# The oppression of Native Americans

Centuries of dispossession made national policy: the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, the massacres from Sand Creek to Wounded Knee, the reservation and allotment system, the boarding schools meant to 'kill the Indian', the Termination era and the coerced sterilizations, and the resistance from AIM to the modern apologies.

*This story parallel: Segregation: Jim Crow and its global cousins*
*This story parallel: Colonial concentration camps and atrocities across the empires*
*This story part of: Health and medicine*

## 28 May 1830 — Indian Removal Act

The United States Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the federal government to negotiate the forced relocation of Indigenous nations from the southeastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. It provided the legal basis for removing the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations from their homelands. Thousands died during the forced marches that followed, most infamously the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

## 3 March 1832 — Worcester v. Georgia decided

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee Nation was a sovereign entity and that Georgia's state laws had no force within Cherokee territory. President Jackson refused to enforce the ruling, reportedly saying John Marshall had made his decision and could enforce it himself. The federal and Georgia governments proceeded with removal regardless.

## 28 December 1835 — Second Seminole War begins

Seminole resistance to removal from Florida erupted into open war after an ambush killed Major Francis Dade and most of his command. The war lasted until 1842, cost the U.S. government tens of millions of dollars, and killed thousands of soldiers, Seminoles, and enslaved Black allies who had joined the Seminole cause. Most surviving Seminoles were eventually forced to Indian Territory, though a remnant held out in the Everglades.

## c. 1836 — Creek (Muscogee) removal

After the Second Creek War, federal troops and state militia forcibly marched most of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation from Alabama to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Many were transported in chains as prisoners of war rather than as treaty parties. Historians estimate several thousand Creek people died from disease, exposure, and starvation during the removal and its immediate aftermath.

## c. September 1838 — Cherokee Trail of Tears

After the May 1838 removal deadline passed, U.S. Army troops under General Winfield Scott rounded up Cherokee families into stockades and forced roughly 16,000 people on a march west to Indian Territory, continuing into the spring of 1839. The Cherokee National Council later estimated that about 4,000 people died along the route and in the holding camps from disease, cold, and hunger; other scholarly estimates range somewhat lower. The route and removal became known as the Trail of Tears.

## c. January 1864 — Long Walk of the Navajo

Following a scorched-earth campaign led by Kit Carson that destroyed Navajo (Diné) crops, orchards, and livestock, the U.S. Army forced roughly 8,000 Navajo people to walk over 300 miles to the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Hundreds died during the marches from cold, starvation, and violence. Conditions at Bosque Redondo were so severe that the Navajo were allowed to return to a portion of their homeland under an 1868 treaty.

## 29 November 1864 — Sand Creek Massacre

Colonel John Chivington led roughly 675 Colorado militia in an attack on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment flying an American flag and a white flag of truce under Chief Black Kettle. A subsequent U.S. Army investigation and congressional inquiry condemned the attack as a massacre; estimates of the dead, mostly women, children, and the elderly, range from about 70 to over 200 depending on the source, with the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site citing roughly 230. Three congressional and military investigations followed, and Chivington was never prosecuted.

## 27 November 1868 — Washita River Massacre

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry in a dawn attack on a Cheyenne village on the Washita River led by Chief Black Kettle, the same leader who had survived Sand Creek four years earlier. Custer reported around 100 warriors killed, but later investigations and tribal accounts indicate many of the dead were women and children; Cheyenne sources put total deaths at around 30 to 60. Black Kettle and his wife were killed in the attack.

## 23 January 1870 — Marias Massacre

U.S. Army cavalry under Major Eugene Baker attacked a Blackfeet (Piegan) winter camp on the Marias River, killing an estimated 173 to 217 people, most of them women, children, and the elderly, according to Army and Interior Department reports at the time. The camp Baker's men attacked was later found to belong to a band led by Chief Heavy Runner, who was not the intended target and who was shot while displaying papers proving his peaceful status. The killings drew public outrage and congressional criticism, though no soldiers were prosecuted.

## c. June 1874 — Red River War

The U.S. Army launched a coordinated campaign against Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho bands resisting confinement to reservations in Indian Territory, culminating in the destruction of villages and horse herds at Palo Duro Canyon that September. The war ended organized Plains tribal resistance in the southern Plains by mid-1875 and forced the remaining bands onto reservations. It marked the effective close of independent life on the southern Plains.

## 25 June 1876 — Battle of the Little Bighorn

Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated the U.S. 7th Cavalry, killing Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and roughly 260 of his men, during the Great Sioux War. The victory was short-lived: the U.S. Army responded with a much larger campaign that forced most of the Lakota onto reservations within a year and stripped away the Black Hills, which had been guaranteed to the Sioux by treaty.

