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Native American Cultures

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 16, 2023 | Original: December 4, 2009

Many thousands of years before Christopher Columbus ’ ships landed in the Bahamas , a different group of people discovered America: the nomadic ancestors of modern Native Americans who hiked over a “land bridge” from Asia to what is now Alaska more than 12,000 years ago.

In fact, by the time European adventurers arrived in the 15th century, scholars estimate that more than 50 million people were already living in the Americas. Of these, some 10 million lived in the area that would become the United States. As time passed, these migrants and their descendants pushed south and east, adapting as they went.

In order to keep track of these diverse groups, anthropologists and geographers have divided them into “culture areas,” or rough groupings of contiguous peoples who shared similar habitats and characteristics. Most scholars break North America—excluding present-day Mexico—into 10 separate culture areas: the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast and the Plateau.

The Arctic culture area, a cold, flat, treeless region (actually a frozen desert) near the Arctic Circle in present-day Alaska , Canada and Greenland, was home to the Inuit and the Aleut. Both groups spoke, and continue to speak, dialects descended from what scholars call the Eskimo-Aleut language family.

Because it is such an inhospitable landscape, the Arctic’s population was comparatively small and scattered. Some of its peoples, especially the Inuit in the northern part of the region, were nomads, following seals, polar bears and other game as they migrated across the tundra. In the southern part of the region, the Aleut were a bit more settled, living in small fishing villages along the shore.

Did you know? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 4.5 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives in the United States today. That’s about 1.5 percent of the population.

The Inuit and Aleut had a great deal in common. Many lived in dome-shaped houses made of sod or timber (or, in the North, ice blocks). They used seal and otter skins to make warm, weatherproof clothing, aerodynamic dogsleds and long, open fishing boats (kayaks in Inuit; baidarkas in Aleut).

By the time the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, decades of oppression and exposure to European diseases had taken their toll: The native population had dropped to just 2,500; the descendants of these survivors still make their homes in the area today.

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Long before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on what would come to be known as the Americas, the expansive territory was inhabited by Native Americans. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, as more explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various stages, from cooperation to indignation to revolt. After siding with the French […]

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The Subarctic

The Subarctic culture area, mostly composed of swampy, piney forests (taiga) and waterlogged tundra, stretched across much of inland Alaska and Canada. Scholars have divided the region’s people into two language groups: the Athabaskan speakers at its western end, among them the Tsattine (Beaver), Gwich’in (or Kuchin) and the Deg Xinag (formerly—and pejoratively—known as the Ingalik), and the Algonquian speakers at its eastern end, including the Cree, the Ojibwa and the Naskapi.

In the Subarctic, travel was difficult—toboggans, snowshoes and lightweight canoes were the primary means of transportation—and population was sparse. In general, the peoples of the Subarctic did not form large permanent settlements; instead, small family groups stuck together as they traipsed after herds of caribou. They lived in small, easy-to-move tents and lean-tos, and when it grew too cold to hunt they hunkered into underground dugouts.

The growth of the fur trade in the 17th and 18th centuries disrupted the Subarctic way of life—now, instead of hunting and gathering for subsistence, the Indians focused on supplying pelts to the European traders—and eventually led to the displacement and extermination of many of the region’s native communities.

The Northeast

The Northeast culture area, one of the first to have sustained contact with Europeans, stretched from present-day Canada’s Atlantic coast to North Carolina and inland to the Mississippi River valley. Its inhabitants were members of two main groups: Iroquoian speakers (these included the Cayuga, Oneida, Erie, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora), most of whom lived along inland rivers and lakes in fortified, politically stable villages, and the more numerous Algonquian speakers (these included the Pequot, Fox, Shawnee, Wampanoag, Delaware and Menominee) who lived in small farming and fishing villages along the ocean. There, they grew crops like corn, beans and vegetables.

Life in the Northeast culture area was already fraught with conflict—the Iroquoian groups tended to be rather aggressive and warlike, and bands and villages outside of their allied confederacies were never safe from their raids—and it grew more complicated when European colonizers arrived. Colonial wars repeatedly forced the region’s Indigenous people to take sides, pitting the Iroquois groups against their Algonquian neighbors. Meanwhile, as white settlement pressed westward, it eventually displaced both sets of Indigenous people from their lands.

The Southeast

The Southeast culture area, north of the Gulf of Mexico and south of the Northeast, was a humid, fertile agricultural region. Many of its natives were expert farmers—they grew staple crops like maize, beans, squash, tobacco and sunflower—who organized their lives around small ceremonial and market villages known as hamlets. Perhaps the most familiar of the Southeastern Indigenous peoples are the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole, sometimes called the Five Civilized Tribes, some of whom spoke a variant of the Muskogean language.

By the time the U.S. had won its independence from Britain, the Southeast culture area had already lost many of its native people to disease and displacement. In 1830, the federal Indian Removal Act compelled the relocation of what remained of the Five Civilized Tribes so that white settlers could have their land. Between 1830 and 1838, federal officials forced nearly 100,000 Indigenous people out of the southern states and into “Indian Territory” (later Oklahoma) west of the Mississippi. The Cherokee called this frequently deadly trek the Trail of Tears .

The Plains culture area comprises the vast prairie region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, from present-day Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Before the arrival of European traders and explorers, its inhabitants—speakers of Siouan, Algonquian, Caddoan, Uto-Aztecan and Athabaskan languages—were relatively settled hunters and farmers. After European contact, and especially after Spanish colonists brought horses to the region in the 18th century, the peoples of the Great Plains became much more nomadic.

Groups like the Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapaho used horses to pursue great herds of buffalo across the prairie. The most common dwelling for these hunters was the cone-shaped teepee, a bison-skin tent that could be folded up and carried anywhere. Plains Indians are also known for their elaborately feathered war bonnets.

As white traders and settlers moved west across the Plains region, they brought many damaging things with them: commercial goods, like knives and kettles, which Indigenous people came to depend on; guns; and disease. By the end of the 19th century, white sport hunters had nearly exterminated the area’s buffalo herds. With settlers encroaching on their lands and no way to make money, the Plains natives were forced onto government reservations.

The Southwest

The peoples of the Southwest culture area, a huge desert region in present-day Arizona and New Mexico (along with parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas and Mexico) developed two distinct ways of life.

Sedentary farmers such as the Hopi, the Zuni, the Yaqui and the Yuma grew crops like corn, beans and squash. Many lived in permanent settlements, known as pueblos, built of stone and adobe. These pueblos featured great multistory dwellings that resembled apartment houses. At their centers, many of these villages also had large ceremonial pit houses, or kivas.

Other Southwestern peoples, such as the Navajo and the Apache, were more nomadic. They survived by hunting, gathering and raiding their more established neighbors for their crops. Because these groups were always on the move, their homes were much less permanent than the pueblos. For instance, the Navajo fashioned their iconic eastward-facing round houses, known as hogans, out of materials like mud and bark.

By the time the southwestern territories became a part of the United States after the Mexican War, many of the region’s native people had already been killed. (Spanish colonists and missionaries had enslaved many of the Pueblo Indians, for example, working them to death on vast Spanish ranches known as encomiendas.) During the second half of the 19th century, the federal government resettled most of the region’s remaining natives onto reservations.

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The Great Basin

The Great Basin culture area, an expansive bowl formed by the Rocky Mountains to the east, the Sierra Nevadas to the west, the Columbia Plateau to the north, and the Colorado Plateau to the south, was a barren wasteland of deserts, salt flats and brackish lakes. Its people, most of whom spoke Shoshonean or Uto-Aztecan dialects (the Bannock, Paiute and Ute, for example), foraged for roots, seeds and nuts and hunted snakes, lizards and small mammals. Because they were always on the move, they lived in compact, easy-to-build wikiups made of willow poles or saplings, leaves and brush. Their settlements and social groups were impermanent, and communal leadership (what little there was) was informal.

