People were hungry and confused. Most tribes could not practice their religions. In many reservation schools children were forced to speak English. They were encouraged to live like white Americans. Many Sioux joined the Ghost Dance Movement. Shots were fired. Over one hundred Sioux and over twenty-five US soldiers died. They are still here, and individuals and organizations have advocated for the rights of the native peoples.
Today, Native Americans live much like other Americans. The majority live in cities. Native Americans have much higher rates of poverty and alcoholism compared to the rest of the population. Native Americans have a special political status.
Those who live on reservations are part of their tribe and their nation. Both are sovereign bodies. They hold tribal elections, and the tribal government represents the tribe in negotiations with the state and federal government. Some tribal governments believe the US Government has not fulfilled the treaty obligations from the past. They ask for compensation, for instance funds for education and health care. Many tribes see parts of the landscape as sacred places. They want these sites to be protected.
Tribes need to balance environmental protection and economic development. When a corporation or the government wants to use natural resources on a reservation for profit, they have to negotiate with the tribal government. Some sports teams and companies use Native American figures as mascots and advertising symbols.
Many Native Americans do not like this. They believe it reduces the native people to stereotypes. Sports teams, like the Washington Redskins, have been asked to change their name. Native Americans also struggle against the stereotype images in movies and television shows. They want to remind people that the Native Americans did not disappear, and they are not imaginary creatures. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search.
It is our deep conviction that black Africa is at the very root of the human adventure and is the seed of all civilization, and Dr. Imhotep's work is a huge contribution in restoring to the black African people their rightful place in history.
David Imhotep has pulled together an amazing set of facts. What is obvious is that what we have been told in history books about the true origin of ancient American civilization is simply wrong. This book provides convincing evidence that the Americas were settled far earlier than thought and that the earliest inhabitants probably came from Africa.
Color Edition. Of course, Dr. Imhotep is not the first person to draw attention to the African presence in the Americas before Columbus. Imhotep's thesis is by far the most revolutionary viewpoint ever published on this subject. After colossal Negroid stone heads were first excavated in Mexico in the s, several Latin American scholars began to speculate that Africans had sailed to the New World in ancient times. Unlike his predecessors he does not claim that Africans simply sailed to the Americas before Columbus and influenced the native Americans who resided in the New World.
He states, instead, that the Native Americans themselves were Black Africans who first reached the New World at least , years ago. Citing skulls and skeletons, footprints in lava, campsites, genetic markers, linguistics, paintings, carvings, architecture and Egyptian writing, artifacts and structures. This book is richly illustrated with colorful pictures of the Black Native Americans. This volume will revise the way we look at the modern populations of Latin America and North America by providing a totally new view of the history of Native American and African American peoples throughout the hemisphere.
Gunpowder had changed the battlefield forever. The Militarization of Native America At first, Native Americans had no firearms; but the tribes had the advantages of mobility and knowledge of the land. Tactically, Indian warriors frustrated European commanders almost from their first encounters.
In consequence, Europeans began to play on inter-tribal rivalries and hatreds, especially after trade, rather than saving souls or extracting mineral wealth, became the real focus of European colonial aspirations. Indian tribes became allied with particular colonial nations and sometimes with particular trading companies. In return for beaver pelts, deer hides or land for commercial ventures, Native Americans received iron pots, cloth and, importantly, firearms.
Guns, adapted to Indian tactics, became almost unbeatable; almost at once, the colonists began to form themselves into local militia and utilize the tactics copied from tribal warfare. As the competition between the imperial powers of France, England, Holland and Spain grew, however, the need for well-armed Native American allies expanded exponentially. By the mids many of the tribes had been thoroughly militarized internally, were symmetrically armed and had become quite capable of inflicting significant damage on the Europeans as well as other tribes.
Inter-tribal wars nearly lost their ritual context and became progressively more brutal. Indian-white warfare, appallingly brutal to begin with, expanded in terms of both intensity and lethality largely due to the increased availability of firearms and because both sides had so rapidly militarized Steele, ; Dowd, For whites, especially the newly emergent Americans, Indian hating and killing became an expression of identity.
