Unit 13 the native american
T
he
story of the Native American – or American Indian – is one that
is unique, tragic and ultimately inspiring. It is unique because the
Indians were the original inhabitants of the American continent and
experienced every phase of its European settlement, from the earliest
17th century colonies to the closing of the western frontier at the
end of the 19th century. It is tragic because the conflict between
the Indians and whites paralleled the experience of traditional
peoples throughout the world who have come in contact with expanding,
industrialized societies. It is an inspiring story because the Native
Americans although dispossessed of much of their land in the 19th
century, have survived, asserted their political and economic rights,
and succeeded in retaining their identity and culture. Today, Native
Americans are full citizens of the United States who are proud to be
Americans. However, they are equally proud of their own cultural
heritage, and, though it is difficult in the modern world, they are
trying to protect and maintain it. Marks of that heritage can be
found all over the United States. Many of the names on United States
maps – Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Idaho and more –
are Indian words. The Indians taught the Europeans how to cultivate
crops such as corn, tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco. Canoes, snowshoes
and moccasins are all Indian inventions. Indian handcrafted artifacts
such as pottery, silver jewelry, paintings and woven rugs are highly
prized.
About 62 percent of the Indians in the United States live in large cities and rural areas scattered throughout the country. The rest of them live on about 300 federal reservations (land set aside for their use). Together, the reservations comprise 52.4 million acres (21 million hectares) of land, or about 2.5 percent of the land area in the United States. Most reservations are located west of the Mississippi River.
In recent decades, the Native American population has been increasing steadily. Today, there are about 4 million Native Americans. The largest Amerindian tribes today are: Cherokee, Navajo, Chippewa, Sioux, Choctaw, Pueblo, Apache, Iroquois, Lumbee, and Creek.
In 1492, an Italian navigator named Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain in search of a sea route to Asia. Columbus hoped to obtain access to the wealth of spices, silks and gold for which the Asian continent was famous. Six weeks later, his men sighted land. Thinking he had landed in the Indies, a group of islands east of the coast of Asia, he called the people on the first island on which he landed "los Indios," or, in English, "Indians."
Though Columbus had one name for them, the Indians comprised many groups of people. The Indians north of Mexico in what is now the United States and Canada spoke over 300 languages, some of which were as different from one another as English is from Chinese. (Some 50 to 100 of these languages are still spoken today.) They lived scattered across the continent in small bands or groups of bands called tribes. To them, the continent was hardly new. Their ancestors had been living there for perhaps 30,000 years.
Scientists speculate that people first came to North America during the last ice age. At that time, much of the earth's water was frozen in the glaciers that covered large parts of the globe. As sea levels dropped, a strip of land was exposed in the area that is now the Bering Strait. Man probably followed the big game he was hunting across this land bridge from Siberia into Alaska. Over time, these people increased in number, adapted to different environments and spread from the far northern reaches of Alaska and Canada to the tip of South America.
Some groups, such as the peaceful Pueblo of the American Southwest (the present day states of Arizona and New Mexico), lived in busy towns. The Pueblo people were the best organized of the Amerindian farming peoples. They shared many-storied buildings made of adobe (mud and straw) bricks, dried in the sun. Some of these buildings contained as many as 800 rooms, crowded together on top of one another. Their towns were built for safety on the sides and tops of cliffs. The Spanish explorers named both the people and their villages pueblos (Spanish for “town”).The Pueblo made clothing and blankets from cotton which grew wild in the surrounding deserts. On their feet they wore boot-shaped leather moccasins to protect their legs against the sharp rocks and cactus plants of the desert. Long before Europeans came to America the Pueblo were building networks of canals across the deserts to bring water to their fields. They grew corn, squash and beans.
Their neighbors, the Apache, lived in small bands and never became settled farmers. They hunted wildlife and gathered plants, nuts and roots. After acquiring horses from the Spanish, they made their living by raiding food and goods from their more settled white and Indian neighbors. The Apache were fierce and warlike, and they were much feared by the Pueblo.