## 5 October 1877 — Nez Perce War ends with Chief Joseph's surrender

After a roughly 1,170-mile fighting retreat toward Canada to escape forced removal to a reduced reservation, Chief Joseph surrendered the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) to U.S. Army General Nelson Miles just short of the border. Joseph's surrender speech, including the line "I will fight no more forever," became one of the most quoted statements associated with Native resistance. Survivors were exiled to Indian Territory rather than returned to their homeland as promised, and many died there of disease before some were allowed back to the Pacific Northwest years later.

## 6 October 1879 — Carlisle Indian Industrial School founded

Army officer Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first federally run off-reservation boarding school for Native children, on the site of a former military barracks. Pratt summarized his assimilationist philosophy as an intent to "kill the Indian... and save the man," separating children from their families, languages, and cultures. Carlisle became the model for a nationwide system of roughly 350 government and church-run boarding schools that operated over the following century.

## 8 February 1887 — Dawes General Allotment Act

Congress passed the Dawes Act, which broke up communally held reservation land into individual allotments, typically 160 acres per head of household, and declared remaining acreage "surplus" for sale to non-Native settlers. Over the following decades tribal landholdings fell from about 138 million acres in 1887 to roughly 48 million acres by 1934. The policy was intended to force assimilation into individual farming and dissolve tribal governance.

## 29 December 1890 — Wounded Knee Massacre

U.S. 7th Cavalry troops surrounded a band of roughly 350 Lakota, mostly followers of Chief Spotted Elk (Big Foot) who had been practicing the Ghost Dance, at Wounded Knee Creek to disarm them. A shot rang out during the disarmament and soldiers opened fire with rifles and rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns; estimates of the dead range from about 150 to 300, according to varying contemporary and later accounts, including many women and children cut down as they fled. Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for the action, awards that Native advocacy groups have since campaigned to rescind.

## 28 June 1898 — Curtis Act

Congress extended the allotment policy to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations in Indian Territory, which had previously been exempt from the Dawes Act under their removal-era treaties. The law abolished tribal courts and dissolved tribal governments' control over their own land, clearing the way for Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and further loss of communal tribal land.

## 2 June 1924 — Indian Citizenship Act

Congress granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans born within the country, though many states continued to deny Native people the right to vote for decades afterward through state-level restrictions; some states did not fully guarantee Native voting rights until the 1950s or later. The act followed the service of thousands of Native American soldiers in World War I, many of whom had not been citizens when they enlisted.

## 21 February 1928 — Meriam Report published

A federally commissioned survey led by Lewis Meriam, formally titled "The Problem of Indian Administration," documented widespread poverty, malnutrition, disease, and abuse across reservations and boarding schools. It found boarding school food and medical care to be grossly inadequate and child labor at the schools excessive, and it criticized the allotment system for impoverishing tribes. The report's findings pushed Congress toward the reforms enacted in the Indian Reorganization Act six years later.

## 18 June 1934 — Indian Reorganization Act

Also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act, this law ended further allotment of tribal land, extended the trust period on existing allotments, and encouraged tribes to adopt formal constitutions and elected governments. It reversed decades of allotment policy but was imposed somewhat uniformly across tribes with very different governance traditions, and some tribes rejected it. It marked the first major reversal of federal assimilation policy since the 1880s.

## 1 August 1953 — Congress adopts House Concurrent Resolution 108

Congress formally adopted a policy of "termination," ending federal recognition and trust protections for selected tribes and subjecting their members to state law like other citizens. Over the following years more than 100 tribes and bands were terminated, including the Menominee of Wisconsin and the Klamath of Oregon, resulting in loss of land, health services, and tribal sovereignty for the affected communities.

## 3 August 1956 — Indian Relocation Act

The Bureau of Indian Affairs began actively encouraging and funding Native Americans to relocate from reservations to designated urban centers such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Denver, promising job training and housing assistance. Many relocated families found the promised support inadequate and faced discrimination, poverty, and isolation from their tribal communities in the cities. The policy, paired with termination, was intended to reduce federal responsibility for reservations and accelerate assimilation.

## 30 April 1961 — Menominee termination takes effect

The Menominee Termination Act, passed in 1954, took full effect, dissolving the Menominee Nation's federal recognition and converting the reservation into a Wisconsin county. The loss of tax-exempt trust status and federal services caused severe economic decline in the former reservation area, and the tribe spent the next decade organizing to reverse termination.

## 28 July 1968 — American Indian Movement founded

Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, George Mitchell, and other Native activists founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis, initially to address police harassment of Native residents and later expanding into a national movement for treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, and an end to federal termination and relocation policies. AIM went on to organize some of the most visible Native protests of the era, including the occupations of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee.

