HIST
Abbera
WestwardExpansion130212.pptxThe American West
Professor Mindi Sitterud-McCluskey
Westward Expansion
From the inception of the United States, the western frontier had been imbued with freedom and opportunity in the American mind as well as in the minds of many Europeans. The western frontier seemed to offer what the east coast and Western Europe did not by the mid-1800s: Land. Historically speaking, land signified empowerment. Land represented independence and opportunity, namely the possibility of becoming a truly “free man” through self-management, self-sufficiency, and claiming and benefitting fully from the product of one’s own labor.
Land figured prominently into the high ideals with which the American Revolution and Early Republic were imbued. For, to be a republic- for, by, and of the people, the United States would need to be a nation of truly free people. The United States seemed to have land enough to make this possible.
Empire of Liberty:
Inspired by republican notions of freedom, Thomas Jefferson had looked west and envisioned an “Empire of Liberty,” comprised of independent, self-sufficient, and self-managing small farmers.
Jefferson perceived agriculture as not just conducive to freedom but also uniquely virtuous. By contrast, he viewed the owning, investing, and banking class as corrupt and waged laborers as degraded, dependent and unfree.
Jefferson believed that by securing the western lands, the United States could better secure itself as a free republic and avoid the fate of industrial Britain: Armies of unfree wage-workers, “dark, satanic mills,” and urban slums.
Introduction
Inspired by republican notions of freedom and pushed by members of the working-class struggle and their abolitionist allies, the radical Republican Party of Lincoln passed the Homestead Act even as the Civil War entered its second year on the East Coast.
Homestead Act (1862)
Offered at least 160 acres of free western land to those who filed a claim, lived on the land for at least 5 years, and made improvements.
Open to anyone who had not taken up arms for the Confederacy, including women, blacks, and immigrants who had applied for citizenship
Goal: Rooted in republican notions of freedom, it intended to provide laboring people with land and, by extension, an opportunity to work their way into a condition of real freedom. It would be comparable to Washington DC, today, giving citizens the capital and resources needed to start a small business.
After being stalled by the southern states for years, the Pacific Railway Act also became passed by the Republicans as the war grinded on between the states in the east.
Pacific Railway Act: (1862)
The US government allocated unprecedent funds, grants, bonds and free land for the purpose of contracting with private capitalists to build a Transcontinental Railroad.
Westward Expansion
Transcontinental Railroad
Constructed between 1863-1869
Eastward construction began near San Francisco under the Central Pacific company. Westward construction began near Council Bluffs, Iowa, under the Union Pacific company.
The 1,912 miles of track eventually became constructed between these two lines.
The Transcontinental Railroad represented a massive project of industry, engineering, and muscle- capitalist firms could not have completed it without substantial financial aid from the federal government and the labor of thousands of men, native-born, immigrant, and labor-migrant.
Central Pacific Rail-Line: Constructed primarily by Chinese
Chinese migrants had arrived for the California Gold Rush and became part of the subsequent mineral rushes of the American West, 1850s and 1860s.
Railroad agents recruited these miners and traveled to southern Chinese ports to recruit more.
Chinese crews laid 690 miles of track, through the rocky Sierra Nevada's and sparse Nevada desert. They tunneled through the snow to lay track in the winter and used nitroglycerine to carve roads along faces of cliffs and bore through mountains
Westward Expansion
Union Pacific Rail-Line: Constructed primarily by Irish and German immigrants as well as freedmen, Civil War vets, and sundry laboring people hoping to be paid in the process of going West.
Laid 1,085 miles of track over mostly flat territory.
Before meeting the Central Pacific line in northern Utah, the final stages became facilitated by Mormon work crews, largely miners from England and Scotland.
The Transcontinental Railroad represented an engineering marvel and testament of brut strength against the extremes of nature.
It also represented unprecedented government/capitalist corruption.
Even as the project spent the health and lives of thousands of laboring men, it generated millionaires who never raised a hammer or pick.
Many of these new millionaires built the first mansions in San Francisco to oversee the creation of a new commercial empire extending from the China trade to the settlement and industrialization of the American West.
Indeed, the Transcontinental Railroad not only facilitated commerce between the US and Asia, it connected the East Coast and the West Coast and drove the market economy into the frontier.
Westward Expansion
The Transcontinental Railroad carried the world into the American frontier…
As global capitalist transformations and political turmoil uprooted communities and dispersed families, the American West became an eclectic, multi-ethnic/ multi-national hotspot.
