Hi [r/AskAnAmerican](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/) I’m a Dutch person due to write a report on the Natives of America (USA) in particular on the suppression of them. I’m not really sure on the topics to write about. Can anyone give important topics/definitions on the suppression of the Native Americans? Thanks in advance 🙂
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They were repeatedly tricked and lied to as they were slowly wrangled into smaller and smaller areas while being executed. That went on for almost 300 years
It started with the arrival of Dutch, English, French, colonists and Spanish Conquistadors. It progressed as these settlers grew in numbers and spread across the Americas.
This really isn’t the source you should use. Even starting with Wikipedia and using that to find academic sources would be better than asking here. Don’t put a bunch of anonymous reddit accounts as your bibliography.
I have a history degree and have been studying paleoindian culture for the last 2 years. If you are going to do suppression you have to consider it is rather a broad field. Lots is written on it so even in your country it should be easy to find books. There was forced relocation which is a topic in itself. There was a policy in many western hemisphere countries to re-educate indigenous populations to change them to European. There was cultural suppression by forcing religion changes to Christianity and away from native religious practices. Forced changes in other cultural aspects such as diet. If you want feel free to message me and I’ll be glad to help.
The constant “treaty but not really” position of the US. Reservation schools dedicated to eradicating their culture.
[This will have more than enough information to get you started.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Native_Americans_in_the_United_States?wprov=sfti1)
I would highly recommend not relying on Reddit to answer questions for a school report. You may get great answers here, but you might also get really biased or misleading or outright false ones as well. I think it would be better, if anything, to ask for good sources or books to look at to further research this subject
I mean, there were a lot of tribes that had a lot of different interactions with different European groups over the decades and centuries with America was settled by Europeans. There were a lot of alliances between tribes and European settlers in the beginning against other native tribes. The Pilgrims for example despite how their relationship with natives is now described by revisionists with an agenda were allies of the Wampanoag for decades against some of the war-like tribes in the region. The breakdown came way later, and was technically kind of the fault of the Wampanoag chief at the time.
As things got bigger these relationships got a lot more complicated and natives began to be increasingly manipulated by settlers into giving up land. As the technology of settlers began to further outpace that of the natives it got worse and settlers simply started forcing natives off their land.
The main tactics of removing natives were simply manipulations, lies, legal trickery (later), threats of violence, or just violence itself.
Disease->Fighting->Treaty->Broken Treaty->Fighting->Reservations
As others said, it was a long progression of deceit, outright war, and disease.
My suggestion is writing about the King Philips War which was one of the first wars between Native Americans and European colonists.
It would be a great topic because it is largely unknown and actually pretty important. If the colonists lost that war we might see a very different world today. It is even possible that your teacher doesn’t know about it.
It is fascinating because some native tribes allied with the colonists against their native enemies. It was also early on in the colonization by the English so the colonists were just starting to settle in. It was not a huge war. Combatants were only in the low thousands but the population of native people and colonists was so low at the time it was extremely decisive.
This is an amazingly large subject, this took place over a very long period of time involving many different indigenous groups. You might want to narrow your scope. I would recommend going over to r/AskHistorians for more info there.
One thing I think may be interesting to write on is about how often the defeat and displacement of one native group often was aided by another. These peoples all had their own geopolitical goals and agendas. Often one group would join with the US (or other Settler force) against another. Indian Scouts were a part of this.
Suppression? It was murder.
It’s an almost ludicrously broad topic. Do you have an era you’re interested in? Tribes or a region? Do you know what you mean by suppression? Are you interested suppression only or in a wider picture of relationships, which will include both friendly events and betrayals and tragedies, sometimes all at once? As is, you might as well be writing a brief report of the wars in Europe for the past 500 years.
Some suggestions for something narrower, going chronologically (and based on where I’ve lived, which is the northeast and southwest, there are gigantic gaps in my knowledge even on a broad scale)
The policies and relationships are of the Jamestown colonies with the local tribes.
The relationships between various tribes from the initial settlements in Massachusetts through King Philip’s War.
The Iroquois federation history, from colonial times to today. The current day tribe I’ve heard the most about are the Metis, who are mostly in Canada, but the story of the Iroquois general is huge and has a fair amount written on it.
The Cherokee, starting from their history as a powerful tribe, to the Trail of Tears, followed by their building a home in Oklahoma and the struggles they’ve faced to reach where they are today. This is a good option simply because the tribe has a great deal of resources online about their history and traditions.
The history of Oklahoma in general.
The Seminoles and their history of taking in runaway slaves.
The history of Mormon settlers in the southwest in rescuing Paiute children stolen into slavery by the Apache and raising them in their own families rather than returning them for religious reasons. (“Native American” is as broad and bloody a history as “European”)
The general history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, including various policies around suppressing native culture (this is probably the most direct way to find the word “suppression”).
