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Of the four group-struggles that Unit Y319 gathers under the heading of "civil rights", the experience of Native Americans is in one crucial respect the reverse of the others. Where African Americans, women and workers began the period seeking rights they did not possess and, on the whole, gradually gained ground, Native Americans began it as members of sovereign nations who still controlled substantial territory, and spent much of the period losing land, autonomy and cultural survival to a federal government determined to break up their societies. Their struggle for rights was therefore not primarily a demand for inclusion in American citizenship but, at its heart, a defence of collective survival and self-determination against forced assimilation and dispossession. A thematic study must resist narrating this as a chain of episodes — the Plains wars, then the Dawes Act, then the New Deal, then termination, then Red Power. Instead it must ask an analytical question about change and continuity across the whole period: how far, and by what means, did the position of Native Americans change between 1865 and 1992, and how far did the federal policy of assimilation and control persist beneath its dramatic swings of direction?
The organising question for this lesson is therefore: why did federal policy toward Native Americans oscillate so violently — between dispossession and assimilation, between self-government and termination — across the period, and how far had Native Americans, by 1992, converted survival into a genuine measure of self-determination? Keep this question in view. The material below is organised not decade by decade but around the recurring tension between federal control and Native self-determination — a tension visible in the reservation system, the assimilationist Dawes Act, the reforming Indian Reorganization Act, the destructive termination policy, and the eventual turn to self-determination won partly through the militancy of the Red Power movement.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y319 (Thematic study and interpretations): Civil Rights in the USA 1865–1992, a UG3 thematic-study unit. Unit Y319 is assessed in two distinct ways. First, it is examined by thematic essays that range across the entire period 1865–1992 (AO1) — synoptic questions requiring analysis of change and continuity, similarity and difference, across more than a century, organised by theme rather than by decade. Second, it is examined by historical interpretations (AO3) focused on three named depth topics: the Gilded Age 1875–1895, the New Deal and civil rights 1933–1941, and Malcolm X and Black Power 1941–1970 (these interpretation topics are treated in later lessons). The present lesson develops the AO1 thematic-synthesis skill applied to Native American rights and dispossession across the whole period.
Within our own teaching sequence we treat Native Americans as a distinct theme, placed third in the course, because their struggle inverts the pattern of the others — a defence against dispossession rather than a campaign for inclusion — and because the "Indian policy" oscillations intersect with the wider story (the reservation frontier of the Gilded Age; the New Deal's simultaneous reform of Native and labour policy; the Red Power movement's debt to Black Power). This is our pedagogical decision, not a transcription of the specification's ordering. The change-and-continuity threads foregrounded here — the persistence of federal control, the recurring pull between assimilation and autonomy, and the vulnerability of Native rights to shifts in federal policy — run across the whole unit. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Because Y319 is a thematic study, the examiner rewards command of change over time across the whole period and judgements that compare different phases rather than narrating a sequence of episodes. Throughout, keep asking how each development altered — or preserved — the balance between federal control and Native self-determination.
The starting condition of the theme is one of comparative Native strength that the period would steadily erode. In 1865 many Native peoples — above all the horse-mounted nations of the Great Plains, such as the Lakota (Sioux), Cheyenne and Comanche — still controlled vast territories and retained their independence. The decades after the Civil War brought a determined federal campaign to break that independence, driven by the westward surge of settlers, railroads and miners, and justified by an ideology of "civilisation" that regarded the nomadic, communal life of the Plains as an obstacle to progress.
The instruments of dispossession were both military and administrative:
| Instrument | How it worked |
|---|---|
| The Plains wars | A series of campaigns (1860s–1890) in which the US Army broke Native military resistance; Native victory at the Little Bighorn (1876) was exceptional and provoked overwhelming reprisal |
| The reservation system | Native peoples were confined to defined, shrinking tracts of (usually poor) land, dependent on federal rations and supervised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) |
| Destruction of the buffalo | The near-extermination of the bison herds by the 1880s destroyed the economic base of Plains life and forced dependence on the reservation |
| Treaty-breaking | Treaties recognising Native land were repeatedly broken as settlers encroached; in 1871 Congress ended treaty-making altogether, treating tribes as wards rather than sovereign nations |
Native resistance was persistent but ultimately overwhelmed. The end of armed resistance is conventionally dated to the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 1890), where the US Army killed some 250 Lakota men, women and children, in a climate of official panic over the spiritual revival known as the Ghost Dance. Wounded Knee stands at the close of the era of military conquest — and, in a telling continuity, would give its name to the great protest of 1973 that reopened the whole question of Native rights.
The analytical point for the theme is that by the 1880s Native Americans had been reduced from independent nations to dependent wards, confined to reservations and subject to the near-total administrative control of the BIA. The gap between the promise of American liberty and the reality of Native experience was, if anything, wider than for any other group — because the federal government's aim was not merely to exclude Native peoples from rights but to dissolve their separate existence altogether.
Once military conquest was complete, federal policy turned to a subtler but arguably more corrosive weapon: forced assimilation. The reformers of the 1880s — self-styled "friends of the Indian" — believed that the way to solve the "Indian problem" was to destroy tribal life and remake Native Americans as individual, property-owning, Christian farmers. The central instrument was the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.