After European contact, some Great Basin groups got horses and formed equestrian hunting and raiding bands that were similar to the ones we associate with the Great Plains natives. After white prospectors discovered gold and silver in the region in the mid-19th century, most of the Great Basin’s people lost their land and, frequently, their lives.

Before European contact, the temperate California area had more people than any other North American landscape at the time, with approximately 300,000 people in the mid-16th century. It's estimated that 100 different tribes and groups spoke more than 200 dialects. These languages were derived from the Penutian (the Maidu, Miwok and Yokuts), the Hokan (the Chumash, Pomo, Salinas and Shasta), the Uto-Aztecan (the Tubabulabal, Serrano and Kinatemuk) and the Athapaskan (the Hupa, among others). Many of the “Mission Indians” who were driven out of the Southwest by Spanish colonization also spoke Uto-Aztecan dialects.

Despite this great diversity, many native Californians lived very similar lives. They did not practice much agriculture. Instead, they organized themselves into small, family-based bands of hunter-gatherers known as tribelets. Inter-tribelet relationships, based on well-established systems of trade and common rights, were generally peaceful.

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Spanish explorers infiltrated the California region in the middle of the 16th century. In 1769, the cleric Junipero Serra established a mission at San Diego, inaugurating a particularly brutal period in which forced labor, disease and assimilation nearly exterminated the culture area’s native population.

The Northwest Coast

The Northwest Coast culture area, along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to the top of Northern California, has a mild climate and an abundance of natural resources. In particular, the ocean and the region’s rivers provided almost everything its people needed—salmon, especially, but also whales, sea otters, seals and fish and shellfish of all kinds. As a result, unlike many other hunter-gatherers who struggled to eke out a living and were forced to follow animal herds from place to place, the Indians of the Pacific Northwest were secure enough to build permanent villages that housed hundreds of people apiece.

Those villages operated according to a rigidly stratified social structure, more sophisticated than any outside of Mexico and Central America. A person’s status was determined by his closeness to the village’s chief and reinforced by the number of possessions—blankets, shells and skins, canoes and even slaves—he had at his disposal. (Goods like these played an important role in the potlatch, an elaborate gift-giving ceremony designed to affirm these class divisions.)

Prominent groups in the region included the Athapaskan Haida and Tlingit; the Penutian Chinook, Tsimshian and Coos; the Wakashan Kwakiutl and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka); and the Salishan Coast Salish.

The Plateau

The Plateau culture area sat in the Columbia and Fraser River basins at the intersection of the Subarctic, the Plains, the Great Basin, California and the Northwest Coast (present-day Idaho, Montana and eastern Oregon and Washington). Most of its people lived in small, peaceful villages along streams and riverbanks and survived by fishing for salmon and trout, hunting and gathering wild berries, roots and nuts.

In the southern Plateau region, the great majority spoke languages derived from the Penutian (the Klamath, Klikitat, Modoc, Nez Perce, Walla Walla and Yakima or Yakama). North of the Columbia River, most (the Skitswish (Coeur d’Alene), Salish (Flathead), Spokane and Columbia) spoke Salishan dialects.

In the 18th century, other native groups brought horses to the Plateau. The region’s inhabitants quickly integrated the animals into their economy, expanding the radius of their hunts and acting as traders and emissaries between the Northwest and the Plains.

In 1805, the explorers Lewis and Clark passed through the area, followed by increasing numbers of white settlers. By the end of the 19th century, most of the remaining members of Plateau tribes had been cleared from their lands and resettled in government reservations.

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Religion and native american assimilation, resistance, and survival.

Tammy Heise Tammy Heise University of Wyoming
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.394
Published online: 20 November 2017

Since the early 19th century, the expansion of American empire has constrained Native American autonomy and cultural expression. Native American history simply cannot be told apart from accounts of violent dispossession of land, languages, and lifeways. The pressures exerted on Native Americans by U.S. colonialism were intense and far-reaching: U.S. officials sought no less than the complete eradication of Native cultures through the assimilation policies they devised in the 19th century and beyond. Their efforts, however, never went uncontested. Despite significant asymmetries in political power and material resources, Native Americans developed a range of strategies to ensure the survival of their communities in the complicated colonial context created by American expansion. Their activism meant that U.S. colonialism operated as a dynamic process that facilitated various forms of cultural innovation. With survival as their goal, Native American responses to U.S. colonialism can be mapped on a continuum of resistance in which accommodation and militancy exist as related impulses. Native Americans selectively deployed various expressions of resistance according to the particular political circumstances they faced. This strategy allowed them to facilitate an array of cultural changes intended to preserve their own cultural integrity by mitigating the most damaging effects of white rule.

Because religion provided the language and logic of U.S. colonial expansion and Native American resistance, it functioned as a powerful medium for cross-cultural communication and exchange in the American colonial context. Religion facilitated engagement with white (mostly Protestant) Christian missionaries and allowed Native Americans to embrace some aspects of white American culture while rejecting others (even within the context of Native conversion to Christianity). It also allowed for flexible responses to U.S. consolidation policies intended to constrain Native autonomy still further by extending the reservation system, missionary oversight of indigenous communities, and land use in the late 19th century. Tribes that fought consolidation through the armed rebellions of the 1870s could find reasons to accept reservation life once continued military action became untenable. Once settled on reservations, these same tribes could deploy new strategies of resistance to make reservation life more tolerable. In this environment of religious innovation and resistance, new religious movements like the Ghost Dance and peyote religion arose to challenge the legitimacy of U.S. colonialism more directly through their revolutionary combinations of Native and Christian forms.

assimilation
colonialism
Ghost Dance religion
peyote religion

Christian Missions and American Colonialism

U.S. Indian policy focused on removing Native American tribes from their homes east of the Mississippi River and resettling them on western lands acquired through the Louisiana Purchase in the 1830s. Earlier generations of European and European American settlers had engaged in similar practices of dispossession; however, U.S. authorities intensified their effects when they adopted Indian removal as official policy during this period. The rapid emigration of white settlers to regions west of the Mississippi River in the mid- to late 19th century demonstrated the inadequacies of the existing Indian policy to U.S. officials. Determined to open new lands to white settlement, the U.S. government enacted new consolidation policies in the 1860s to force the removal of Native Americans yet again. These policies aimed not only to limit conflict between Native Americans and the white newcomers who had encroached on their lands, but also to eradicate Native cultures by forcing Native Americans to live on isolated reservations where land and resources would be shared among different tribes. U.S. officials expected such changes to break down existing tribal identities and undermine traditional customs over time. Eventually, they hoped that consolidation would result in the total assimilation of Native Americans to U.S. culture.

Christian missionaries acted as the U.S. government’s partners in this effort. Shared assumptions that Christianity and civilization were coextensive helped to forge strong alliances between (mostly Protestant) Christian missionaries and federal officials as they worked together to transform Native societies according to their own cultural standards. Protestant understandings of conversion as a spiritual transformation that manifested its reality through specific cultural practices aligned with the interests of American colonialism and helped to support its continued expansion. According to this logic, Native Americans would convert to Christianity and American civilization virtually simultaneously. Their inward embrace of Christian religion (understood by American Protestants as inherently individualistic and democratic) would result in a speedy transition from traditional to new customs. Christian missionaries taught that polygamous marriage, varying styles of dress and adornment, and gendered divisions of labor that put women in control of agriculture and village life and left men responsible for hunting must be abandoned. In their place, Native Americans were expected to adopt American-style monogamous family structures, clothing and hairstyles, and a new gendered division of labor in which men would farm individual homesteads while women would tend their homes. Only through such changes, Christian missionaries and U.S. officials insisted, could Native Americans be absorbed into the white settler population and contribute to the U.S. government’s purposeful expansion of its empire. Although nearly all Christian missionaries understood their efforts to transform Native cultures in terms of benevolent reform, their work as ministers, farmers, teachers, and (eventually) federal bureaucrats charged with administering U.S. Indian policy cannot be separated from the American colonial project to dominate Native peoples.

