Shameful Genocide of Native Americans Hidden From History
As trump wages war to anesthetize and neutralize African American history he is channeling an earlier time in U.S. history when the government hid its shameful history of attempted genocide of Native Americans.
Two bloody, murderous and contemptible incidents stand out.
One was the largest mass execution in U.S. history that occurred on Dec. 26, 1862, marking the final confrontation in the so-called Dakota War of 1862.
The other in 1864 was of the most heinous massacres in American military history led. Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist pastor, Mason and army colonel, lead 700 volunteers of the Colorado Territory in the November Sand Creek Massacre.
An estimated 70 to 600 Cheyenne and Arapaho, who were mostly women, children, and infants, were murdered and mutilated. Chivington and his men took scalps and other human body parts as trophies, including unborn fetuses, as well as male and female genitalia.
The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War investigated and condemned Chivington and his soldiers but no court-martials were brought. The only punishment Chivington suffered was public exposure and the end of his political aspirations.
Throughout the late 19th century, the number of Native Americans in the U.S. withered to an estimated 250,000, down from the pre-European population of about 8 million. The population increased in the 20th century to a total of 6.79 million or 2.09 percent of the total population.
The United States has never held a truth commission nor built a memorial for the genocide of Indigenous people. The government still does not acknowledge nor compensate for the historical violence against Native Americans.
Dakota War
As a result of the Dakota War, President Lincoln ordered the execution of 38 Dakota Indians for rebellion. It was a disgraceful incident, considering that Lincoln never executed any of the hundreds of white Confederate officials and generals who were stained with the blood of more than 400,000 Union soldiers.
The only Confederate ever executed was Capt. Henry Wirz, the commander of the Andersonville Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near Andersonville, Ga. Nearly 13,000 Union Army prisoners of war died as a result of inhumane conditions, leading to Wirz’ trial and execution for war crimes.
The native Americans were sentenced to the gallows for allegedly killing 490 white settlers, including women and children, in the Santee Sioux uprising the previous August. The executions were carried out on a giant square scaffold in the center of town, in front of hundreds of white people. A report in the N.Y. Times said the 38 eight Dakota men “wailed and danced atop the gallows, waiting for the trapdoors to drop beneath them.”
The Dakota War of 1862 began on August 18, 1862, when the Dakota, who were facing starvation and displacement, attacked the white settlements along the Minnesota River valley in southwest Minnesota. The war lasted for just five weeks but cost the deaths of hundreds of settlers and the displacement of thousands more. After the war. the Dakota people were exiled from their homelands, forcibly sent to reservations in the Dakotas and Nebraska, and the State of Minnesota confiscated and sold all their remaining land in the state.
In 1862, Minnesota was a new frontier state and mostly white lumbermen, speculators and farmers were pushing out the Dakota Indians, also called the Sioux. The U.S. government aided the white settlers by voiding or ignoring repeated peace treaties.
The government’s complicity in violating and ignoring treaties reached a nadir in the summer of 1862 when the government failed to deliver promised food and supplies to the Indians which was supposed to be partial payment for giving up their lands to whites.
One trader, Andrew Myrick and his Dakota wife, Nancy, operated stores in southwest Minnesota at two Native American agencies serving the Dakota near the Minnesota River. In the summer, Myrick, the “most hated of the traders,” refused to sell food on credit to the starving Indians. Myrick was alleged to have said of the Dakota, “Let them eat grass.”
The Dakota leader Little Crow led his “enraged and starving” tribe in a series of attacks on frontier settlements. The war ended but not before Henry Hastings Sibley, first governor of Minnesota and a leader of the state militia, captured 2,000 Dakota, and a military court sentenced 303 to death.
Sibley was a trader with the American Fur Company, founded in 1834 by John Jacob Astor, a German-born American businessman, merchant, real estate mogul, and investor. Astor made his fortune in a fur trade monopoly, by exporting opium into the Chinese Empire, and by investing in real estate in or around New York City during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was the country’s first multi-millionaire.
In the 1840s, Sibley’s fur trade with the Dakota declined sharply for a variety of reasons. The situation for the Dakota was exacerbated by a measles epidemic that led to a decline in the number of Dakota hunters, and the dwindling population of elk, buffalo and other game. In 1846, drought and corn crop failure made things worse.
Leading up to the war, Sibley negotiated a series of treaties which severely reduced land and resource rights for the Dakota. Little Crow had a major role in signing the 1851 Treaty of Mendota which ceded most of the Dakota lands in present-day Minnesota and Iowa to the United States. In 1858, Little Crow led a delegation of Dakota leaders to Washington, D.C., where the U.S. government pressured them to surrender their remaining holdings north of the upper Minnesota River.
By 1858, the Dakota, Ojibwe and Winnebago had been forced to live on reservations. The Dakota were relocated to a narrow slice of land by the Minnesota River.
By 1862, the Dakota had been coerced and manipulated to relinquish their own culture and religion and were routinely misled and cheated by Sibley and others. That summer, the Dakota faced severe economic hardship, starvation, and tensions with government Indian agents, fur traders, and a fast-growing population of European and American settlers. Annuity payments promised to the Dakota by the government were cut because of the ongoing Civil War. Many Dakota people saw it as an opportune time to take back the lands of Minnesota and began attacking the settlers in an effort to drive them out.
The feuding intensified and on August 17, 1862, four Dakota hunters killed five Anglo-American settlers including two women. Little Crow led an ongoing massacre of hundreds of settlers, as well as the capture of nearly 300 “mixed-blood” and white hostages, almost all women.
