Many nineteenth-century Americans, especially those living on the frontier, held the same beliefs about Indians that Bradford expressed.

Question

Many nineteenth-century Americans, especially those living on the frontier, held the same beliefs about Indians that Bradford expressed. What seems to account for the continuance of those ideas? Is it simply that white settlers on the frontier wanted Indian lands, and by demonizing the Indians the white settlers helped justify the taking of Indian lands?

Answer 1

The taking of land from Native American tribes is a lengthy and complex process in American history and impossible to cover in a brief response. But a quick summary will show that regardless of white settler attitudes, the federal government played a major role in taking Native American lands through war, broken treaties, and removal, all of which were based on contorted legal arguments.

European settlements also spread disease to Native Americans who had little to no immunity to them, causing major population loss. This made it easier for white settlers to move in.

The 1845 doctrine of Manifest Destiny that claimed God meant for democracy to spread coast to coast across America fueled government initiatives and white settlement as well.

Finally, the Indian Assimilation movement that began in the last quarter of the 19th century and lasted into the first quarter of the 20th created a narrative that stigmatized Indian culture as a disease. This “disease” could only be cured by moving Indians off the reservation and into mainstream white culture. A massive federal education movement began, mostly organized around Indian boarding schools, that aimed to strip Native American students of their tribal identities and language and replace it with working class white cultural values and English as the sole language.

The Dawes Act of 1887, the government program to break up tribal holdings by dividing reservations into 160-acre tracts given to Indian families to farm, also resulted in a loss of tribal lands. All told, the Dawes Act caused Native Americans to lose close to two-thirds of their tribal lands until it ended with the Wheeler-Howard Act, or Indian Reorganization Act, in 1934.