia, 627 Great Basin. See Geographical Index Great Bend culture, 443 Great Depression (1930’s), 67, 293, 481 Great Plains. See Geographical Index Greenland. See Geographical Index Greenville, Treaty of (1795), 333, 461 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of (1848), 34, 169, 174-177, 524; maps, 175 Guardians of the Oglala Nation, 603 Gunther Island Site 67, California, 628 Gwich’in Final Agreement (1991), 554
Habeas corpus, 109, 194, 288, 520 Handsome Lake, Code of, 101-104 Hard Labor, Treaty of (1768), 459 Hardaway Site, North Carolina, 628 Haskell Institute, Kansas, 628 Haudenosaunee, 305 Hawikuh, New Mexico, 628 Healing v. Jones (1962), 387 Health care, 203 Hell Gap, Wyoming, 439 Hohokam culture, 451 Holly Bluff Site, Mississippi, 629 Hopewell culture, 305 Hopewell tradition, 433, 442 Hopi, 3 Horner Site, Wyoming, 629 Horseshoe Bend, Battle of (1814), 274 Horseshoe Bend Treaty (1814), 113, 176-177 Hubbell Trading Post, Arizona, 629 Hudson’s Bay Company, 229, 469, 550 Huff Archaeological Site, North Dakota, 629 Human immunodeficiency virus, 129 “I will fight no more, forever” speech (Chief Joseph), 395 ICC. See Indian Claims Commission Icelandic sagas, 254 Idaho. See Geographical Index Igloos, 455 IGRA. See Indian Gaming Regulatory Act IHS. See Indian Health Service IITC. See International Indian Treaty Council Illinois. See Geographical Index Independent Oglala Nation, 605 Indian (term), 177-178, 382 Indian Act of 1868, 119, 231 Indian Act of 1876, 119, 178-180, 181, 486 Indian Act of 1951, 67, 180, 181-182 Indian Act of 1989, 182-184, 487 Indian Appropriation Act (1871), 92, 184-187, 555, 570 Indian Bill of Rights. See Indian Civil Rights Act
812 / Subject Index Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), 188189, 465 Indian Citizenship Act (1924), 171, 189-192, 376, 517, 595 Indian Civil Rights Act (1968), 122, 193-195, 296, 383, 465 Indian Claims Commission (est. 1946), 196-198, 339, 481, 558, 597 Indian Claims Limitation Act (1982), 297 Indian Education Acts (1972, 1978), 198-199 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (1988), 200-202, 298 Indian Health Service (est. 1954), 203204 Indian New Deal (1933-1945), 23, 107, 204-205, 206, 214, 481 Indian Offenses Act (1883), 205-206, 288, 561 Indian preference (est. 1933), 206-207 Indian Removal Act (1830), 207-212, 275, 278, 506, 545; map, 211 Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 6, 20, 23, 74, 76, 173, 204, 213-217, 290, 292, 377, 401, 529, 561 Indian Rights Association (est. 1882), 218-219, 338, 365, 378 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), 27, 74, 219-220, 482 Indian Vocational Training Act (1957), 295 Indian-white relations; Canadian, 226234; Dutch colonial, 48, 234-236; English colonial, 237-244; French colonial, 47, 245-253; Norse, 254256; Russian colonial, 257-260; Spanish colonial, 260-267; Swedish colonial, 268-271; U.S., 1775-1830, 272-277; U.S., 1831-1870, 278-284; U.S., 1871-1933, 284-291; U.S., 1934-2002, 292-299 Indiana. See Geographical Index Indian’s Friend, The (National Indian Association), 378 Indians of All Tribes, 16 Influenza, 126
Interior, U.S. Department of the, 73 Intermarriage; English, 243; Metis, 228; Russian, 259 International Indian Treaty Council (est. 1974), 300-301 Inuvialuit Final Agreement (1984), 553 ION. See Independent Oglala Nation IRA. See Indian Removal Act; Indian Reorganization Act; Indian Rights Association Irish Potato Famine (Native American aid during), 302-304 Iroquoian-speaking people, 433 Iroquois Confederacy, 243, 304-308; American Revolution, 272; map, 306; U.S. Congress meeting (1776), 309-312 J. R. Williams (steamboat), 100 Jaketown Site, Mississippi, 629 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975), 552 Jamestown, 421, 425 Jay’s Treaty (1794), 144, 313-314 Jerome Commission (1892), 337 Jesuit missionaries, 243, 249, 413 Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), 83 Kachinas, 466 Kahnawake people, 249 Kansas. See Geographical Index Kathio Site, Minnesota, 630 Kearny Code, 522 Keeler Commission (est. 1961), 314316 Keetoowah Society (est. 1859), 316 Kennedy Report (1967), 317 Kennewick Man, 318-322 Key Marco, Florida, 630 Kickapoo Resistance (1819-1834), 323 Kickapoo uprisings (1865-1873), 324 Kid catching, 67 King George’s War (1739-1748), 11 King Philip’s War. See Metacom’s War Kingdom (term), 562 Kiowa uprising (1871), 286 Kiva Clubs, 380 Kivas, 466
