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Native
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Introduction:
Part III
Cultural
Survival Strategies
As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the Indians east of
the Mississippi faced a fundamental challenge: how to preserve
their cultures and heritage in the face of declining populations
and a loss of land. As the historian Gary Nash has shown, these
people met this challenge by adopting two basic survival strategies.
One strategy, physical resistance, was pursued by the Shawnees
and other tribes in Indiana and the Creeks in northwestern Georgia
and Alabama. The other strategy, cultural adaptation and renewal,
was embraced by the Iroquois and the Cherokees.
Few
people better illustrate the process of cultural adaptation than
the Iroquois. Displaced from their traditional lands and suffering
the psychological and cultural disintegration brought on by epidemic
disease, rampant alcoholism, and dwindling land resources, the
Iroquois reconstituted and revitalized their culture under the
leadership of a prophet named Handsome Lake. The prophet endorsed
the demand of Quaker missionaries that the traditional Iroquois
sexual division of labor emphasizing male hunting and female horticulture
be replaced. He argued that men should farm and women rear children
and care for the home. He also called for modification of the
Iroquois system of matrilineal descent, in which the tie between
mothers and daughters had been strong and the bond between spouses
had been fragile. Handsome Lake emphasized the sanctity of the
marriage bond, and said that marriage should take precedence over
all other kinship ties.
As
a result of Handsome Lake's religious movement, the Iroquois abandoned
their matrilineal longhouses and began to dwell in male-headed
households in individual log cabins. They modified their system
of matrilineal descent to allow fathers to pass land to their
sons. And Iroquois men took up farming, even though this was traditionally
viewed as women's work. By adopting those aspects of the encroaching
white culture that were relevant to their lives and fitting them
into traditional cultural patterns, the Iroquois were largely
able to maintain their culture, values, and rituals.
The
Cherokees also demonstrated the ability of Native Americans to
adapt to changing conditions while maintaining their tribal heritage.
During the early nineteenth century, these people developed a
written alphabet, opened schools, established churches, built
roads, operated printing presses, and even adopted a constitution.
The
alternative to cultural revitalization was armed resistance. Between
1803 and 1809, William Henry Harrison, Indiana's territorial governor,
acquired thirty-three million acres in cessions from Indians in
the Old Northwest. Two Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa
("the Shawnee Prophet"), to resist further encroachments,
created a pan-Indian alliance, consisting of the Kickapoos, Menominis,
Ottawas, Potawatomis, Shawnees, Winnebagos, and Wyandots. In 1811,
when Tecumsah was in the South attempting to rally support, Harrison
forced a confrontation with the Shawnee Prophet at the battle
of Tippecanoe. The Indian stronghold, Prophetstown, was burned,
and Indian supplies were destroyed. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh
fought in support of the British. But he was killed at the battle
of the Thames in 1813, ending effective Indian resistance in the
Old Northwest.
The
military power of the Creek Indians was also broken during the
War of 1812. During his trip to the South, Tecumseh encouraged
the Creeks to defend their land from encroaching whites. In retaliation
for a Creek attack on an American fort, in which some 500 whites
were killed, Andrew Jackson and a force of 4,000 surrounded the
chief Creek village at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. In the ensuing
battle, more than 800 Creeks were killed, against 49 white deaths.
The
War of 1812 marked a crucial dividing line in the history of the
eastern Indians. No longer would they have European allies capable
of supplying guns or slowing the advance of white settlers. In
the Old Northwest, Britain agreed to abandon its forts on American
soil. In the South, Spain ceded part of Florida in 1810 and the
rest in 1819, leaving the southeastern Indians, like the Seminoles,
without a secure refuge. Abandoned by their British and Spanish
allies, the eastern Indians would have to confront a new policy:
removing all eastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi
River.
Clearing
the Land of Indians
At the time Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, 125,000 Native
Americans still lived east of the Mississippi River. Cherokee,
Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek Indians--60,000 strong--held millions
of acres in what would become the southern Cotton Kingdom stretching
across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The political question
was whether these Indian tribes would be permitted to block white
expansion. By 1840, Jackson and his successor, Martin Van Buren,
had answered this question. All Indians east of the Mississippi
had been uprooted from their homelands and moved westward, with
the exception of rebellious Seminoles in Florida and small numbers
of Indians living on isolated reservations in Michigan, North
Carolina, and New York.
