Native Americans lived in the western territories of the American continent for more than 10 millennia. In the late 19th century, approximately 250,00 Native people lived in the American West.1 Nevertheless, the brutal expansion of American settlers significantly altered the indigenous way of living and resulted in thousands of killings. The aim is to understand the logic and reasoning behind such unacceptable actions. At the same time, it is important to understand how the indigenous population fought against this expansion. The main thesis is that the expansionist mindset of the well-equipped white conquerors was a factor in the hard-line approach to Native Americans.
The harsh treatment of Native Americans by the US government is explained by the expansionist and racist thinking of federal powers, which imposed collective responsibility on all American Indians. The literature discussing this period shows that there were some incidents when Native Americans were responsible for the killings of white people.2 Angry colonists took revenge for these crimes not on the guilty, but on the entire population. For example, in 1891, a Sioux delegation described the events of the Wounded Knee Massacre to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C. They claimed that the massacre of nearly 300 Lakota people happened because a young Indian guy fired the gun.3 However, it was absolutely unnecessary to kill all the people. Thus, the whole thinking about the backwardness of Native Americans was the cause of physical and cultural genocide.
However, although American residents were cruel toward Native Americans, they tried to assimilate these indigenous groups. The main reason for these policies was the assumption that homogeneous and culturally similar Native Americans would more easily accept the economic and political intrusion in their lands. This approach destroyed cultural code of many Indian tribes. Nevertheless, assimilation policies improved indigenous people’s quality of life. As Laura C. Kellogg indicates, the introduction of proper education resulted in the enhancement of self-consciousness.4 Among Americans, there was the party of reformers who tried to preserve Indians from white greed and violence. Acknowledging that the co-living of Americans and Indians was unavoidable, reformers tried to establish land rights and educated Natives about their rights.5 Therefore, besides pure assimilation for reasons of power accumulation, there was the stream of approach aimed at helping Native Americans understand ‘the rules of the game’.
Native Americans tried to resist the oppression and intrusion of American residents in the late 19th, but the more powerful weaponry of the latter caused a large number of victims. Helen Hunt Jackson was a contemporary of these events describing the autocracies of white people. She indicates that the main features of white people’s behavior were “cheating, robbing, [and] breaking promises”.6 However, although Native Americans tried to oppose newcomers with the help of prophets and tribe leaders, every time someone attacked Americans, there was harsh revenge. Thus, it seems that the inequality of arms and other means of fighting blocked the resistance movement.
To conclude, this essay discussed the main features surrounding American expansion in the West in the late 19th. To understand the behavior of white conquerors, one should realize how they thought about Native Americans. For these people, Indians were just barriers before gold mines and new profits. They considered Native Americans as backward creatures who could not understand anything about Americans’ economic plans. Nevertheless, the reformers tried to educate indigenous people at the expense of peculiar local cultural identity. The system of schools was based on Americanized knowledge which was fundamentally different from the Native Americans’ perspectives.
Bibliography
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Kellogg, Laura M. Cornelius, Kristina Ackley, and Cristina Stanciu. “Some Facts and Figures on Indian Education.” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 1, no. 15 (1913): 36-46.
Locke, Joseph L., and Ben Wright. The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook, Vol. 2: Since 1877. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: H. Holt, 1919.
United States Department of the Interior. Annual Report of the Department of the Interior. Vol. 2. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1892.
White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Footnotes
- Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright, The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook, Vol. 2: Since 1877 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 28.
- Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 44.
- United States Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Department of the Interior. Vol. 2. (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1892), 179-181.
- Laura M. Cornelius Kellogg, Kristina Ackley, and Cristina Stanciu, “Some Facts and Figures on Indian Education,” Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 1, no. 15 (1913): 40.
- Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 111.
- Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt, 1919).