What was the goal of the federal governments policies towards Native Americans at the end of the 19th century?

The U.S. Government used treaties as one means to displace Indians from their tribal lands, a mechanism that was strengthened with the Removal Act of 1830. In cases where this failed, the government sometimes violated both treaties and Supreme Court rulings to facilitate the spread of European Americans westward across the continent.

As the 19th century began, land-hungry Americans poured into the backcountry of the coastal South and began moving toward and into what would later become the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Since Indian tribes living there appeared to be the main obstacle to westward expansion, white settlers petitioned the federal government to remove them. Although Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe argued that the Indian tribes in the Southeast should exchange their land for lands west of the Mississippi River, they did not take steps to make this happen. Indeed, the first major transfer of land occurred only as the result of war.

In 1814, Major General Andrew Jackson led an expedition against the Creek Indians climaxing in the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend (in present day Alabama near the Georgia border), where Jackson’s force soundly defeated the Creeks and destroyed their military power. He then forced upon the Indians a treaty whereby they surrendered to the United States over twenty-million acres of their traditional land—about one-half of present day Alabama and one-fifth of Georgia. Over the next decade, Jackson led the way in the Indian removal campaign, helping to negotiate nine of the eleven major treaties to remove Indians.

Under this kind of pressure, Native American tribes—specifically the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—realized that they could not defeat the Americans in war. The appetite of the settlers for land would not abate, so the Indians adopted a strategy of appeasement. They hoped that if they gave up a good deal of their land, they could keep at least some a part of it. The Seminole tribe in Florida resisted, in the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and the Third Seminole War (1855–1858), however, neither appeasement nor resistance worked.

From a legal standpoint, the United States Constitution empowered Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” In early treaties negotiated between the federal government and the Indian tribes, the latter typically acknowledged themselves “to be under the protection of the United States of America, and of no other sovereign whosoever.” When Andrew Jackson became president (1829–1837), he decided to build a systematic approach to Indian removal on the basis of these legal precedents.

To achieve his purpose, Jackson encouraged Congress to adopt the Removal Act of 1830. The Act established a process whereby the President could grant land west of the Mississippi River to Indian tribes that agreed to give up their homelands. As incentives, the law allowed the Indians financial and material assistance to travel to their new locations and start new lives and guaranteed that the Indians would live on their new property under the protection of the United States Government forever. With the Act in place, Jackson and his followers were free to persuade, bribe, and threaten tribes into signing removal treaties and leaving the Southeast.

In general terms, Jackson’s government succeeded. By the end of his presidency, he had signed into law almost seventy removal treaties, the result of which was to move nearly 50,000 eastern Indians to Indian Territory—defined as the region belonging to the United States west of the Mississippi River but excluding the states of Missouri and Iowa as well as the Territory of Arkansas—and open millions of acres of rich land east of the Mississippi to white settlers. Despite the vastness of the Indian Territory, the government intended that the Indians’ destination would be a more confined area—what later became eastern Oklahoma.

The Cherokee Nation resisted, however, challenging in court the Georgia laws that restricted their freedoms on tribal lands. In his 1831 ruling on Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that “the Indian territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States,” and affirmed that the tribes were “domestic dependent nations” and “their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.” However, the following year the Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled that Indian tribes were indeed sovereign and immune from Georgia laws. President Jackson nonetheless refused to heed the Court’s decision. He obtained the signature of a Cherokee chief agreeing to relocation in the Treaty of New Echota, which Congress ratified against the protests of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay in 1835. The Cherokee signing party represented only a faction of the Cherokee, and the majority followed Principal Chief John Ross in a desperate attempt to hold onto their land. This attempt faltered in 1838, when, under the guns of federal troops and Georgia state militia, the Cherokee tribe were forced to the dry plains across the Mississippi. The best evidence indicates that between three and four thousand out of the fifteen to sixteen thousand Cherokees died en route from the brutal conditions of the “Trail of Tears.”

With the exception of a small number of Seminoles still resisting removal in Florida, by the 1840s, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, no Indian tribes resided in the American South. Through a combination of coerced treaties and the contravention of treaties and judicial determination, the United States Government succeeded in paving the way for the westward expansion and the incorporation of new territories as part of the United States.

In many parts of the world, including Northern America, the indigenous peoples who survived military conquest were subsequently subject to political conquest, a situation sometimes referred to colloquially as “death by red tape.” Formulated through governmental and quasi-governmental policies and enacted by nonnative bureaucrats, law enforcement officers, clergy, and others, the practices of political conquest typically fostered structural inequalities that disenfranchised indigenous peoples while strengthening the power of colonizing peoples.

Although the removals of the eastern tribes in the 1830s initiated this phase of conquest, the period from approximately 1885 to 1970 was also a time of intense political manipulation of Native American life. The key question of both eras was whether indigenous peoples would be better served by self-governance or by assimilation to the dominant colonial cultures of Canada and the United States.