Subject Index / 813 Knife River Indian Villages, North Dakota, 630 Koster, Illinois, 631 Lacey Act (1907), 290 Lake Mohonk Conferences, 165, 171, 289, 378 Lancaster Treaty (1744), 11 Land claims, 242; trust funds, 224-225 Landergin Mesa, Texas, 631 Langdeau Site, South Dakota, 631 Language, written (Cherokee), 88 L’Anse aux Meadows, 254 Leary Site, Nebraska, 631 Lehner, Arizona, 632 Lemhi Pass, Tendoy, Idaho, 631 Lewis and Clark expedition (18041806), 324-329; map, 328 Little Arkansas Treaty (1865), 359 Little Bighorn, Battle of the (1876), 287, 329-332, 514, 592 Little Bighorn, Montana, 632 Little Turtle’s War (1790-1794), 274, 333-335; Fallen Timbers, 131-135; Wabash, 572-573 Lochaber, Treaty of (1770), 459 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), 290, 336339, 558 Long Island of the Holston, Tennessee, 632 Long Walk (1866), 340-344; map, 342 Longest Walk (1978), 26, 345-346, 543 Longhouse religion, 103 Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), 346-349 Louisiana Purchase (1803), 325 Lower Loup phase, 443 Lowry Ruin, Colorado, 632 Lubbock Lake Site, Texas, 633 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1987), 32, 350-351 Maine. See Geographical Index Maine Indian Claims Act (1980), 351352 Major Crimes Act (1885), 122, 131, 194, 289, 352-353 Mangas Coloradus, 35
Manhattan Island purchase (1626), 236, 353-356 Manifest destiny, 174, 280, 521 Manitoba. See Geographical Index Manitoba Act (1870), 489 Marmes Rockshelter, Washington, 633 Mascouten people, 250 Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, Connecticut, 633 Maumee Confederacy, 573 Measles, 126, 466 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty (1867), 337, 357-361, 473, 582 Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty Site, Kansas, 633 Medicine Wheel, Wyoming, 633 Meech Lake Accord (1990), 117, 233, 362-363 Menoken Indian Village Site, North Dakota, 634 Menominee, 530 Menominee Restoration Act (1973), 363-364 Menominee Tribe v. United States (1968), 558 Meriam Report (1928), 20, 67, 74, 107, 290, 292, 364-365, 481 Mesa Verde, Colorado, 634 Metacom’s War (1675), 365-369, 411 Metis, 551; origins of, 228 Mexican-American War (1846-1848), 174, 281 Michigan. See Geographical Index Midwest. See Geographical Index Militancy, 25-26 Minisink Archaeological Site, Pennsylvania, 634 Minnesota. See Geographical Index Minnesota Uprising (1862), 370-371 Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, California, 634 Mission Santa Ines, California, 635 Missions and missionaries, 229; California, 76-79, 266; Catholic, 227, 262; French, 249; Indian, 242; Southwest, 413. See also Franciscan missionaries; Jesuit missionaries Mississippi. See Geographical Index
814 / Subject Index Mississippian cultures, 442, 448 Missouri. See Geographical Index Moccasin Bend Archaeological District, Tennessee, 635 Modoc War (1872-1873), 286, 372-373 Mogollon culture, 452 Mohawk tribe; and Dutch, 235; sovereignty, 104 Mohawk Upper Castle Historic District, New York, 635 Molstad Village, South Dakota, 636 Montana. See Geographical Index Moraughtacund; Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Moultrie Creek Treaty (1823), 507 Mound builders cultures, 53, 433, 449 Moundville, Alabama, 449, 636 Mount Dexter, Treaty of (1805), 545 Muddy Creek, Battle of (1876), 287 Mummy Cave, Wyoming, 440 NAGPRA. See Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act NARF. See Native American Rights Fund Narragansett; Pequot War, 409 Natchez, Mississippi, 636 Natchez Revolt (1729), 374 National Congress of American Indians (est. 1944), 375-376 National Council of American Indians (est. 1926), 376-377 National Indian Association (est. 1879), 378-379 National Indian Brotherhood (est. 1968), 117 National Indian Council (est. 1961), 117 National Indian Education Association (est. 1969), 379-380 National Indian Youth Council (est. 1961), 380-381 Nations, tribes as, 563 Native American (term), 21, 177, 381382 Native American Church, 31, 383 Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Council (1959), 382-383