For the most part, we shot them.
(Not saying it was the right thing to do… but facts are facts).
You act like this is all one group. If it was, the original European colonists would have been ousted before they could establish settlements, let alone the colonies. Native American tribes were small, there were bigger confederacies and later war parties, but before the threat of their annihilation, most tribes didn’t work together that often.
The first blow was accidental, the explorers like Columbus accidentally introduced European diseases to north America. Long story short, things like the black death in an unexposed population were detrimental, it’s estimated well over half of the native populations in the Americas died. Most of this occurred long before Europeans set foot in these areas.
From there, it was the American spin on European colonialism. Disputes and conflict lead to land seizure. Treaties were signed, then reneged upon. War bands formed, were crushed, formed again….
A big part of the history, the part that gets focused on in our schools is the Trail of Tears, where the US government forcibly moved American Indians onto reservations. American Indians are actually a sovereign nation within the US, they have their own congress, [https://ncai.org/about-ncai/mission-history](https://ncai.org/about-ncai/mission-history).
r/HomeworkHelp
Russell Means testified before a Senate committee in the late 80s and talked about some of atrocities that the government committed against his people. This should give you a bit of an understanding, but I suggest doing more research as well. It’s a complicated and dark story that started well before the US was founded. https://youtu.be/xVANRroxuOo
Gunpowder, smallpox, & fraud.
I…have no idea where to start.
They were suppressed through a combination of viruses (both intentionally spread and unintentionally spread), warfare, genocide, and unfair treaties. There were also tons of broken promises and forced relocation.
If you want more information on any one of those topics, I can give you that.
go to r/AskHistorians but here’s a overview:
* The Colombian exchange saw Eastern Hemisphere diseases take the population of the western hemisphere from 25 million to 2 million in 50 years (1492-1542 ish)
* Over the next 2.5 centuries the Spanish and Portuguese would send some colonists, largely to South and central America, note this does not include the modern USA, because nomadic groups were more trouble for the Spanish to conquer in this time period.
* in the 1600s after some successful island colonization where the last natives had died out years prior and replaced with slaves, the British, Dutch, and French try to colonize the Eastern coast of the USA and Canada. Some light warfare occurs, but only the St. Lawrence River and coastal territories are effective colonized.
* Starting with the war of 1812, the Native Americans lost the ability to counter American expansion when the British withdrew support for a “Indian buffer state”
* the Purchase of Louisiana would see the United States begin Western expansion because:
* the following century would see 35 million Europeans (Europe’s 1910 population was 350 million) leave the continent adding population pressures for the nation and encouraging western Expansion
* The navigable Mississippi river and basin would see most of this population growth occur near it due to economic factors.
* The Mexican American war would see the longest period of the Indian wars follow because:
* The introduction of the railway would see the USA have a way to project force and commerce into terrain the Spanish were not able to after taking it from Mexico.
* The USA’s new migrants would also be able to populate these lands unlike Mexico which lacked the demographics at the time to fully populate “El Norte” (its 18th century term for the lands the USA annexed)
* This would also allow the USA to defeat tribes like the Apache which had resisted Spanish/Mexican incursion for 3 centuries.
* The Indian wars do not have a definitive end, but Wounded Knee is generally considered the end of large scale operations (but some tribes would fight up until ww1)
As you can see the biggest factor is just demographics, 35 million Europeans came to the USA–while the territories of the USA today in 1800 probably has 1/2 a million Native Americans (that could even be generous)–and had largely white descendants which just overrode the underlying country.
This is also why the USA has a more European Heritage while Mexico and central America have a mixed Native-European heritage (Mestizo), less European migrants even though it was relatively large (majorities of Latin America were white or mixed by 1700) and earlier.
This is a n overly broad question. It happened in different places, to different groups, by different groups, all for varying reasons.
You might want to refine your question to a specific subset of Native American groups in a particular region in a specific time period.
Well, it started with a sweetheart deal when the Dutch purchased Manhattan Island for 60 guilder from the Native Americans, it quickly went downhill from there.
Of all the horrors that happened I think one of those most tragic was while conspiring to rid the land of Natives, the governments realized that the natives relied entirely on Bison.
So the government proceeded to kill all the Bison.
The Bison went from like 60 million to *541,* no zeros on that number, in like 100 years.
So there is one way they suppressed them. The governments hunted their food source to near extinction in order to starve them into submission.
On a lighter note, the bison are back up to 31,000+ nowadays.
Sadly, most Americans have no clue.