On August 19, 1862, Sibley lead an expedition to Fort Ridgely, which had been under attack from Dakota warriors led by Little Crow. On August 29, Sibley’s forces rescued the 250 settlers after the Dakota abandoned the fort four days earlier. The final engagement of the fighting led to a decisive U.S. victory and the release of 269 captives, including 107 European-American and 162 biracial.
General John Pope, who led the battle against a Sioux uprising in southern Minnesota, was clear about his attitude toward them.
“It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so,” Pope wrote.
The Sioux and Winnebago, who had nothing to do with the uprising, were all forced off of their lands in Minnesota.
Between September 28 and November 5, 1862, a military commission created by Sibley held 392 trials for murder, participation in murder, participation in combat, and rape. The defendants had no lawyers and some ended in a matter of a few minutes. By November 5, the commission had sentenced 307 men to death and given 16 prison terms.
Lincoln found a lack of evidence at most of the tribunals and in an extremely unpopular political move, he commuted the sentences of 265 of the Indians.
“I could not afford to hang men for votes,” said Lincoln.
On December 6, 1862, Lincoln approved 39 of the 303 death sentences and 38 were hanged at Mankato, including at least one whose sentence had been commuted by Lincoln.
The remaining 300 Dakota warriors were imprisoned and more than 1,600 women, children and elderly were held in a crowded encampment on Pike Island below Fort Snelling until river transportation resumed in the spring . Many died from a measles epidemic that swept the camp in December.
Sibley was rewarded with a promotion to brigadier-general of volunteers. He soon nullified treaties with the Dakota and most tribal members were banished to reservations in the Dakotas and Nebraska. The state offered a reward for the scalp of any Dakota man killed in Minnesota.
For the next two years Sibley and General Alfred Sully led bloody campaigns to pursue Dakota escapees as far west as the Yellowstone River. The period was the start of bloody wars between the U.S. government and Dakota that lasted for nearly 20 years.
Little Crow was shot and killed on July 3, 1863, by two settlers, a father and son. They scalped him and took his body to Hutchinson, Minn., where it was displayed and mutilated. The state paid the father $500 for killing Little Crow, and paid the son $75 for his scalp.
Little Crow’s remains were later exhumed by Army troops. In 1971, the Minnesota Historical Society finally returned Little Crow’s remains to his descendants for proper burial at the First Presbyterian Church and Cemetery. Little Crow’s burial site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.
Genocide Causes
In its earlies days, the U.S. government determined that the nation had a manifest destiny to expand. The rationalization for seizing Native American land was based on Catholic papal decrees issued in the 15th century which authorized European powers to conquer the lands of non-Christians.
Early colonial proponents of manifest destiny included George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who believed that Indigenous people had to live like the whites or be pushed aside. After Jefferson determined that assimilation was no longer possible, he advocated for the extermination or displacement of Indigenous people.
The Native American population continued to dwindle throughout the nation’s early years. Initially, many Native Americans died because their bodies could not fight the diseases that colonizers brought to their lands, including influenza, pneumonic plagues, cholera, and smallpox. Other major causes were U.S. colonization, removal policies and assimilation programs.
The Pequot War, fought between 1636 and 1638, was the earliest attempt at genocide inflicted by New England colonists on Native Americans. By the end of the war, about 700 Pequots had been killed or captured. An estimated 2,500 Pequots survived but were prohibited from returning to their lands, speaking their tribal language, or even referring to themselves as Pequots.
The Great Swamp Massacre of 1675 destroyed much of the Narragansett population. It began after Narraganset warriors attacked and burned the Jireh Bull Blockhouse in South Kingstown, R.I. Around 15 soldiers died defending the fort. Four days later, English militias descended on the main Narragansett town in South Kingstown, R.I. They burned down the settlement, destroyed most of the tribe’s winter stores and killed at least 97 Narragansett warriors and 300 to 1,000 non-combatants.
During the French and Indian War, Massachusetts governor William Shirley issued a bounty of 40 pounds for a male Indian scalp, and 20 pounds for scalps of Indian females or of children under 12 years old.
During Pontiac’s War, Native Americans rebelled against the British. As part of the British response, Colonel Henry Bouquet and Sir Jeffrey Amherst conspired to infect Native Americans through biological warfare with smallpox blankets.
The Trail of Tears was an ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of around 60,000 people of the “Five Civilized Tribes” between 1830 and 1850. Members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to newly designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830.
The Cherokee removal in 1838 was the last forced removal east of the Mississippi. It was conducted after gold was discovered near Dahlonega, Ga. Thousands of Native Americans died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after.
The Long Walk of the Navajo, also known as the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, was aimed at forcing Native Americans off their lands in a series of marches beginning in 1864. Navajos were forced to walk from their land in western New Mexico Territory (modern-day Arizona) to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico.
In the so-called 1848 Mendocino War and the subsequent Round Valley War, the Yuki people were nearly extinguished; their population fell from around 6,800 to fewer than 300. The murderous efforts arose after the U.S. colonization of California started in earnest in 1846, leading to the Mexican–American War. The war ended with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which gave the U.S. authority over 525,000 square miles of new territory. The treaty followed the discovery of gold and the ensuing Gold Rush.
In years after the treaty was signed, at least 4,500 California Indians were killed between 1849 and 1870. Many more were weakened and died of disease and starvation. As many as 10,000 Indians were kidnapped and sold as slaves as whites hunted down adult Indians in the mountains, kidnapped their children, and sold them as apprentices for as little as $50.