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Europeans arrived on American shores and it became a shared space of vast differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people. -
By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained. -
The decision by Indiana Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison to attack and burn Prophetstown, the Indian capital on the Tippecanoe River, while Tecumseh was away campaigning the Choctaws for more warriors, incited the Shawnee leader to attack again. This time he persuaded the British to fight alongside his warriors against the Americans. -
Settlement of the Americans and Europeans near the west wreaked havoc on the Indian people living there. In 1868, a conference was held at Fort Laramie that resulted in a treaty with the Sioux Indians. -
the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century -
The Indian reservation system was created to keep Native Americans off of lands that European Americans wished to settle.
The reservation system allowed indigenous people to govern themselves and to maintain some of their cultural and social traditions. -
Authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual contacts were allowed to become US citizens. -
A shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe, had a vision. Claiming that God had appeared to him disguised as a Native American and revealed to him a land full of love and peace. Wovoka founded a spiritual movement called the Ghost Dance. He prophesied the reuniting of the remaining Indian tribes of the West and Southwest and the banishment of all evil from the world. -
As a result of wars with the United States, many tribes were forced off their lands, relocated, or confined to reservations where they endured poverty, racism, and attempts to erase their traditional cultures. -
Beginning in the late 1800s, Indian children were forbidden to speak their own languages and punished in government- and church-supported boarding schools if they did.