For obvious reasons, most Indians preferred self-governance, also known as sovereignty. Although many Euro-Americans had notionally agreed with this position during the removal era, by the late 19th century most espoused assimilation. Many ascribed to progressivism, a loosely coherent set of values and beliefs that recognized and tried to ameliorate the growing structural inequalities they observed in Northern America. Generally favouring the small businessman and farmer over the industrial capitalist, most progressives realized that many inequities were tied to race or ethnicity and believed that assimilation was the only reasonable means through which the members of any minority group would survive.

This view held that the desire among American Indians to retain their own cultures was merely a matter of nostalgia and that it would be overcome in a generation or two, after rationalism replaced indigenous sentimentality. In Canada, early assimilationist legislation included the Crown Lands Protection Act (1839) and the many acts flowing from Canada’s Bagot Commission, such as the Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes of the Canadas (1857). In the United States, the most prominent example of such legislation was the Indian Civilization Act (1819).

Although assimilationist perspectives were often patronizing, they were also more liberal than some of those that had preceded them. The reservation system had been formulated through models of cultural evolution (now discredited) that claimed that indigenous cultures were inherently inferior to those originating in Europe. In contrast to those who believed that indigenous peoples were inherently incompetent, assimilationists believed that any human could achieve competence in any culture.

Programs promoting assimilation were framed by the social and economic ideals that had come to dominate the national cultures of Canada and the United States. Although they varied in detail, these ideals generally emphasized Euro-American social structures and habits such as nuclear or, at most, three-generation families; patrilineal kinship; differential inheritance among “legitimate” and “illegitimate” children; male-led households; a division of labour that defined the efforts of women, children, and elders as “domestic help” and those of men as “productive labour”; sober religiosity; and corporal punishment for children and women. Economically, they emphasized capitalist principles, especially the ownership of private property (particularly of land, livestock, and machinery); self-directed occupations such as shop keeping, farming, and ranching; and the self-sufficiency of the nuclear household.

Most Native American nations were built upon different social and economic ideals. Not surprisingly, they preferred to retain self-governance in these arenas as well as in the political sphere. Their practices, while varying considerably from one group to the next, generally stood in opposition to those espoused by assimilationists. Socially, most indigenous polities emphasized the importance of extended families and corporate kin groups, matrilineal or bilateral kinship, little or no consideration of legitimacy or illegitimacy, households led by women or by women and men together, a concept of labour that recognized all work as work, highly expressive religious traditions, and cajoling and other nonviolent forms of discipline for children and adults. Economically, native ideals emphasized communitarian principles, especially the sharing of use rights to land (e.g., by definition, land was community, not private, property) and the self-sufficiency of the community or kin group, with wealthier households ensuring that poorer neighbours or kin were supplied with the basic necessities.

Assimilationists initiated four movements designed to ensure their victory in this contest of philosophies and lifeways: allotment, the boarding school system, reorganization, and termination. Native peoples unceasingly fought these movements. The survival of indigenous cultures in the face of such strongly assimilationist programming is a measure of their success.

Within about a decade of creating the western reservations, both Canada and the United States began to abrogate their promises that reservation land would be held inviolable in perpetuity. In Canada the individual assignment, or allotment, of parcels of land within reserves began in 1879; by 1895 the right of allotment had officially devolved from the tribes to the superintendent general. In the United States a similar policy was effected through the Dawes General Allotment Act (1887).

Although some reservations were large, they consistently comprised economically marginal land. Throughout the colonial period, settlers and speculators—aided by government entities such as the military—had pushed tribes to the most distant hinterlands possible. Further, as treaty after treaty drew and redrew the boundaries of reservations, the same parties lobbied to have the best land carved out of the reserves and made available for sale to non-Indians. As a result, confinement to a reservation, even a large one, generally prevented nomadic groups from obtaining adequate wild food; farming groups, who had always supplemented their crops heavily with wild fare, got on only slightly better.

Native leaders had insisted that treaties include various forms of payment to the tribes in exchange for the land they ceded. Although the governments of the United States and Canada were obliged to honour their past promises of annuities, many of the bureaucrats entrusted with the distribution of these materials were corrupt. The combination of marginal land and bureaucratic malfeasance created immense poverty in native communities.

Ignorant of the legal and bureaucratic origins of reservation poverty, many Euro-Americans in the United States and Canada developed the opinion that reservation life, particularly its communitarian underpinnings, fostered indolence. They came to believe that the privatization of land was the key to economic rehabilitation and self-sufficiency. The right to allot reserves was held by the government in Canada, which at the time dictated that individual title and full citizenship were restricted to those who relinquished their aboriginal status. In the United States, the Dawes Act authorized the president to divide reservations into parcels and to give every native head of household a particular piece of property. The land would be held in trust for a period of 25 years, after which full title would devolve upon the individual. With title would go all the rights and duties of citizenship. Reservation land remaining after all qualified tribal members had been provided with allotments was declared “surplus” and could be sold by the government, on behalf of the tribe, to non-Indians. In the United States a total of 118 reservations were allotted in this manner. Through the alienation of the surplus lands and the patenting of individual holdings, the nations living on these reservations lost 86 million acres (34.8 million hectares), or 62 percent, of the 138 million acres (55.8 million hectares) that had been designated by treaty as Native American common property.