The advent of the Peace Policy made the fusion of religious and political goals in the execution of U.S. Indian policy explicit. In 1869 , the U.S. government turned to Christian missionaries to administer the nation’s reservations. U.S. officials also placed responsibility for the formulation and oversight of federal Indian policy in the hands of a newly established Board of Indian Commissioners—comprising prominent Protestant laymen with close connections to their respective denominations—at the same time. These reforms aimed not only to root out corruption in the management of U.S. Indian policy, but also to hasten Native assimilation to white (Protestant) Christian civilization through expanded missionary activity and management of the reservation system. Supporters believed that missionary instruction in Christianity and civilization would provide the necessary conditions for Native Americans to assimilate fully into American society. Once Native Americans had been transformed through conversion to Christianity and their concomitant assimilation to white American culture, Peace Policy advocates believed U.S. territorial expansion into the American West would proceed in peace. The new policy—often interpreted as a humane and progressive reform for its time—maintained significant continuity with earlier strategies governing U.S. Indian affairs that it seemed to displace. The Peace Policy supported and even extended the U.S. colonial project by privileging U.S. interests over Native rights, coercing Native assimilation to white cultural norms through aggressive missionary tactics, and threatening forceful retaliation if Native peoples resisted U.S. authority.

The Peace Policy reflected the religious and political sentiments of many Americans in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Tired of fighting rebellious whites in the South and Native Americans in the West, they hoped to secure lasting peace through moral reform rather than military intervention. Ulysses S. Grant—the former Union general who waged a successful campaign for the U.S. presidency in 1868 —promised as much through his campaign slogan: “Let us have peace.” 1 Almost immediately after taking office in 1869 , Grant undertook the task of reconstructing U.S. Indian affairs along the same lines as he intended to reconstruct the South. The new president turned to Ely S. Parker for assistance in a project that many Americans understood to be a radical restructuring of U.S. Indian affairs. Parker’s appointment as commissioner of Indian affairs in 1869 shocked many Americans and confirmed their belief that Grant fully intended to reconstruct existing U.S. Indian policy through benevolent reform. As a Seneca Indian and former military aide to the president, Parker embodied the ideals the Peace Policy attempted to realize. His role as the primary architect of Grant’s Peace Policy ensured that the program would operate with the total assimilation of Native peoples as its ultimate goal.

The Peace Policy’s initial aim was to end political patronage in the administration of Indian affairs. Convinced that corruption represented an impediment to Native assimilation, Parker requested that representatives at Quaker yearly meetings appoint Indian agents for the U.S. government in February 1869 . The U.S. government charged Hicksite and Orthodox Quakers with the management of the Northern and Central Superintendencies, respectively. 2 Grant then appointed army officers to oversee the remaining Indian agencies. Congress later barred military personnel from accepting civil appointments—a decision that opened reservations once under military control to religious oversight. The Peace Policy expanded to include a variety of other (mostly) Protestant denominations in 1870 . These religious bodies appointed missionaries from their ranks to serve as U.S. Indian agents, teachers, farmers, and other employees on the reservations assigned to their management. These Christian missionaries- cum -Indian agents then established churches and schools on reservations; instructed their charges in English, agriculture, and various domestic skills deemed necessary for civilized life; and dispersed government funds and rations to ensure economy and to promote Native industry and, eventually, self-sufficiency. Supporters of the Peace Policy expected the transformation of U.S. Indian agencies from political to missionary outposts of American civilization to garner rapid results, and the U.S. government enforced existing consolidation policies aggressively during this period to force Native peoples onto reservations where they would receive missionary instruction to hasten their assimilation. In 1871 , the U.S. government also abandoned the treaty system in a related move to solidify its dominance over Native Americans.

Those who expected the Peace Policy to effect the immediate conversion of Native Americans to Christian religion and American civilization found themselves disappointed. The religious organizations charged with overseeing U.S. Indian policy proved themselves no more effective in the management of Indian affairs than their civilian or military predecessors. Most importantly, the Peace Policy simply did not keep the peace its name promised. Violence surged in the American West throughout the 1870s, as many Native Americans forcefully resisted the federal government’s demands that they abandon their homes and customs for life on remote reservations. U.S. officials took an increasingly dim view of social reform and advocated violent military intervention as conflicts with the Modoc, Comanche, Sioux, and other tribes raged throughout the decade. Grant’s Peace Policy assumed an even more militaristic bent during the Great Sioux War when the United States sustained massive losses at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 . Shocked by the annihilation of Colonel George Custer and five companies of the U.S. 7th Cavalry under his command, Congress appropriated funds for additional troops and forts to support more expansive efforts to police Native American resistance in the West. 3 The military campaign to hunt down the Sioux and Cheyenne bands responsible for the U.S. defeat at Little Bighorn eventually exerted such significant pressure on these Native peoples that they were forced to accept government control over their lives on reservations. 4

The U.S. government also sought to tighten its control over Native peoples through the implementation of new policies and procedures governing reservation life in the 1880s. Interior Secretary Henry Teller promulgated the Code of Indian Offenses in 1883 , which identified Native customs he viewed as a “great hindrance” to the progress of civilization and outlined methods for their suppression. His attack focused squarely on Native religion. The code banned traditional dances and feasts, gift exchanges, funeral rites, and polygamy. It also sought to constrain the influence of medicine men by suppressing their healing rites and other rituals. Teller identified their influence as especially dangerous to the cause of progress: “The medicine men resort to various artifices and devices to keep the people under their influence, and are especially active in preventing the attendance of the children at the public schools, using their conjurers’ arts to prevent the people from abandoning their heathenish rites and customs.” 5 Penalties for those who persisted in practicing Native customs ranged from imprisonment to loss of government rations. The Code of Indian Offenses was amended in 1933 as part of reforms initiated through the Indian New Deal.

The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 converted all communal tribal lands into individual property allotments. Under its terms, Native Americans who renounced their tribal affiliations and assimilated to white cultural norms would receive property allotments of up to 160 acres and full citizenship. This legislation reflected the emphasis American Protestants placed on individual conversion as the most effective means of reforming society. Senator Henry Dawes, the author of the Dawes Act, was among those American reformers who insisted that Native assimilation depended upon individualization. He advocated for a change in Indian policy that would “treat [the Indian] as an individual and not as an insoluble substance that the civilization of this country has been unable, hitherto, to digest.” Like other Protestant reformers, Dawes understood Protestant individualism within a constellation of related values including hard work, thrift, self-sufficiency, and respect for private property. He believed that a mandate to break up tribal lands into individual parcels would transform Native American hunters into yeomen farmers once and for all. Only when “the individual is separated from the mass, set up upon the soil, made a citizen,” Dawes insisted, could he be “a positive good, a contribution to the wealth and strength and power of the nation.” 6

The Dawes Act had far-reaching effects for Native Americans. Not only did the act provide for the division of tribal lands among Native Americans who demonstrated their assimilation, it also declared all land not allotted to Native Americans “surplus” and opened it to white settlement. This change destabilized communal forms of social organization with Native tribes and dramatically reduced the land on which Native peoples could live and hunt. U.S. officials also reduced the rations provided to Native tribes through treaty agreements at the same time. This coercive measure aimed to force Native peoples to adopt farming to avoid starvation. This policy was reversed under the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 , which allowed “surplus” lands to be returned to tribal ownership. Many tribes sought redress in the courts in the 20th and 21st centuries , arguing for the restoration of or compensation for lands lost under the Dawes Act.

