Recommendations for Indian Policy 1886The Native Americans lead a strong resistance against their forced relocation

evidenced in the Battle of the Greasy Grass, Red Cloud’s war, the Nez Perce trail, etc. Write a government policy arguing one of the following solutions for Native American-White relations. Mention specific ways in which it could be implemented. Present your policy.

1. State the purpose of the policy.

2. Give a reason for the policy.

3. Discuss the implementation of the policy.

POLICY OPTIONS

a. No regulation

b. Return to Homeland

c. Reservation System

d. Assimilation

e. Annihilation

Homestead Act - 1862

• Legal mandate for Manifest Destiny

• 160 acres for a small fee

• Populism

Fort Laramie Treaty - 1868

• Cedes the Black hills to the Sioux

• Black Hills = Gold

• Black Hills war

• Custer’s Last Stand / Custer’s Bluster•http://www.custerwest.org/accueileng.htm

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

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

Oklahoma Land Runs - 1889

• September 22, 1891: Land run to settle Iowa, Sac and Fox, Pottawatomie, and Shawnee lands.

• April 19, 1892: Land run to settle the Cheyenne and Arapaho lands.

• September 16, 1893: Cherokee Strip Land Run. The Run of the Cherokee Strip opened nearly 7,000,000 acres (28,000 km²) to settlement on September 16, 1893. The land was purchased from the Cherokees for $7,000,000.

• May 23, 1895: Land run to settle the Kickapoo lands.

Ghost Dance - 1888

• Wovoka’s dream

• Native American apocalypse

• A return to life without the white man

Wounded Knee

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)

Assimilation

“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