4. The Dawes Act - 1887 “ The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.” - General William Tecumseh Sherman 1867 [to be civilized is to]… "wear civilized clothes...cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property." – Congressman Henry Dawes
5. VISION: The Dawes Act codified the idea of dividing Indian lands into individual holdings to promote assimilation by deliberately destroying tribal relations. Surplus land was given to whites. Allotted land for specific tribe and left other tribal allotments to the discretion of the President. “ Civilize” the Indians through education, private property, and introduction of agriculture. Support from paternalistic Easterners REALITY: Supporters of the Dawes Act either knew or should have known that in many cases it would mean allotting land that could not be farmed. The Indians, for the most part, did not become self-supporting farmers or ranchers. Inheritance caused problems as allotments were further and further subdivided. The Dawes Act prescribed the assimilation of Native Americans and the loss of their traditional ways of agriculture, but most significantly, it resulted in the loss of Indian lands. Native Americans didn’t get the right to vote until 1924. http://www.csusm.edu/nadp/asubject.htm
10. The frozen body of one of the victims at Wounded Knee. The caption written on this photograph identifies him as the medicine man who triggered the conflict with a handful of dust tossed into the air to illustrate how the power of the Ghost Dance would sweep the whites from the plains. (Library of Congress)
12. “ A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” -Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, 1892
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Notas del editor
Built house out of sod for lack of trees Deep cold, swarms of grasshoppers ate crops. Drought. Populism grew out of farmers that feel into debt because of fluctuations in crop prices. A sort of socialism. The Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862. Eventually 1.6 million homesteads were granted and 270 million acres was privatized between 1862 and 1964. A total of 10% of all lands in the United States. The person to whom title was granted had to be at least 21 years of age, white, and free, to have built on the section, and to have farmed on it for 5 years, and to have a house on it that was at least 12 by 14 feet (3.6 x 4.3 m) in size.
Ended Red Cloud’s war – one real victory of Native Americans. Fetterman’s Massacre (Crazy Horse) took place during the war. From the 1860s through the 1870s the American frontier was filled with Indian wars and skirmishes. In 1865 a congressional committee began a study of the Indian uprisings and wars in the West, resulting in a Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes , which was released in 1867. This study and report by the congressional committee led to an act to establish an Indian Peace Commission to end the wars and prevent future Indian conflicts. The United States government set out to establish a series of Indian treaties that would force the Indians to give up their lands and move further west onto reservations. In the spring of 1868 a conference was held at Fort Laramie, in present day Wyoming, that resulted in a treaty with the Sioux. This treaty was to bring peace between the whites and the Sioux who agreed to settle within the Black Hills reservation in the Dakota Territory. The Black Hills of Dakota are sacred to the Sioux Indians. In the 1868 treaty, signed at Fort Laramie and other military posts in Sioux country, the United States recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, set aside for exclusive use by the Sioux people. In 1874, however, General George A. Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills accompanied by miners who were seeking gold. Once gold was found in the Black Hills, miners were soon moving into the Sioux hunting grounds and demanding protection from the United States Army. Soon, the Army was ordered to move against wandering bands of Sioux hunting on the range in accordance with their treaty rights. In 1876, Custer, leading an army detachment, encountered the encampment of Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn River. Custer's detachment was annihilated, but the United States would continue its battle against the Sioux in the Black Hills until the government confiscated the land in 1877. To this day, ownership of the Black Hills remains the subject of a legal dispute between the U.S. government and the Sioux. We packed them... on top of the ammunition boxes in the wagons.... Could not tell Cavalry from the Infantry. All dead bodies stripped naked, crushed skulls, with war clubs, ears, nose and legs had been cut off, scalps torn away and the bodies pierced with bullets and arrows, wrists, feet and ankles leaving each attached by a tendon... We walked on their internals and did not know it in the high grass. Picked them up, that is their internals, did not know the soldier they belonged to, so you see the cavalry man got an infantry man's guts and an infantry man got a cavalry man's guts. Private John Guthrie describing Fetterman’s Massacre http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/sioux-treaty/ http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/sioux/sioux.asp
Native Americans lost more than 90 million acres of Indian land. The Indian estate amounted in 1887 to 136,394,985 acres. By 1920 it had shrunk to 72,660,316 acres, of which 17,575,033 acres were leased to whites. In Congress, the bill was pushed through not by greedy Western land speculators, but by Eastern humanitarians that felt that “communal landholding was an obstacle to the civilization they wanted Indians to acquire.” They also feared that by doing nothing the Indians would succumb totally to Westward expansion; the government doing little or nothing to stop it.
Even reservations that were still unallotted by 1904 lost land, however. Even with the addition of new reservations after 1887, statistics for 47 unallotted reservations, agencies and tribal units shows that more than 37 percent of their land was alienated between 1887 and 1904.
The person to whom title was granted had to be at least 21 years of age, white, and free, to have built on the section, and to have farmed on it for 5 years, and to have a house on it that was at least 12 by 14 feet (3.6 x 4.3 m) in size. The Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20 , 1862 . Eventually 1.6 million homesteads were granted and 270 million acres was privatized between 1862 and 1964. A total of 10% of all lands in the United States.
Carlisle, Penn. 1879-1917. At the Carlisle school Pratt was instructed to recruit 36 children from each of the reservations. Parents were persuaded to send their children. If their children were literate, maybe they could prevent the mistakes of the past.