Indian New Deal

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 profoundly altered U.S. Indian policy. Under the leadership of John Collier, commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945 , the U.S. government reversed many of its previous assimilationist policies. This act—regarded as the centerpiece of the Indian New Deal—attempted to halt allotment, established procedures for the creation of tribal governments and the recognition of tribal constitutions, and repealed prohibitions on the performance of traditional Native American customs. Around the same time, the U.S. government provided grants to create local school districts (in a partial reform of the existing boarding-school program), hospitals, and social-service agencies to assist Native Americans in sustaining and strengthening their own cultures.

The act’s implementation and results were mixed. It slowed—but did not stop—the practice of allotting tribal lands to individual tribal members. The act made no attempt to restore tribal lands already held by individuals to tribal groups. Because the act did not disturb existing allotments, it left reservations with a patchwork of privately owned and communal tribal lands—a situation that persists to this day. The act also facilitated the restoration of some lands to tribes through its provisions for land acquisition. Its authorization of limited Native self-rule and suspension of bans on Native customs provided relief from the oppressive assimilationist agenda of previous decades for many Native Americans; however, the imposition of new forms of social and political organization through the Indian New Deal had profound consequences for Native peoples in the 20th century and beyond.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Congress rejected much of the Indian New Deal by passing a series of laws intended to return to the assimilationist policies of the past, but to execute them with greater urgency and vigor. Several of these laws focused on termination—a new federal policy that called for the legal dissolution of Native American tribes. The U.S. government eventually terminated more than one hundred tribes by revoking their status as sovereign dependent nations and ending all forms of federal aid associated with that designation. Relocation functioned as a key component of the termination policy. U.S. officials encouraged Native Americans living on reservations to relocate to urban areas, offering job training and housing assistance for those who migrated to San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis, and other cities. More than thirty-three thousand Native Americans entered the relocation program between 1953 and 1960 . 7 U.S. officials envisioned termination and relocation as mechanisms to assimilate Native Americans into white American society. However, integration proved more complicated than they anticipated. The government’s domestic policies gave rise to the emergence of the American Indian Movement and other Red Power groups in the 1960s. The cultural dislocation caused by federally mandated assimilation policies of this era fueled Native religious and political dissent in the late 20th century and provided many Native Americans with the skills they would need to agitate for their own civil rights.

The U.S. government repudiated termination in the late 1960s and 1970s, changing federal policy yet again to favor Native self-determination rather than total assimilation. Some tribes fought termination in the courts and delayed its implementation long enough to avoid the dissolution of their tribal identities altogether. A few survived as the result of technical errors in processing their legal termination. Numerous others have regained their legal status as federally recognized sovereign states or are now seeking restoration of their tribal status.

Negotiating Strategies for Survival on the Continuum of Resistance

Native Americans remained determined to control their own destinies despite the pressures exerted on them to assimilate. Religion played a crucial role in the formulation and execution of various strategies intended to ensure the survival of Native communities. As a powerful medium for cultural innovation and communication, religion facilitated a range of responses to the challenges presented by U.S. colonialism. Native American resistance to total assimilation was dynamic, shifting along a continuum in which accommodation or militancy (or some combination of both) could be expressed to address the particular political circumstances faced at any given time. Even as the solidification of U.S. cultural dominance increasingly constrained the options available to Native Americans, this survival strategy continued to create spaces in which Native peoples and their cultures could endure.

Conversion to Christianity functioned in this way. Although historians have tended to interpret Native American engagement with and conversion to Christianity as evidence of complete (or, sometimes, as incomplete) assimilation, more recent studies have demonstrated that Native Americans who chose to identify as Christians did so on their own terms. Their reasons for accepting the religion of the Christian missionaries they encountered were complex and owed more to their own cultural understandings than those promoted by white Protestants and Catholics. Without question, Native Americans who investigated or accepted Christianity found resources to help them negotiate new relationships and identities in a world transformed by colonialism. Missionaries offered assistance many Native Americans wanted and needed to position themselves and their communities more favorably in a rapidly changing environment. English learned through Bible reading or catechism classes could be put to other uses—setting terms for trade, understanding (perhaps to avoid) government oversight, and communicating with distant tribes about shared concerns. Ojibwe hymn singing fits this pattern of conversion. Hymn societies flourished because they allowed Ojibwe singers to express “age-old values of reciprocity, subsistence, and the seasonal round” in the new context of reservation life. As these traditions developed in the late 19th century and into the 20th , “both Christian and non-Christian Ojibwe could consider such ritualized hymn singing . . . fully Christian [and] also fully Ojibwe.” 8

Religion facilitated other forms of resistance as well. New religious movements like Ghost Dance religion and peyote religion arose in the 19th century to challenge the legitimacy of U.S. colonialism more directly through their revolutionary combinations of Native and Christian religious forms. The Christian theologies and practices they developed within a thoroughly Native context would prove profoundly unsettling for U.S. officials and Christian missionaries committed to the U.S. colonial project and its assimilationist goals.

Peyote Religion

Beginning in the 1870s, a new religion formed around the ritual consumption of peyote among Native Americans confined to reservations in western Indian Territory that would become one of the most significant Pan-Indian movements in American history. Peyote—a small, spineless cactus that produces visual and auditory hallucinations when ingested—had long been used in healing rituals performed by Native American tribes living near the Mexican border where the plant grew in the wild. Peyote religion, however, emerged as a distinct phenomenon as the U.S. government sought to consolidate its power through an aggressive campaign to assimilate Native peoples to white, (mostly Protestant) Christian cultural norms in the late 19th century . In this context, Native Americans who embraced peyote religion looked to the transformative power of the rituals they developed to facilitate cultural changes that would ensure the survival of their communities in a rapidly changing world.

No individual is more closely associated with the history of peyote religion than Quanah Parker. Although not the first or only peyote roadman to serve the Comanche people, Parker played an outsized role in the diffusion of the new religion within his own tribe and among other Native peoples. His biography—although extraordinary in many respects—is not incidental to the emergence of peyote religion and its rapid spread among numerous tribes. Parker was the son of a Comanche chief named Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, a European American woman kidnapped as a child and then assimilated to Comanche culture. (U.S. soldiers later recaptured Cynthia Ann Parker and returned her to American society—to which she adamantly refused to re-assimilate.) Parker became a powerful Comanche war leader as a young man and vigorously contested U.S. consolidation policies. He refused to honor the Treaty of Medicine Lodge of 1867 , which stipulated that the Comanche people would accept reservation life, and sought spiritual power through innovative religious practices before leading a series of devastating raids into Texas. Working with a medicine man and prophet named Isa-tai, Parker participated in the first Sun Dance conducted among the Comanche and forged alliances with other disaffected Comanche and Cheyenne warriors through millennial prophecies that fueled their rebel against U.S. authority. 9 He conceded to white rule only when militant resistance appeared futile and embraced integration with whites with intense interest once settled on the Kiowa-Comanche reservation in southwestern Indian Territory in 1875 . Parker carefully negotiated his acceptance of white culture, adopting those practices that offered spiritual and material benefits to him and his people and rejecting others. This strategy allowed Parker to work closely with white Christian missionaries and businessmen in support of Western-style education and commerce for his people while rejecting the Protestant religion (especially its emphasis on monogamous marriage) that Christian missionaries viewed as necessary for assimilation. 10

