An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People

Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapter 9-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 6 Summary: “Jefferson, Jackson, and the Pursuit of Indigenous Homelands”

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase with France totaling 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi River. He did this without Indigenous involvement and concocted policies to pressure them into schemes that caused them to incur massive debts. By restricting trading networks and building settlements in former hunting grounds, the US government forced nations like the Choctaws and Chickasaws into buying agricultural equipment and then selling land to pay the debt. Federal Indian agents like Benjamin Hawkins lobbied tribes to adopt European practices.

The Muscogee Nation fell into civil war in 1813 when traditionalists Upper Creeks, or Red Sticks, attacked Lower Creeks, who were collaborating with Hawkins. Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee militia leader, led 700 men and 600 Lower Creek and Cherokee allies to destroy the Red Sticks. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson’s forces captured 300 wives and children and killed 800 of 1,000 fighters, losing just 49 men in the process. Jackson mutilated Red Stick corpses for “souvenirs,” and the 1814 Treaty of the Creeks ceded 22 million acres of Muscogee homeland to the US, including Lower Creek lands (114). The remaining Red Sticks joined the Seminole Nation of the Florida Everglades, a nation of refugees and Africans who escaped slavery. The Seminoles withstood several US invasions and never signed a treaty.

Jackson became a major general and eventually president of the United States. The Georgia legislature declared that the Cherokee Nation’s constitution was void and that all its land belonged to the settlers. The Cherokee took the battle to the Supreme Court, which found that state laws could not invalidate a federal treaty. Jackson ignored the ruling and instead worked with Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to 86 new treaties that moved 26 Indigenous nations to lands west of the Mississippi River. In the case of the Cherokee, Jackson imprisoned leaders and signed the deal with unauthorized negotiators. Some Cherokee left for present-day Arkansas, but 16,000 members stayed on their homeland. In 1938, the Army forcibly marched them to reservations in Oklahoma in the middle of winter. Only half survived this Trail of Tears with other nations suffering similar losses.

In 1832, led by Black Hawk, the Sauk Nation attempted to reclaim their homeland in present-day Illinois, but militias and federal troops forced them back into an Iowa reservation after four months of fighting. More than four million settlers would migrate west of the Appalachian Mountains, and eventually Indigenous relations would transfer from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior to signify the end of major fighting.

Chapter 7 Summary: “Sea to Shining Sea”

Spain claimed territory on North America’s Pacific Coast that included the Apache, Navajo, Comanche, Caddo, Miwoks, Ute, and Pueblo nations. Some nations had fixed boundaries, while others were nomadic. Spain invaded Pueblo territory in the present-day southwest in 1598, destroying many towns and forbidding traditional religion. However, the Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, and Ute united under the religious leader Po’pay to overtake the Spanish capital of Santa Fe in 1680. They maintained their freedom for 12 years until another Spanish invasion recolonized the area for 130 years.

The Spanish waited several hundred years between its first expedition and the establishment of San Antonio in what would become Texas, where it maintained peaceful-but-tense relations with the Apache and Comanche. Spain claimed present-day California in the 1520s but did not colonize it until 1769, when friar Junipero Serra established 21 Franciscan missions along the El Camino Real road. Serra kidnapped people for conversion and labor, and even European observers objected to conditions there. In 1775, 600 Indigenous people from 15 villages destroyed the San Diego mission, and the colonial government would shift focus to secular towns in 1779.

Indigenous peoples supported independence movements throughout South America and the Caribbean that dismantled the Spanish Empire. In 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo, a priest with a deep involvement in Indigenous communities, led a revolt that culminated in Mexico’s independence in 1821. The new nation opened its borders to trade and became a refuge from US persecution, but it was also poor and unable to maintain prior commitments. This led to conflicts with the Apaches and Comanches that damaged its defenses.

Starting in 1823, Mexico began a land-grant system that brought 30,000 American settlers into Texas. The United States already had its eye on Northern Mexico after expeditions by Lewis and Clark as well as army lieutenant Zebulon Pike. So-called Anglo-Americans married into influential families, and plantation owners pressured the Mexican government to reverse its slavery ban. This led to a plot by Texas to secede from Mexico. While the Anglo-Americans lost the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, it ultimately secured independence and eventually joined the United States.

Meanwhile, US expeditors promised military protection to Anglo Americans on the Pacific coast. The US declared war on Mexico in 1846 and eventually occupied Mexico City until Mexico signed the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico would cede half of its territory, and Indigenous peoples again had no say in the matter.

Books like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans portray American conquest in a romantic light, and even anti-war and abolitionist writers like Henry David Thoreau and James Russell Lowell did not question Manifest Destiny. Poets Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson also celebrated Mexico’s defeat and the promised replacement of the Indigenous populations.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Indigenous Lands Become ‘Indian Country’”

In the 1860s, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, Pacific Railway Act, and Morrill Act, which undermined treaties to benefit settlement, land, and gold operations. The country also took land from the Dakota, which became Minnesota, and abandoned treaty obligations. When the Dakota revolted, the Union Army captured thousands and sentenced 303 men to death. Lincoln reduced the number to 38, which was still the largest mass execution in US history.

Civilian volunteers replaced soldiers in the west during the Civil War, leading to genocidal acts like the Sand Creek massacre in Colorado, where volunteers killed and scalped 130 shelter-seeking Cheyenne and Arapaho people. Despite verbal condemnation by US officials, no one faced charges. Brigadier General James Carleton earned his rank through massacres of unarmed Indigenous nations as well as an assault on the Apache and the forced march of the Navajo. However, the Navajo eventually negotiated a return to their homeland in 1868.

The Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw provided support to the Confederate States of America. Some reasoned that this would weaken both factions, but influential elites in those nations were also slaveowners. Thousands of Indigenous men and self-emancipated African Americans joined the Union Army, and others switched allegiances to the North over time.