Since
Jefferson's presidency, two conflicting Indian policies, assimilation
and removal, had governed the treatment of Native Americans. One
policy, assimilation, encouraged Indians to adopt white American
customs and economic practices. The government provided financial
assistance to missionaries in order to Christianize and educate
Native Americans and convince them to adopt single family farms.
Proponents defended the assimilation policy as the only way Native
Americans would be able to survive in a white-dominated society.
According to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,
"There is no place on earth to which they can migrate, and
live in the savage and hunter state. The Indian tribes must, therefore,
be progressively civilized, or successively perish."
The other policy--removal--was first suggested by Thomas Jefferson
as the only way to ensure the survival of Indian cultures. The
goal of this policy was to encourage the voluntary migration of
Indians westward to tracts of land where they could live free
from white harrassment. As early as 18l7, James Monroe declared
that the nation's security depended upon rapid settlement along
the southern coast and that it was in the best interests of Native
Americans to move westward. In 1825 he set before Congress a plan
to resettle all eastern Indians upon tracts in the West where
whites would not be allowed to live. Initially, Jackson followed
the dual policy of assimilation and removal, promising remuneration
to tribes that would move westward, while offering small plots
of land to individual Indians who would operate family farms.
After 1830, however, Jackson favored only removal.
The
shift in federal Indian policy came partly as a result of a controversy
between the Cherokee nation and the state of Georgia. The Cherokee
people had adopted a constitution asserting sovereignty over their
land, and the state of Georgia responded by abolishing tribal
rule and claiming that the Cherokee fell under its jurisdiction.
The discovery of gold on Cherokee land triggered a land rush,
and the Cherokee nation sued to keep white settlers from encroaching
upon their territory. In two important cases, Cherokee Nation
v. Georgia in 1831 and Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, the Supreme
Court ruled that states could not pass laws conflicting with federal
Indian treaties and that the federal government had an obligation
to exclude white intruders from Indian lands. Angered, Jackson
is said to have exclaimed: "John Marshall has made his decision;
now let him enforce it."
The primary thrust of Jackson's removal policy was to encourage
Indian tribes to sell all tribal lands in exchange for new lands
in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Such a policy, the President maintained,
would open new farm land to whites while offering Indians a haven
where they would be free to develop at their own pace. "There,"
he wrote, "your white brothers will not trouble you, they
will have no claims to the land, and you can live upon it, you
and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water
runs, in peace and plenty."
Pushmataha,
a Choctaw chieftain, called on his people to reject Jackson's
offer. Far from being a "country of tall tress, many water
courses, rich lands and high grass abounding in games of all kinds,"
the promised preserve in the west was simply a barren desert.
Jackson responded by warning that if the Choctaw refused to move
west, he would destroy their nation.
During
the Winter of 1831, the Choctaw became the first tribe to walk
the "Trail of Tears" westward. Promised government assistance
failed to arrive and malnutrition, exposure, and an epidemic of
cholera killed many members of the nation. In 1836, the Creek
suffered the hardships of removal. About 3,500 of the tribes 15,000
members died along the westward trek. Those who resisted removal
were bound in chains and marched in double file.
The
Cherokee, emboldened by the Supreme Court decisions that declared
that Georgia law had no force on Indian territory, resisted removal.
Fifteen thousand Cherokee joined in a protest against Jackson's
policy: "Little did [we] anticipate that when taught to think
and feel as the American citizen...[we] were to be despoiled by
[our] guardian, to become strangers and wanderers in the land
of [our] fathers, forced to return to the savage life, and to
seek a new home in the wilds of the far west, and that without
[our] consent." The federal government bribed a faction of
the tribe to leave the land in exchange for transportation costs
and $5 million, but the majority of the people held out until
1838, when the army evicted them from their land. All totalled,
4,000 of the 15,000 Cherokee died along the trail to Oklahoma.
A
number of tribes organized resistance against removal. In the
Old Northwest, the Sauk and Fox Indians fought the Black Hawk
War to recover ceded tribal lands in Illinois and Wisconsin. At
the time that they had signed a treaty transferring title to their
land, these people had not understood the implications of their
action. "I touched the goose quill to the treaty," said
Chief Black Hawk, "not knowing, however, that by that act
I consented to give away my village." The United States army
and the Illinois state militia ended resistance by wantonly killing
nearly 500 Sauk and Fox men, women, and children who were trying
to retreat across the Mississippi River. In Florida, the military
spent seven years putting down Seminole resistance at a cost of
$20 million and 1,500 troops, and even then only after the treacherous
act of seizing the Seminole leader Osceola during peace talks.
