History of Intergroup Relations
From the first Spanish colonists to the French, English, and Dutch who followed, European settlers took what land they wanted and expanded across the continent at will. If Indigenous people tried to retain their stewardship of the land, Europeans fought them off with superior weapons. Given that colonization uses force, the result for Indigenous populations was genocide, which is the deliberate systematic killing of an entire people or nation. Although Native Americans’ lack of immunity to European diseases caused the most deaths, overt mistreatment of Native Americans by Europeans was devastating as well.
After the establishment of the United States government, discrimination against Native Americans was codified and formalized in a series of laws intended to subjugate them and keep them from gaining any power. Some of the most impactful laws are as follows:
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced the relocation of Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, and other eastern American Indian tribes to lands west of Mississippi River. These lands were cleared of Native Americans so that white Americans and their African slaves could settle upon them. Thr removal act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson and it is an example of legal and institutionalized discrimination: discrimination as unequal treatment that has been established and enforced within an institution like the government.
In 1838, in accordance with the removal act (as described above), about 17,000 Cherokee were forced to traverse approximately 1200 miles to their new location in what is now Oklahoma, referred to as the Trail of Tears. During this move, the Cherokee were exposed to brutal weather and trail conditions which resulted in at least 4,000 deaths, but some estimates suggest it is as high as 8,000 Cherokee deaths (Healey & O'Brien, 2015; Schaefer, 2015).
According to Elliott (2015), the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 authorized the creation of Indian areas in what is now Oklahoma. Native peoples were again forced to move to even smaller parcels of land now called reservations. The U.S. government had promised to support the relocated tribal members with food and other supplies, but their commitments often went unfulfilled, and the Native Americans’ ability to hunt, fish and gather food was severely restricted.
The 1862 Homestead Act allowed for any qualified citizen (at the time, it was primarily white Americans) to claim land for settlement purposes. The Act allowed many White frontiersman to claim lands that were inhabited by Native Americans (Acuña, 2015).
The establishment of the Boarding School Era (1860s-1930s) began the forced assimilation of Native Americans. These schools, run by both Christian missionaries and the United States government, had the express purpose of “civilizing” Native American children and assimilating them into white society. The boarding schools were located off-reservation to ensure that children were separated from their families and culture. Schools forced children to cut their hair, speak English, and practice Christianity. Physical and sexual abuses were rampant for decades; only in 1987 did the Bureau of Indian Affairs issue a policy on sexual abuse in boarding schools. Some scholars argue that many of the problems that Native Americans face today result from almost a century of mistreatment at these boarding schools. While these boarding schools represented forced assimilation, they also resulted in cultural genocide which is the deliberate annihilation of a group's material and non-material/symbolic culture, like languages and traditions.
The 1871 Indian Appropriations Act removed the status of American Indian tribes as sovereign nations, which meant that Native Americans were now wards of the state. By taking away their independent nation status, the result was full paternalism in which the United States was "parenting" Native Americans for their "own good" (Healey & O'Brien, 2015).
The 1885 Major Crimes Act allowed for the United States to defy and/or nullify any treaty with Native American Nations regarding autonomous jurisdiction in tribal lands. Previous to the Major Crimes Act, Indigenous peoples had control over policing their lands autonomously.
Similar to the assimilation projects present in the Boarding School Era and the Adoption Era, the Dawes Act of 1887 reversed the policy of isolating Native Americans on reservations, and instead forced them onto individual properties that were intermingled with White settlers, thereby reducing their capacity for power as a group. The Dawes Act also established the policy of blood quantum.
The blood quantum policy is based on family genealogies of individuals; you were considered American Indian based on the number of your ancestors who could be determined to be Indigenous from written documents. The U.S. government collected this information as part of the Dawes Act, which functioned largely to terminate the federal government’s treaty responsibilities to Indigenous societies. The family genealogies they collected are called the Dawes Rolls. One way the Dawes Act leveraged this information against the Indigenous population, was by making only "full-blooded" Native Americans qualified for land deeds (land available to purchase) and those that were "mixed-blood" only received land rental agreements.
This policy is fundamentally different than another governmental policy of the same time in U.S. history that stated if a person had “one drop of Negro blood,” that individual was Negro (African-American) and was subject to Jim Crow laws. While the one-drop rule functioned to preserve the African identity of people for the enforcement of oppressive Jim Crow laws, blood quantum and documents like the Dawes Act sought to reduce or eliminate the identity of Indigenous peoples and the government’s treaty obligations to them.
The continued racism, anger, and resentment directed at Native Americans by the U. S. government violently culminated in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. According to Dee Brown (1970), the soldier chiefs (U.S. Army) at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation were not satisfied with the number of guns taken from American Indians (Lakotas) and ordered further searches of them by taking away their blankets among other items. Black Coyote raised his Winchester above his head and stated he bought it. Somehow, Black Coyote's rifle went off and the U.S. Army soldiers fired at the Native Americans. It is estimated that 153 were known to be dead, but that the final total was about 300 American Indians were dead. The U.S. Army had 25 soldier fatalities and 39 wounded soldiers (Brown, 1970).
Despite being the original inhabitants of the United States, Native Americans were one of the last racial groups to be conferred U.S. citizenship. The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act provided U.S. citizenship to any Native American person born within U.S. territories. It has been argued that the intent of this act was to reduce the demand for Indigenous identity among American Indians. Tribal nations such as the Hopi and Onondaga rejected this Act by providing their own tribal passports (Aguirre &Turner, 2004).
The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act attempted to provide more autonomy to Native Americans by rescinding the Dawes Act and allowing tribes to adopt their own constitution and elect their own tribal council. Although the goal was for more self-governance, the expectation was for tribes to conform to the values and practices of dominant (White) society.
In an effort to provide legal recourse to American Indians, the 1946 Indian Claims Commission Act established a Claims Commission that would hear cases brought about by Native Americans regarding the loss of their lands. Unfortunately, this commission did not have the authority to return lands, but rather financially compensated American Indians for those lands. This financial compensation would not result in much money or cover the true value of these stolen lands (Aguirre & Turner, 2004).
In 1953, the Termination Act was passed. The act intended to help Native Americans by attempting to give them more autonomy but it actually reduced federal funding to achieve that. Ultimately, federal services were cut from reservations leaving some of them without the most basic services such as medical care and fire protection (Schaefer, 2015).
The Relocation Act of 1956 led to the creation of job training centers and job training programs in urban centers. The intention of that Act was to encourage Native Americans to move off tribal lands and ultimately assimilate to dominant (White) society. The Act fulfilled its goal--many American Indians moved out of reservations and into cities. Some of these programs required Native Americans to sign an agreement not to return to the reservations (Aguirre & Turner, 2004).
The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act signed by President Richard Nixon, the sovereign status of American Indian nations in Alaska was revoked, which basically made an estimated 44 million acres of formerly Native American lands the property of the United States (Aguirre & Turner, 2004).
The 1990 National Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) describes the rights of Indigenous peoples with respect to the treatment and repatriation (return) of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and other cultural items. Although NAGPRA has made repatriation efforts more accessible, these efforts are not equitable across tribes. According to Rebecca Kitchens (2012), current laws, including NAGPRA, grant some Native American Nations legal access to their cultural objects at the expense of other Nations or Indigenous peoples, ultimately creating a hierarchy that legally favors some tribes over others.
Finally, it should be noted that Congress has never, in its entire history, kept any treaty it has made with any American Indian tribe.