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), 318, 383-385 Native American Languages Act (1990), 297 Native American Rights Fund (est. 1970), 385-386 Navajo Code Talkers Association (est. 1971), 108 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act (1974), 387 Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Act. See Navajo Rehabilitation Act Navajo National Monument, Arizona, 637 Navajo Rehabilitation Act (1950), 388389 Navajo Reservation, 387 Navajo Tribe of Indians, Treaty Between the United States of America and the (1868), 344 Navajo War (1863-1866), 390-391 NCAI. See National Congress of American Indians; National Council of American Indians Nebraska. See Geographical Index Nevada. See Geographical Index New Echota Treaty (1835), 547 New Jersey. See Geographical Index New Mexico. See Geographical Index New Netherland Company (est. 1614), 235 New York. See Geographical Index Newspapers, Native American, 87 Newtonia battles (1862, 1864), 99 Nez Perce National Historical Park, Idaho, 637 Nez Perce War (1877), 286, 391-395; map, 394 NIA. See National Indian Association NIEA. See National Indian Education Association Nisga’a Agreement in Principle (1996), 395-396 NIYC. See National Indian Youth Council Norse colonialism, 254-256
Subject Index / 815 North America (colonial). See Geographical Index North Carolina. See Geographical Index North-West Angle Treaty (1873), 551 North West Company, 470 Northeast. See Geographical Index Northeastern Quebec Agreement (1978), 552 Northwest Ordinance (1787), 397-398 Northwest Territories. See Geographical Index Northwest Uprising (second Riel Rebellion, 1885), 490 Norton Mound Group, Michigan, 637 Nunavut Territory (1993), 233, 362, 398-399, 553. See also Geographical Index Obsidian Cliff, Wyoming, 638 Oconto Site, Wisconsin, 638 Ohio. See Geographical Index Ojibwa tribe, 550 Oka crisis (1990), 399-400 Oklahoma. See Geographical Index Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act (1936), 401-402 Old Oraibi, Arizona, 638 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978), 402 Ontario. See Geographical Index Opata people, 413 Oregon. See Geographical Index Oregon Territory, 280, 392 Owasco culture, 305 Ozette, Washington, 638 Pacific Northwest. See Geographical Index Paleo-Arctic tradition, 428 Paleo-Indians, 447 Paris, Treaty of (1763), 163, 416 Paris, Treaty of (1783), 132, 141, 152, 312-313, 544, 572 Pavonia Massacre (1643), 403 Paxton Boys’ Massacres (1763), 403407 Payne’s Landing, Treaty of (1832), 548
Pea Ridge, Battle of (1862), 99, 282 Peach Wars (1655-1664), 236, 408 Pemaquid Archaeological Site, Maine, 638 Pemmican, 470 Pemmican Proclamation (1814), 471 Pennsylvania. See Geographical Index Penutian-speaking people, 437 Pequot War (1636-1637), 409-412, 505 Peyote, 31 Picotte Memorial Hospital, Nebraska, 639 Pictograph Cave, Montana, 639 Pike Pawnee Village Site, Nebraska, 639 Pima uprisings (1695, 1751), 413-414 Pin Indians, 316 Pine Ridge shootout (1975), 26, 414-416 Pipestone Quarries, Minnesota, 640 Piqunin tradition, 446 Pit houses, 452 Pittsburgh, Treaty of (1775), 349 Plague, 126 Plains of Abraham, Battle of the (1759), 162 Plainview points, 439 Plano tradition, 440 Plateau. See Geographical Index Plymouth Colony, 366 Point Pleasant, Battle of (1774), 348 Pontiac’s Resistance (1763-1766), 240, 310, 346, 416-419, 456 Pontotoc Creek, Treaty of (1832), 546 Port Madison Reservation, 402 Potlatch, 232 Poverty Point, Louisiana, 448, 640 Powder River expedition, 592 Powhatan Confederacy, 420-424 Powhatan Wars (1622-1646), 273, 424426 Prehistory; Arctic, 427-428; California, 428-430; Great Basin, 430-432; Northeast, 432-435; Northwest Coast, 435-438; Plains, 439-444; Plateau, 444-446; Southeast, 447449; Southwest, 449-453; Subarctic, 453-455 Presidios, 262