They joined militias in droves and armed themselves to the teeth Drinnon, ; Berkhofer, The Indian reaction was to do likewise. Violence and militarization spiraled upward. A brief history of the Teton Sioux or Lakota might suffice to demonstrate this process of spiraling militarization.
In different techniques and forms, militarization occurred among the Iroquois, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Apaches, the tribes of the Northwest Coast, Ojibwas, Miamis, Kickapoos, Shawnees and many other groups.
Trade, encroachment and the introduction of guns were its primary causes. There is a serious disagreement between the Lakotas themselves and the non-Lakota scholars over Lakota origins.
Oral traditions indicate they emerged from the Black Hills and were therefore on the northern plains since time began. Scholars, however, argue that the Lakotas originated in the region of the Great Lakes and migrated onto the buffalo plains after obtaining horses.
Whatever the case, it is known that by the mids the Lakotas were on the plains hunting buffalo on horseback. At the time, the Lakotas were not necessarily the warrior culture for which they would come to be known.
Horses simply made life easier. Buffalo hunting from horseback allowed them to increase the number of animals killed per season. Thus, hunting became very efficient and hunters could focus more of their time attending to the rich Lakota spiritual life and take part in perhaps the most elaborate and ritualistic type of warfare ever practiced.
The Lakotas practiced this form of warfare until the early nineteenth century, when displaced tribes from the east, armed with guns, began to appear in Lakota territory. The Lakota, through the fur trade, acquired guns of their own and, under the pressure of escalating combat with both traditional enemies and whites, began to militarize their society. By the mid-nineteenth century, this militarization process was nearly complete Secoy, , pp. Young Lakota men, who could have gained status as hunters, orators, craftsmen, shamans, dancers, singers or anyone of a number of different roles of valued status in Lakota society, were placed in the situation whereby they were under a great deal of social pressure to become warriors.
Lakota militarization resulted in a number of victories over the U. Red Cloud scored a great military success over the whites in recovering the Powder River country and forcing the army to vacate the forts along the Bozeman Trail. The consequent treaty negotiations cost Red Cloud a great deal of political capital, however, and he did not take part in any further wars against the whites. In that particular battle, the Lakota and their allies used their limited number of firearms to devastating effect Keegan, , pp.
By that time, war with the whites had decidedly changed the nature of plains warfare. The Lakotas, for the most part, were killing white soldiers effectively and efficiently. Still, some vestiges of Lakota ritual warfare lingered. Warriors and war leaders relied on visions and helping spirits to aid them in combat. An excellent example of the continuation of traditional sanctions against taking combat to the extreme of massacre occurred just a few days prior to the defeat of General Custer.
The Lakota decision to allow Crook to escape was based on a vision given to Sitting Bull during a Sun Dance held not long before. It was equally true, from the standpoint of the Lakotas and Cheyennes involved in the fight, that they had the most powerful medicine in those days.
They, along with several other tribal groups, represented the second, and most widespread, form of Native American militarization: that of deliberate recruitment and The Militarization of Native America compulsion to war by the whites against mutual tribal enemies.
Both forms of militarization equally changed the styles of warfare the tribes fought. Spain, as the first imperial power to lay claim to the Americas, was the first imperial power to utilize Native American allies and auxiliaries to lend their claims the weight of military force.
Cortes used native allies and the fact that smallpox had spread through Mexico to topple the Aztec empire. The descendants of Aztec warriors, in turn, became soldiers in the cause of Spanish expansion into Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
Spain gained allies among the Pueblo tribes along the Rio Grande and turned their considerable fighting skills against the Navajos, Apaches and Comanches. The French, Dutch and British empires followed suit. The League of the Iroquois first aided the Dutch and then the British in the long struggle against the French and their Huron, Ottawa and Ojibwa allies.
