Native Americans
The United States has had a historically divisive relationship with the native Americans found within its borders. The poor relationships between settlers and native Americans began before the United States was even established. Early British and other European colonists paid little attention to the territorial claims of rights of the natives in the American lands which they dubbed the New World. Despite native American support of settlers who first came to America the help they provided was forgotten as soon as it ceased to be beneficial to the settlers to remember.
When Christopher Columbus landed in Hispaniola, modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic, he abused the native American tribe known as the Arawak. In his journals upon first encountering these native Americans he estimates that it would take as few as fifty men to subjugate the entire tribe. He believed the native Americans he encountered to be hiding gold deposits from him, which led to his brutalization of them in an attempt to extract the nonexistent gold stores he was convinced they were hiding from him. The brutality with which the Spanish conquistadors treated the native Americans they encountered in Hispaniola is believed to have reduced the population from approximately one hundred thousand in 1492 to less than six hundred by 1531. In the areas which comprise present day Canada and United States there were nine geographic classifications of native American tribes prior to the arrival of Europeans. These classifications were, ranging from northwest to south east part of the continent, Artic Native Americans, Sub-Artic Native Americans, Northwest Coast Native Americans, Plateau Native Americans, California Native Americans, Great Basin Native Americans, Southwest Native Americans, Plains Native Americans, Northeast Native Americans, and Southeast Native Americans.
Columbus’s exportation of native Americans to Europe as exhibitions of his experiences, as well as his grossly exaggerated claim of the wealth to be obtained in the New World caused a rush of settlers seeking to find wealth across the Atlantic. These settlers would carry on the mistreatment of native Americans started by Columbus and his crew. Pre-Columbian population data has been difficult to establish. Nineteenth Century scholarship estimated to population to be approximately ten million individuals; by the end of the Twentieth Century, scholarly consensus places the population at approximately fifty million people. Some scholars, however believe the population figures to be closer to one hundred million native Americans. It is estimated that the death rate among native Americans due to widespread of disease is as high as eighty percent. Pre-Columbian population figures are a subject of heavy politicalization, with interpretation of sources subject to debate among individuals who may criticized Western civilization or who may seek to minimize criticism of European expansive efforts. It is possible that in the hardest hit areas Eurasian diseases which the native American populations had no previous exposure may have killed as much as ninety percent of the population before any direct contact was experienced with Europeans.
Chemical warfare was also employed intentionally by some Americans in an attempt to move native Americans off of their tribal lands. In 1845, John Sullivan wrote an article in which the phrase manifest destiny appeared. Manifest destiny, the idea that it was the divine wish for the United States to spread from Atlantic to Pacific was used as a motivation for the removal of native Americans from their lands. This was in continuation of policies established under Andrew Jackson of Indian removal. Indian removal was part of a ongoing struggle to “civilize” native Americans. After the American Revolution George Washington and Henry Knox, the first American Secretary of War, laid out a six point plan to civilize native Americans. They advocated impartial justice toward Native Americans, regulation of the purchase of Native American lands, promoting commerce among native American tribes, support of attempts to civilize or improve Native American society, the extension of the authority of the President to provide presents to tribes and tribal leaders, and the punishment of anyone violating the rights of native Americans. Unfortunately the punishment of violations of native American rights did not appear to extend to actions of the federal government. Native American tribes were considered domestic dependant nations in the eyes of the law until 1871. In 1871 the Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act, which removed federal recognition of native American tribes and nations. When the tribes were considered independent tribes and nations they were entitled to treaties governing the state and federal government’s interactions with the tribes. These treaties have been routinely violated.
The only portion of the treaties that have not been violated has been the removal of native Americans from the lands on which they had been living. Often native Americans were removed from lands they had been relocated to only a short amount of time earlier. By 1890 treaties had removed nearly every nation of native Americans from their tribal lands. Those which had not been evicted to reservations were extinct. Often times native Americans were forced to sign the treaties after their insurrections in an attempt to defend their rights were defeated.
Andrew Jackson perpetrated one of the worst acts against native Americans. The Trail of Tears was the removal of forty-six thousand native Americans from historic tribal lands located in the Deep South. Their removal allowed white settlers and homesteaders to open up twenty five million acres of land for development. Much of this land would become valuable farm land. The Trail of Tears was authorized by passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The first tribe removed was the Choctaw in 1831. The Seminole tribe followed in 1832, with the Creek coming in 1834the Chickasaw in 1837, and finally the Cherokee in 1838. The Choctaw ancestral lands were found in Mississippi and Alabama, the Seminole in Florida, the Creek in Alabama, and the Cherokee in Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. These five tribes of native Americans were known as the Five Civilized Tribes. All five tribes were forced to travel from their tribal lands, the traditional homes of their ancestors, to the recently established Indian Territory in what would become Oklahoma.