816 / Subject Index Problem of Indian Administration, The. See Meriam Report Proclamation of 1763, 163, 310, 397, 417, 455-459; map, 457 Property rights, 242 Prophetstown (est. 1808), 156, 460-463, 526, 537 Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, 8 Public Lands Act (1923), 18 Public Law 280 (1953), 464-465 Pueblo Grande Ruin and irrigation sites, Arizona, 640 Pueblo peoples, 2-3, 560; Anasazi predecessors, 453 Pueblo Revolt (1680), 265, 465-468 Put-In Bay, Battle of (1813), 532 Quaker Peace Policy, 473 Quakers, 103, 404, 567 Quapaw tribe, 250 Quebec. See Geographical Index Railroad; Canada, 550; impact of, 57, 488, 578 Re Paulette et al. and the Registrar of Titles (1974), 552 Red Progressive movement, 376 Red River Colony, 550 Red River Raids (1815-1817), 469-472 Red River Rebellion (first Riel Rebellion, 1869-1870), 488 Red River War (1874-1875), 4, 286, 473-476 Red Sticks, 113, 149, 176 Religion; Christianization, 218, 229; English missionaries, 242; Ghost Dance, 101, 287, 598; Handsome Lake, 101-104; Russian Orthodox, 259; Zuñi, 611. See also Christianization; Franciscan missionaries; Jesuit missionaries; Missions and missionaries; Religious freedom Religious freedom, 29-32, 124, 194, 205-206, 216, 297, 350, 382, 466 Remarks Concerning the Savages (Franklin), 239 Repartimiento system, 261, 466
Reservation system (U.S.), 478-483 Reserve system (Canada), 179, 484487 Revolutionary War. See American Revolution Riel Rebellions (1869-1870, 1885), 231, 488-491, 551; map, 489 Robinson-Huron and RobinsonSuperior treaties (1850), 550 Rosebud Creek, Battle of (1876), 287, 492-493 Rosebud Reservation, 540 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1991-1996), 494-499 Royal Proclamation of 1763, 495, 549. See also Proclamation of 1763 Russian-American Company, 258 Russian colonialism, 77, 257-259, 266 Russian Orthodox Church, 259 St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, 298 Salinas Pueblo Missions, New Mexico, 640 Salish-speaking people, 437 Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation, 122 San Antonio missions, Texas, 641 San Carlos Reservation, 36, 287 San Xavier del Bac Mission, Arizona, 641 Sand Creek Massacre (1864), 359, 500503 Sand Hollow, Battle of (1848), 83 Sandoval case (1913), 17 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978), 195, 503-504 Santa Fe Trail, 521 Saskatchewan. See Geographical Index Saulteaux, 550 Saybrook, Battle of (1636-1637), 410, 504-506 Scandinavian explorers, 254 Sechelt Indian Band Self-Government Act (1986), 487 Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. See Indian SelfDetermination and Education Assistance Act
Subject Index / 817 Seminole Tribe of Indians v. Florida (1996), 201 Seminole Wars (1817-1858), 506-510 Sequoyah’s Cabin, Oklahoma, 641 Serpent Mound, Ohio, 641 Seven Oaks Massacre (1816), 471 Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), 14, 94, 160, 252, 549 Severalty. See Allotment system; General Allotment Act Shawnee Mission, Kansas, 641 Sheepeaters War (1879), 286 Sherbert v. Verner (1963), 124 Shiloh, Tennessee, 642 Siouan-speaking people, 433 Sioux War (1862), 282, 511-514 Sioux War (1876), 287 Sitka, Alaska, 642 Skraelings, 255 Slave trade in Indians; by other Indians, 220-224; by Spanish, 262 Slim Buttes, Battle of (1876), 287 Smallpox, 126, 240; blankets carrying, 418; Canada, 232 Snake War (1866-1868), 44, 515-516 Snaketown, Arizona, 642 Society of American Indians (19111924), 376, 516-517 South. See Geographical Index South Carolina. See Geographical Index Southeast. See Geographical Index Southwest. See Geographical Index Spanish colonialism, 260-267 Spiro, Oklahoma, 642 Sports mascots and team names, 518520 Standing Bear v. Crook (1879), 288, 520 Status Indians, 117, 180 Stephens v. Cherokee Nation (1899), 290 Subarctic. See Geographical Index Sunken Village Archaeological Site, Oregon, 643 Sunwatch Site, Ohio, 643 Supreme Court (U.S.) and treaties, 557 Survival of American Indians Association (1964), 139
