Tragedy of the Native
After you finish your commercial, take some time to read through the following and watch the video. If there is one thing that our country has brushed under the rug because of how brutal it was, it is the treatment of the Native Americans that were on this continent long before our European ancestors came over the Atlantic. The following readings and video will hopefully give you an idea of what happened. At the end there are a few questions to think about and discuss with a partner that has also finished.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865
http://www.nmai.si.edu/explore/education/did-you-know/
Skip this step for now (2017) Go to educanon and watch the video that is available.
Sand Creek Massacre-In 1864 a part of the Cheyenne tribe was attacked and brutally killed by U.S. soldiers. Young, old, male, female, baby or grandparent...it didn't matter.
Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the lone American Indian in Congress, called it "one of the most disgraceful moments in American history." About 700 U.S. army volunteers stormed through an Indian encampment near Big Sandy Creek in Colorado, slaughtering scores of women and children. This episode became known as the Sand Creek Massacre.
In the Spring of 1864, a wing of the Cheyenne tribe unleashed attacks on white settlers, which prompted John M. Chivington, a Methodist minister who had become Colorado's military commander and was eager to become a member of Congress, to call for volunteer Indian fighters for 100-day enlistments. On November 29, 1864, the colonel and his volunteers rode into the Arapaho-Cheyenne reservation, where Indians led by the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle had set up a camp weeks earlier. A white flag and an American flag flew above Black Kettle's tepee.
After unleashing cannon fire into the village, the volunteers swept the Creek bed, killing every Indian they could find, often hunting down fleeing children. "Kill them big and small," Chivington reportedly said, "nits become lice" (nits are the eggs of lice). After six hours, about 150 Indians, a quarter of the camp's population, lay dead. The soldiers took three prisoners, all children. A dozen soldiers were killed, some apparently by friendly fire in the frenzy.
Eyewitness accounts are chilling. Lt. Joseph Cranmer described "a squaw ripped open and a child taken from her. Little children shot while begging for their lives." Capt. Silas Soule, who was assassinated after testifying at a congressional inquiry, said, "it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized." A joint congressional committee concluded that Chivington "deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre, which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were victims of his cruelty."
In response to the massacre, President Lincoln replaced Colorado's territorial governor. A Congressional inquiry condemned the battle as a massacre. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were promised reparations in an 1865 treaty, but none were paid.
Apache Indians, led by Geronimo, fought for 25 years against the U.S. government, for their land. Geronimo was finally killed, and the fight was won by the Government.
Wounded Knee- This is another incident, in fact, the final incident when U.S. Army was used to remove Natives and it turned South.
The late 19th century marked the nadir of Indian life. Deprived of their homelands, their revolts suppressed, and their way of life besieged, many Plains Indians dreamed of restoring a vanished past, free of hunger, disease, and bitter warfare. Beginning in the 1870s, a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance arose among Indians of the Great Basin, and then spread, in the late 1880s, to the Great Plains. Beginning among the Paiute Indians of Nevada in 1870, the Ghost Dance promised to restore the way of life of their ancestors.
During the late 1880s, the Ghost Dance had great appeal among the Sioux, despairing over the death of a third of their cattle by disease and angry that the federal government had cut their food rations. In 1889, Wovoka, a Paiute holy man from Nevada, had a revelation. If only the Sioux would perform sacred dances and religious rites, then the Great Spirit would return and raise the dead, restore the buffalo to life, and cause a flood that would destroy the whites.
Wearing special Ghost Dance shirts, fabricated from white muslin and decorated with red fringes and painted symbols, dancers would spin in a circle until they became so dizzy that they entered into a trance. White settlers became alarmed: "Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy...We need protection, and we need it now."
Fearful that the Ghost Dance would lead to a Sioux uprising, army officials ordered Indian police to arrest the Sioux leader Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull resisted, he was killed. In the ensuing panic, his followers fled the Sioux reservation. Federal troops tracked down the Indians and took them to a cavalry camp on Wounded Knee Creek. There, on December 29, 1890, one of the most brutal incidents in American history took place. While soldiers disarmed the Sioux, someone fired a gun. The soldiers responded by using machine guns to slaughter over 200 Indian men, women, and children. The Oglala Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk summed up the meaning of Wounded Knee:
I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there.
The Battle of Wounded Knee marked the end of three centuries of bitter warfare between Indians and whites. Indians had been confined to small reservations, where reformers would seek to transform them into Christian farmers. In the future, the Indian struggle to maintain an independent way of life and a separate culture would take place on new kinds of battlefields.
Carlisle Indian School- We will revisit the topic of the Indian School next week. We will watch a video that helps explain exactly what happened here. This is a preview of that.
In 1879, an army officer named Richard H. Pratt opened a boarding school for Indian youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His goal: to use education to uplift and assimilate into the mainstream of American culture. That year, 50 Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Pawnee arrived at his school. Pratt trimmed their hair, required them to speak English, and prohibited any displays of tribal traditions, such as Indian clothing, dancing, or religious ceremonies. Pratt's motto was "kill the Indian and save the man."
The Carlisle Indian School became a model for Indian education. Not only were private boarding schools established, so too were reservation boarding schools. The ostensible goal of such schools was to teach Indian children the skills necessary to function effectively in American society. But in the name of uplift, civilization, and assimilation, these schools took Indian children away from their families and tribes and sought to strip them of their cultural heritage.
By the late 19th century, there was a widespread sense that the removal and reservation policies had failed. No one did a more effective job of arousing public sentiment about the Indians' plight than Helen Hunt Jackson, a Massachusetts-born novelist and poet. Her classic book A Century of Dishonor (1881), recorded the country's sordid record of broken treaty obligations, and did as much to stimulate public concern over the condition of Indians as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did to raise public sentiment against slavery or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to ignite outrage against environmental exploitation. Ironically, reformers believed that the solution to the "Indian problem" was to erase a distinctive Indian identity.
During the late 19th century, humanitarian reformers repeatedly called for the government to support schools to teach Indian children "the white man's way of life," end corruption on Indian reservations, and eradicate tribal organizations. The federal government partly adopted the reformers' agenda. Many reformers denounced corruption in the Indian Bureau, which had been set up in 1824 to provide assistance to Indians. In 1869, one member of the House of Representatives said, "No branch of the federal government is so spotted with fraud, so tainted with corruption...as this Indian Bureau." To end corruption, Congress established the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1869, which had the major Protestant religious denominations appoint agents to run Indian reservations. The agents were to educate and Christianize the Indians and teach them to farm. Dissatisfaction with bickering among church groups and the inexperience of church agents led the federal government to replace church-appointed Indian agents with federally-appointed agents during the 1880s.
In 1871 to weaken the authority of tribal leaders, Congress ended the practice of treating tribes as sovereign nations. To undermine older systems of tribal justice, Congress, in 1882, created a Court of Indian Offenses to try Indians who violated government laws and rules.
Natives arriving at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
Questions:
0. Why would the U.S. Government want to end Native American culture?
1. I think it's safe to assume that most of us feel that the handling of the Native Americans wasn't proper, fair, or dignified. With that concession made, why do you think the U.S. Government wanted the Natives off of the land?
2. Between the three articles, which one do you think created the worst situation and why?
3. Here we are 140 years later, the Native Americans have been removed from the land for all of that time and we have lived our lives our way. There has been a resurgence recently, of talk about how poorly the Natives were treated. Many say that it was wrong to kick the Natives off of the land. However, if the Natives weren't removed from the land, you probably wouldn't be living the way you are, or where you are. The question I have for you is this. Would you be willing to give up everything you have today, to allow the Natives to live on the land like they used to?