Spanish came over, killed 90% of them on accident because plagues are a thing. Started the encomienda system, which killed them further in the Caribbean and South America, while exploring up through Montana and Washington. They had great success in MĂ©xico and the andes because they were able to replace the central government, but were less successful in Northern Mexico and the US because there were no states to take over.
English, French, and Dutch colonists settled further north trying to replicate the encomienda, but this didn’t work (because the natives refused to feed them) so they starved. The English then pivoted to giving individuals plots of land to people, who would be able to defend it with their weapons. One French-Indian war later (French + Indians vs England) over expansion into the Ohio River Valley, Indians fought on the side of England against the colonists who wanted to expand. Once independent, America began expanding into Ohio and Michigan, as well as Florida. Indians in the south were marched to Oklahoma (Indian Country, at the time) in the trail of tears. Further expansion west after the Louisiana purchase brought pioneers into conflict with the Indians over things like water, wood, and Buffalo. The pioneers were assumed to be in the right, and the army was sent in to fight the Indians and force them onto smaller and smaller reservations (for example, the Lakota are in a much smaller parcel of land than originally promised). These battles culminated in Wounded Knee, though the true last one was in Bear Valley
Google trail of tears. It was basically a death March.
They were on land. We wanted land. We viewed them as people from an unsophisticated culture. Though they were thought as above black people so we wouldn’t force them into slavery. And that it would be a waste of this land to not have us build it up to its potential.
As others have said I would not use this subreddit. There is nothing better than using primary sources, first hand accounts and historians from.the time for example, or ones that use them as their sources. If you want to have people who will point you in the right direction I suggest /r/Askhistorians. Beyond that it will be very colored by the prejudices of random people on the internet.
However to point you in the right direction I can show you how *I* would right it up. First an acknowledgement that although Christipher Columbus didn’t quite *discover* the continents but that hir arrival did herald a new era of contact between the two overall cultures. Second an acknowledgment that the impending relationship is overall a human experience and not one driven solely by ideology, religion, or economic systems. Noting that history is the tale of human interactions over time would get you high marks in my class.
Then we get in to the meat and potatoes. I would drive at the multifaceted way that humans interact by giving several different examples in history. Starting first with the conquering and enslavement of the Spanish Empire, which you *can* throw in because they did have operations on what eventually became the US. Then throw in the competition between France and Britain that led to the playing off of allies and enemies. Finally to the US itself where the Natives and us had a complicated relationship where coexistence was tried and ultimately the pressures of a growing nation led to compromises that unfortunately led to the Natives getting the crap end of the stick.
Which I would top off with a small introduction of legal attempts at recourse and a small narrative about how the US is trying but could do better.
You don’t have to do any of this. However I would expressly caution against trying to make the US out as some sort of aberration in history for it’s treatment of Natives. It was the norm, unfortunately, in human history.
I would use this YouTube video as a jumping-off point.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H2Gl4QFA6mA
However, for a more well-rounded perspective on the topic, I would also stop by and lurk r/indiancountry since you are using reddit anyways. The sub can be ahistorical certainly, but not so much more so than any other one here and at least most of the users there are actual native Americans, and their own version if events ought not be discredited.
It should be said however that there is no single “native american” experience. The natives today are not the victims of some grand genocidal collaboration, but rather the survivors of an apocalypse. By the time the Europeans really began settling North America, it estimated that up to 90% of all natives in the western hemisphere succumbed to smallpox brought over from initial Spanish and Portuguese contact, which spread naturally as they traveled and traded amongst themselves. It was not uncommon for Americans to find ghost villages as they settled, those places abandoned for decades or even a century due to a plague they never saw coming and could not anticipate.
Finally, like in all world affairs, there were many losers but some of them also were winners who benefited from colonization. Keep that in mind.
Disease. Then expansion, and war. Then some more atrocities.
This is a long story. I’d say the lack of immunity to diseases carried by European colonials did most of the work before Europeans set eyes on most Native tribes. If you want a specific time period, I can recommend Ken Burns’s The West. It has a lot of detail on what happened to the Natives during Manifest Destiny days.
That’s an extremely broad topic.
One thing I would suggest is to consider your sources. Many history books and articles you’ll find will be from non-native historians that tend to gloss over or water down/sugarcoat certain less than flattering aspects of colonist/native relationships.
It’s worth seeking out native perspectives as well which are a little harder to find.
The Wampanoag were one of the first tribes in north America to encounter colonists and is one of the more infamous stories in colonial history. That might be a good place to start
https://www.plymouth400inc.org/our-story-exhibit-wampanoag-history/
Violence, deception, and lots of Germs
Curious why your school is focusing on that and not your own country’s history of repression. I mean it’s so disconnected from you that you’re asking Americans on Reddit to help you… Like The Netherlands doesn’t have the best record with gypsies. I’m saying this not to negate America’s treatement of Native Americans, but because I’ve often seen Europeans focus on America’s racism, slavery, colonialism, supression, while ignoring their own millenia long history.
