Sullivan Expedition Near the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the British Army and Native American allies staged attacks on frontier towns in the Mohawk Valley region of New York. To resolve this issue, George Washington ordered the
Continental Army, under the command of
John Sullivan and
James Clinton, to conduct a series of
scorched earth campaigns against the four British-allied nations of the
Iroquois Confederacy. Washington's orders followed an initial assault against the
Haudenosaunee where Colonel Van Schaik burned two Onondaga villages. In May 1779, Washington wrote, "The expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the six nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more." Sullivan and Clinton's troops reportedly burned over forty settlements and hundreds of acres of crops, as well as an estimated 160,000 bushels of corn. Despite this, Sullivan failed to capture a sizable number of prisoners, and did not achieve the original goal of invading the British base at Fort Niagara. The Continental Army also failed to completely dispel threats from the Haudenosaunee. In fact, attacks against frontier towns increased after the expedition, as the Haudenosaunee pursued revenge. Historian Joseph R. Fischer has called the expedition a "well-executed failure." The United States continued the European practice of recognizing only limited land rights of
Indigenous peoples. In a policy formulated largely by
Henry Knox,
Secretary of War in the Washington administration, the U.S. government sought to expand into the west through the purchase of Native American land in treaties. The United States justified manifest destiny with the
Doctrine of Discovery, a fifteenth century international law developed by the Catholic Church. Three landmark Supreme Court cases, the Marshall Trilogy, invoked the Doctrine of Discovery to declare that Native Americans were domestic dependent Nations and only had limited sovereignty on their own land. Only the federal government could purchase Indian lands, and this was done through treaties with tribal leaders. Whether a tribe actually had a decision-making structure capable of making a treaty was a controversial issue. The national policy was for the Indians to join American society and become "civilized", which meant no more wars with neighboring tribes or raids on white settlers or travelers, and a shift from hunting to farming and ranching. Advocates of civilization programs believed that the process of settling native tribes would greatly reduce the amount of land needed by the Native Americans, making more land available for homesteading by white Americans.
Thomas Jefferson believed that the Indigenous people of America had to assimilate and live like the whites or inevitably be pushed aside by them. Once Jefferson believed that assimilation was no longer possible, he advocated for the extermination or displacement of Indigenous people. Following the forced removal of many Indigenous peoples, Americans increasingly believed that Native American ways of life would eventually disappear as the United States expanded. Humanitarian advocates of removal believed that American Indians would be better off moving away from whites. As historian Reginald Horsman argued in his influential study
Race and Manifest Destiny, racial rhetoric increased during the era of manifest destiny. Americans increasingly believed that Native American ways of life would "fade away" as the United States expanded. As an example, this idea was reflected in the work of one of America's first great historians,
Francis Parkman, whose landmark book
The Conspiracy of Pontiac was published in 1851. Parkman wrote that after the French defeat in the
French and Indian War, Indians were "destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward unchecked and unopposed". Parkman emphasized that the collapse of Indian power in the late 18th century had been swift and was a past event. While some literary works, like those of
James Fenimore Cooper, portrayed Native Americans positively, others did not:
Mark Twain, for example, was overwhelmingly negative in his characterizations, and seeking to counter the trope of the "Noble Aborigine" in 1870 went so far as to write that the "Noble Red Man" was "[...] nothing but a poor filthy, naked scurvy vagabond, whom to exterminate were a charity to the Creator's worthier insects and reptiles which he oppresses".
Trail of Tears The
Trail of Tears was an
ethnic cleansing and
forced displacement of approximately 60,000 people of the "
Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850 by the
United States government. As part of the
Indian removal, members of the
Cherokee,
Muscogee (Creek),
Seminole,
Chickasaw, and
Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to newly designated
Indian Territory west of the
Mississippi River after the passage of the
Indian Removal Act in 1830. The
Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near
Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828, resulting in the
Georgia Gold Rush. The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands, made vulnerable by removal, died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after. Some historians have said that the event constituted a
genocide, although this label remains a matter of debate. Chalk and Jonassohn assert that the deportation of the Cherokee tribe along the Trail of Tears would almost certainly be considered an act of genocide today. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the exodus. About 17,000 Cherokees, along with approximately 2,000 Cherokee-owned black slaves, were removed from their homes. Historians such as
David Stannard and Barbara Mann have noted that the army deliberately routed the march of the Cherokee to pass through areas of a known
cholera epidemic, such as
Vicksburg, Mississippi. Stannard estimates that during the forced removal from their homelands, following the Indian Removal Act signed into law by President
Andrew Jackson in 1830, 8,000 Cherokee died, about half the total population.
Indiana Throughout the first half of the 19th century, several Native American groups such as the
Potawatomi and
Miami were expelled from their homelands in
Indiana under the
Indian Removal Act. The
Potawatomi Trail of Death alone led to the deaths of over 40 individuals.
Long Walk The
Long Walk of the Navajo, also called the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo (), was the 1864 deportation and
ethnic cleansing of the
Navajo people by the
United States federal government. Navajos were
forced to walk from their land in western
New Mexico Territory (modern-day
Arizona) to
Bosque Redondo in eastern
New Mexico. Some 53 different forced marches occurred between August 1864 and the end of 1866. Some
anthropologists claim that the "collective trauma of the Long Walk [is] critical to contemporary Navajos' sense of identity as a people".
Yavapai Exodus In 1886, many of the Yavapai ethnic group joined in campaigns by the US Army, as scouts, against
Geronimo and other Chiricahua Apache. The wars ended with the Yavapai's and the Tonto's removal from the
Camp Verde Reservation to
San Carlos on February 27, 1875, now known as Exodus Day. 1,400 where relocated in these travels and over the course the relocation the Yavapai received no wagons or rest stops. Yavapai were beaten with whips through rivers of melted snow in which many drowned, any Yavapai who lagged behind was left behind or shot. The march lead to 375 deaths.
Reservation system Indian removal policies led to the current day reservation system which allocated territories to individual tribes. According to scholar
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "the treaties also created reservations that would confine Native people into smaller territories far smaller than they had for millenia been accustomed to, diminishing their ability to feed themselves." According to author and scholar David Rich Lewis, these reservations had much higher population densities than indigenous homelands. As a result, "the consolidation of native peoples in the 19th century allowed epidemic diseases to rage through their communities." In addition to this "a result of changing subsistence patterns and environments-contributed to an explosion of dietary-related illness like diabetes, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, cirrhosis, obesity, gallbladder disease, hypertension, and heart disease". Many Native Americans were moved to reservations—constituting 4% of U.S. territory. In a number of cases, treaties signed with Native Americans were violated. Tens of thousands of American Indians and Alaska Natives were forced to attend a
residential school system which sought to reeducate them in white-settler American values, culture, and economy. Oceti Sakowin historian
Nick Estes has called reservations "prisoner of war camps," citing forced removal and confinement. For instance,
Whyte explains that being confined to a reservation jeopardizes Native communities' relationships with plants and animals located outside the scope of the reservation. Reservations also limit space for ceremonial practices and harvesting, and disrupt traditional seasonal rounds, which allowed Indigenous people to adapt to their environments.
House Concurrent Resolution 108, passed in 1953, attempted to withdraw federal protection of tribal lands and dissolve reservations. Many Native Americans were then relocated to cities. In June 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in
Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta that Oklahoma has jurisdiction over Native reservations when a non-Native commits a crime against a Native. This contemporary decision further weakened Native control over their own reservation lands. ==Genocidal campaigns==