Swamp Fight, Great (1676), 368 Swedish colonialism, 268-271 Sycamore Shoals, Tennessee, 643 Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 643 Talton v. Mayes (1896), 193 Taos, New Mexico, 644 Taos Rebellion (1847), 521-524 Taylor Peace Commission (1868), 343 Tecumseh’s Rebellion (1809-1811), 525-527 Tennessee. See Geographical Index Termination Resolution (1953), 136, 294, 315, 482, 528-531 Texas. See Geographical Index Thames, Battle of the (1813), 527, 532535 Three Fires Indians, 252 Thule tradition, 427 Tippecanoe, Battle of (1811), 274, 463, 527, 536-538 Tippecanoe Battlefield, Indiana, 644 Tobias-Thompson Complex, Kansas, 644 Toltec Mounds Site, Arkansas, 645 Toolesboro Mound Group, Iowa, 645 Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494), 246 Trachoma, 129 Trade; early U.S. Republic, 274; English colonial, 240. See also Fur trade Trade and Intercourse Acts (17901834), 275, 352, 538-540 Trail of Broken Treaties (1972), 540543, 558 Trail of Tears (1830-1842), 90, 116, 211, 302, 478, 544-548; map, 545 Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 8 Treaties and agreements; Canadian, 549-554; U.S., 555-559 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. See Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of Treaty of Doak’s Stand. See Doak’s Stand, Treaty of Treaty of Fort Laramie. See Fort Laramie, Treaty of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. See Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of
818 / Subject Index Treaty of New Echota. See New Echota, Treaty of Treaty of Paris. See Paris, Treaty of (1898) Treaty of Payne’s Landing. See Payne’s Landing, Treaty of Tribal courts, 289, 402, 560-561 Tribally Controlled Community College Act (1978), 24 Tribe (term), 561-565 Tribes, federal recognition of, 136 Trust funds, 224-226 Tuberculosis, 129 Tuscarora War (1711-1713), 566-569, 608 Umatilla tribe, 286 Union Party, 316 United Nations, 301 United States. See Geographical Index United States v. Kagama (1886), 193, 289, 570 United States v. Sioux Nation (1980), 297, 339 United States v. Washington (1974), 139, 570-572 Utah. See Geographical Index Ute War (1879), 286 Utz Site, Missouri, 645 Valverde, Battle of (1862), 340 Vanderbilt Archaeological Site, South Dakota, 645 Veterans Citizenship Act (1919), 191 Vinland, 255 Virginia. See Geographical Index Voting rights, 595 Wabash, Battle of the (1791), 572-573 Waiilatpu Mission, 82 Walam Olum, 269 Walking Purchase (1737), 574-577 Walla Walla Council (1855), 577-578, 607 Wallamwatkin, 393 Wallowa Lake Site, Oregon, 645 War of 1812, 110, 115, 274, 470, 527, 532
WARN. See Women of All Red Nations Warrior Society, 104 Washington State. See Geographical Index Washita Battlefield, Oklahoma, 646 Washita River Massacre (1868), 361, 579-582 Weippe Prairie, Idaho, 646 Weroances, 422 West. See Geographical Index West India Company (est. 1621), 235 West Indian uprisings (1495-1510), 583-586 West Indies. See Geographical Index Wheeler-Howard Act. See Indian Reorganization Act White Hill, Battle of (1863), 514 White Paper of Canada (1969-1970), 586-588 Whitman Massacre (1847), 280 Wild west shows (1883-1914), 588-590 Winnebago Uprising (1827), 590-591 Winters v. United States (1908), 591592 Wisconsin. See Geographical Index Wolf Mountains, Battle of (1877), 287, 592 Women of All Red Nations (est. 1978), 593 Wood Lake, Battle of (1862), 371 Woodland tradition, 432, 440, 448 Worcester v. Georgia (1832), 85, 88, 184 World War I, 191, 594 World War II, 232, 293, 595-597 Wounded Knee Battlefield, South Dakota, 646 Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), 288, 514, 598-601 Wounded Knee occupation (1973), 25, 27, 297, 415, 602-606 Wupatki National Monument, Arizona, 646 Wyoming. See Geographical Index Yakima War (1855-1856), 607-608 Yamasee War (1715-1728), 94, 223, 608609
Subject Index / 819 Yellow Creek Massacre (1774), 347 Yellowstone, Wyoming, 647 Yuma Crossing, Arizona, 647
Zuñi-Cíbola Complex, New Mexico, 647 Zuñi people, 3 Zuñi Rebellion (1632), 609-613