In the northeastern woods of the North American continent, the Iroquois hunted, fished and farmed. They grew beans, squash and 12 varieties of corn. The people lived in permanent villages, their long houses, covered with elm bark, held as many as 20 families. Each family had its own apartment, on either side of a central hall. The Iroquois were fierce warriors. They surrounded their villages with wooden stockades to protect them from attack by their neighbors. They fought for the glory of their tribe and for the glory of individual warriors. From boyhood on, male Iroquois were taught to fear neither pain, nor death. Bravery in battle was the surest way for a warrior to win respect and high position in his tribe.
Many miles to the west, on the vast plains of grass that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, there was another warrior nation. This group called themselves Dakota, which means “allies”. But they were better known by the name which other Amerindians gave to them – Sioux, which means “enemies”. The Sioux grew no crops and built no houses. For food, for shelter and for clothing they depended upon the buffalo. Millions of these large, slow-moving animals wandered across the western grasslands in vast herds. When the buffalo moved, the Sioux moved. The buffalo never remained on the pasture for long, so everything the Sioux owned was designed to be carried easily. Within hours they could take down their tepees, pack their belongings, and move off after the buffalo. They even carried fire from one camp to the next. A hot ember would be sealed inside a buffalo horn with rotten wood. There it would smolder for days, ready to bring warmth from the old village to the new.
The lifestyle of the people of North America’s northwest coast was different again. They gathered nuts and berries from the forests, but their main food was fish, especially the salmon of the rivers and the ocean. Each spring hundreds of thousands of salmon swam in from the Pacific and fought their way up the fast-flowing rivers to spawn. A few months’ work during this season provided the people of the Pacific coast with enough food to last a whole year.
This abundance of food gave the tribes of the Pacific coast time for feasting, for carving and for building. Tribes like the Haida lived in large plank houses with elaborately carved doorposts. The most important carvings were on totem poles, these were specially decorated tree trunks which some tribes placed in front of their houses, but which the Haida made part of the house itself. The carvings on the totem pole were a record of the history of the family which lived in the house.
Some wealthy Pacific coast tribes, like the Haida, had a special ceremony called “potlatch” (the word means “gift giving”). A modern potlatch is a kind of party at which guests are given gifts, but the original potlatch ceremonies went much further. A chief or head of a family might give away everything that he owned to show how wealthy he was and gain respect. To avoid disgrace, the person receiving the gifts had to give back even more. If he failed to do so his entire family was disgraced.
The Amerindian peoples of North America developed widely varied ways of life. Many Indians were fine craftsmen, they made pottery, baskets, carvings and wove cotton and plant-fiber cloth. They traveled in small boats and on foot, never having developed the wheel. Some, such as the Plains Indians, used dogs to pull a load-carrying frame called a travois. Others, such as the Winnebagoes of the Midwest developed a sophisticated calendar that took the motions of both the sun and the moon into account.
Different as they were, all tribes were greatly affected by the coming of the white man, with his firearms, iron cooking pots, horses, wheeled vehicles and with his diseases, to which the Indians had no immunities. The European arrival changed the Indian way of life forever.
Spanish settlers arrived in North America in the early 1500s. They settled in what are now Florida and California and in the southwest section of the continent. They sent missionaries to bring Christianity and "civilization" – farming, crafts and so on – to the "Indians," and they forced the Indians to labor in their fields, mines and houses.
Other Europeans, such as the French and the Dutch, came to the New World in search of profit. Some came to fish the rich waters off of the Atlantic coast, many came to trade with the Indians. They exchanged guns, iron tools, whiskey and trinkets for beaver and otter pelts.
Most often, though, the Europeans came to establish new homes and to farm. And for that they needed land. Much of the Indians' land appeared vacant to white settlers. The Indians didn't “improve the land” with fences, wells, buildings or permanent towns. Many settlers thought the Indians were savages and that their way of life had little value. They felt they had every right to farm the Indian lands.