By twentieth-century standards, Jackson's Indian policy was both
callous and inhumane. Despite the semblance of legality--ninety-four
treaties were signed with Indians during Jackson's presidency--Indian
migrations to the west usually occurred under the threat of government
coercion. Even before Jackson's death in 1845, it was obvious
that tribal lands in the West were no more secure than Indian
lands had been in the East. In 1851 Congress passed the Indian
Appropriations Act, which sought to concentrate the western Native
American population upon reservations.
Why
were such morally indefensible policies adopted? The answer is
that many white Americans regarded Indian control of land and
other natural resources as a serious obstacle to their desire
for expansion and as a potential threat to the nation's security.
Even had the federal government wanted to, it probably lacked
the resources or military means to protect eastern Indians from
the encroaching white farmers, squatters, traders, and speculators.
By the 1830s, a growing number of missionaries and humanitarians
agreed with Jackson that Indians needed to be resettled westward
for their own protection. But the removal program was doomed from
the start. Given the nation's commitment to limited government
and its lack of experience with social welfare programs, removal
was doomed to disaster. Contracts for food, clothing, and transportation
were let to the lowest bidders, many of whom failed to fulfill
their contractual responsibilities. Indians were resettled on
arid lands, unsuited for intensive farming. The tragic outcome
was readily foreseeable.
The
problem of preserving native cultures in the face of an expanding
nation was not confined to the United States. Jackson's removal
policy can only be properly understood when it is seen as part
of a broader process: the political and economic incorporation
of frontier regions into expanding nation states. During the early
decades of the nineteenth century, European nations were penetrating
into many frontier areas, from the steppes of Russia to the plains
of Argentina, the veldt of South Africa, the outback of Australia,
and the American West. In each of these regions, national expansion
was justified on the grounds of strategic interest (to preempt
settlement by other powers) or in the name of opening valuable
land to settlement and development. And in each case, expansion
was accompanied by the removal or wholesale killing of native
peoples.
The
"Five Civilized Tribes" and the Civil War
There is a tragic postscript to the story of the Trail of Tears.
In 1861, many Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles
decided to join the Confederacy, in part because some of the tribes'
members owned slaves. In return, the Confederate states agreed
to pay all annuities that the U.S. government had provided and
let these tribes send delegates to the Confederate Congress. A
Cherokee chief, Stand Watie, served as a brigadier general for
the Confederacy and did not formally surrender until a month after
the war was over. Some of these people supported the Union, however,
including a Cherokee faction led by Chief John Ross.
After
the war, the tribes were severely punished for supporting the
Confederacy. The Seminoles were required to sell their reservation
at 15 cents an acre and buy new land from the Creeks at 50 cents
an acre. The other tribes were required to give up half their
territory in Oklahoma, to become reservations for the Arapahoes,
Caddos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Iowas, Kaws, Kickapoos, Pawnees,
Potawatomies, Sauk and Foxes, and Shawnees. In addition, the tribes
had to allow railroads to cut across their land.
The
Tragedy of the Western Indians
It took white settlers a century and a half to expand as far west
as the Appalachian Mountains, a few hundred miles from the Atlantic
coast. It took another 50 years to push the frontier to the Mississippi.
By 1830, fewer than 100,000 American soldiers, missionaries, fur
trappers, and traders, had crossed the Mississippi.
By
1850, pioneers had pushed the edge of settlement all the way to
the Pacific Ocean. When Americans ventured westward, they did
not enter virgin land. Large parts of the West were already occupied
by Indians and Mexicans, who had lived in the region for hundreds
of years and established their own distinctive ways of life.
In
1840, before large numbers of white pioneers and farmers crossed
the Mississippi, at least 500,000 Indians lived in the Southwest,
California, the Great Plains, and the Northwest Pacific Coast,
divided into more than two hundred tribes. The single largest
concentration of Indians was in California, where some 275,000
lived in the early nineteenth century.
The
California Indians had little contact with Europeans before the
late eighteenth century, when Spanish explorers, soldiers, and
missionaries arrived from Mexico. Despite its proximity to Mexico,
Spain did not begin to colonize the area until 1769, when it learned
that Russian seal hunters and traders were moving south from Alaska.
The
Spanish clergy played a critical role in colonization, using the
mission system, which was designed to spread Christianity among,
and establish control over, the indigenous western population.
