U.S. Government Policies and Native American Displacement
From the 1830s through the end of the 19th century, the U.S. government carried out a sustained campaign to remove Native Americans from their lands and destroy their ways of life. This wasn't a single policy or event but a combination of laws, treaties, military force, and cultural suppression that reshaped the entire continent.
Impact of U.S. Policies on Tribes
The legal framework for displacement started decades before the Westward Expansion era but accelerated dramatically during it.
- The Indian Removal Act (1830) gave the president authority to negotiate removal treaties with Native American tribes east of the Mississippi. In practice, "negotiate" often meant coerce. The most devastating result was the Trail of Tears (1838–1839), when roughly 15,000 Cherokee were forced to march from their homeland in the Southeast to present-day Oklahoma. Around 4,000 died from exposure, disease, and starvation along the way.
- The reservation system confined tribes to designated areas, often on land the government considered undesirable. These reservations had limited resources and poor conditions, making it nearly impossible for tribes to continue traditional hunting, gathering, and farming practices that had sustained them for generations.
- Treaties were routinely broken or renegotiated when white settlers wanted more land. The Treaty of Fort Laramie is a clear example: the 1851 version recognized vast Lakota territory across the northern Plains, but the 1868 version dramatically shrank those boundaries. Even the 1868 treaty was violated after gold was discovered in the Black Hills.
- Manifest Destiny, the belief that American expansion across the continent was both justified and inevitable, provided the ideological cover for all of this. It framed displacement as progress rather than conquest.
Role of Violence in Displacement
When treaties and policy weren't enough, the U.S. government turned to military force. The Indian Wars (1850s–1890s) were a series of armed conflicts between tribes and the U.S. Army, fought across the Plains, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest. Two events stand out for their brutality:
- Sand Creek Massacre (1864): U.S. troops under Colonel John Chivington attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho village in Colorado Territory. The camp was flying an American flag and a white flag of surrender. Soldiers killed and mutilated around 150 people, mostly women, children, and the elderly.
- Wounded Knee Massacre (1890): U.S. soldiers killed an estimated 250–300 Lakota Sioux, including many women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. The Army had been sent to disarm the Lakota, and the situation escalated into a one-sided slaughter. This event is widely considered the end of the Indian Wars and the final act of armed resistance on the Plains.
Assimilation Efforts and Cultural Impacts
After military conquest confined most Native Americans to reservations, government policy shifted toward a different goal: erasing Native cultures entirely. The idea was to "civilize" Native Americans by forcing them to adopt white American customs, language, religion, and economic practices.
Effects of Assimilation Efforts
Boarding schools were one of the most destructive tools of assimilation. Starting in the late 1870s, the government funded schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, whose stated philosophy was to "kill the Indian, save the man." Children were taken from their families, sometimes by force, and sent to these schools where they were:
- Forbidden from speaking their native languages
- Required to cut their hair and wear Euro-American clothing
- Punished for practicing any cultural or spiritual traditions
- Given English names to replace their own
The trauma from these schools didn't end with the students. It passed down through families and communities for generations.
The Dawes Act (1887) attacked Native life from an economic angle. It broke up communally held reservation land into individual allotments of 160 acres per family head, with the goal of turning Native Americans into independent farmers.
- Any land left over after allotment was declared "surplus" and sold to white settlers. Between 1887 and 1934, Native Americans lost roughly two-thirds of their remaining land, about 90 million acres.
- The allotment system shattered the communal land practices that were central to many tribal cultures and economies.
- Most allotments were on marginal land poorly suited for farming, setting up many families to fail.
Beyond land and schooling, the government also banned Native religious practices and ceremonies, including the Sun Dance and the Ghost Dance. Traditional knowledge, oral histories, and skills eroded as younger generations were cut off from elders and forced into an unfamiliar way of life.
Long-Term Consequences
What happened during this period fits the definition of cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's culture, language, and identity. The combined effects of removal, reservation confinement, boarding schools, allotment, and religious suppression didn't just change Native American life. They were designed to end it as a distinct way of living.
The consequences persist. Tribes today continue to fight for sovereignty, land rights, and the revitalization of languages and traditions that nearly disappeared. The intergenerational trauma from these policies remains a lived reality for many Native communities, not just a historical footnote.