The destruction of Native American peoples, religions, cultures, and languages has been characterized by many as genocide. Debates are ongoing as to whether the entire process or only specific periods or events meet the definitions of genocide. Many of these definitions focus on intent, while others focus on outcomes. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", considered the displacement of Native Americans by European settlers as a historical example of genocide. While description as genocide has found increasing acceptance within Indigenous and genocide studies, mainstream scholarship on US and Native American history has largely rejected it, preferring to describe it as ethnic cleansing or certain events as genocidal.
Historians have long debated the pre-European population of the Americas. In 2023, historian Ned Blackhawk suggested that Northern America's population (including modern-day Canada and the United States) had halved from 1492 to 1776 from about 8 million people (all Native American in 1492) to under 4 million (predominantly white in 1776). Russell Thornton estimated that by 1800, some 600,000 Native Americans lived in the regions that would become the modern United States and declined to an estimated 250,000 by 1890 before rebounding.
The virgin soil thesis (VST), coined by historian Alfred W. Crosby, proposes that the population decline among Native Americans after 1492 is due to Native populations being immunologically unprepared for Old World diseases. While this theory continues to receive support in popular imagination and academia, recently, some scholars have argued that many Native American populations did not plummet after initial contact with Europeans, but only after violent interactions, including wars, removal, confinement to reservations and forced assimilation, and that these exacerbated the effects of disease.
The population decline among Native Americans after 1492 is attributed to various factors, including Eurasian diseases like influenza, pneumonic plagues, cholera, and smallpox. Additionally, conflicts, massacres, forced removal, enslavement, imprisonment, and warfare with European settlers significantly contributed to the reduction in populations and the disruption of traditional societies. Historian Jeffrey Ostler emphasizes the importance of considering the American Indian Wars, campaigns by the U.S. Army to subdue Native American nations in the American West starting in the 1860s, as genocide. Scholars increasingly refer to these events as massacres or "genocidal massacres", defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes intended to send a message to the larger group.
Native American peoples have been subject to both historical and contemporary massacres along with acts of forced conversion and cultural genocide as their traditional ways of life were threatened by settlers. Colonial massacres and acts of ethnic cleansing explicitly sought to reduce Native populations and confine them to reservations. Forced conversion and cultural genocide was also deployed, in the form of displacement and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, to weaken Native sovereignty. Native American peoples still face challenges stemming from colonialism, including settler occupation of their traditional homelands, police brutality, hate crimes, vulnerability to climate change, and mental health issues. Despite this, Native American resistance to colonialism and genocide has persisted, both in the past and the present.
The destruction of Native American peoples, religions, cultures, and languages has been characterized by many as genocide. Debates are ongoing as to whether the entire process or only specific periods or events meet the definitions of genocide. Many of these definitions focus on intent, while others focus on outcomes. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", considered the displacement of Native Americans by European settlers as a historical example of genocide. While description as genocide has found increasing acceptance within Indigenous and genocide studies, mainstream scholarship on US and Native American history has largely rejected it, preferring to describe it as ethnic cleansing or certain events as genocidal.
Historians have long debated the pre-European population of the Americas. In 2023, historian Ned Blackhawk suggested that Northern America's population (including modern-day Canada and the United States) had halved from 1492 to 1776 from about 8 million people (all Native American in 1492) to under 4 million (predominantly white in 1776). Russell Thornton estimated that by 1800, some 600,000 Native Americans lived in the regions that would become the modern United States and declined to an estimated 250,000 by 1890 before rebounding.
The virgin soil thesis (VST), coined by historian Alfred W. Crosby, proposes that the population decline among Native Americans after 1492 is due to Native populations being immunologically unprepared for Old World diseases. While this theory continues to receive support in popular imagination and academia, recently, some scholars have argued that many Native American populations did not plummet after initial contact with Europeans, but only after violent interactions, including wars, removal, confinement to reservations and forced assimilation, and that these exacerbated the effects of disease.