A Franciscan father, Junipero Serra, established the first California
mission near the site of present-day San Diego. Between 1769 and
1823, Spain established twenty-one missions in California, extending
from San Diego northward to Sonoma. By 1830, thirty thousand Indians
lived in mission communities, where they toiled in workhouses,
orchards, and fields for long hours. At least a quarter million
other Indians lived outside of missions, occupying small villages
during the winter, and moving during the rest of the year gathering
wild plants and seeds, hunting small game, and fishing in the
rivers.
The
Mexican Revolution led to the demise of the mission system in
California. In 1833-34, the missions were "secularized"--broken
up and their property sold or given away to private citizens.
By 1846, mission lands had fallen into the hands of eight hundred
private landowners. The Indians who worked on these private estates
had a status similar to that of slaves. Indeed, the death rate
of Indians on these ranchos was twice as high as among southern
slaves, and by 1848 a fifth of California's Indian population
had died.
The
acquisition of California by the United States resulted in further
reductions in the number of Indians. In 1846, fifteen years before
the United States was plunged into civil war, it fought a war
against Mexico that increased the country's size by one third.
On January 10, 1848, less than ten days before the signing of
the peace treaty ending the war, gold was discovered in California.
Within two years, California's non-Indian population soared from
14,000 to 100,000. For California's Indians, the results were
catastrophic. Between 1849 and 1859, disease and deliberate campaigns
of extermination killed 70,000 Indians. Many Indian women were
forced into concubinage and many men into virtual slavery. By
1880, there were fewer than 20,000 Indians in California.
In
California and northward the Indian population remained extremely
vulnerable to European diseases. In the Oregon country of the
Pacific Northwest, the arrival of Protestant missionaries, beginning
in 1834, ignited epidemics of measles and other diseases that
killed tens of thousands of people. Many more died during the
Cayuse War (1847-50) and the Rogue River wars of the 1850s.
A
pervasive belief in white supremacy led to mass killings of Indians
in Texas and the Great Basin, the harsh, barren region between
the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. A treatise of the 1850s
provided a pseudo-scientific rationale for the extermination campaigns:
"The Barbarous races of America...are essentially untameable.
Not merely have all attempts to civilize them failed, but also
every endeavor to enslave them."
In
Texas, settlers accused Indian warriors of impaling white women
on fence posts and staking men under the sun with their eyelids
removed, while heaping burning coals on their genitals. They retaliated
with campaigns of extermination against the Karankawas and other
peoples who inhabited the area. In the Great Basin, where food
was so scarce that the Paiutes and Gosiutes subsisted on berries,
pine nuts, roots, and rabbits, impoverished Indians were sometimes
shot by trappers for sport.
Resistance
on the Great Plains
Beyond the Mississippi River, stretching westward to the Rocky
Mountains and south from Alberta and Saskatchewan to Texas, lies
a dry, largely treeless region known as the Great Plains. Before
European contact, the Plains Indians were relatively small in
number, since it was difficult to cultivate the tough Plains sod.
Many of the original inhabitants of the Plains were farmers who
lived in villages along rivers and streams where the land was
more easily cultivated. In the summer, these people would leave
their villages to hunt antelope, bison, deer, and elk.
The
introduction of the horse by the Spanish brought about a thoroughgoing
transformation of life on the Plains. Population size, hunting,
communication, transportation, and warfare--all greatly changed.
Horses made the Plains Indians much more efficient hunters. Animals
that were difficult to hunt on foot could easily be followed on
horseback. As a result, many agricultural people, like the Cheyenne,
became hunters.
During
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many new peoples,
including the Apaches, the Arapahoes, the Blackfeet, the Cheyennes,
the Comanches, and the Sioux--moved onto the Plains, tripling
the population to approximately 360,000. As an increasing number
of tribes were forced onto the Plains by advancing white settlement,
intertribal conflict grew. These Indians developed sign language
as an easily understood system of communication.
Not
all Plains Indians, however, conformed to the Hollywood image
of hunters on horseback. Many village dwellers continued to herd
sheep and cultivate corn, beans, and squash. Semi-sedentary tribes,
such as the Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Pawnee, lived in earth-
or sod-covered lodges with log frames, while more nomadic peoples
lived in portable tipis covered with buffalo hides.
A
belief that the Great Plains was a dry, barren wasteland--a great
American desert--delayed white settlement in that region. But
the discovery of gold, silver, copper, and lead in Nevada and
Colorado in the 1850s, Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and the
Black Hills of South Dakota in the 1870s touched off a rush of
white prospectors into these areas. Ranchers soon arrived, bringing
cattle and sheep to the Plains. Farmers followed, using windmills
to draw water from wells, and shipping their goods on newly constructed
railroads. As miners, ranchers, and land-hungry farmers moved
onto the Plains, they violated treaties that guaranteed this land
to the Indians "as long as the rivers shall run and the grass
shall grow."
