Conflict with the Indigenous Nations

II - Causes

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Looking at the Conflict - BBC Bitesize

Indian Wars (1864-68): Causes and Consequences  - Clever Lili

Why was there so much bloodshed on the Plains 1861-77? - Miss Pickett

The first reason the Indigenous Peoples and white Americans came into conflict was CULTURAL.

White Americans could not understand the hunter-gatherer life of the Indigenous Peoples, and put it down to barbarism.

For example, the teepee seemed simply an 'inconceivably filthy' tent. They saw exposure as cruel abandonment and polygamy as perverted. They despised Indigenous religion as godless superstition, and thought the 1890 ghost dance was a rebellion.

Similarly, w Indigenous warriors chose to ignore the Treaties agreed by their chiefs, or waged war by stealth and ambush, or stole horses, the white Americans put it down to cowardice and treachery.

Most of all, the wašíču could not understand the Indigenous attitude to the land. The Indigenous Peoples loved the land and thought it did not belong to them; the white Americans wanted to work it, and could not understand why the Indigenous Peoples would not sell the land to him … until, in the end, they just took it.

By contrast, the Indigenous Peoples looked at the white Americans and decided that they were devils who damaged and ruined the earth. The white Americans’ exploitative attitude to the land and the spirits made their heart break with sadness. Meanwhile, everything the white Americans did endangered their way of life. The railroads and fences stopped the migration of the buffalo, which were being wiped out by hunting. Even the white Americans who did not want to exterminate them were demanding that they give up their nomadic way of life, give up the land and go to live on small reservations, and live in fixed homes and take up farming.

There was a conflict of culture before there was a conflict of war.

A second reason, mixed in with this clash of cultures, was GENOCIDAL RACISM.

The white Americans believed that they were the highest point of creation, racially superior to blacks, Jews and Indigenous people, and that it was their Manifest Destiny to conquer the West. President Jefferson regarded the Indigenous Nations as 'backward in civilisation [like] beasts'. This caused the white Americans to treat the Indigenous people in a harsh and supremacist way.

For example, the white settlers hated the Indigenous Peoples, and openly said that 'complete extermination is our motto'. When white settlers began to cross the Plains, Indigenous warriors had robbed and killed some of them; the settlers greatly exaggerated the cruelty of such incidents, in order to persuade the government to wipe the Indigenous Peoples out. In the 1850s, militia groups were exterminating Indigenous Californians for $5 a scalp. In 1864 the Colorado Volunteers under Chivington massacred a peaceful Indigenous village at Sand Creek. Hunters systematically set about killing all the buffalo so that the Indigenous Peoples would starve to death.

Against this, the Indigenous Chiefs tried negotiation and signed treaties; some Indigenous tribes accepted every oppression, and some individuals literally laid down and died; but they were faced with declared genocide.

The third reason for conflict was ECONOMIC

Because white Americans wanted the Great Plains (primarily the gold, but also the land) and the Indigenous People were simply in the way.

Until 1840, there was little conflict because the white Americans thought the Great Plains were a desert and did not want them. But as gold miners, Mormons, cattle ranchers and then homesteaders went west, white Americans began first to cross the Great Plains, then to settle on them. At the Treaties of Laramie and Medicine Lodge Creek, the Indigenous Chiefs agreed to live, first on their hunting grounds, then as farmers on small reservations, but nothing stopped the white Americans wanting more and more. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota in 1874, thousands of miners rushed onto the Sioux reservation.

Therefore, Indigenous Nations went to war to try to defend their lands from invasion and colonization: what Black Elk called the ‘flood’ of whites.

A fourth reason was POLITICAL: the behaviour of the US government.

It wanted the Plains settled, and therefore always supported the settlers against the Indigenous tribes. It reneged on the Laramie Treaty of 1851, which had given the Black Hills of Dakota to the Sioux “for all time”. After the Medicine Lodge treaty of 1867, the US government broke all its promises to supply food and medicine. Faced with gold miners flooding onto the Black Hills after 1874, Red Cloud appealed to the government; first it tried to buy the land from him, then sent Colonel Custer to destroy the Sioux villages.

What else could the Indigenous Nations do but take matters into their own hands, and abandon peace and fight, when they had been lied to and tricked; when the Apache people were left to starve to death on San Carlos reservation; when Red Cloud got no support from the government against the gold miners? ?

So… the final reason was RESISTANCE.

At this point the Indigenous People found themselves in the situation that confronts all oppressed peoples. If they did nothing, and gave way, the oppressor would simply destroy them bit-by-bit by dispossession and starvation. But when they fought back, they were denounced as savages and terrorists, and exterminated by force.

For example, in 1861 the Cheyenne went on the warpath because the government tried give most of their land to the settlers. In 1866 Crazy Horse wiped out a unit of US cavalry (the Fetterman massacre); in 1876 Sitting Bull wiped out Custer's army at Little Bighorn – both were responses to open (and foolhardy) provocations by the army.

Even Army Generals like Custer and Sheridan admitted that, had they been in the Indigenous Peoples’ position, they would have fought back.

All these acts of resistance did, however, was to evoke a stronger response, until Custer’s Avengers finally destroyed the Indigenous resistance altogether.