On Manhattan Island, the present site of New York City, beaver, deer, fox, wild turkey and other game were plentiful. The Shinnecock Indians used the island for fishing and hunting, but they didn't live there. In 1626, the Dutch "bought" the island from them. The Shinnecock did not understand that once the land was sold, the Dutch felt it was their right to keep the Indians off. Like most Indians, they had no concept of private property.
The Indians believed that the land was there to be shared by all men. They worshipped the earth that provided them with food, clothing and shelter and they took from it only what they needed. They didn't understand when the settlers slaughtered animals to make the woods around their towns safer. They didn't like the roads and towns that to them, scarred the natural beauty of the earth.
Small Indian bands and tribes could do little against the well-armed and determined colonists, but united, they were often a more powerful force. King Philip, a Wampanoag chief, rallied neighboring tribes against the Pilgrims in 1675. For a year, they fought bloody battles. But even his 20,000 allies could do little against the numerous colonists and their guns.
The Iroquois, who inhabited the area below Lakes Ontario and Erie in northern New York and Pennsylvania, were more successful in resisting the whites. In 1570, five tribes joined to form the League of the Iroquois. The League was run by a council made up of 50 representatives from each of five member tribes. The council dealt with matters common to all of the tribes, but it had no say in how the free and equal tribes ran their day-to-day affairs. No tribe was allowed to make war by itself. The council passed laws to deal with crimes such as murder.
The League was a strong power in the 1600s and 1700s. It traded furs with the British. It sided with the British against the French in a war for the dominance of America from 1754 to 1763. The British might not have won that war without the support of the League of the Iroquois. In that case, North America might have had a very different history.
The League stayed strong until the American Revolution. Then, for the first time, the council could not reach a unanimous decision on whom to support. Member tribes made their own decisions, some fighting with the British, some with the colonists, some remaining neutral. As a result, everyone fought against the Iroquois. Their losses were great and the League never recovered.
At the time of the American Revolution, the western boundary of the United States was the Appalachian Mountains. Land had become scarce and expensive in the colonies and many people were eager to settle the wilderness that lay beyond those mountains. Armed with only an axe, a rifle and their own self-confidence, these people journeyed across the mountains to make new farms and settlements out of the wilderness. Many of the new settlers moved to lands north of the Ohio River. Amerindians who already lived on these lands saw the settlers as thieves who had come to steal their hunting grounds and fought these invaders with vengeance. Encouraged by the French or the British, who were trying to retain control of the lands west of the United States, Amerindians attacked frontier settlements. The white settlers struck back, sometimes destroying entire Amerindian villages.
President James Monroe thought that the Indians' only chance for survival was to be removed to an area where they would not be disturbed by the settlers. There they would be free either to continue their old ways of life or to adopt those of white Americans. And so, in 1830, the United States passed the Indian Removal Act to put this policy into practice. The law said that all Indians living east of the Mississippi River would be removed west to a place called Indian Territory. This was an area beyond the Mississippi that was thought to be unusable for white farmers. Some people claimed that the Indian Removal Act was a way of saving the Amerindians but most saw it simply as a way to get rid of them and seize their land.
One of the tribes that suffered greatly from the Indian Removal policy was the Cherokee people. Their lands lay between the state of Georgia and the Mississippi River. Ironically, the Cherokee had already adopted many of the white man's ways. By the early 19th century the Cherokees were a civilized community. Many owned large farms and lived in European-style brick houses. Their towns had stores, sawmills, blacksmith shops, spinning wheels and wagons. They had become Christians and attended church, and sent their children to school. They had a written language and published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English. But none of this saved the Cherokees. In the 1830s the Congress declared that their lands belonged to the state of Georgia and they were divided up for sale to white settlers. When gold was discovered on Cherokee land, pressure for removal mounted.
