The Native Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries - Essay Example

Native Americans Abstract Native Americans are those people indigenous to the United States of America within the present-day continental United States’ boundaries, including parts of the island state of Hawaii and Alaska. The name includes a great number of distinct ethnic groups, tribes and states, many of them still surviving as political communities (Native Americans para1). The history of the Native Americans is not only intriguing, but it is also in many ways tragic. Studies indicate that during the ice age, the Native Americans had traveled across the Bering Sound from Siberia into Alaska. Gradually, they had migrated across the land and towards the South into Mexico and beyond. This paper discusses the Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Throughout these centuries, Native Americans suffered a great deal in the hands of European colonists. Introduction Although there is a common belief that the Native Americans came from Asia, few if any came from India. Mistakenly believing that he had landed in the Indies, Christopher Columbus gave them the name ‘Indian’ (Native Americans para2). Other names accorded to them include Indigenous Peoples of America, Aboriginal Americans, American Indians, Amerindians, and First Peoples First Nations among others. For many years, these people had peacefully lived in America until the invasion of the European colonialists and explorers who brought endless problems to them (Native American History para1-2). Since the European colonists landed in America in the 16th and 17th century, the Native Americans welcomed them enthusiastically. They admired their “outlandish clothes, ships as well as their superb technology including brass and copper kettles, mirrors, earrings, the fire-belching cannon and arquebus, hawkbells, steel swords and knives” among others (Native Americans para4). However, there eventually arose conflicts as the Native Americans discovered their materialistic view of the land coupled with their “cultural arrogance” (5). In the 18th and 19th centuries, the European colonists invaded the state and colony's frontiers inexorably displacing Native Americans from the most favorable land. Largely displaced were the Native Americans in the central and eastern North Carolina portions. Often times, “the Natives resisted this process violently” (Native Americans para17). Armed conflicts such as the Tuscarora (1711–1715) and Yemassee (1715–1717) wars involved “forcefully” removing native populations onto a small number of small reservations. More commonly, the colonists forced native populations to join allied tribes in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia among other places. Some Native American tribes in the piedmont and coastal regions relocated voluntarily prior to colonial frontier expansion (American History para20). A great number of Native Americans from the Mikmacs, Colvilles and Lummis in the Northwest Pacific to the hop-picking Yakimas, who constituted the backbone of the potato-picking labor force in Maine starting before 1880, had lost their land following the non-Indian settlement’s spread across North America. These Native Americans became seasonal and migrant workers. Native American men worked as guides, built forts, irrigation systems and houses and cleared fields while women did heavy housecleaning and laundry. Mormons also hired women to gather edible plants and to work on their farms where they planted turnips, onions, potatoes and other crops. The hiring of both men and women was on a daily basis and the “wages were in form of flour and clothing” (Johansen p259). Native American History explains that as the European colonists and explorers, with their “insatiable arrogance and greed”, invaded the sacred lands of the Native Americans, they brought virulent diseases including yellow fever, cholera, smallpox and measles among others, severely diminishing the Native American populace as well as annihilating entire villages (5). In 1803, the Louisiana Territory was purchased from the French. This led to the adoption of the national policy of relocating Native Americans west of the Mississippi. Whites who had moved onto these lands pressed the government of the United States to do something about the presence of the Native Americans. The government therefore started Relocation Programs as well as the famous “Trail of Tears” march. Congress, under Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson’s presidency, enacted the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that directed the executive branch to negotiate for Indian lands. The whites coerced onto western reservations the Five Civilized Tribes from the east namely Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Cherokee, principally to obtain their land for settlement. Numerous deaths as well as great hardship marked this forced migration. Its route is referred to as the ‘Trail of Tears’. With it, numerous Native Americans succumbed to death due to illnesses, exposure and starvation. This led to a drastic decline in the number of the Native Americans (White para9). White refers to the removal of the Cherokee Indians as possibly the most culturally distressing occurrence of this era. By tradition, the Cherokees had lived in the southern Appalachians villages – present day northeastern Alabama, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, northern Georgia, western North Carolina, West Virginia, and Virginia where they had developed a culture based on fishing, hunting, and farming. The Cherokees adopted some of the white society’s ways such as writing a constitution, establishing a newspaper, developing a written language, and building farmsteads and homes in European style (10). Among the things they learnt from Europeans was scalping, with the first case of white men scalping Native Americans