To find a way for Indians and white settlers to live peacefully
federal officials introduced a policy known as "concentration."
At Fort Laramie in Wyoming in 1851, representatives of the United
States government and the Plains Indians met and Indian leaders
agreed to restrict hunting to specified regions in exchange for
yearly payments in money and goods. But this agreement quickly
broke down, as railroad tracks disrupted the migration routes
of buffalo herds and farms disrupted Indian lands.
Beginning
in the 1860s, a thirty-year conflict arose as the government sought
to concentrate the Plains tribes on reservations. Philip Sheridan,
a Civil War general who led many campaigns against the Plains
Indians, is famous for saying "the only good Indian is a
dead Indian." But even he recognized the injustice that lay
behind the late nineteenth-century warfare:
We
took away their country and their means of support, broke up
their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease
and decay among them, and it was for this and against this that
they made war. Could anyone expect less?
Violence
erupted first in Minnesota, where, by 1862, the Santee Sioux were
confined to a territory 150 miles long and just 10 miles wide.
Denied a yearly payment and agricultural aid promised by treaty,
these people rose up in August 1862 and killed 500 white settlers
at New Ulm. Lincoln appointed John Pope, who had commanded Union
forces at the second Battle of Bull Run, to crush the uprising.
The general announced that he would deal with the Sioux "as
maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties
or compromises can be made." When the Sioux surrendered in
September 1862, about 1,800 were taken prisoner and 303 were condemned
to death. Lincoln commuted the sentences of most, but he authorized
the hanging of 38, the largest mass execution in American history.
In
1864, warfare spread to Colorado, after the discovery of gold
led to an influx of whites. Because the regular army was fighting
the Confederacy, a the Colorado territorial militia was responsible
for maintaining order. On November 29, 1864, a group of Colorado
volunteers, under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington, fell
on Chief Black Kettle's unsuspecting band of Cheyennes at Sand
Creek in eastern Colorado, where they had gathered under the protection
of the governor. "We must kill them big and little,"
he told his men. "Nits make lice" (nits are the eggs
of lice). The militia slaughtered about 150 Cheyenne, mostly women
and children.
Violence
broke out on other parts of the Plains. Between 1865 and 1868,
conflict raged in Utah. In 1866, the Teton Sioux, tried to stop
construction of the Bozeman Trail, leading from Fort Laramie,
Wyoming to the Virginia City, Wyoming, gold fields, by attacking
and killing Captain William J. Fetterman and 79 soldiers.
The
Sand Creek and Fetterman massacres produced a national debate
over Indian policy. In 1867, Congress created a Peace Commission
to recommend ways to reduce conflict on the Plains. The commission
recommended that Indians be moved to small reservations, where
they would be Christianized, educated, and taught to farm.
At
two conferences in 1867 and 1868, the federal government demanded
that the Plains Indians give up their lands and move to reservations.
In return for supplies and annuities, the southern Plains Indians
were told to move to poor, unproductive lands in Oklahoma and
the northern tribes to the Black Hills of the Dakotas. The alternative
to acceptance was warfare. The commissioner of Indian Affairs,
Ely S. Parker, himself a Seneca Indian, declared that any Indian
who refused to "locate in permanent abodes provided for them,
would be subject wholly to the control and supervision of military
authorities." Many whites regarded the Plains Indian as an
intolerable obstacle to westward expansion. They agreed with Theodore
Roosevelt that the West was not meant to be "kept as nothing
but a game reserve for squalid savages."
Leaders
of several tribes--including the Apaches, Arapahos, Cheyennes,
Kiowas, Navajos, Shoshones, and Sioux--agreed to move onto reservations.
But many Indians rejected the land cessions made by their chiefs.
In
the Southwest, war broke out in 1871 in New Mexico and Arizona
with the massacre of more than one hundred Indians at Camp Grant.