Many parts of the West were settled by first and second- generation Americans
Individual ethnic groups tended to settle together, in the same rural regions of the West, the same urban neighborhoods, and the same section of a work-camps and company towns.
They generally recreated the village life they had left behind and continued to speak their native tongues and engage in aspects of their native culture.
Most of these immigrants also exported part of their wages to family members in the “Old Country” as well as aspects of American culture.
Many returned to the Old Country. It was not uncommon for young men to engage in labor migrations to the US and other industrializing nations to earn wages with which to live better in the homeland. These “Birds of Passage” played an important role in a making the US the most productive nation in world by the end of the century.
Westward Expansion
The advent of railroad lines in the far West revolutionized and expanded the cattle industry….
Before the Civil War, cattle ranchers generally supplied local markets.
During the Civil War, cattle herds, especially in south Texas, rapidly multiplied due to disrupted markets.
After the Civil War, an excess of cattle caused market prices to slump.
Solution: Drive the cattle herds to other markets.
Where did the cattle-drives lead? Increasingly, railheads. Railroads allowed for the transportation of cattle to distant markets.
Three factors made the cattle drives possible: The expansion of railroads, the invention of refrigerated boxcars, and the existence of an open range.
Western Expansion
Typical cattle drive: 3,000 cattle, 10 cowboys, 30 horses, wrangler to tend spare horses, and a chuck-wagon with cook/doctor.
The average Cowboy was:
Young
Poor
Of a variety of nationalities, ethnicities and races
Many former slaves
Mexican Vaqueros
Confederate vets, farm boys and ranch hand
Poorly paid
Most did not own the horse they rode… just the saddle
Overworked
About half made only one drive due to the rigors of the job
Western Expansion
Despite the outpouring of books, wild west shows, and (later) movies celebrating cowboys and the “Wild West” genre, the cattle kingdom of the open range proved short-lived, as the privatization of land and barbed-wire to secure land claims increasingly limited the free movement of cowboys and livestock and, thus, closed the “open range.”
1874: Joseph Glidden received a patent for barbed wire, an inexpensive, durable and effective material for fencing the private property.
1881: Last big cattle drive to Dodge City.
In the previous 15 years, many as two million longhorns had been driven to market in Dodge.
Thus, even as the American cowboy became an icon of freedom and open spaces in new pop culture genres called wild west shows and rodeos, the reality increasingly became cheap wage labor on large ranches or independent ranchers ever struggling not to be knocked out of business by ranching monopolies.
As will be discussed in a later lesson, many of the ranching monopolies rose by displacing pre-existing Mexican rancherias, especially in Texas and California.
Nate Love: Former slave, cattle driver, ranch hand, & rodeo champion.
Westward Expansion
Indeed, in contrast with the vision expressed by the Homestead Act, the West became rapidly industrialized, corporatized, monopolized, and, otherwise, made vulnerable to the forces which had rendered family farms and other small enterprises precarious endeavors throughout the nation by the close of the century (see “Farmer’s Alliance” lesson). The Transcontinental Railroad, in essence, sped-up time in the West, meaning settlement and development occurred much more rapidly, here, than in the other half of the nation.
The railroad represented industrialization and high finance, and it ushered-in capitalist expansion, corporatization, and industrialization.
It carried capitalist investors from the east coast and Europe into the West- or, at least their agents, as well as armies of wage-workers.
It extended corrupt courts and speculators into the West who manipulated law and finance to cheat ordinary people out of their land and resource claims.
Land and resource monopolies followed, leading to agribusiness and corporate ranches.
The railroad, itself, became monopolized, despite the public money (taxes) invested in it. Railroad monopoly rendered the transportation of goods to the market expensive.
Hence, the Farmers Alliance, populist movement, and labor wars previously discussed became extended into the West. went West.
Some family farms and ranches did persist against the odds but, by the close of the century, western expansion cannot be accurately described as begetting an “Empire of Liberty.” Indeed, from the perception of some Americans, it might have more accurately represented an empire.
Westward Expansion as Colonialism: Native Americans
Westward Expansion
Historical Memory and the American West
The first generations of American historians, portrayed the movement of populations westward as a triumphant “taming of the frontier” during which an American character was forged: An individualistic, violent, and persevering character, reflective of the Social Darwinist ideals embraced by the American elite of the period.
Such portrayals of the West were quite selective. They emphasized the sensational over the everyday realities of homesteaders, reliant upon large families and strengthened by community ties. It all but ignored the industrial laborers.
