3. Peace or War?
• Two different Native American views
• Why the difference?
4. "Teach your children what we have taught our children that the earth is our mother.
What ever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
This we know.
The earth does not belong to us.
We belong to the earth.
This we know.
All things are connected-like the blood which unites one family.
All things are connected.
What ever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
We did not weave the web of life;
we are merely a strand in it.
Whatever we do to the web,
We do to ourselves".
Chief Seattle
Born 1780, Blake Island
Died 1866, Port Madison
5. Sitting Bull
was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man
who led his people as a tribal chief during years of resistance
to United States government policies.
He was born in 1831, Grand River
He died 1890 on Standing Rock Indian Reservation
6. “The Indian" has been recklessly portrayed
throughout American history
The gross caricatures of Native Americans in
Hollywood westerns are only the most familiar
example
During the nineteenth century, cheap novels
painted a similarly unreal and stereotypic portrait of
the Indian as a bloodthirsty savage
More serious writers, like James Fennimore
Cooper, sometimes portrayed the Indian as a
"noble savage" rather than a barbaric warrior
7. But it’s a more complicated story…
A more accurate historical narrative begins with the fact that two centuries
after the first English settlers reached Virginia in 1607, the fate of the North
American continent was still undetermined
In 1763, the British drew a line limiting Anglo-American expansion to
the east side of the Appalachian Mountains
They acknowledged Indian rights to the land as the continent's first
occupants and they mandated that Indian lands only be obtained by
treaty and purchase
8. But after the American Revolution Britain gave all of its North
American holdings south of Canada to the United States
The territorial claims of Native Americans were basically
cancelled by this action and for a few years, the newly founded
United States operated under the concept that the Indians were
a defeated people, and therefore a people with no rights
But during George Washington's presidency Secretary of War
Henry Knox tried to place US-Indian relations on a more fair basis
He believed that treating America's Indians with justice was the
young republic's first test
So he therefore tried to negotiate treaties rooted in the idea that the
Indians possessed rights under natural law as the original occupants
of the land
9. Knox's policies were not implemented with complete success nor were
they followed by other administrations
President Andrew Jackson resolved during the 1830s to remove
all eastern Indians to land west of the Mississippi River
10. America‘s Seventh
President
1829 - 1837
The efforts of this "Indian-hating" president have been contrasted with
the more humane attempts of judges, congressmen, missionaries, and
philanthropists to defend Native Americans and their claims to the land
But the truth is more complex –
Jackson believed he was dealing with a defeated nation who had
only passed through hunting lands and had no legal ownership of
land
In modern terms Jackson would be seen as a racist (although he
encouraged inter-racial marriage and adopted an Indian child)
11. For twenty years following removal US-Indian relations were
comparatively calm
But as western expansion accelerated after 1860 frontier violence
increased
Homesteaders flocking west hunting for cheap public lands
Railroad companies laying tracks across the hunting grounds
of the Plains Indians started wars lasting almost 20 years
12. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian "threat" against
America's frontier was gone (mostly through violence)
Defeated in war and confined to reservations the Indian nations
that had once filled the continent had been reduced to about
250,000 people
But even in this framework the complexity
of Native Americans' condition shouldn’t
be simplified
The Indians who filled these reservations in 1900 were not exactly
the same as those of 1800
Mixing with Anglo-Americans changed them and their beliefs
Within the Ghost Dance western Indians combined traditional
Indian spirituality with Christian beliefs to forge a powerful religious-
political movement that revitalized communities (and terrified white
authorities)
13. The conclusion has to be that it was a tragedy
but it was not simple to understand or follow
it wasn‘t entirely one –sided either
the effect remains that the settlers destroyed Indian culture
killed the Indians
killed their food
and stole their land
