Genocide of American Indians

Significance: The impact of European colonization of North America had an immediate and devastating impact on the indigenous population.

The European discovery of the New World had devastating consequences for the native population. Within a century of Christopher Columbus’s landing in 1492, the number of people living in the Americas had declined from 25 million to 1 million. Whole societies in Mexico and South America died within weeks of initial contact with Spanish explorers and adventurers. The major cause of the devastation was disease. Native Americans had lived in total isolation from the rest of the world since first arriving in the New World from Central Asia around 20,000 BCE; hence, they had escaped the devastating epidemics and diseases, such as smallpox and the plague, that had afflicted the rest of humankind for generations. Such diseases normally required human carriers to pass them on to others, and such conditions did not exist in the New World until after 1492.

Deadly Contact

Columbus and his crew made four separate voyages to the New World between 1492 and 1510, and on each of those voyages sailors brought new diseases with them. Even the common flu had devastating consequences for Native American babies and children. Other people of the world had built up immunities to these killers, but Native Americans had none, so they died in massive numbers. In the 1500s, most of the dying took place from Mexico south, since the Spanish appeared to be uninterested in colonizing North America. Only after the English settled Jamestown in 1607–8 and Plymouth in Massachusetts in 1620 did the epidemics affect Native Americans in that region.

The first major tribe to be exterminated in North America was the Massachusetts of New England, whose population died out completely between 1619 and 1633 from a smallpox epidemic. Yet other things besides disease were killing Native Americans. Most Europeans believed that the people they came across in their explorations were not human at all, but instead savage, inferior beings who had no law and order, no cities, no wealth, and no idea of God or progress. When they died from “white man’s diseases,” this offered further proof of the weakness and helplessness of the population. Europeans soon turned to Africa for their supply of slave laborers; Africans, who had had a much longer history of contact with other peoples of the world, had built up immunities to the killing diseases. Native Americans were not so lucky.

Conflict over Land

As time passed, immunities were built up by native peoples, and fewer tribes were extinguished by diseases. Warfare, however, continued to take its toll. Thousands of Native Americans died defending their homelands from American settlers in the aftermath of the War for Independence. Native Americans were not made citizens by the Constitution of 1787 but were legally defined as residents of foreign nations living in the United States. Wars and conflicts over territory devastated many tribes by 1830. In that year, president Andrew Jackson and Congress adopted a program, the Indian Removal Act, that they hoped would put an end to wars with the Native Americans. Under this new act, the American government would trade land west of the Mississippi River for land owned by the tribes in the east. Land in the west, acquired from France in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, was deemed unsuitable for farming by Europeans. Native Americans, on the other hand, would be able to survive on the Great Plains, called the “Great American Desert” by most whites, by hunting buffalo and other game.

Congress authorized the president to exchange land beginning in 1831. Three years later, a permanent Indian Country was created in the West and settlement by whites was declared illegal. By 1840, Indian Removal was complete, though it took the Black Hawk War in Illinois, the Seminole Wars in Florida, and the terrible march forcing the Cherokee from Georgia to the Indian Territory, to complete the process. At least three thousand Native American women and children died at the hands of the US Army on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Indian Removal meant death and disaster for many eastern tribes.

Native American Tribes That Have Been Completely Exterminated

Conflict was reduced by the program only until whites began moving into the West in the 1860s. During the Civil War (1861–65), several Indian Wars were fought in Minnesota and Iowa, and the infamous Chivington Massacre took place in Colorado in 1864. In this incident, 450 Native Americans were slaughtered without warning in a predawn raid by the Colorado militia. To prevent massacres in the West, Congress enacted a “reservation policy,” setting aside several million acres of western lands for “permanent” Indian settlement. The Army had the job of keeping the tribes on their reservations. Frequent wars resulted as Great Plains tribes attempted to leave their reservations to hunt buffalo (bison) and the army drove them back.

Problems increased with the coming of railroads. The first transcontinental railroad began carrying passengers in 1869. Huge buffalo herds presented the railroads with a major problem, however, because they took hours and sometimes days to cross the tracks. To keep trains running on time, railroads hired hunters to kill the buffalo. By the late 1880s, they had nearly accomplished their goal of killing off all the herds. Buffalo had once numbered 100 million, but by 1888, there were fewer than 1,000. With the destruction of the buffalo came the end of the Native American way of life. The final war was fought in 1890 in the Black Hills of South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation. An Indian holy man claimed that the whites would disappear and the buffalo would return if Native Americans danced a Ghost Dance. Magical shirts were given to the dancers that were supposed to protect them from white men’s bullets. When the white Indian agent asked Washington for help to put down the Ghost Dancers, the Army responded by killing hundreds of the Native Americans, whose magical shirts did not work.

Native Americans did not become American citizens until 1924 and were required to live on reservations. Not until 1934 was self-government granted to the tribes, and by that time the reservations had become the poorest communities in the entire United States. It is only in recent decades, with the rise in Indian activism and legislation protecting Indian civil and tribal rights, that Native Americans have begun to recover.

Bibliography

Debo, Angie. A History of the Indians of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1970. Print.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Print.

Josephy, Alvin M. Jr. The Indian Heritage of America. New York: Knopf, 1968. Print.

Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Indian in America. New York: Harper, 1975. Print.

Woolford, Andrew John, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton. Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print.