A few Cherokees were willing to move to the new lands. Though they did not represent the Cherokee nation, they signed a treaty with the American government agreeing to the removal of the Cherokees. The peaceful Cherokees were removed by force from their homes and forced to march overland to Indian Territory (in what is now the state of Oklahoma). The difficult journey took three to five months. The worst year was 1838. In bitterly cold winter weather American soldiers gathered thousands of Cherokee men, women and children, and drove them west. In all, some 4,000 – one quarter of the Cherokee nation – lost their lives in the course of this removal. This shameful moment in American history has come to be called "The Trail of Tears ".
On the Great Plains, tribes such as the Sioux roamed on horseback, hunting the buffalo that ranged there. In the early 19th century an estimated twelve million of these gentle, heavy animals wandered the Great Plains. The buffalo gave them everything they needed to live. They ate its meat, used its skin and fur to make clothing. They stretched its hides over a frame of poles to make the tepees, or tents, they lived in. They carved buffalo bones into knives and tools. The clothing of the Plains Indians was decorated with bead work, and their hair with eagle feathers. These were the proud Indians depicted in television dramas and films about the American West.
In the 1840s wagon trains heading for Oregon and California began to cross the Great Plains. The Sioux allowed them to pass through their lands without trouble. Then railroads began to push across the grasslands. The railroad carried white people who stayed on the prairies and began to plough them. Amerindians made treaties with the government, giving up large pieces of their land. In 1851 the Pawnee people signed away an area that today forms most of the state of Nebraska. In 1858 the Sioux gave up an area almost as big in South Dakota. In the 1860s the Comanche and the Kiowa gave up lands in Kansas, Colorado and Texas. In return, the government promised them peace, food, schools, supplies and the fair arbitration of all conflicts.
One of such treaties was the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868. It declared the vast lands between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains to be Sioux territory, on which whites were prohibited from passing or settling. The government promised that these lands would remain Sioux property “as long as the grass should grow and the water flow.” However, six years later, gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a land the Sioux considered sacred. The United States government tried to buy the Black Hills from the Sioux but they refused to sell. Crazy Horse, a great Sioux chief, said: "One does not sell the Earth upon which the people walk ". A gold rush was on, and the treaty of Fort Laramie was ignored. In the winter of 1875 thousands of white men poured into the area.
By this time the Amerindian peoples of the Great Plains were facing another serious problem. The buffalo that they depended on had begun to disappear. More and more land that the big animals needed to graze upon was being taken and fenced by farmers and ranchers. And whites began to hunt the buffalo for sport and for its hide. They were shooting the buffalo in thousands and left their flesh to rot. In just two years between 1872 and 1874 the hunters almost completely destroyed the great herds. The Amerindians could not understand this behavior. “Has the white man become a child that he should recklessly kill and not eat?” they asked. But the American army encouraged the slaughter, they saw the extermination of the buffalo as the way to end Amerindian resistance.
As more settlers claimed homestead in the West the American government needed more land for them. By 1871, the government had determined that the treaty was no longer an appropriate means of regulating Indian-white relations and that no Indian nation or tribe should be recognized as an independent nation. They pressured the Indians to give up their traditional way of life and to live only on reservations. These reservations were areas of land that were usually so dry and rocky that the government thought white settlers were never likely to want them.
The Amerindians resisted. And though they were outnumbered and outgunned, they inflicted some surprising defeats on the American soldiers. They won their best known victory at the battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876. On a hill beside the Little Big Horn River 3000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse surrounded and killed all 225 men of the company of United States cavalry. The American government and people were angry at the defeat of their soldiers and felt humiliated. More soldiers were sent west, and the Sioux were too weak to fight back. With the buffalo gone, more of their people were dying every day of starvation and disease. So the Sioux surrendered and the soldiers marched them away to the reservations.
In 1890 a religious prophet told the Sioux to dance a special dance called the Ghost Dance. They believed that if they did so a great miracle would take place – their dead warriors would come back to life, the buffalo would return, all the white men would be swept away by a great flood. The Ghost Dance movement was peaceful, but the Dancers’ beliefs worried the government. So did the fact that some of them waved rifles above their heads as they danced. It ordered the army to arrest the movement leaders.