occurring in 1725 in New Hampshire colony. However, some scholars argue that according to historical evidence, Native Americans had practiced scalping “long before coming into contact with Europeans” (Native Americans para18). Nevertheless, the Native Americans discovered that they could not stop whites from grabbing their lands, as the government did not guarantee them equal protection under the law. The whites drove them away from their homes, herded them into detention camps and forcibly moved them to a strange land (White para11). By the year 1840, the whites had annihilated or forcibly removed all the eastern tribes to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi (White para2). Following the United States’ Westward expansion in the 19th century, there was an increased expulsion of numerous Native Americans from extensive areas of their territory. This was either by “outright massacres” or by “forcing them farther and farther west into marginal lands” (Native Americans para21). By the late 19th century, Native American men and women worked as loggers and miners in majority of the extractive industries, usually regarded at frontier whites’ province. As in the Spanish missions and encomiendas, native labor was forced. In many instances, they were forced to work for little pay if any. In other cases, “European demand and money capitalism advent” rearranged the economies of Native Americans – a good example was in the fur trade. From the period of gold rush onwards, California ranchers and miners utilized Indian labor in ranching and mining (Johansen p259). Lippert asserts that between 1861 and 1865, Native Americans participated in the Civil War to protect themselves against the white man. Approximately 17,000 fought in the war, most of them being from the Confederacy (194). On the other hand, some Native Americans, as American History documents, avoided direct involvement into conflicts with colonists and took part in larger systems of colonial settlement, trade and politics yielding extensive disruptions of their traditional cultural patterns – there was loss of native languages, disintegration of group and social ties and identities, as well as loss of other cultural elements. This persisted into the 20th century (22). The ever-growing whites’ arrogant attitude instigated conflicts between United States’ forces and various tribes, which culminated into the Indian Wars and the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The authorities then got into numerous treaties. For instance, they entered into military treaties like the “atypical Native American victory at the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn as well as the 1890 Native Americans’ massacre at Wounded Knee”. However, they later abrogated many of these treaties for various reasons (Native Americans para23). In the beginning of 1876, the government of the United States decreed that all remaining Native Americans move into reserves or reservations where most of them still reside to date. Alongside the American Bison’s near-extinction, which various tribes had lived on, this started the Prairie Culture’s downturn that had developed around the use of the horse for trading, travel and hunting (Native Americans para24). In 1890, there arose one of the most horrible massacres ever – Wounded Knee, South Dakota where the US Cavalry ferociously slaughtered children, women and warriors (Native American History para5). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, reformers took on the practice of educating Native American children in Indian Boarding Schools, primarily run by Christians, in an attempt of civilizing Indians. These schools taught Christianity to the Indian children instead of their native religions, restricted them from speaking their native languages and in several other ways coerced them to desert their Indian identity thereby adopting European-American culture. Many of these practices were in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s clauses separating state and church. Records indicate that there also existed many cases of mental, physical and sexual abuses at these schools. In general, there were several attempts to deprive the American Indians of their religious beliefs, language and culture. To date, some of these are still evident (Native Americans para25). Conclusion Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Native Americans suffered a great deal in the hands of European colonists. Some were acculturated into the Europeans’ way of life abandoning their customs, traditions, native language, among others. They also lost their group and social ties and identities as well as other cultural elements. Worthy to note is the fact that there was a sharp decline in their numbers by almost half – as Native American History documents, during the arrival of the Europeans, there were approximately ten to ninety million Native Americans living in America (1). The decline resulted from deaths arising from conflicts as well as the diseases that the Europeans brought with them, hitting the Native Americans hard. As earlier noted, most Native Americans still live in reservations, even after the passing of the Indian Citizen Act of 1924, which gave them official citizenship in America. They are yet to know and experience definitive deliverance and freedom. Works cited American History. Rain.org. 2002. 18 Sept. 2010 . Johansen, Bruce E. The Encyclopedia of Native American Economic History. New York: Greenwood Publishing Group. 1999. Print. Lippert, Dorothy & Stephen, J. S. Native American History for Dummies. United States: For Dummies. 2007. Print. Native American History. Allabouthistory.org. 2010. 18 Sept. 2010 . Native Americans. Americanwest.com. 1997. 19 Sept. 2010 . Native Americans. Crystalinks.com. 2009. 18 Sept. 2010 . White, Richard. Cherokee Removal - The Trail Where They Cried. 2007. Powersource. 18 September 2010 . Read More