The population decline among Native Americans after 1492 is attributed to various factors, including Eurasian diseases like influenza, pneumonic plagues, cholera, and smallpox. Additionally, conflicts, massacres, forced removal, enslavement, imprisonment, and warfare with European settlers significantly contributed to the reduction in populations and the disruption of traditional societies. Historian Jeffrey Ostler emphasizes the importance of considering the American Indian Wars, campaigns by the U.S. Army to subdue Native American nations in the American West starting in the 1860s, as genocide. Scholars increasingly refer to these events as massacres or "genocidal massacres", defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes intended to send a message to the larger group.
Native American peoples have been subject to both historical and contemporary massacres along with acts of forced conversion and cultural genocide as their traditional ways of life were threatened by settlers. Colonial massacres and acts of ethnic cleansing explicitly sought to reduce Native populations and confine them to reservations. Forced conversion and cultural genocide was also deployed, in the form of displacement and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, to weaken Native sovereignty. Native American peoples still face challenges stemming from colonialism, including settler occupation of their traditional homelands, police brutality, hate crimes, vulnerability to climate change, and mental health issues. Despite this, Native American resistance to colonialism and genocide has persisted, both in the past and the present.
The Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast were of many nations and tribal affiliations, each with distinctive cultural and political identities, but they shared certain beliefs, traditions, and practices, such as the centrality of salmon as a resource and spiritual symbol. Their gift-giving feast, potlatch, is a highly complex event where people gather to commemorate special events. These events include the raising of a totem pole or the appointment or election of a new chief. The most famous artistic feature of the culture is the totem pole, with carvings of animals and other characters to commemorate cultural beliefs, legends, and notable events.
The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American civilization that archaeologists date from approximately 800 CE to 1600 CE, varying regionally. It was composed of a series of urban settlements and satellite villages (suburbs) linked together by a loose trading network, the largest city being Cahokia, believed to be a major religious center. The civilization flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States.
Numerous pre-Columbian societies were urbanized, such as the Pueblo peoples, Mandan, and Hidatsa. The Iroquois League of Nations or "People of the Long House" was a politically advanced, democratic society, which is thought by some historians to have influenced the United States Constitution, with the Senate passing a resolution to this effect in 1988. Other historians have contested this interpretation and believe the impact was minimal, or did not exist, pointing to numerous differences between the two systems and the ample precedents for the constitution in European political thought.
Many Indigenous nations shared the belief of collective continuance and systems of responsibility with other humans and the non-human world. According to Citizen Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte, collective continuance refers to a society's ability to adapt to conditions to ensure community survival. Collective continuance begets the creation of systems of responsibility, in which individuals have a moral reciprocal relationship with the non-human world. The Oceti Sakowin belief of Mni Wiconi (water is life), for instance, describes a relationship in which the Missouri River nourishes their community, and they have a responsibility to protect it. The idea of collective continuance and systems of responsibility also extend into social structures. For example, for the Anishinaabe, gender was not binary, and women had more leadership roles that included responsibilities to others beyond their marriages.
The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequots. The colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts offered bounties for the heads of killed hostile Indians, and later for just their scalps, during the Pequot War in the 1630s; Connecticut specifically reimbursed Mohegans for slaying the Pequot in 1637. At the end, about 700 Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity.
The English colonists imposed a harshly punitive treaty on the estimated 2,500 Pequots who survived the war; the Treaty of Hartford of 1638 sought to eradicate the Pequot cultural identity—with terms prohibiting the Pequots from returning to their lands, speaking their tribal language, or even referring to themselves as Pequots—and effectively dissolved the Pequot Nation, with many survivors executed or enslaved and sold away. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies; other survivors were dispersed as captives to the victorious tribes. The result was the elimination of the Pequot tribe as a viable polity in Southern New England, the colonial authorities classifying them as extinct. However, members of the Pequot tribe still live today as a federally recognized tribe.
Massacre of the Narragansett people
The Great Swamp Massacre was committed during King Philip's War by colonial militia of New England on the Narragansett people in December 1675. On December 15 of that year, Narraganset warriors attacked the Jireh Bull Blockhouse and killed at least 15 people. Four days later, the militias from the English colonies of Plymouth, Connecticut, and Massachusetts Bay were led to the main Narragansett town in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. The settlement was burned, its inhabitants (including women and children) killed or evicted, and most of the tribe's winter stores destroyed. It is believed that at least 97 Narragansett warriors and 300 to 1,000 non-combatants were killed, though exact figures are unknown. The massacre was a critical blow to the Narragansett tribe during the period directly following the massacre. However, much like the Pequot, the Narragansett people continue to live today as a federally recognized tribe.