Such representations further ignored the fact that the ancestors of many Americans, today, experienced westward expansion, not as a heroic struggle westward in search of freedom, but as an invasion and an impending loss of security, sovereignty, and homeland. For Native people, the struggle for freedom entailed struggle against the United States and the flood of forces it ushered-in.
In this way, the extension of US borders, governance, settlement-building, and hegemony westward constituted more than just “expansion.” Facing east, it represented entailed a series of invasions and a larger project of colonialism targeting indigenous peoples and people of Mexican descent.
Western Expansion
Manifest Destiny: A term used by historians to describe the belief system that grew-up around American westward expansion.
It expressed a sense of entitlement to the western lands, despite these lands being inhabited by Native people and ethnic Mexicans.
This sense of entitlement found justification in the assertion of national exceptionalism and a sense of supremacy in culture and lifeways.
It secularized the old Puritan self-delusions of having a divine mission to take possession of the land, make it “righteous,” and, thereby, redeem the world.
Exceptionalism entails a belief that others are “unexceptional” and, therefore, not entitled to the universal natural/human rights championed by the revolutionary age.
Moreover, it mixed the high ideals of the revolutionary age with exceptionalisms to justify killing, stealing, and otherwise subordinating basic ethics to expand “freedom,” “democracy,” civilization and Christianity westward as a national “duty.”
Thus, as with the institution of slavery, westward settler colonialism conflicted sharply with the high ideals of the American Revolution, standard biblical “shall nots,” and basic standards of morality. This created a tension in need of psychological resolution. The cognitive dissonance required abandonment or the creation of stories and myths to justify such behavior.
Westward Expansion
Cognitive Dissonance: A principle in psychology which theorizes that when contradictions arise between one’s desires and what one understands to be ethical and just, the resulting tension requires that the individual (or nation) cease and desist or retreat into fantasy, self-delusions and an alternative reality in which one’s behavior is justified.
The Puritans of colonial America told themselves stories about their own “choosiness” and a Divinely mandated mission from God to assert control over new lands, expand their superior influence, and, thereby, redeem the world, no matter the carnage sown. Manifest Destiny secularized Puritan cognitive dissonance into a national myth.
Chattel slavery functioned in a similar way .
Choosiness’ and exceptionalism imply others are not chosen and exceptional. The inference is that the chosen and exceptional people transcend adherence to the “rules” that others are expected to follow, … because they are, allegedly, on a special mission to redeem, uplift, and save the world.
Ironically, Manifest Destiny mimicked the narratives that the British Empire told itself about its place in the world and the meaning of its colonial project, dubbed a “civilizing mission.” Having become liberated from the British Empire, the US became an empire, first overland and then abroad, justified by many of the same supremist ideals which accompanied British expansion.
“The White Man’s Burdon” is a poem that was published by Rudyard Kipling in 1899. It portrayed imperialism, not as the conquest and plunder it truly is, but as a humanitarian obligation to uplift and civilize the world’s allegedly inferior and backward people. It relied upon racism, self-delusions, and historical amnesia, and disassociation from basic realities. Nevertheless, the genre of thought it represented and narrative of the world it spun has proven quite enduring: Imperialism with a humanitarian face, reliant upon the assumption of exceptionalism.
Westward Expansion
Settler Colonialism:
A process by which an indigenous population is replaced by settlers from a distant land.
A Native people, culture, and governance is destroyed and replaced with an invasive people, culture and governance. This is ethnic cleansing.
Survivors become subordinated as a subject people in their own homeland.
American westward settler colonialism occurred in a global context of a gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and an Age of Revolution.
Entrepreneurs called “mountain men” entered the West in search of animal pelts, followed by traders, as well as gold and silver miners, wealthy land speculators, then homesteaders and industrializers.
Some arrived driven by greed, others as religious refugees and refugees from failed revolutions abroad in search of a space for liberty. The greatest part were economic refugees: Failed small farmers, wage-workers and freed people from the eastern states and European peasants, uprooted from the land by capitalist processes which made their labor an unneeded surplus.
An important reality is that settler colonialism involves real people with a diversity of push factors moving into the homeland of another with the intention of making it their home.
Westward Expansion
With American westward expansion, expanded American systems which collided with the way in which Native people perceived of and interacted with the world.
Transformations associated with capitalism continued to prove destabilizing and catastrophic for the American and European underclasses who became uprooted amid land privatization, mechanization, and market forces beyond control.