In the south, tribal alliances swung back and forth. Cherokees fought the British and then became their solid allies in the eighteenth century.
The Muscogee Creeks played a deadly game of shifting alliances between the British, Spanish, French and eventually the Americans throughout the same time period. When the Americans revolted against British rule, the Continental Congress authorized George Washington to recruit 2, Indian auxiliaries. The first treaty made between a Native American nation and the newly formed United States was essentially a military alliance with the Delawares.
Without Indian allies the Americans would have lost in the attempt to gain political efficacy over the territory acquired in the Treaty of Paris in closing the revolution. The two American armies sent to pacify the confederation of northern tribes under the leadership of Little Turtle, a Miami, were soundly defeated. In the War of , both the British and the Americans sought and used Indian allies. During the Creek war of , Cherokee and.
Indians served as scouts in the Mexican War and as American allies along the trails leading to the newly acquired territories of California and Oregon. When the Civil War erupted both the Union and the Confederacy sought military alliances with a number of Indian nations.
When the Civil War ended, spending for the American armed forces was cut severely. The Army, however, now had two military tasks to accomplish: the pacification of the south and of the western tribes. On a shoestring budget and with limited manpower, the Army set out to conquer highly militarized tribes like the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, Comanches, Dakotas and Lakotas.
The Americans, primarily as a result of the amateur soldiering encouraged during the Civil War, had provoked a long and extremely violent war with the western Apaches. Chivington, massacred the Cheyenne encampment at Sand Creek Brown, , pp. Charged with keeping the tribes on the reservations, protecting the railroads under construction, keeping the immigrant routes open and maintaining various posts, camps and forts in the trans-Mississippi west, the Army was forced to enlist the aid of Native allies once again.
In , the Army pressured Congress into passing an act that contained a provision for the establishment of the Indian Scouting Service. The Scouting Service was a departure from the usual method of securing Indian allies through agreement or by treaty. Indian scouts were enlisted on an individual basis and for a pre-determined period of time.
They were paid as regular soldiers Dunlay, , P. On the other hand, the scouts were never viewed, nor did they operate, like regular army troops. They knew the land and the nations against whom they fought. In most instances, the scouts, being highly mobile and largely independent of main force units, acted as strike forces and in reconnaissance roles.
In what must have been agonizing experiences, Lakota warriors served as scouts against other Lakotas in the late s and Apaches hunted down other Apaches for the Army in the s. Two more steps were taken toward the militarization of Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first was the institution of military-type training and regimentation in the Indian boarding school system.
In her study of Chilocco Indian School, for example, K. Tsianina Lomawaima writes: The bugle sounded twenty-two times a day at Chilocco: reveille, assembly, mess call, school call, call to quarters. Students practiced close-order drill every moming, and military companies of boys and girls competed in Sunday dress parades. The founder of the boarding school system, Richard Henry Pratt, was an army officer who had served in the Union army during the Civil War and had taken part in the campaigns against the Comanches, Kiowas, Cheyennes and Arapahos.
He would become, in the late s the warden over the Indian prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida. The boarding school at Carlisle served as the model for the establishment of many more and institutions like Chilocco were its lineal descendants.
The Indian boarding schools were, like army recruit training, designed to redirect loyalties and to train young Indians to become Americans citizens. Simply put, Pratt thought that militarization led directly to political reliability, which, in turn, legitimized U. He had, after all, seen European immigrants use military service as the means to obtain legitimacy.
Why could it not do the same for Native Americans? The policy of assimilating American Indians into mainstream American society was one of those relatively liberal ideals that too often masked the wholesale confiscation of Indian lands and resources.
On another level, the ideal of assimilation was used at one point to bolster military manpower in the trans-Mississippi west. In , Secretary of War Renfield Proctor authorized the enlistment of one company of American Indian soldiers for each of the twenty-six non-Indian regiments of infantry and cavalry then in service west of the Mississippi. He saw military service as the perfect institution for this transformation.
His creation was successful but short-lived.
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