Parker’s desire to establish connections with his mother’s white relatives brought him into contact with peyote. Although accounts differ in some details, Quanah Parker seems to have embraced peyote religion while visiting his uncle John Parker in Mexico. He may have suffered from a stomach ailment or from blood poisoning after being gored by a bull. Whatever the exact circumstances, Parker consumed peyote as part of a healing ritual in the mid-1880s and attributed his cure to its power. 11 He became an ardent advocate of peyote religion, aggressively missionizing peyote’s ritual consumption as a means to revitalize Native communities and working to protect the new religion from federal suppression. Parker’s activism proved instrumental in securing a privileged place for the Half Moon ceremony within peyote religion. Known as the “old way,” the Half Moon ceremony took its name from the shape of the altar on which the peyote rested during the ritual. This version of peyote religion emphasized the use of traditional Native mythology and tobacco in its prayers. Although Half Moon ceremonies may include Christian elements, this tradition’s blending of Native and Christian forms—such as prayers addressed to Jesus and the presence of a Bible—is less pronounced than that of the Cross Fire or other competing versions of the religion. 12

When Christian missionaries and U.S. Indian agents realized that their Native American charges had adopted the use of peyote, they immediately sought to suppress the practice. The Bureau of Indian Affairs issued a general ban on peyote consumption in 1890 ; however, this restriction did little to diminish the popularity of peyote religion or limit the availability of peyote among Native peoples. Indeed, the new religion grew more popular during this period. The very men expected to halt the progress of peyote religion often assisted in its dissemination. On the Comanche-Kiowa reservation, for example, peyotists—including Quanah Parker—dominated the Court of Indian Offenses and opted not to enforce restrictions on peyote use attached to the Code of Indian Offenses promulgated by the U.S. government. 13 Christian missionaries and U.S. officials—frustrated in their attempts to suppress peyote consumption through U.S. Indian policy—sought to enact a federal statute criminalizing its transportation and use. Their activism resulted in congressional hearings on peyote use among Native Americans in 1918 .

Ethnologist James Mooney led the defense of peyote religion when Congress attempted to take action against Native American peyotists. From 1891 to 1918 , Mooney had conducted extensive fieldwork among the western Plains Indians and had participated in numerous peyote rituals while living among these tribes. He insisted that peyote religion was not the unhealthy, heathenish, uncivilized custom anti-peyotists claimed, but an expression of Native people’s “civilized” status. 14 Mooney’s testimony helped to turn opinion within the U.S. House of Representatives in favor of the peyotists and allowed them to win a narrow victory over their opponents. Convinced more needed to be done to protect the new religion, Mooney traveled to Oklahoma to assist in chartering the Native American Church later in 1918 . Sympathy for Native American causes—especially the ritual consumption of peyote—cost Mooney his job when the secretary of the interior issued a ban on his ethnographic research.

The incorporation of the Native American Church helped to prevent another national effort to ban peyote without ending the controversy surrounding its use. In many ways, the formation of the Native American Church laid bare the competing definitions of religion, religious freedom, and American national identity held by the majority of white American Protestants and Native American peyotists. The founders of the Native American Church had accepted much that Christian missionaries had offered to them from their Protestant traditions—including devotion to Christ and Christian morality defined by sobriety, industry, and honest living. 15 However, their practice of peyote religion within this Christian context marked a clear difference between their Christianity and the missionaries’ version of Christianity. The peyotists had made Christianity their own in ways the missionaries could not (or would not) condone, and they claimed protection for their religious vision and for their rights as Americans by forming a church of their own. Although Native Americans would not win formal recognition as U.S. citizens until 1924 , the incorporation of the Native American Church in 1918 represented an unequivocal demand for equal protect for peyote religion under the First Amendment.

Ghost Dance Religion

Multiple Ghost Dances emerged in the 19th century as Native Americans forcefully contested white rule in the American West and sought to shape new social identities for themselves within an increasingly restrictive colonial context. Ghost Dancers fused Christian and Native American traditions in their new religious movement to offer a potent message of hope for cultural renewal within their communities. Their teachings focused on expectations for the immanent return of dead friends and relatives on a restored earthly paradise and the disappearance of the white newcomers who had intruded on their lands. Ghost Dancers attempted to hasten the arrival of this promised millennial glory through their elaborate dance rituals. Their efforts would give rise to a diffuse, but powerful, restorationist movement that helped to organize an increasingly unified and coherent sense of Indian national identity capable of challenging white rule in the West.

Wodziwob, the principle prophet of the 1870 Ghost Dance, articulated a transformative message of Native renewal through his prophetic ministry in the Walker Lake region of western Nevada during the 1860s and early 1870s. His teachings subverted U.S. consolidation policies aimed at eradicating Native autonomy through claims that Native Americans could change their present circumstances by practicing ceremonial dances and other rituals that would allow them to access extraordinary powers. Wodziwob also prophesied the collapse of the existing social order, predicting that an earthquake soon would destroy white settlers or somehow create the necessary social conditions to end racial distinctions between whites and Indians. After the coming cataclysm, he promised that a new order would be established that would revitalize all aspects of Native American culture, bring dead ancestors back to life, and restore the earth itself to a paradise imagined to have existed before contact with whites.

As Ghost Dance prophecy spread, its focus on Native identity and opposition to U.S. authority served to sharpen existing racial distinctions between Native Americans and whites rather than to obliterate them. Weneyuga, a Ghost Dance evangelist who carried the new religion from Nevada into California and Oregon in the early 1870s, held a vision of the restored world promised through Ghost Dance prophecy that allowed no room for whites in the new millennium. He preached a strident message of racial difference, insisting that the return of the dead would be accompanied by the complete destruction of whites and mixed-race children. Weneyuga also sought to access and then to subvert the spiritual powers supporting U.S. colonialism by appropriating symbols of U.S. authority in Ghost Dance rituals. His expansive ceremonial repertoire included not only the days-long round dance rituals, trances, and visions for which the Ghost Dance has become famous, but also more mysterious rites that incorporated U.S. government buildings, military insignia, and other symbols of white rule to overthrow the existing world. 16

Weneyuga’s apocalypticism resonated with members of the Modoc tribe in California in an especially powerful way. Already embroiled in a dispute with the U.S. government over efforts to contain their tribe on the Klamath reservation in Oregon, Modoc Ghost Dancers looked to their new religion to provide the spiritual and political resources needed to intensify their resistance. The Modoc War erupted in the fall of 1872 and frustrated U.S. attempts to contain the tribe for several months. After sustaining a series of significant defeats, the U.S. government appointed a peace commission to treat with the Modoc leaders to end the conflict. Some Modoc resistance fighters attacked the peace commissioners rather than accept a compromise that would limit their sovereignty in any way. Acting under the orders a powerful medicine man and Ghost Dance evangelist named Curly-haired Doctor, the Modoc warriors killed General Edward Canby and the Reverend Eleazer Thomas during the raid and injured the remaining peace commissioners and their staff. 17

With peace no longer an option, U.S. forces pursued the Modoc rebels with renewed vigor. This onslaught strained Modoc resources to the breaking point. Military losses caused some Modoc warriors to doubt the Ghost Dance prophecy that had inspired their spirited resistance to U.S. rule. They now feared the “Christian bullets” once believed to have no power to harm them. 18 The Modoc War ended with the capture of the Modoc rebels in June 1873 . U.S. military officials executed the Modoc chief Kientpoos and three other resistance leaders on October 3, 1873 . Last-minute reprieves saved the lives of two other condemned rebels, who were later sent to serve life sentences at Alcatraz Island. After the execution of their leaders, the remaining Modoc prisoners of war lived in exile at the Quapaw Agency in Indian Territory until 1909 , when the U.S. government allowed Modoc tribal members to return to the Klamath Reservation they had once fought so hard to leave.