## 20 November 1969 — Occupation of Alcatraz begins

A group calling itself Indians of All Tribes, mostly Native college students, occupied the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island, citing an 1868 Sioux treaty provision allowing Native people to claim unused federal land. The occupation lasted 19 months until federal marshals removed the remaining occupants in June 1971, and it drew national attention to Native grievances, helping end the termination era and push the federal government toward a policy of tribal self-determination.

## 27 February 1973 — Occupation of Wounded Knee

AIM activists and Oglala Lakota traditionalists occupied the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the site of the 1890 massacre, to protest tribal government corruption and demand renewed federal enforcement of treaty rights. The occupation led to a 71-day standoff with federal marshals and FBI agents; two Native occupiers, Frank Clearwater and Buddy Lamont, were killed by gunfire before the siege ended in May 1973. The event drew international media attention to Native American grievances.

## 22 December 1973 — Menominee Restoration Act

Congress restored federal recognition to the Menominee Nation, reversing its 1961 termination after years of organizing led by activist Ada Deer and the group DRUMS (Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders). It was the first successful reversal of a termination-era decision and became a model for other tribes seeking restoration.

## 4 January 1975 — Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act

President Gerald Ford signed legislation allowing tribes to contract directly with the federal government to administer their own health, education, and social service programs rather than having them run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The act formally repudiated termination as federal policy in favor of tribal self-governance and became the foundation for the modern government-to-government relationship between tribes and Washington.

## 4 November 1976 — GAO report exposes IHS sterilizations of Native women

The U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report finding that Indian Health Service facilities in just four of its twelve regions had sterilized 3,406 Native American women between 1973 and 1976, and that consent procedures required by federal regulation were often not followed. Physician and researcher Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri separately estimated that IHS may have sterilized between one quarter and one half of Native American women of childbearing age during the decade, a figure attributed to her research rather than the GAO. The revelations led to reformed federal consent rules for sterilization procedures.

## 11 August 1978 — American Indian Religious Freedom Act

Congress passed a resolution affirming the right of Native Americans to practice traditional religions, including access to sacred sites and use of sacred objects, after decades in which practices like the Sun Dance and use of peyote in Native American Church ceremonies had been suppressed or criminalized. The act had limited enforcement power and later Supreme Court rulings narrowed its practical protections, prompting further legislation in the 1990s.

## 8 November 1978 — Indian Child Welfare Act

Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in response to findings that state welfare agencies were removing Native children from their families and placing them with non-Native adoptive and foster homes at drastically disproportionate rates, in some states affecting a quarter to a third of all Native children. The law established tribal jurisdiction and preference standards for custody proceedings involving Native children. It has since been challenged in federal courts, including a 2023 Supreme Court case that upheld it.

## 19 December 2009 — US apology to Native Peoples signed

President Barack Obama signed a formal apology to Native American peoples on behalf of the United States, included as a rider within the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act, acknowledging "years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants" by the federal government. The apology received little public attention at signing, was not read aloud in a ceremony, and included a disclaimer that it did not authorize or support any legal claims against the United States.

## 8 December 2010 — Cobell settlement funded

President Obama signed the Claims Resolution Act, funding a $3.4 billion settlement of the Cobell v. Salazar class action lawsuit, which Blackfeet activist Elouise Cobell had filed in 1996 over the federal government's decades-long mismanagement of individual Native American trust land accounts and royalties. The settlement compensated roughly 300,000 individual account holders and funded a program to consolidate fractionated tribal land. Cobell died in 2011, shortly after the settlement was finalized.

## 18 June 2019 — California apologizes for historical genocide against Native Americans

Governor Gavin Newsom issued a formal state apology, describing the historical treatment of California's Native peoples, particularly during the Gold Rush era, as genocide, and signed an executive order creating a truth and healing council. Scholars estimate California's Native population fell from roughly 150,000 to about 30,000 between 1846 and 1873 due to violence, disease, and state-sanctioned militia campaigns, estimates drawn from historian Benjamin Madley's research and state archival records.

## c. 2021 — Rosebud Sioux children's remains returned from Carlisle cemetery

The U.S. Army, which maintains the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School cemetery, disinterred and returned the remains of nine Rosebud Sioux children who had died at the school in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The repatriation was part of a broader, ongoing effort by tribes to identify and recover children buried in unmarked or poorly documented graves at former boarding school sites across the country, following renewed public attention after unmarked grave discoveries at Canadian residential schools in 2021.

## 11 May 2022 — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report released

The U.S. Department of the Interior, under Secretary Deb Haaland, released the first volume of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigative report, identifying 408 federal boarding schools that operated across 37 states or territories between 1819 and 1969 and documenting at least 500 recorded child deaths at the schools, with the department stating the true number is likely far higher as investigation continues. The report recommended further investigation of burial sites and expanded federal support for boarding school survivors and descendants.