Or are you doing some sort of project on repression of indigenous populations around the world? It would be a very long list.
The Spanish were among the earliest with their policy of *encomienda*. It was a system where conquerors were given power over the non-Christian people they conquered in the form of using them as a labor force. It was supposed to be a trade-off in that the newly conquered people received protection and the benefits of being Spanish subjects, but it often didn’t work out that way. This was mainly in their attacks on the South and Meso-American tribes and empires, but was felt in all of their holdings up to Florida and the modern Southwest.
Further North, settlers in the various colonies from differing countries would get into disagreements, fights, and eventually wars against the natives they were coexisting with, and European colonists did not think kindly of them. Look into King Philip’s War and the relocation of the Massachuset people to Deer Island.
The governments overseas mainly wanted to maintain stability with them when possible, mostly for trade relations, example of which was the policy the British Crown had of forbidding people from expanding over the Appalachian Mountains, but the colonists wanted more land. During the Revolution, the British had western and northern native tribes as allies and used them to attack supply lines, settlers, and the exposed backside of colonial forces. There were American military efforts against them as well. Look up the Squaw Campaign in which an American regiment under Edward Hand attacked neutral tribes in Western PA, including one shameful incident where they managed to kill an old woman, her son, a few women and a child.
After the war, the new government maintained that entitled superiority they inherited from the old European mindsets and nixed that policy. They began expanding out into the Ohio country, forcing the natives to move farther and farther west. That kept up for at least another 150 years with continued military force, broken treaties, forced relocation. Stuff like walking treaties, the Trail of Tears, the Indian Wars, etc.
Distinct versions of this happened in other parts of the Americas. You’d either have to do independent research or ask r/askacanadian or r/asklatinamerica for the specific history in their regions. I don’t feel comfortable acting as an authority on histories I’m not as familiar with.
Others have pointed out that this is a really long and broad topic, but there is a comment from r/AskHistorians about the misconception we have about the Native Americans’ ideas of property rights and how Europeans and Americans abused them whenever they could.
You might find it to be an interesting read.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/kf01cw/comment/gg5xpwu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/kf01cw/comment/gg5xpwu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I can’t remember what history magazine I read this in, years ago, but apparently natives killed more whites than vice versa. They were really good fighters, fitter and smarter from superior childhood nutrition, and they didn’t remain technologically outmatched for long – they adopted horses and mastered horsemanship quickly, and adopted firearms while retaining a wicked expertise with the bow, which is in some situations the better weapon, being quieter and with a faster rate of fire than early rifles.
Looks like we just outbred them. We were the weaker fighters but we could absorb losses that they couldn’t.
I can’t speak to the veracity of that historian’s assessment, but it’s something to look into. It sounds plausible anyway.
Note: the historian was talking about direct confrontation casualties, not death from unfamiliar infectious diseases, which weakened native nations before we even met them.
That’s incredibly broad and depends largely on time period and location within the continental US. Look up the Trail of Tears, the Buffalo Hunts, Plague Blankets and the Seminole Wars in Florida to get started.
r/AskHistorians is a **much** better place to look. I can almost guarantee you they will have a place to start looking in their FAQ and if they don’t asking this question will get you much better quality answers with sources.
But to give you an exceptionally condensed and unnuanced version, Europeans discovered (or rediscovered) the new world and the Spanish were the first to take advantage of this. While their conquest of the Aztecs and Inca are far more infamous, they did send a sizeable army to March around what is the modern day American south east looking for gold. Between the battles they fought and the diseases they and North European fishermen spread, Natives in North America suffered population loss of at least half and I’ve seen some figures say up to 90% of their population between 1500 and 1750.
When European colonists arrived, broadly speaking they were usually quick to find local allies that were willing to help them get established in exchange for assistance which could be anything from trade to military aid against their rivals.
Eventually, the European colonies grew large and established enough that they could fend for themselves and were the dominant powers in the region. Only larger and more powerful tribes or confederations could challenge them and even they were exceptionally weakened by repeated waves of disease. By 1815, the last attempt at a confederation powerful enough to challenge the United States was defeated.
Following this, the US policy towards natives boiled down to “Get them out of the good land and resettle them on reservations and make sure they don’t pose a threat to anyone.” Which more often than not involved humiliating treaties that the US might not even respect, frequent massacres, forced relocations, disarmament, and violence.
There’s a great book on the subject called guns, germs, and steel. It explores the reasons why the europeans were technologically far ahead of other peoples.