Ghost Dancing continued among the Modoc even after U.S. troops put down their rebellion. For the Modoc and other Native Ghost Dancers, the fusion of religious and social reality expressed in Ghost Dance prophecy provided the context to formulate various strategies to deal with the challenges posed by U.S. colonialism. Prophetic religion helped Ghost Dancers mediate political opposition to white rule that manifested as militancy or quietism at different times depending on the particular circumstances they faced.

As the Ghost Dance movement continued its rapid spread from California to Oklahoma in the late 1880s, it attracted the attention of U.S. officials who worried that the new religion might fuel an armed rebellion against their authority. Some Ghost Dancers—especially among the Bannock, Cheyenne, and Lakota—expressed a fervent (if still somewhat inchoate) Indian nationalism and a willingness to fight for self-government. The prophetic religion of the Ghost Dance mediated their resistance to white rule, facilitating new alliances and authorizing direct action to hasten the coming millennium. Ghost Dance religion remained profoundly subversive even in its most quietistic forms. Its emphasis on restoring Native communities to wholeness through healing and increase rites served as a potent political protest to U.S. colonialism, directly challenging its aims to break down Native identities and Native communities through assimilation.

Wovoka’s ministry heightened concerns among increasingly watchful U.S. officials. They saw a direct challenge to the union of religion and politics supporting their colonial authority in his blending of Native and Christian religious forms. Nothing scandalized them more than Wovoka’s embodiment of the claim that Christ identified with the suffering of Native peoples and had come back to earth to live among his chosen people. As the “Indian Christ,” Wovoka presented a serious theological challenge to white Protestants. Ghost Dance adherents understood themselves as Christians because they followed a living Indian Christ. Indeed, they interpreted their Christian faith as superior to the Christianity proclaimed by their opponents. Through this blending of Native and Christian religious forms, Ghost Dance partisans contested the authority of the United States to govern them at all.

Ghost Dance religion assumed its most militant expression among the Lakota peoples during this period. Their practice of the new religion contained powerful messages of religious dissent and political resistance, conveying the hope that Native autonomy would be reestablished in the American West and the expectation that Native peoples might play an active role in inaugurating the world to come. These Ghost Dance partisans expressed their resistance to white rule through evocative songs and symbolic actions. They repeatedly occupied dance circles for the performance of their rituals in defiance of colonial authority. Through their ritual actions, Lakota Ghost Dancers actively resisted the cultural decline U.S. officials sought to impose upon them. Ghost Dance religion created spaces for them to focus on their future growth and cultural renewal in a world that increasingly constrained their autonomy. The Lakota Ghost Dancers would have expected U.S. officials to intervene to suppress their religious ceremonies. The government’s ban on the Sun Dance in 1883 had made it clear that the expression of Native forms of spirituality would not be tolerated. The Lakota Ghost Dancers’ decision to remove their children from school also was deliberately provocative. White interference to stop Ghost Dancing served to heighten tensions, especially at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

In defying U.S. authority by continuing to dance, Lakota Ghost Dancers knew they risked the escalation of sanctions enacted against them and the application of more severe forms of government repression. They knew that U.S. officials might send soldiers to the reservations to end the Ghost Dance. However, few Lakota could have guessed that the United States would deploy thousands of troops to occupy their reservations in what would become the largest single military operation in the nation since the Civil War. 19 Chaos reigned on the reservations after the soldiers arrived. Lakota Ghost Dancers fled to a remote location known as the “stronghold.” Sitting Bull’s murder during a botched attempt to arrest the Lakota holy man intensified Lakota fears that the soldiers would attack. Wild rumors added to the confusion and stoked fears on both sides of the conflict.

Big Foot—the leader of the Miniconjou band that had offered sanctuary to some of Sitting Bull’s followers after his death and an enthusiastic supporter of the Ghost Dance religion—decided to surrender to the soldiers at Pine Ridge. He hoped to restore order in the region by returning his people to the reservation. U.S. troops intercepted the mixed Miniconjou-Lakota band at Wounded Knee Creek on December 28, 1890 . They found Big Foot severely ill with pneumonia and moved him to an army ambulance for the night. The other members of Big Foot’s party camped along the creek. Accounts vary about precisely what happened the next morning. According to some reports, a medicine man urged the Ghost Dancers to resist the soldiers, promising that no bullets could harm them and blowing dust in the air. Some observers reported that a deaf Lakota man refused to hand over his gun when a solider tried to disarm him, accidently discharging the weapon as the two men struggled. Others asserted that a soldier shot the medicine man when he blew dust in the air, fearing that his action was a signal for the warriors to attack the U.S. troops. Whatever the reason for the attack, the 7th Cavalry opened fire on the men, women, and children gathered at Wounded Knee. Some estimates claim as many as three hundred members of Big Foot’s band died in the massacre. 20

Many observers believed that the Ghost Dance ended after the violence at Wounded Knee. They were mistaken. The movement survived well beyond the immediate aftermath of the massacre among a number of groups. Indeed, the Caddo and some other Native peoples continue to practice Ghost Dance religion to this day. Most famously, the American Indian Movement “restored” the Ghost Dance during its occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 . Through their embrace of Ghost Dance religion, AIM members found not only authorization for their political resistance to U.S. authority, but also the spiritual tools to construct a new social identity for themselves. Their “restoration” of the Ghost Dance (and other Native traditions) allowed urban Indians dislocated from reservation culture through termination and relocation programs to engage in new forms of religious innovation intended to ensure the continued survival of Native American cultures.

Review of the Literature

Although no comprehensive analysis of Native American assimilation, resistance, and survival exists, the literature concerning these related topics is vast. Nearly all histories on Native Americans and Native American cultures touch on these subjects in some way. This literature review will focus quite narrowly on studies that trace the development of U.S. Indian policy and its assimilationist agenda, peyote religion, and Ghost Dance religion. Francis Paul Prucha’s work on Native American–U.S. relations is essential reading for anyone studying the formulation and administration of U.S. Indian policy. In The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians ( 1984 ), Prucha provides a detailed history of U.S. colonialism from the colonial era into the 1970s. American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 , another volume written by Prucha and published in 1975 , stands as a useful complement to The Great Father and examines the role Christian missionaries played in administering U.S. Indian policy in comprehensive fashion. Frederick E. Hoxie’s A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 ( 2001 ) provides a thoughtful overview of this slightly later phase of U.S. Indian policy. The historiography of peyote religion is decidedly more limited. Omer C. Stewart’s Peyote Religion ( 1987 ) provides a truly comprehensive study of the movement. Thomas C. Maroukis builds upon and updates Stewart’s classic with The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church ( 2010 ). Other volumes—including Paul Steinmetz’s Pipe, Bible, and Peyote among the Oglala Lakota ( 1990 ) and David F. Aberle’s The Peyote Religion among the Navaho ( 1991 )—address local peyote traditions. Historical treatments of Ghost Dance religion—and especially the Wounded Knee massacre—constitute a considerable body of work. James Mooney’s massive ethnographic study of Ghost Dance religion, “The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 ” ( 1896 ), remains the most comprehensive examination of the movement. Gregory Smoak’s The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization ( 2006 ) expands the historiography of the Ghost Dance considerably by focusing attention on its practice among the Bannock and Shoshone peoples of Idaho and describing how the religion functioned in the construction of new forms of ethnic identity. Similarly, Alice Beck Kehoe’s investigation of the persistence of Ghost Dance religion among the New Tidings Community in Canada into the 1960s in The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization ( 1989 ) represents a significant contribution to the field. Jeffery Ostler’s The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee ( 2004 ) also makes an important contribution to Ghost Dance historiography by offering a sustained examination of colonialism as a dynamic process of cultural contestation.