The Apache war did not end until 1886, when their leader, Geronimo
was captured. On the southern Plains, war erupted when the Cheyennes,
Comanches, and Kiowas staged raids into the Texas panhandle. The
Red River War ended only after federal troops destroyed Indian
food supplies and killed a hundred Cheyenne warriors near the
Sappa River in Kansas. This brought resistance on the southern
Plains to a close. In the Pacific Northwest, the Nez Perce of
Oregon and Idaho rebelled against the federal reservation policy
and then attempted to escape to Canada, covering 1300 miles in
just 75 days. They were forced to surrender in Montana, just forty
miles short of the Canadian border. Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce
leader, offered a poignant explanation for why he had surrendered:
I
am tired of fighting....The old men are all killed.... The little
children are freezing to death....From where the sun now stands,
I will fight no more forever.
After their surrender, the Nez Perce were taken to Oklahoma,
where most died of disease.
The
best-known episode of Indian resistance took place after miners
discovered gold in the Black Hills--land that had been set aside
as a reservation "in perpetuity." When thousands of
miners staked claims on Sioux lands, war erupted, in which an
Indian force led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull killed General
George Custer and his 264 men at the Battle of the Little Big
Horn. "Custer's Last Stand" was followed by five years
of warfare in Montana that confined the Sioux to their reservations.
Several
factors contributed to the defeat of the Plains Indians. One was
a shift in the military balance of power. Before the Civil War,
an Indian could shoot thirty arrows in the time it took a soldier
to load and shoot his rifle once. The introduction of the Colt
six-shooter and the repeating rifle after the Civil War, undercut
this Indian advantage. During the 1870s, the army also introduced
a military tactic--winter campaigning. The army attacked Plains
Indians during the winter when they divided into small bands,
making it difficult for Indians effectively to resist.
Another
key was the destruction of the Indian food supply, especially
the buffalo. In 1860, about 13 million roamed the Plains. These
animals provided Plains Indians with many basic necessities. They
ate buffalo meat, made clothing and tipi coverings out of hides,
used fats for grease, fashioned the bones into tools and fishhooks,
made thread and bowstrings from the sinews, and even burned dried
buffalo droppings ("chips") as fuel. Buffalo also figured
prominently in Plains Indians' religious life. After the Civil
War, the herds were cut down by professional hunters, who shot
a hundred an hour to feed railroad workers, and by wealthy easterners
who killed them for sport. By 1890, only about 1,000 bison remained
alive. Government officials quite openly viewed the destruction
of the buffalo as a tool for controlling the Plains Indians. Secretary
of the Interior Columbus Delano explained in 1872, "as they
become convinced that they can no longer rely upon the supply
of game for their support, they will return to the more reliable
source of subsistence...."
Wounded
Knee
The late nineteenth century marked the nadir of Indian life. Deprived
of their homelands, their revolts suppressed, and their way of
life besieged, many Plains Indians dreamed of restoring a vanished
past, free of hunger, disease, and bitter warfare. Beginning in
the 1870s, a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance arose
among Indians of the Great Basin, and then spread, in the late
1880s, to the Great Plains. Beginning among the Paiute Indians
of Nevada in 1870, the Ghost Dance promised to restore the way
of life of their ancestors.
During
the late 1880s, the Ghost Dance had great appeal among the Sioux,
despairing over the death of a third of their cattle by disease
and angry that the federal government had cut their food rations.
In 1889, Wovoka, a Paiute holy man from Nevada, had a revelation.
If only the Sioux would perform sacred dances and religious rites,
then the Great Spirit would return and raise the dead, restore
the buffalo to life, and cause a flood that would destroy the
whites.
Wearing
special Ghost Dance shirts, fabricated from white muslim and decorated
with red fringes and painted symbols, dancers would spin in a
circle until they became so dizzy that they entered into a trance.
White settlers became alarmed: "Indians are dancing in the
snow and are wild and crazy...We need protection, and we need
it now."
Fearful
that the Ghost Dance would lead to a Sioux uprising, army officials
ordered Indian police to arrest the Sioux leader Sitting Bull.
When Sitting Bull resisted, he was killed. In the ensuing panic,
his followers fled the Sioux reservation. Federal troops tracked
down the Indians and took them to a cavalry camp on Wounded Knee
Creek. There, on December 29, 1890, one of the most brutal incidents
in American history took place. While soldiers disarmed the Sioux,
someone fired a gun. The soldiers responded by using machine guns
to slaughter over 200 Indian men, women, and children. The Oglala
Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk summed up the meaning of Wounded
Knee:
I
can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and
was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there.
The
Battle of Wounded Knee marked the end of three centuries of bitter
warfare between Indians and whites. Indians had been confined
to small reservations, where reformers would seek to transform
them into Christian farmers. In the future, the Indian struggle
to maintain an independent way of life and a separate culture
would take place on new kinds of battlefields. |
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