The Dawes Act broke up the communally held reservations into individual family allotments (typically 160 acres), with the "surplus" land — the majority — sold off to white settlers. Its logic was explicitly assimilationist: private property, it was believed, would dissolve tribal loyalties and turn Native Americans into self-supporting citizens.
| Feature of the Dawes Act and allotment era | Effect |
|---|---|
| Individual allotment | Broke up communal landholding; allottees held land in federal "trust" for 25 years before gaining title (and the right to sell) |
| Sale of "surplus" land | The bulk of reservation land passed out of Native hands; between 1887 and 1934 Native landholding fell from roughly 138 million acres to about 48 million |
| Citizenship as a lever | Allottees could gain US citizenship; assimilation, not rights, was the aim (universal citizenship came only with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924) |
| Cultural suppression | Boarding schools such as Carlisle removed children from their families to "kill the Indian, save the man" — suppressing language, religion and dress |
The result was catastrophic dispossession without the promised prosperity. Much allotted land was poor, allottees lacked capital, and once trust restrictions lapsed a great deal of land was lost through sale, fraud or debt. Far from creating prosperous farmer-citizens, allotment left many Native communities landless and impoverished while shattering the tribal structures that had sustained them. The historian Francis Paul Prucha, the leading authority on federal Indian policy, characterised the allotment era as the high tide of a well-meaning but destructive assimilationism that treated the erasure of Native culture as synonymous with Native welfare. This is a crucial thematic point: the assimilation policy was framed by its advocates as a benefit to Native Americans, yet its effect was to intensify dispossession and to attack the collective identity that Native peoples most wished to preserve.
The first great reversal in the theme came in the 1930s, and it forms the Native American counterpart to the New Deal breakthroughs for labour and (more tentatively) African Americans. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the reform-minded Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier — a sharp critic of allotment who admired the communal traditions of the Pueblo peoples — reversed the assimilationist policy of half a century. The centrepiece was the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, sometimes called the "Indian New Deal".
| Provision of the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) | Significance |
|---|---|
| Ended allotment | Halted the further break-up and sale of reservation land, stopping the haemorrhage of the Dawes era |
| Restored tribal self-government | Encouraged tribes to adopt constitutions and form elected tribal councils, recognising a measure of collective autonomy |
| Promoted communal landholding | Allowed the consolidation and recovery of some tribal land and supported economic development through a credit fund |
| Respected Native culture | Reversed the suppression of language and religion; supported Native arts and crafts |
The IRA marked a genuine change of direction: for the first time federal policy sought to preserve rather than dissolve Native societies, and to restore a degree of the self-government that conquest and allotment had stripped away. Yet its achievement was partial and contested. Some tribes rejected the IRA's model of government as an alien imposition that did not match their own traditions; the elected-council structure sometimes cut across existing forms of authority; and the underlying poverty of the reservations was not overcome. The thematic significance, however, is considerable: the IRA established the principle — never wholly lost thereafter, despite the reaction that followed — that Native peoples possessed a collective right to exist and to govern themselves, and it thereby set the terms of the argument for the rest of the period.
The post-war years brought a sharp swing back toward assimilation, in a policy known as termination — the most serious threat to Native survival in the second half of the period, and a striking parallel to the wider conservative reaction of the era. The reasoning was a mixture of cost-cutting, Cold War individualism (communal landholding was viewed with suspicion) and a revived belief that Native Americans should be "freed" from federal wardship and absorbed into mainstream society.
Termination had two main components:
| Policy | Aim and effect |
|---|---|
| Termination (from 1953) | Congress's House Concurrent Resolution 108 (1953) declared the intention to end the federal trust relationship with tribes; specific tribes (notably the Menominee of Wisconsin and the Klamath of Oregon) were "terminated", losing federal recognition, services and protected land status |
| Relocation | A programme encouraging (and often pressuring) reservation Native Americans to move to cities for work; it accelerated urbanisation but frequently led to poverty and dislocation |
The consequences of termination were severe for the tribes affected: the loss of federal recognition often brought economic collapse, the sale of tribal land, and the erosion of community. The Menominee, once relatively prosperous, were plunged into poverty. But termination also proved a turning point in a further, unintended sense. It provoked determined resistance, revived pan-tribal political organisation, and discredited the assimilationist project so thoroughly that it prepared the ground for the opposite policy. Relocation, meanwhile, by concentrating Native Americans in cities, created the urban communities and the educated activists from whom the militant protest movement of the late 1960s would spring. As with the labour and racial themes, a repressive federal turn generated the reaction that eventually reversed it.
The final phase of the period saw Native Americans move onto the offensive and win a decisive shift back toward self-government — the culmination of the theme. Drawing inspiration from the African American civil-rights and Black Power movements, a new generation of activists pursued "Red Power": a militant assertion of Native rights, pride and sovereignty. The National Indian Youth Council (1961) and, above all, the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in Minneapolis in 1968, gave the campaign national visibility through direct action.
| Red Power action | Significance |
|---|---|
| Occupation of Alcatraz (1969–71) | A coalition of activists occupied the former prison island for nineteen months, claiming it under a broken treaty and dramatising Native grievances to national attention |
| The Trail of Broken Treaties (1972) | A cross-country caravan culminating in the occupation of the BIA headquarters in Washington, presenting demands for the restoration of treaty rights |
| Wounded Knee (1973) | AIM's 71-day armed occupation of the site of the 1890 massacre, on the Pine Ridge reservation, produced a tense standoff with federal forces and became the symbol of the whole movement |
The militancy of Red Power coincided with, and helped drive, a genuine change in federal policy. Even before AIM's most dramatic actions, the tide had turned against termination: President Nixon formally repudiated it in 1970, calling instead for Native "self-determination without termination". The landmark legislative result was the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which allowed tribes to take over the administration of federal programmes on their reservations — a substantial transfer of practical control. Alongside it came a series of measures recognising Native rights: the Indian Civil Rights Act (1968), the Indian Education Act (1972), the Menominee Restoration Act (1973) (which reversed that tribe's termination), the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). Native peoples also began to win significant victories in the courts and to develop reservation economies, including, by the 1980s, the beginnings of tribal gaming.
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