Although the particulars of allotment were different in the United States and Canada, the outcomes were more or less the same in both places: indigenous groups and individuals resisted the partitioning process. Their efforts took several forms and were aided by allotment’s piecemeal implementation, which continued into the early 20th century.

A number of tribes mounted legal and lobbying efforts in attempts to halt the allotment process. In the United States these efforts were greatly hindered when the Supreme Court determined, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), that allotment was legal because Congress was entitled to abrogate treaties. In Canada the decision in St. Catherine’s Milling & Lumber Company v. The Queen (1888) found that aboriginal land remained in the purview of the crown despite treaties that indicated otherwise and that the dominion, as an agent of the crown, could thus terminate native title at will.

In the United States, some tribes held property through forms of title that rendered their holdings less susceptible to the Dawes Act. For instance, in the 1850s some members of the Fox (Meskwaki) nation purchased land on which to reside. Their original purchase of 80 acres (32 hectares) of land was held through free title and was therefore inalienable except through condemnation; the Meskwaki Settlement, as it became known, had grown to more than 7,000 acres (2,800 hectares) by 2000. In a number of other areas, native individuals simply refused to sign for or otherwise accept their parcels, leaving the property in a sort of bureaucratic limbo.

Despite its broad reach, not every reservation had been subjected to partition by the end of the allotment movement. The reservations that avoided the process were most often found in very remote or very arid areas, as with land held by several Ute nations in the Southwest. For similar reasons, many Arctic nations avoided not only allotment but even its precursor, partition into reserves.

Allotment failed as a mechanism to force cultural change: the individual ownership of land did not in itself effect assimilation, although it did enrich many Euro-American land speculators. Native social networks and cultural cohesion were in some places shattered by the dispersal of individuals, families, and corporate kin groups across the landscape. Many native institutions and cultural practices were weakened, and little to nothing was offered in substitution.

Indian boarding school

The worst offenses of the assimilationist movement occurred at government-sponsored boarding, or residential, schools. From the mid-19th century until as late as the 1960s, native families in Canada and the United States were compelled by law to send their children to these institutions, which were usually quite distant from the family home. At least through World War II, the schools’ educational programming was notionally designed to help students achieve basic literacy and arithmetic skills and to provide vocational training in a variety of menial jobs—the same goals, to a large extent, of public education throughout Northern America during that period.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School

However, the so-called Indian schools were often led by men of assimilationist convictions so deep as to be racist. One example is Carlisle Indian Industrial School (in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, U.S.) founder Richard Pratt, who in 1892 described his mission as “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Such sentiments persisted for decades; in 1920 Duncan Campbell Scott, the superintendent of the Canadian residential school system, noted his desire to have the schools “continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” Stronger statements promoting assimilation at the expense of indigenous sovereignty can hardly be imagined.

In pursuing their goals, the administrators of residential schools used a variety of material and psychological techniques to divest native children of their cultures. Upon arrival, students were forced to trade their clothes for uniforms, to have their hair cut in Euro-American styles, and to separate from their relatives and friends. Physical conditions at the schools were often very poor and caused many children to suffer from malnutrition and exposure, exacerbating tuberculosis and other diseases that were common at the time. The schools were generally run by clergy and commingled religious education with secular subjects; staff usually demanded that students convert immediately to Christianity. Displays of native culture, whether of indigenous language, song, dance, stories, religion, sports, or food, were cruelly punished through such means as beatings, electrical shocks, the withholding of food or water, and extended periods of forced labour or kneeling. Sexual abuse was rampant. In particularly bad years, abuse and neglect were acknowledged to have caused the deaths of more than half of the students at particular schools.

Native families were aware that many children who were sent to boarding schools never returned, and they responded in a number of ways. Many taught their children to hide at the approach of the government agents who were responsible for assembling children and transporting them to the schools. Many students who were transported ran away, either during the trip or from the schools themselves; those who escaped often had to walk hundreds of miles to return home. Some communities made group decisions to keep their children hidden; perhaps the best-known of such events occurred in 1894–95, when 19 Hopi men from Oraibi pueblo were incarcerated for refusing to reveal their children’s whereabouts to the authorities. Through these and other efforts, native communities eventually gained control over the education of their children. It was, however, a slow process: the first school in the United States to come under continuous tribal administration was the Rough Rock Demonstration School in Arizona in 1966, while in Canada the Blue Quills First Nations College in Alberta was the first to achieve that status, in 1971.

Many researchers and activists trace the most difficult issues faced by 20th- and 21st-century Indian communities to the abuses that occurred at the boarding schools. They note that the problems common to many reservations—including high rates of suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual assault—are clear sequelae of childhood abuse. In 1991 the assaults perpetrated upon Canadian children who had attended residential schools in the mid-20th century began to be redressed through the work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The commission’s 1996 report substantiated indigenous claims of abuse, and in 2006 Canada allocated more than $2 billion (Canadian) in class-action reparations and mental health funding for the former students.