American Indian removal and resettlement

US policy during the late 18th and 19th centuries that forced the American Indian population into confined territories so whites could settle on their lands, and then tried to assimilate American Indians into US culture. Major legislation of this policy included the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887.

Settlers came into increasing conflict with American Indians during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Beginning in 1778, the US government signed a series of nearly 400 treaties with Indian tribes. Under the terms of the treaties, each tribe relinquished part of their territory and agreed to recognize the authority of the US government in exchange for a cash payment, federal protection, and often food and other essential supplies. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), established in 1824, attempted to ease the transition with an often inadequate supply of government food, blankets, and provisions. Many historians consider this a paternalistic policy. Settlers often ignored the treaties and moved on to land reserved for Indians.

The Indian Removal Act authorized US president Andrew Jackson to offer land in Indian Territory, an undefined area that by 1834 was most of the present state of Oklahoma, to all American Indians situated east of the Mississippi River, in exchange for their lands there. When the southeastern tribes resisted, the government used military force. Over the course of the next ten years, nearly 100,000 American Indians were relocated west of the Mississippi River. As many as a third of them died in the process. Nations such as the Cherokee of Georgia were the hardest hit, and their forcible removal from 1838 to 1839, in which one quarter of them died, is known as the Trail of Tears.

After the discovery of gold in California in 1848, Indian land west of the Mississippi River became an important throughway for wagon trains headed to the west coast. The US government initiated a new set of treaties designed to force the Indians to give up their titles to this land. Settlers travelling westward slaughtered much of the game that the Indians needed for food, causing a round of bloody Indian wars lasting thirty years. It was during this period that US general George Armstrong Custer was killed by the forces of Sioux chief Sitting Bull in the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876), and Chiricahua Apache Indian chief Geronimo fought against US authorities in the Southwest.

In 1871 the US government declared that it would make no more treaties with Indian governments, whose independence they would no longer recognize. Under this new policy, the Dawes General Allotment Act allotted land to American Indian families living on reservations. The act was designed to encourage American Indians to become farmers and assimilate into US society. As a result of this act, however, American Indians collectively lost more than 60% of their land, as well as many of their cultural traditions. Having lost their economic self-sufficiency and political independence, they became dependent upon the US government. By the 1920s American Indians were the most impoverished sector of the population in the USA.