Native Americans "Removed" Archives

Youth Suicide In South Dakota | An Aftermath of Wounded Knee?

Some say that the recent epidemic of suicide among Oglala Lakota youths living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota results from cyberbullying. In the first 110 days of 2013, 100 youths, including a 6-year-old, attempted suicide. By the end of the year, five adults and children had killed themselves. And from late December 2014 through February 2015, more than 100.young Lakota tried to take their own lives. Nine, between the ages of 12 […]

Massacre at Wounded Knee

7 On December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the U.S. 7th Calvary murdered some 350 Lakota men, women, and children. In the eyes of history, the “Wounded Knee Massacre” broke the hearts of the Native American population and put an end to the “Indian Wars.” In the preceding years, the U. S. government continued to seize Lakota lands, white settlers hunted the bison to near-extinction, and treaties promising to protect reservations from encroachment were ignored. Wovoka, a […]

The “Trail of Tears”

From the time the first white settlers landed in North America, there were conflicts between whites and Native Americans. In the southeastern region, five Indian tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chicasaw, Creek, and Seminole—hunted, fished, and raised families.on land perfect for the settlers to cultivate cotton. Gradually, these tribes adopted the farming practices of the white Americans and, in some cases, owned African-American slaves. These practices led to the […]

Lincoln and the Dakota Sioux

History holds President Abraham Lincoln in awe, but his decisions about whether or not to punish insurgents were not consistent, perhaps reflecting personal and national biases. After Minnesota became a state in 1861, the U.S. government forced the Dakota Indians to hand over the territory to white settlers, promising food and supplies as partial compensation. In the summer of 1862, the Dakota were starving, […]

“The Indians never had any real title to the soil.”

In 1892, nine years before his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt defended the federal government’s treatment of Indians, saying: “This continent had to be won. We need not waste our time in dealing with any sentimentalist who believes that, on account of any abstract principle, it would have been right to leave this continent to the domain, the hunting ground of squalid savages. It had to be […]

Assimilate, Eliminate, Exterminate

In 1803, the United States paid France $15,000,000 for 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River, thereby doubling the size of the young nation. The Louisiana Purchase Territory-1803 Thomas Jefferson’s original plan regarding indigenous peoples was to coerce them into to giving up their cultures, religions, and lifestyles, in favor of the euro-American ways. He believed that assimilation would […]

George Washington, French and Indian War “Hero”

This is the earliest authenticated portrait of George Washington. It shows him in the Virginia Regiment colonel’s uniform he wore during the French and Indian War. The painting hangs in the Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. George Washington was an ambitious young man who proved himself to be a military prodigy. At age 20, he […]

The Hypocrisy of Mount Rushmore

To escape the northeastern winter, my husband and I spent the month of February in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The landscape is stunning, the blue of the sky intense, the architecture often reminiscent of Native American pueblos. For an out-of-the-way town, there is a plethora of notable art galleries and museums, often showing works depicting Native Americans. Some were idealized images of native people living close to the land, […]