For Native people, the privatization of nature and impending loss of a “means of production” proved more perplexing and devastating.
Indeed, in the case of Native tribes, the “productive property” which buttressed freedom and sovereignty was not a private farm nor workshop. It was a tribal claim to territory and a natural environment capable of sustaining the life of the community– water resources and plant and animal life, including game to be hunted and, for some, fertile land to be planted.
Native people recognized territorial claims among themselves- typically broad territories in which humans and animals moved. In some places, different groups shared a common hunting ground. Nowhere did they have a conceptions of private property- an exclusive claim to nature and ability to buy and sell it, until settler colonialism imposed such a system.
“What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth. For the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?
Massasoit, New England 1600s.
"Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself, and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.“
Heinmot Tooyalaket (Chief Joseph), Nez Perce Leader
“Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to the white man is an 'unbroken wilderness.' But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly. Our faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings. ― Chief Luther Standing Bear
“When men take to buying and selling the land, saying ’This is mine’, they restrain other fellow creatures from seeking nourishment from mother earth…..so that he that had no land was to work for those, for small wages, that called the land theirs; and thereby some are lifted up into the chair of tyranny and others trod under the footstool of misery, as if the earth were made for a few and not for all men.”
Winstanley, English True Leveller
Historically, neither Europeans (and other “Old World” people) nor Native Americans conceived of the earth as private property. When notions of privatized nature began to develop in Europe across the 1500s and 1600s, commoners were perplexed that God’s creation could be monopolized by some at the expense of others…..
Westward Expansion
Beginning with the earliest North American settlers during the 1600s, settlers and Native people generally coexisted and eagerly traded with one another until the newcomers began to undermine the ability of Native people to exist in their homeland. The same pattern became replicated with every push westward.
In the far West, where the natural landscape and ecosystems are more dramatic and fragile, the pattern became more intense and often predated attempts to settle upon the land...
As wagon trains rolled across the Great Plains and Mountain West toward California and the Oregon Country across the 1850s-1870s:
Migrants polluted rivers with diseases such as cholera
Migrants hunted wildlife, rendering food sources more-scarce.
Livestock belonging to the migrants ate the grasses and other vegetation, undermining the quality and quantity available to Native American ponies and the wildlife needed for sustenance, including the great bison herds.
Even before profession buffalo hunters entered the Great Plains, railroad companies fed their large work-crews by killing the bison around which plains tribes had crafted an existence.
The earliest major conflicts occurred at this juncture- the juncture in which the interests of the newcomers undermined the ability of Native people to sustain themselves on the land and enjoy sovereignty.
Westward Expansion
As tribes of the Great Plains increasingly found their tribal territories stripped of essential resources and polluted, they became resistant to further migration and less willing to tolerate modest settlement building and temporary mining boom towns.
Native people turned to deterrence through harassment and scare tactics, the same treatment they would have extended to an encroaching tribe.
Attacks ensued, launched by both sides, followed by small massacres and then large massacres, including the notorious Sand Creek Massacre.
1864: First Sand Creek Massacre
Place: Eastern Colorado
Causes:
Flood of migration
Colorado Gold Rush
Resource competition and depletion, which undermined Native survival.
General harassments and assaults upon Native American women by the newcomers.
Young Cheyenne “Dog Soldiers” defied an older generation’s decision to trade territory for peace. They attacked miners and killed livestock.
The Colorado Volunteers became organized, led by Col. John Chivington
“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians… I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”
Col. Chivington
Westward Expansion
Events leading up to the massacre:
Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders travelled to Denver to renegotiate a treaty
Made camp on the Sand Creek and raised an American flag and white flag
Warriors went hunting, leaving only old men, women, & children in camp.
Many of Chivington’s men drank heavily in anticipation of attacking the camp; some did refuse to attack.
Aftermath:
Some 200 Native people were killed, mostly women and children
15 soldiers killed, largely from friendly fire
Body parts were paraded through the streets of Denver.
Public outrage forced Chivington to resign and relocate to Nebraska where he became an unsuccessful freight hauler.
Delegation of Cheyenne, Arapaho and Kiowa Chiefs to Denver, 1864
Westward Expansion
“Fingers and ears were cut off the bodies for the jewelry they carried. The body of White Antelope, lying solitarily in the creek bed, was a prime target. Besides scalping him the soldiers cut off his nose, ears, and testicles…”
Many of Pro-Peace leaders were killed
Cheyenne Dog Soldiers united with young, militaristic warriors from other tribes to seek revenge and halt migration
Fighting on the plains escalated
With the Civil War winding-down in the east, military deployments to the West accelerated.