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Erasing Indigenous History, Then and Now

Deondre Smiles

Two pictures of Tom Torlino, a member of the Navajo Nation, depicting him before and after his time at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1882.

When historians construct narratives about the past they exclude as well as include—and nowhere is that more apparent than in the way Native people have been erased from most histories of the United States. This month, Geographer Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) invites us to reexamine the conventional stories Americans tell themselves from a Native point of view. At stake is not only a fuller understanding of our history but, as Smiles notes, a people erased from the past are easily erased from the present also.

“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here...I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.”

—Rick Santorum, April 2021

Former Pennsylvania senator (and CNN commentator) Rick Santorum made those comments at a conservative student organization-hosted conference. They were given as part of a speech about the beginnings of what we now call the United States, and they have garnered criticism and controversy from a wide spectrum of American society. He is now an ex-CNN commentator.

Rick Santorum giving a speech at the Young American Foundation event in 2021.

Rick Santorum giving a speech at the Young American Foundation event, 2021.

Santorum’s comments were rightfully criticized as being dismissive of a long history of genocide in the United States against Native peoples and cultures , as well as being historically ignorant. We must call this sort of behavior out when we see it.

However, Santorum’s comments point to a much deeper structural myth of the treatment of Native peoples in the United States that Americans have constructed over time. What I mean by this, is that American history has been constructed in a way that completely ignores Indigenous histories and Indigenous presence upon the lands that we now call the “United States.”

In constructing such a history, we conveniently ignore that land theft and Indigenous erasure have quite literally shaped the development of this country. We’ve been conditioned to accept this “whitewashed,” Indigenous-free accounting of the past as a “given” in American history and the construction of this country. And the implications of this historical erasure have been profound for how we view the very presence and role of Indigenous peoples in contemporary American society.

A group of Apache Native American children pose for a portrait four months after arriving at Carlisle Industrial Indian School in Pennsylvania, ca. 1880s.

Let’s take this structural myth that Santorum presented, break it apart into its constituent pieces, and explore the histories that have given rise to it. Engaging with these histories head-on will open our eyes to facts that run counter to Santorum’s claims.

The United States was not built out of nothing, and the fact that Indigenous cultures are not part of the dominant American “culture” is a calculated action. And this erasure does not mean that Native cultures do not exist, or that our relationships with the lands on which this settler colony is built are any less valid.

“Birthing a Nation from Nothing”

Many Americans believe the lands that comprise the United States have a fairly recent history of human habitation. If one was to ask a group of Americans to name a few of the formative events in American history, they would be likely to hear Christopher Columbus “discovering the New World” (not exactly related to the United States nor historically accurate but never mind); Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth; the Declaration of Independence and Revolutionary War; the Civil War; and the opening/settling of the West.

American Progress (1872) by John Gast

I want to focus on the last example, the “opening” of the American West. But before I do that, let me outline a key term: settler colonialism.

This was a distinct form of colonialism built upon the settlement of a geographic space by non-native people and the displacement of the Indigenous communities who lived in that space. Rather than more extractive forms of “resource colonialism,” where the goal was to exploit natural resources until those resources ran out, the settler colony was meant to be permanent.

Of course, the settler colony could also center around resource extraction, but the larger goal of settler colonies is to control the space. Scholars consider the United States a settler colony along with Canada , Australia , New Zealand , South Africa , Israel , and others.

Let’s return to the “opening” of the American West where, in the standard telling, settlers and “pioneers” pushed forward and westward from the original 13 states across the Appalachians towards the Mississippi and eventually the Pacific Ocean, forming new settlements in new territories.

Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851–52) by George Caleb Bingham.

Rugged frontier explorers such as Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and others loom large in these histories and supposedly testify to the individual spirit and drive of American settlers as they worked to a build a new country out of the “wilderness.” It’s a story designed to inspire pride and confidence in any American about the heritage and spirit of our country.

Except, there’s a lot more to this history than that. Beneath the feel-good, pride-inspiring stories about hardworking Americans building a country out of “nothing,” there is also the story of dispossession and genocide.

Indigenous nations dwelled in those territories and landscapes that American settlers coveted. Overt military force was usually deployed to dispossess these nations of their land.

This map of the Trail of Tears depicts the routes taken to forcibly relocate Native Americans from the Southeastern United States to present-day Oklahoma between 1836 and 1839.

The “ Trail of Tears ,” which is probably one of the better-known examples of dispossession, was a relocation of tribes in the Southeastern United States westward towards the Mississippi River and eventually into what was known as the “Indian Territory,” now the state of Oklahoma. The land that was stolen became a central part of the plantation economy of the South, worked by slave labor to create wealth for white settler landowners.

These relocations were, of course, just a chapter in a long history of violent dispossessions and seizures of Indigenous land in the United States. The prevailing opinion was that since Indigenous peoples were not using the land in ways that settlers considered “productive,” the land was in far better hands being owned and used by settlers.

In other cases, land passed into the hands of the United States and settlers through ostensibly “legal” means, via land cession treaties. Under the terms of these treaties, Indigenous tribes agreed to give up lands and relocate to other spaces, or as time went on, to reservations, parcels set aside for them by the U.S. government.

This 19th-century map depicts the major Native American land cessions that occurred between 1784-1894 as a result of treaties. These cessions resulted in the formation of what is now Michigan.

In return for giving up lands, tribes were often guaranteed to retain certain rights in the ceded land, such as hunting, fishing, and gathering rights. The government often promised financial compensation as well in the form of annuity payments to tribes. In theory, this meant that tribes were being well compensated for their land cessions, and the United States gained access to more land for settlement—a win-win scenario.

Except, of course, things very frequently did not work out that way, to the detriment of tribal nations. Treaty rights were infrequently honored or respected, annuity payments were often late or nonexistent, and settler pressures on reservation land led to conflicts.

One notable example of the latter is the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, a clash overshadowed by the Civil War. In this fight, Dakota peoples in Minnesota had been pushed onto a small reservation in return for promised annuities and other treaty rights. Increased demands for land by Minnesota settlers whittled down the Dakota reservation, and due to the Civil War, annuity payments were usually late if they came at all.

Drawing of the 1862 mass execution in Mankato, Minnesota following the U.S.-Dakota War.

Settler store owners at reservation trading posts were less than sympathetic to the Dakotas’ situation. In this tense atmosphere, a confrontation between some Dakota youth and a settler farmer touched off a bloody clash that ended with the defeat of the Dakota, the loss of their reservation, and the exile of many tribal members westwards out of Minnesota into what we now know as Nebraska and the Dakotas. Thirty-eight Dakota were hanged at Mankato, Minnesota in what is recognized as the largest mass execution in American history.

There are countless other examples of this, of course, including ones that have made their way into popular consciousness.

This illustration portrays militia men massacring Native Americans in California.

For example, many Americans are familiar at least with the California Gold Rush, which was far more than a rush of people seeking to make it rich. It also was a time of extreme violence to Indigenous peoples in California. Prospectors and other settlers attacked Indigenous settlements, killing many tribal members. Meanwhile, the process of prospecting itself did widespread ecological damage to waterways and rivers in California and undermined the health of Indigenous communities in the process.

Acts of dispossession often come down to us not as history but as sports nicknames, such as the Gold Rush and the San Francisco 49ers NFL team.

