The Federal Government Treatment of American Indians in the Late 19th Century - Report Example

The Federal Government treatment of American Indians in the late 19th century On a hot June morning in 1975 a shoot out between Native Americans and FBI agents left one native and two FBI agents dead. The incident occurred just west of Wounded Knee, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The small community had also been the site of a gun battle in 1890. In December of that year over two hundred Lakota were killed when members of the 7th Cavalry (the unit that was defeated on the Little Bighorn in the battle known as Custers Last Stand in the summer of 1876) opened fire on them. (Connell, 1984) This massacre is widely viewed as the final military engagement between native Americans and the U.S. military. It was the culmination of a half century of active campaigning against North Americas indigenous peoples, a domestic military campaign that covered the entire nineteenth century and reached its peak in the period after the Civil War. The following discussion will consider the Federal government treatment of American Indians in the late nineteenth century. Initially, the nature of the conflict will be considered. The idea that it was a military, political and cultural war will be introduced. Then the situation will be examined in detail as it related to the Lakota people (commonly referred to as the Sioux) who resided on the northern Great Plains in the present day states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana. This situation will present a case study of federal government treatment of American Indians in the last half of the nineteenth century. Finally, a brief conclusion will link the case study to wider government policy towards Indians during this period. According to historian Eric Foner native Indian culture differed from the culture of white Americans and “nearly all officials believed that the federal government should persuade or force the Plains Indians to surrender most of their land and to exchange their religion, communal property, nomadic way of life, and gender relations for Christian worship, private ownership, and small farming on reservations with men tilling the fields and women working in the home.” (Foner, 2008, pp. 612-613) This quotation indicates that the campaign against the Plains Indians was more than simply a land grab – although this was a significant motivating factor in the federal governments approach. The federal government also took umbrage with native culture and social organization. The federal government believed that hunting should be replaced with farming, communal property relations eliminated and private property introduced, and native spirituality superseded by Christianity. Taking Indian land, by force when necessary, was seen as an opportunity for white settlement and development, but also as a key step in forcing Indians to adopt Christian spirituality, capitalist economics and agriculture. In terms of territory the federal government carved away at the land that was assigned to the Plains Indians throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The map on the following page illustrates the declining land base of the Sioux. Initially, they were guaranteed all of the land colored in orange, including land outside present day South Dakota. At the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868 this land shrank to only the orange area within South Dakota in terms of winter residence. A decade later the Black Hills, the western unceded land was gone, in the wake of the discovery of gold. In another decade (1889) the remaining land had been subdivided and shrunk again leaving the nine smaller reservations that still exist today. (Matthiessen, 1975, pp. 5-22) The Shrinking Sioux Landbase, 1868-1889 All Colors – Great Sioux Reservation and Unceded Land Brown, Light Orange – Reservation after 1879 Light Orange – Reservations after 1889 Source: North Dakota State Government. “Establishment of the Great Sioux Reservation”. http://www.ndstudies.org/resources/IndianStudies/standingrock/historical_gs_reservation.html. This map on the preceding page clearly illustrates the shrinking Sioux land base. By 1900 it was only a fraction of what it had been at the middle of the nineteenth century. Duplicitous treaty making and military might were both employed to subdue the Lakota and undermine their land base – the root of their culture. Often the land was taken because the federal government had a use or a need for it. The Black Hills of Montana and Wyoming were granted to the Lakota and then taken back when gold was discovered. However, the land was also taken in an attempt to end hunting and undermine Indian culture and communal property rights. The single large reservation was broken into smaller reservations, in part, as a way of undermining Sioux culture. According to Foner the Dawes Act of 1887 was a “crucial step in attacking tribalism.” (Foner, 2008, p. 613). It ended the communal holding of reservation land, assigned individual farms to all Indian males of majority age, declared the remaining land surplus and saw millions of acres transferred to white ownership in the following decades. At the same time the Buffalo were hunted to virtual extinction by white sportsmen and trophy hunters (often firing directly from railroads). According to historian Robert M. Utley there had been over 13 million buffalo on the Plains in 1866. They had been virtually exterminated by 1890. (Utley, 1973, p. 410) The extermination of the buffalo undermined the Sioux culture as it was built around the buffalo, as was their religion. The Sioux connection to the land, specifically the buffalo and hunting, was destroyed by the expropriation of their land base and the destruction of the buffalo. In this sense the campaign against them was cultural as well as military. The objective, in the widest sense, of the military campaigns, was the devastation of Sioux culture, ethics and mores. Furthermore, the Sioux themselves realized that they were engaged in a struggle with an enemy that desired more than military dominion. They were well aware, as Sitting Bull said in 1882, that they were engaged in a clash of cultures: This land belongs to us.... But white men, who belong to another land, have come upon us, and are forcing us to live according to their ideas. That is an injustice; we have never dreamed of making white men live as we live. White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tepees here and there to the different hunting grounds. The life of white men is slavery. (Sitting Bull, 1882) In 1890 James Mooney prepared a report for the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institute on the recent massacre at Wounded Knee. He identified the Ghost Dance religious revival as a desperate bid by a culture on the brink of destruction to find hope in a Messianic cult that promised the disappearance of the white men and the rebirth of the buffalo herds. (Mooney, 1890, pp. pp. 816-828) Importantly, this indicates that the contemporary white scholars saw the last half of the nineteenth century as the period of the extinction of Plains Indian culture. The Plains Indians (as indicated by the Sitting Bull quotation above) also saw this era as the destruction of their culture and society as well as the conquest of their land. All of the evidence drawn from a case study of the Great Sioux Reservation and the fate of the Sioux Indians from the Civil War to the massacre at Wounded Knee makes it plain that during that period the federal government was constantly decreasing the land available to the Indians, often using the military to force this outcome. It also illustrates that the United States government was actively trying to destroy Indian culture and society as well as alienate its land base. Indeed, alienation of the land base was not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end, the destruction of Indian culture and society. Bibliography Connell, Evan S. (1984). Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn. Harper & Row: New York. Foner, Eric. (2005). Give Me Liberty!: An American History. W. W. Norton & Company: New York. Mooney, James. (1896). “Report XVI: The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890”. Bureau of American Ethnology/Smithsonian Institute. Sitting Bull. (1882) “The Life My People Want is Freedom”. Give Me Liberty! Online” Web. http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/foner2/contents/ch16/documents05.asp. Accessed 1 August 2010. Utley, Robert M. (1973). Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866 – 1891. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, Nebraska. Read More