Officers and soldiers who had implemented scorched earth and total war tactics against the Confederacy became tasked with also bringing “rebellious” tribes “to their knees.”
Even as the war with Native people accelerated in the West, Radical Reconstruction went forward in the former Confederacy amid a growing counter insurgency of vigilante terror and assassination. By the end of the decade, the labor wars had also began to accelerated across the nation.
Dog Soldiers
Westward Expansion
The settler colonial wars against Native people entailed military conflict and, especially, an assault upon nature– “the means of production” for Native people.
1866: Civil War veteran, General Philip H. Sheridan took command of U.S. forces in the West and proposed to bring peace to the plains by exterminating the massive herds of bison upon which tribes depended.
"Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indians.”
New Indian Policy-
Use military (conventional) warfare and “total war” (war on civilians) to starve, threaten, and otherwise drive Native people onto reservations where they would no longer inhibit settlement and become wholly dependent on the federal government for food and resources.
Reservation: Territories to which Native tribes were expected to relocate and remain sedentary. They were typically the most barren parcels of land and most resistant to agriculture. For several decades, they functioned as virtual prison camps where Native people lived under armed guard and relied on government rations for survival. By destroying the bison, the Army sought to destroy Native sustenance, and effectively starve and terrorize these people into a surrender, represented as dependency within these camps.
Col. Custer: Youngest colonel in the Union army at age 23; fought in major battles, including Bull Run and Gettysburg; present at Appomattox Court House. After being court marshalled for going AWOL, his friend, Sheridan, requested his services in the West.
1868: Second Sand Creek Massacre
General Philip Sheridan sent Colonel George Armstrong Custer against the Cheyenne.
Custer's cavalry attacked at dawn, killing more than 100 men, women and children.
Westward Expansion
The extermination of the great American bison herds was key to Sheridan’s new policy…
1870: Buffalo hunters began moving onto the Great Plains.
They arrived in large numbers, facilitated by expanding railroad travel
They were attracted to government bounties ($$$) on buffalo
They were attracted by a growing market for hides and meat
In little more than a decade, they reduced herds once numbering in the tens of millions to an endangered species.
1873: Although federal authorities estimate that hunters are killing buffalo at a rate of three million per year, President Ulysses Grant vetoed a law protecting herds from extermination
Westward Expansion
1871- Indian Appropriations Act:
Ended the practice of treating Native tribes as sovereign nations
Tribes were now to be subjugated, stripped of their sovereignty, and made “wards” of the federal government.
This was a major step toward efforts to dismantle tribal identities and neutralize challenges.
1875-77- Lakota Wars
Originated in a flood of settlers and gold seekers into the Black Hills (South Dakota) in the wake of an economic crisis called the Panic of 1873. The Black Hills constituted the homeland of the Sioux and Cheyenne.
Tribal leaders traveled to Washington DC in an attempt to convince American officials to keep settlers and miners out of the agreed upon tribal territory. Negotiations broke down after indigenous leadership refused to sell the sacred Black Hills.
The Cheyenne and Sioux forces, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, moved to protect their land and guard against continuing attacks on villages by settlers and US forces.
Westward Expansion
1876- Battle of Little Big Horn
(aka: Custer’s Last Stand)
By 1876, most of the Cheyenne and Lakota (Sioux) had become starved onto the reservation.
Cheyenne and Lakota (Sioux) left the reservation to celebrate the Sun Dance, hoping also to hunt bison if any remained.
After Col. George Armstrong’s 7th Calvary became dispatched to punish the Native people and return them to the reservation, the Cheyenne and Sioux (led by Sitting Bull) fought back.
Custer and 268 of his men were killed
This massacred marked the last major victory for the Plains Indians. Much of the public responded with shock and called for revenge
Sheridan increased the number of troops in the West to end Indian resistance.
Surviving Crow scout for Custer
Western Expansion
By the 1880s, the Redeemers had “redeemed” the south from Reconstruction’s intent to bring newly freed people into real freedom. The labor wars were accelerating. And, most Native Americans had become driven to reservations by hunger, disease, and attacks by federal troops.
