Both during and after the colonial era in American history, white settlers engaged in prolonged conflicts with Native Americans in the United States, seeking to displace them and seize their lands, resulting in American enslavement and forced assimilation into settler culture. The 19th century witnessed a surge in efforts to forcibly remove certain Native American nations, while those who remained faced systemic racism at the hands of the federal government. Ideologies like Manifest destiny justified the violent expansion westward, leading to the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and armed clashes.
The dehumanization and demonization of Native Americans, epitomized in the United States Declaration of Independence, underscored a pervasive attitude that underpinned colonial and post-colonial policies. Historical events such as the California genocide, American Indian Wars, the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Navajos, massacres and lynchings reflected the deep-seated racism and violence which were both ingrained in American expansionism, perpetuating a legacy of suffering, forced displacement, and death among Indigenous peoples.
Today, despite legal recognition of their formal equality, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders grapple with economic disparities and disproportionately high rates of health issues, including alcoholism, depression, and suicide. Native Americans face a higher likelihood of being killed in police encounters than any other racial or ethnic group. Native Americans are underrepresented and receive harsher sentences in the criminal justice system, and experience severe disparities in health and healthcare. Racism, oppression, and discrimination persist, fueling a crisis of violence against Native Americans, compounded by societal indifference.
Background
Native Americans have inhabited the North American continent for at least 10,000 years, and millions of Native Americans lived in the region composing the modern-day United States prior to European colonization.Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Vintage Books, 2006, c.2005, p. 18 Both during and after the colonial period of American history, white settlers waged a long series of wars against Native Americans with the aim of displacing them and colonizing their lands. Many Native Americans were enslaved as a result of these wars, while others were forcibly assimilated into the culture of the white settlers.An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. New York: Beacon, 2014. ,
Ethnic cleansing
During the 19th century, the desire to forcibly remove certain Native American nations gained momentum. However, some Native Americans either chose to or were allowed to remain on their land and as a result, they avoided removal but thereafter, the federal government treated them in a racist manner. The Choctaws in Mississippi described their situation in 1849, "we have had our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died." According to Charles Hudson, Joseph B. Cobb, who moved to Mississippi from Georgia, described the Choctaws as having "no nobility or virtue at all, and in some respects he found blacks, especially native Africans, to be more interesting and admirable, the red man's superior in every way. The Choctaw and Chickasaw, the tribes he knew best, were beneath contempt; that is, even worse than black slaves."
Manifest Destiny In the 1800s, ideologies such as manifest destiny, which held the view that the United States was destined to expand from coast to coast on the North American continent, fueled U.S. attacks against, and maltreatment of, Native Americans. In the years leading up to the Indian Removal Act of 1830 there were many armed conflicts between white settlers and Native Americans.Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, Robert Tignor, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, Michael Tsin, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2000, p. 274. A justification for the conquest and subjugation of indigenous people emanated from the stereotyped perception that Native Americans were "merciless Indian savages" (as described in the United States Declaration of Independence). Sam Wolfson in The Guardian writes, "The declaration’s passage has often been cited as an encapsulation of the dehumanizing attitude toward indigenous Americans that the US was founded on."
Simon Moya-Smith, culture editor at Indian Country Today, states, "Any holiday that would refer to my people in such a repugnant, racist manner is certainly not worth celebrating. [July Fourth] is a day when we celebrate our resiliency, our culture, our languages, our children and we mourn the millions – literally millions – of indigenous people who have died as a consequence of American imperialism.""Millions of Americans Have Nothing to Celebrate on the Fourth of July". Mic. Retrieved August 20, 2017
Genocide
Stacie Martin states that the United States has not been legally admonished by the international community for genocidal acts against its Indigenous population, but many historians and academics describe events such as the Mystic massacre, the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek massacre and the Mendocino War as genocidal in nature.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a non-Indigenous professor of ethnic studies, states that U.S. history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories via Indian removal policies, forced removal of Native American children to boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.
The letters exchanged between Bouquet and Amherst during the Pontiac War show Amherst writing to Bouquet the Indigenous people needed to be exterminated: "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execreble race." Historians regard this as evidence of a genocidal intent by Amherst, as well as part of a broader genocidal attitude frequently displayed against Native Americans during the colonization of the Americas. When smallpox swept the northern plains of the U.S. in 1837, the U.S. Secretary of War Lewis Cass ordered that no Mandan (along with the Arikara, the Cree, and the Blackfeet) be given smallpox vaccinations, which were provided to other tribes in other areas.
The United States has to date not undertaken any truth commission nor built a memorial for the genocide of Indigenous people. It does not acknowledge nor compensate for the historical violence against Native Americans that occurred during territorial expansion to the West Coast. American museums such as the Smithsonian Institution do not dedicate a section to the genocide. In 2013, the National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution to create a space for the National American Indian Holocaust Museum inside the Smithsonian, but it was ignored by the latter.
Acts of genocide In 1861, residents of Mankato, Minnesota, formed the Knights of the Forest, with the goal of 'eliminating all Indians from Minnesota.' An egregious attempt occurred with the California genocide, the first two years of which saw the death of thousands of Native Americans. Under Mexican rule in California, Indians were subjected to de facto enslavement under a system of peonage by the white elite. While in 1850, California formally entered the Union as a free state, with respect to the issue of slavery, the practice of Indian indentured servitude was not outlawed by the California Legislature until 1863.Castillo, Edward D. (1998). "Short Overview of California Indian History" , California Native American Heritage Commission. The 1863 deportation of the Navajos by the U.S. government occurred when 9,000 Navajos were forcibly relocated to an internment camp in Bosque Redondo, where, under armed guards, up to 3,500 Navajo and Mescalero Apache men, women, and children died from starvation and disease over the next 5 years.M. Annette Jaimes (1992). The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. p. 34. South End Press
American Indian Wars
Native American nations on the plains in the west continued armed conflicts with the U.S. throughout the 19th century, through what were called generally Indian Wars. Jeffrey Ostler, the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon, stated the American Indian War "was genocidal war." Xabier Irujo, professor of genocide studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, stated, "the toll on human lives in the wars against the native nations between 1848 and 1881 was horrific." Notable conflicts in this period include the Dakota War, Great Sioux War, Snake War and Colorado War. These conflicts occurred in the United States from the time of the earliest colonial settlements in the 17th century until the end of the 19th century. The various wars resulted from a wide variety of factors, the most common being the desire of settlers and governments for Indian tribes' lands.
Massacres
In the years leading up to the Wounded Knee massacre the U.S. government had continued to seize Lakota lands. A Ghost Dance ritual on the Northern Lakota reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, led to the U.S. Army's attempt to subdue the Lakota. The dance was part of a religion founded by Wovoka that told of the return of the Messiah to relieve the suffering of Native Americans and promised that if they would live righteous lives and perform the Ghost Dance properly, the European American invaders would vanish, the bison would return, and the living and the dead would be reunited in an Edenic world. On December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee, gunfire erupted, and U.S. soldiers killed up to 300 Indians, mostly old men, women and children.