On a cold December day in 1890 a group of 350 Sioux left their reservation. Led by a chief named Big Foot, they set off to join another group nearby for safety. But a party of soldiers stopped them on the way and marched them to an army post at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Next morning the soldiers ordered the Sioux to give up their guns, but one young warrior refused. A shot ran out, followed by many more. The soldiers began shooting down the Sioux men, women and children, within minutes most of the Amerindians were dead or badly wounded. Later many of the wounded died in a blizzard that swept over the camp. This bloody confrontation between the Sioux and the American cavalry regiment resulted in over 300 deaths – mostly Indian – and marked the end of all hope for a return to the Indians' traditional way of life on the Plains.
By 1890 almost all the American West, from the prairies to the Pacific, had been settled by cattle ranchers, farmers and townspeople. There was no more frontier, no mountains beyond which the Indians could live undisturbed. Most were confined to reservations. The government had promised to protect the remaining Indian lands, it also promised them food, materials to build homes, tools to cultivate the land, but the promises were often broken. There was great suffering on the reservations, epidemic diseases swept through them, killing a lot of people, and for a while it seemed as though the Indians really were a vanishing race.
Some people were aware of the poor conditions on the reservations. To survive, many believed, the Indians would have to adopt white ways. On the reservations, Indians were forbidden to practice their religion. Children were sent to boarding schools away from their families.
By the General Allotment Act of 1887, each Indian was allotted 160 acres to farm. But many Indians had no desire to farm. Moreover, the land given to them was often unfertile. After each Indian was given his plot, the government sold the remaining lands to white settlers. The result was disastrous. By 1934, Indian land holdings had been reduced from 138 million acres (56 million hectares) to 48 million (19 million hectares).
In the 20th century the United States became proud of its diverse population. And that included a desire to recognize its Native Americans and to try to compensate them for the unfair treatment they had received. In 1924, the Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared all Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States to be citizens. The origin of this act can be attributed to the increased respect of white legislators for the Indians which resulted from their exemplary contribution during World War I. The Act was passed after a period of agitation by pan Indian groups who demanded enlarged political rights for American Indians.
In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act encouraged the Indians to set up their own governments and ended allotment on the reservations. It halted the policy of trying to persuade Indians to give up their traditional culture and religion. In 1946, the government set up the Indian Claims Commission to deal with claims of unfair treatment or fraud. In the 30 years the Commission operated, it awarded $818 million in damages.
At a time when blacks were protesting violations of their civil rights, Indians, too, took their protests to the American public. In the mid-1960s, they called for an "Indian Power" movement to parallel the "Black Power" movement. In 1972, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and other Indian rights groups staged a protest march on Washington called the "Trail of Broken Treaties". In 1973, national attention once again focused on Wounded Knee, South Dakota. A group of Amerindians armed with rifles occupied this place and stayed there for 71 days. They demanded the return of lands taken in violation of treaty agreements.
Recently, many tribes have earned on the battle for Indian rights in court. They have sued for the return of lands taken from their ancestors. In 1972, two tribes, the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy of Maine, sued for the return of 125 million acres of land (five million hectares) – 58 percent of the state of Maine – and $25 thousand million in damages. The tribes settled for $815 million dollars from the federal government in 1980 and invested the money in a variety of profitable business enterprises operated by members of the tribe. The Sioux in South Dakota sued for the return of the Black Hills, seized from them in 1877. They were awarded $122.5 million.
Many of the attempts by individual Indians and by tribes to respond to white society have been highly successful. Two examples are the prosperous Crow and Blackfoot reservations in Montana, on which these two tribes have established and manage a profitable complex of industrial and service oriented enterprises. However, in spite of many gains made by the Indians, they still lag far behind most Americans in health, wealth and education. Many Native Americans live below the poverty line. Diabetes, pneumonia, influenza and alcoholism claim twice as many Indian lives as other American lives.
