How the Plains Wars Were a Consequence of Brutal US Government Policies Against the Native Americans

20. Americanization – the attempt to “kill the Indian to save the man”

As historian Gregory H. Nobles put it, “also buried in those mass graves was the last vestige of significant resistance to the government’s Indian policy in the nineteenth century.” Historian Philip Weeks describes the policy of “Americanization” as the “third solution advanced (by the United States Government”) in the nineteenth century – the first being the policy of Separation which led to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the second being the policy of Concentration which sought to confine tribes on reservations.
The Dawes Act effectively was the means of “Americanizing” or “civilizing” the Native American population by encouraging them to abandon their traditional ways of life and to adopt more American methods of subsistence, such as farming individual plots of land. Education was another method deployed by the government to “kill the Indian and save the man.” By 1900 thousands of Native American children were studying in boarding schools which forbade them from speaking their own native languages and even made them give up their Indian names.

“Americanization” remained the official Native American policy of respective federal governments until the 1930s, when John Collier, who was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Indian Commissioner, declared the policy a failure.

Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

Hagan, William T. How the west was lost, in F. Hoxie-P. Iverson, eds., Indians in American History: An Introduction (Harlan Davidson, 1998).

Nobles, Gregory H. American Frontiers, Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest, (New York, Penguin, 1998).

Prucha, Francis Paul, The Great Father. The United States Government and the American Indians, (University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

Utley, Robert, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (Yale University Press, 1963).

Weeks, Philip, Farewell, My Nation: The United States and the Indians, 1820-1890, (H. Davidson, 1990).

“Indian policy (from United States). David A. Nichols. American History. Oxfordre.

“Native American Timeline of Events.” Kathy Weiser, legendsofamerica.com. March 2017.

“Johnson v McIntosh – Impact” law.jrank.org

“Johnson & Graham’s Lesse v McIntosh.” oyez.org, 23 August 2018.

“Indian Removal Act.” Encyclopaedia Britannica from Standard Edition. (2018).

“Tribal Sovereignty.” paumatribe.com.