After defeating the Confederacy in 1865, the US sent Generals William Sherman and George Custer to the west along with all-African American regiments so that they would be away from the rest of the country. Sherman promoted buffalo hunting to enable railroad development and eliminate an important Indigenous food source, but overhunting nearly drove the animal to extinction. Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne members fought against these efforts, leading to a new round of treaties in 1867. Apache forces under Goyathlay (Geronimo) evaded capture for nearly a decade until he negotiated a surrender in 1887 that “validated Apache sovereignty” (148).

A Modoc group under Kintpuash (Captain Jack) tried to return to its California homeland after the US placed it in the same reservation as its traditional enemies. They fended off US forces for several months and killed a US general during a diplomatic meeting. The US lost 400 soldiers and spent the modern equivalent of $10 million dollars to capture the Modoc. The US executed Kintpuash and five other men, but the killing of several captives by Oregon Volunteers caused public outrage. Newspapers gave sympathetic coverage to nations fleeing military pursuit, like the Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) and Cheyenne.

In 1874, Custer found gold in the Great Sioux Reservation’s sacred Black Hills, leading to a treaty-breaking influx of gold-hunters. Two years later, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull interfered with Custer’s attempted attack on a group of Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn River, killing him and 225 soldiers. The US military later arrested Sitting Bull for his involvement in the Ghost Dance, a nonviolent prayer movement, and a guard killed him while he was under house arrest. As the arrests intensified, Lakota leader Big Foot decided to surrender, but the US Army intercepted him before he could. Custer’s former regiment killed him and nearly all his 350 followers at Wounded Knee Creek.

Most Indigenous nations lived in reservations by the late 1800s, but the US continued to thin out their land. The General Allotment Act of 1887, or Dawes Act, divided communal land into 160-acre individually owned parcels. The US then sold off “surplus” parcels. The Curtis Act of 1898 targeted non-reservation tribes. Indigenous nations lost almost three fourths of their remaining land by 1934.

Chapters 6-8 Analysis

Building on the depiction of George Washington, the presidents in these chapters serve as a warning not to romanticize American political figures from the past. Thomas Jefferson’s desire to drive the Cherokee off their homeland contrasts with the Declaration of Independence, where he wrote that every man deserves life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Dunbar-Ortiz notes that Jefferson’s wealth came from his father’s surveyor and slaveowner work, which enabled this contradiction. Jefferson also encouraged debt schemes to legally steal Indigenous land, which foreshadowed the Indian Removal Act and Dawes Act.

Other presidents pursued Jefferson’s desire to expand the US to the Pacific coast. Andrew Jackson is a particularly visible example because his assaults on Indigenous people launched his political career. During the “national justice and honorable war” he led that resulted in the 1814 Treaty with the Creeks, American soldiers used Muscogee remains as souvenirs and took territory from their allies, the Lower Creeks (114). Even Abraham Lincoln, the paragon of American morality, continued expansion efforts during the Civil War, and the use of civilian volunteers on the frontier led to treaty violations and massacres like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee with no accountability. Although Lincoln made unspecific calls to reform Indigenous relations towards the end of this presidency and provided gifts to Pueblo leaders as a sign of sovereignty, at best he continued the policies of his predecessors. (Black, Sherry S. “Lincoln: No Hero to Native Americans.” Washington Monthly, January/February 2013.)

Indigenous nations showed ingenuity against settler military power, such as the Red Sticks’ barricades. Incorporating heavy logs and packed clay, they provided a durable defense against Jackson’s men and cannons. However, internal division played to the settlers’ favor. The Upper and Lower Creeks split over the adoption of European practices. Some nations supported the Confederacy because the tribal elites now held property and slaves. As violent resistance dwindled, Indigenous nations looked to divine interventions such as the Ghost Dance, which was intended to remove White people and return the Americas to pre-colonial times. This spooked US officials and became a predecessor to later nonviolent movements.

As in the east, western nations resisted colonization attempts by Spain and partnered with disadvantaged groups like mixed-race Mestizos. The Mexican War of Independence is more complicated than in the text. Father Miguel Hidalgo and other Indigenous peoples played a key role in the independence movement. However, it was Mexico’s privileged elite who declared independence in 1821 after Spain’s new constitutional government promised to address the revolutionaries’ demands. Indigenous peoples remained in an oppressed state, but the limited Mexican presence in the north made it a safe haven (History.com Editors. “Spain Accepts Mexican Independence.” HISTORY. 21 August 2020.) Mexico moved from empire to republic in 1823 but became a dictatorship in 1836 under Antonio López de Santa Anna, a president with flexible political ideologies who ruled off-and-on for 22 years. Mexico allowed plantations to use slaves on Mexican land, but its instability and attempts to stop settler migrations contributed to Texas’s secession (Wallenfeldt, Jeff. “Texas Revolution.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed 29 December 2020.)

James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans is a template for how Americans refocus Indigenous narratives on themselves. The heroic Natty Bumppo, a White man raised by Moravian Delaware Christians, criticizes European society and is friends with a fictional Delaware leader who is the last of the “noble” Natives (133). The book romanticizes Indigenous values while still suggesting that a White man can adopt and surpass their ways. (Kupier, Kathleen. “Natty Bumppo.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed 24 December 2020.)

The media may have influenced public perception of Indigenous nations, as The New York Times' sympathetic coverage of Chief Joseph of the Nimi’ipuu helped it gain reservation space in its homeland. However, the Times still villainized warriors like Sitting Bull and Geronimo. Meanwhile, favorable coverage of European figures of the time influenced the perception of history today. For example, the Catholic Church canonized Junipero Serra as a saint in 2015 despite outcry from California’s Indigenous leaders.