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In 1782, a group of militiamen from Pennsylvania killed 96 Christianized Delaware Indians, illustrating the growing contempt for native people. Captain David Williamson ordered the converted Delawares, who had been blamed for attacks on white settlements, to go to the cooper shop two at a time, where militiamen beat them to death with wooden mallets and hatchets. -
From the earliest days of European colonization, bloody clashes over land and natural resources plagued relations between white settlers and Native Americans. European settlers used a variety of methods to wrest land away from indigenous people, from the negotiation of treaties to forcible removal to declarations of war -
In the spring of 1868 a conference was held at Fort Laramie, in present day Wyoming, that resulted in a treaty with the Sioux. This treaty was to bring peace between the whites and the Sioux who agreed to settle within the Black Hills reservation in the Dakota Territory. -
Many Native Americans resisted the imposition of the reservation system, sparking a series of conflicts known as the Indian Wars. Through a series of bloody massacres and victories in battle, the US Army ultimately succeeded in relocating most indigenous people onto reservations. The surrounding land and natural resources of the West were thereby opened up to white settlers. -
“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt, who opened the first such school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system. -
authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become US citizens. -
In 1887, the US Congress passed the Dawes Act, which ended the reservation system by authorizing the federal confiscation and redistribution of tribal lands. The aim of the act was to destroy tribal governing councils and assimilate Native Americans into mainstream US society by replacing their communal traditions with a culture centered on the individual. To this end, tribal lands were parceled out into individual -
During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, Wovoka, a shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe, had a vision. Claiming that God had appeared to him in the guise of a Native American and had revealed to him a bountiful land of love and peace, Wovoka founded a spiritual movement called the Ghost Dance. He prophesied the reuniting of the remaining Indian tribes of the West and Southwest and the banishment of all evil from the world. -
Anti-Indian anger rose in the late 1880s as the Ghost Dance spiritual movement emerged, spreading to two dozen tribes across 16 states, and threatening efforts to culturally assimilate tribal peoples. -
From the earliest days of colonial contact between white Europeans and Native American Indians, certain key assumptions informed their interactions. Most native tribes did not adhere to the European view of land as property.