1881: Nez Perce, Chief Joseph Surrendered
With his band, he led US troops on a chase from the Pacific Northwest, through the newly created yellow Stone National Park in Wyoming, and toward the Canadian border before being apprehended and sent to Oklahoma. The Nez Perce were not allowed to return to their homeland.
1881: Sitting Bull returned from Canada and surrendered
“I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.”
1886: Apache, Geronimo Surrendered
Led a resistance movement in the Southwest for a decade, fighting both American and Mexican armies.
Geronimo and his band were imprisoned in Florida, most died in prison.
Western Expansion
The fact cannot be emphasized enough: The so-called “Indian Wars” of the American West constituted a struggle over nature- how nature would be used and imagined, who nature would benefit.
For pre-industrial people, nature and a healthy ecosystem was the “means of production” that made sustenance, self-sufficiency, self-rule, and sovereignty possible. Nature was also the basis of spiritual belief, culture, community, and sense of self.
Without a sovereign territorial claim to productive nature, Native people entered a condition of dependency, domination, exploitation, suppression, and alienation.
Consequently, the reservations into which Native people were starved, terrorized and coerced became places of policing and surveillance, humiliation, and coercion through hunger and want.
Reservations were generally plagued with disease and malnutrition.
Malnutrition and want was made more severe by corruption among government agents, notorious for selling government rations rather than dispersing them among the tribes.
Reservations naturally became places of material, psychological and spiritual suffering and grief.
Western Expansion
Across the 1870s and 1880s, messianic religious movements spread among the broken and disenchanted tribes of the West and produced a string of prophets. Most counseled non-violence, tribal unity, & turning inward to traditions for spiritual and cultural strength. Where Native people saw hope, many Americans perceived resistance and threat.
1889-90: Ghost Dance Religion
Believers imagined that performing the dance would bring back the dead and the bison and return life to what it had been.
Many believed special ghost shirts offered protection from bullets
They would dance themselves into a trance, and then fall to the ground and later report having visions.
Nervous reservation officials began to suspect a plot of mass insurrection.
Tensions ultimately led to unarmed men, women, and children at the Pine Ridge reservation becoming surrounded by armed soldiers and howitzers, and massacred, killing at least 300. This became known as the Wounded Knee Massacre.
Westward Expansion
Native people had sympathizers. Activists condemned the carnage and broken promises made by the US government.
1881: Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, the first serious critique of federal policy regarding Native people. She argued that empty promises, broken treaties, and brutality paved the way for American settlers and national expansion.
But, … what was the solution to the so-called “Indian Question?” Respect for territorial and cultural sovereignty was not considered a realistic option within a capitalist order of private property rights and profit motives, even among sympathetic reformers.
To save “the race” from becoming extinct, most reformers believed that Native people must be denied sovereignty, agency, and liberty, and actively remade.
Native people became classed as wards of the state- or, dependents rather than humans with natural rights to own themselves and exist without domination, exploitation and suppression.
From a position of dependency, they could be controlled. Even this was not enough, however. They had to be remade.
Boarding Schools: Native American children became removed from their families and transported to often distant boarding schools. The intention was to indoctrinate them with mainstream American ideals, strip them of their own culture and familial and tribal ties, and train them for manual labor jobs as preparation for having a “place” in American society. Parental rights and agency over even small children were not recognized. The boarding schools became notorious for severe punishment for holding on to tribal tongue and culture as well as rampant child abuse, neglect, and death.
"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. 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.“ General Pratt
Westward Expansion
The destruction of Native American identity and community also advanced through remaking their relationship with nature and work.
1887: Dawes General Allotment Act
The act aimed to remake Native American reservations- originally shared by a tribe or collection of tribes, into individual allotments assigned to separate families as private property (though still under federal authority).
Native families were expected to farm their own allotments according to the individualistic and nuclear family norms of American society, as opposed to their communal traditions.
In essence, the goal was to stop Native Americans from existing within communal tribal relationships, including shared labor and child raising responsibilities and shared resources.
By bringing about the end of communal relationships, American authorities hoped to bring about the end of tribal leaders, tribal culture, tribal interests and tribal identities. In essence, they hoped to dissolve a sense of “us” among Native peoples and hone identification with conqueror- the United States.
Of course, the process of parceling-out reservation land was rife with corruption. After allotments had been made, the remaining land became sold.
The process and larger goal of better controlling Native people by stripping them of their culture, identity, and tribal relationships was also rife with resistance. Indeed, military resistance became replaced with cultural resistance, evidenced today in the continuation of tribal languages tribal identities, and tribal structures.