Another example, in 1889 the “Indian Territory,” which had been set aside for tribal nations that had been relocated from the east, was to be opened up for settlement by American settlers. Many settlers who had pushed for the opening of the Territory snuck in early and staked their claims before the land was fully opened to settlement. These people were known as “Boomers” and “Sooners,” names that have come to be associated with the University of Oklahoma, both through its nickname (the Sooners) and its well-known fight song, Boomer Sooner .

The General Allotment Act of 1887, known as the Dawes Act, formalized the reallocation of millions of acres from Indigenous to white control. The Dawes Act divvied up Native land into individual parcels given to Native nuclear families. Anything “left over” was sold off to white settlers and real estate investors. Roughly 100 million acres moved from Indigenous control to settler ownership in the subsequent 50 years.

This is how the West was won. And dispossession was an inherent aspect of many widely celebrated parts of the American past.

Once the land was taken, the American settler state systematically broke down Indigenous identities. Indigenous children were taken from their families and communities and sent to boarding schools far from their homes, where they were trained to adopt settler customs . They received industrial training designed to help them assimilate into American settler society and take up manual labor roles within the settler economy.

Pupils at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, ca. 1900. It is estimated that from 1879 to 1918, over 10,000 Native American children from 140 tribes attended Carlisle.

The blood quantum policy, or the idea that the amount of “Indian blood” in an Indigenous person could be determined mathematically, led to situations where individuals could lose their tribal citizenship (and accompanying rights and benefits) because of their parentage.

In the mid-20 th century, federal policies of relocation and termination resulted in the removal of recognition and treaty rights from some tribal nations, and pushed tribal members to urban centers , which further eroded tribal communities and identities.

“ I mean, yes we have Native Americans…”

As an Ojibwe scholar, teaching Indigenous topics is not new to me—I have been doing it for my entire career. I recently finished teaching a course on Indigenous Environmental Activism, and one of the things that I immediately thought to do was to teach a far more expanded version of the history that I just outlined above.

$Members of the Indigenous Environmental Network protest the Keystone XL pipeline and fracking in Washington D.C., 2013.$

Members of the Indigenous Environmental Network protest the Keystone XL pipeline and fracking in Washington D.C., 2013. (Image by Ben Schumin)

Some of the most common refrains that I heard from my students as I went through the early part of the semester were, “Wow, I didn’t know that these things happened,” and, “Why didn’t we learn more about Native Americans before this class?” Part of this, I argue, comes from the ways in which this history is taught, or is not taught, in schools, both K-12 and college.

I consider myself fortunate to have learned this history, but I am Indigenous myself, being a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and I grew up in a state (Minnesota) that has dedicated more attention to Native history and cultures in its educational curricula than other states. (Wisconsin is another notable example of a state that has mandated Indigenous topics in educational curricula.)

The school district I attended had a robust Native educational program—something that I recognize that not every school district has. Even so, when I was able to get access to educational programming from our Native education specialist, Native history was something that we focused once or perhaps twice a year during our social studies classes.

Samoset entering the Plymouth settlement in 1621, thus making the first contact between Native Americans and the Pilgrims.

Rather, we learned about the “defining moments” in American history, moments that centered settler perspectives and settler figures. It wasn’t until I got to college that I was able to take a class that focused solely on Indigenous histories and cultures.

Of course, Santorum’s remarks go far beyond just a simple lack of understanding of Native identity. A robust historical accounting quickly reveals that his remarks are just one in a long line of ignorant remarks made by American politicians about Native Americans.

They include George Washington’s statement that “Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape,” and Thomas Jefferson’s oath, “If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.”

And they range from Teddy Roosevelt’s “I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth,” to Donald Trump’s calling Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”

Even in the cases where Indigenous peoples are mentioned in some of the most commonly known American historical stories, they are positioned as secondary and often are inaccurately described or portrayed.

Sacagawea (right) with Lewis and Clark at the Three Forks, as depicted in a mural at the Montana House of Representatives.

No matter what has been said, or what has been taught (or not taught), it is clear: For much of this country’s history, Indigenous perspectives and histories have been steadily marginalized and covered up in favor of histories that center on settler colonialism and the ways in which the American settler colony has built itself up.

Individuals such as Squanto, Sacagawea, Pocahontas, and other historic Indigenous figures are portrayed as mere adjuncts to settlers (such as the Pilgrims, the Jamestown colonists, and Lewis & Clark), rather than individuals with agency and motivations of their own, or as part of a larger cultural and political world with its own agendas and struggles.

We often acknowledge that Indigenous peoples did exist, but that recognition is placed in the past tense—tribes are portrayed as having historically once lived in a given space, but then they disappeared. Or their histories trail off, as if they simply stopped existing after a certain point.

Protest against the name and mascot of the Washington Redskins in Minneapolis, 2014.

Not only are we misrepresented by histories, but there is often little attention paid to us in contemporary frameworks. Put bluntly: people forget that Native peoples are still here, and that we have cultural, geographical, and political frameworks that have existed and endured through the history of the United States as well.

The way we tell history and these current views are connected: the writing of Indigenous peoples out of history has led to writing them out of the present as well.

Even in places from which Native peoples were removed, such as Ohio and other places in the Eastern United States, there are thriving and robust communities of Native people in urban centers with their own histories and cultural frameworks.

Many conservative politicians and commentators, like Santorum, have pushed back against what they see as the teaching of “critical race theory” in American classrooms. This label seems to be a catch-all term for any sort of curriculum that brings into question structures of power, privilege, and white supremacy.

A statue of Christopher Columbus lays toppled outside the Minnesota State Capitol in June 2020 during the George Floyd protests.

Of course, for Indigenous peoples, this is nothing new. Anytime Indigenous peoples in the United States have pushed for a more historically accurate telling of American history in respect to Indigenous nations and communities, they are often met with a variety of responses, none of which are good. The combinations and exact verbal permutations of these responses vary, of course, but these are the sort of “generic” responses that I’ve received in speaking on these topics:

“Why can’t we have pride in our country’s history without being made to feel bad or apologize for being Americans/settlers?”

“Native Americans lost, and histories are written by the victors, so get over it.”

“You already get special treatment/free money/casino money/special rights, so why are you complaining?” (a particularly annoying one to me).

These sorts of responses betray a lack of understanding of the role of Indigenous peoples in American history and show a resistance to learning about these histories.

I argue that if these folks were to learn a bit more about these histories, it not only would chip away at many of the myths that have been built up in the ways that we have constructed American history, but it also would have profound implications for how settler Americans view Indigenous peoples’ roles in contemporary American society.

Viewing Indigenous peoples as vibrant communities with long histories and possessing cultural and political sovereignty that extends to the present day makes it much tougher to view us as caricatures, as insulting sports team mascots or other stereotypical depictions.

A Standing Rock solidarity march in San Francisco to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline that would run through Sioux land, 2016.

It makes it tougher to justify extractive resource production and infrastructure such as mining and pipelines , especially those that run through reservations or even through land ceded by treaty. Just because a space isn’t located within a reservation boundary doesn’t mean that there aren’t ongoing relationships between the land and Indigenous communities.

It calls into question the very nature of how many of the cities, towns, and settlements that make up the United States came to be on the land that they’re on—were they truly created through the hard work and sacrifice of American forefathers and pioneers, as many people including Santorum claim?

Or are these places built upon stolen land, written into histories that erase Indigenous histories and whitewash the violence through which this country was created? And if this is truly the case, what obligations does the United States have to the tribal nations who call these lands home? Could it be that Indigenous political and cultural sovereignty could not only still exist, but do so in a vibrant and resurgent way?

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States . Boston: Beacon Press.

Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance . London: Verso.

Jentz, Paul. 2018. Seven Myths of Native American History . Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Rifkin, Mark. 2014. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native." Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387-409.

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