Life on the reservations varies greatly. The Navajo reservation, located in the Southwest, is the nation's largest. It is also one of the poorest. Its 16 million acres (6,667,000 hectares) are home for 160,000 Indians. Government housing stands side by side with mobile homes and hogans (eight-sided, one roomed traditional Navajo homes are made from logs and have an earthen roof). Many reservation homes lack electricity and plumbing. The reservation has few towns and few jobs.
In contrast, the Mescalero Apache reservation nearby in New Mexico is one of the nation's wealthiest. It sits on 460,384 acres (186,390 hectares) in some of the highest mountains in the area. The tribe owns and operates a logging company and a cattle ranch. Both are multimillion dollar businesses. They recently built a $22 million luxury resort offering everything from skiing to horseback riding. Most of the reservation's inhabitants live in new two-story houses built on large plots of land.
In all, the Indians signed 370 treaties with the United States. In return for Indian land, the government promised to protect their remaining lands and resources. Government funds support many reservation programs. Since 1824, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has been responsible for Indian lands, resources and programs. But slowly, Indians are gaining a stronger voice in determining how the reservations are operated. Today most reservations are governed by a tribal council, and any run their own police forces, schools and courts that try minor offenses. The aim of most Indian tribes is to become self-supporting. They are trying to attract businesses to the reservations and hope that the natural resources on their reservations will provide much needed income. The Navajo, for example, possess oil, coal and uranium reserves. Other reservations are rich in timber, gas, minerals and water.
DISCUSSION
Why is the story of the Native American unique, tragic and inspiring at the same time?
How many Amerindians live in the USA today? Are they mostly country or city dwellers?
How can the Amerindian cultural heritage be seen today in the modern USA?
What are the most numerous Amerindian tribes today?
How long had native Indian tribes been living on the continent when Columbus discovered it? How did they arrive there?
What was the Pueblo way of living like?
When first Europeans came to America the Apache acquired some horses from them. How did it influence the Apache’s style of living?
What part of the continent did the Iroquois inhabit? What were their dwellings like?
Why did the Sioux way of living require the ability to move their belongings from one place to another? Were they a peaceful tribe?
How did the life of the Pacific coast tribes differ from that of other Amerindians? Can you describe the ceremony called “potlatch”?
How did the arrival of the Spanish influence Amerindian life?
Why did the Indians’ land seem to be vacant to the Europeans?
How did Indian and European attitudes to land differ?
Did Indian tribes unite to fight against the Europeans?
Which of the parties did the League of the Iroquois support in the Seven Years’ War?
What did the government do to keep peace between the Amerindian tribes and white settlers of the frontier?
What was the Amerindians’ only chance to survive according to the idea of President James Monroe? When was the Indian Removal Act passed and what did it state?
What territory did the Cherokee inhabit? Were they a civilized or a savage tribe? Why do they call the history of their removal to the reservation “The Trail of Tears”?
What did the government promise to Amerindians in exchange for their land?
What did the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868 declare? How was it violated six years later?
How did the extermination of the buffalo help white settlers to fight against Amerindians?
What do we learn from the text about the Big Little Horn battle of 1876?
What was the meaning of the Ghost Dance?
What was the result of the bloody confrontation between the Sioux and the American cavalry regiment in 1890?
What actions did the government take to make Indians adopt white ways? Why were many Indians unwilling to farm?
How did Amerindian life change due the New Deal policy (1930s)?
What action was undertaken by Amerindians in South Dakota in 1973? What did they demand?
How does life in different Amerindian reservations vary today?
USE THE TEXT TO PROVE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS
In recent decades the Native American population has been increasing steadily.
The Pueblo were the best organized of the Amerindian farming peoples.
The abundance of food gave the tribes of the Pacific coast time for feasting, carving and building.
The Native tribes of North America developed widely varied ways of life.
Many Amerindians had no concept of private property.
By the time of the American Revolution land in the colonies had become scarce and expensive.
In several years buffalo hunters did more to suppress Amerindian resistance than the whole American army in three decades.
Recently Amerindians have won some battles in court.
Many Amerindian attempts to adopt white society ways have been very successful.
Despite many gains made by Amerindians, they still fall behind most Americans.