French and Indian War and Pontiac's War
On June 12, 1755, during the French and Indian War, Massachusetts governor William Shirley issued a bounty of £40 for a male Indian scalp, and £20 for scalps of Indian females or of children under 12 years old. In 1756, Pennsylvania lieutenant-governor Robert Hunter Morris, in his declaration of war against the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) people, offered "130 Pieces of Eight, for the Scalp of Every Male Indian Enemy, above the Age of Twelve Years", and "50 Pieces of Eight for the Scalp of Every Indian Woman, produced as evidence of their being killed." During Pontiac's War, Colonel Henry Bouquet conspired with his superior, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to infect hostile Native Americans through biological warfare with smallpox blankets.
Ethnic cleansing
Sullivan Expedition
Near the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the British Army and Native American allies staged attacks on frontier towns in the Mohawk Valley region of New York. To resolve this issue, George Washington ordered the Continental Army, under the command of John Sullivan and James Clinton, to conduct a series of scorched earth campaigns against the four British-allied nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Washington's orders followed an initial assault against the Haudenosaunee where Colonel Van Schaik burned two Onondaga villages. In May 1779, Washington wrote, "The expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the six nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more."
Sullivan and Clinton's troops reportedly burned over forty settlements and hundreds of acres of crops, as well as an estimated 160,000 bushels of corn. Despite this, Sullivan failed to capture a sizable number of prisoners, and did not achieve the original goal of invading the British base at Fort Niagara. The Continental Army also failed to completely dispel threats from the Haudenosaunee. In fact, attacks against frontier towns increased after the expedition, as the Haudenosaunee pursued revenge. Historian Joseph R. Fischer has called the expedition a "well-executed failure." Although the expedition's goal of eliminating Native populations was not met, the Haudenosaunee still faced hardship as many lost their livelihoods and were displaced from their homes.
The Sullivan Expedition has been memorialized by American settlers in what historical anthropologist A. Lynn Smith calls the "Sullivan commemorative complex." Smith refers to monuments, markers, and places bearing the name of the expedition as a celebration of colonialism and domination, and she argues that they affect how local residents relate to their past. Smith shows that Haudenosaunee populations are harmed by this commemorative complex that pinpoints the sites of destruction on their ancestral lands and seeks to replace Native memory. Many people, both Native and non-Native, disapprove of these commemorative markers, and various activists and organizations seek to get markers removed and reveal the reality of the Expedition.
Manifest destiny
Manifest destiny had serious consequences for Native Americans, since continental expansion implicitly meant the occupation and annexation of Native American land, sometimes to expand slavery. This ultimately led to confrontations and wars with several groups of native peoples via Indian removal. The United States continued the European practice of recognizing only limited land rights of Indigenous peoples. In a policy formulated largely by Henry Knox, Secretary of War in the Washington administration, the U.S. government sought to expand into the west through the purchase of Native American land in treaties.
The United States justified manifest destiny with the Doctrine of Discovery, a fifteenth century international law developed by the Catholic Church. Three landmark Supreme Court cases, the Marshall Trilogy, invoked the Doctrine of Discovery to declare that Native Americans were domestic dependent Nations and only had limited sovereignty on their own land.
Only the federal government could purchase Indian lands, and this was done through treaties with tribal leaders. Whether a tribe actually had a decision-making structure capable of making a treaty was a controversial issue. The national policy was for the Indians to join American society and become "civilized", which meant no more wars with neighboring tribes or raids on white settlers or travelers, and a shift from hunting to farming and ranching. Advocates of civilization programs believed that the process of settling native tribes would greatly reduce the amount of land needed by the Native Americans, making more land available for homesteading by white Americans. Thomas Jefferson believed that the Indigenous people of America had to assimilate and live like the whites or inevitably be pushed aside by them. Once Jefferson believed that assimilation was no longer possible, he advocated for the extermination or displacement of Indigenous people. Following the forced removal of many Indigenous peoples, Americans increasingly believed that Native American ways of life would eventually disappear as the United States expanded. Humanitarian advocates of removal believed that American Indians would be better off moving away from whites.