Russell Means, who was born on the Ogalala Sioux reservation in South Dakota, became a leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the late 1960s. In often dramatic ways, AIM protested the government and society's treatment of Native Americans. …

This account of Native American life in Pennsylvania was published by the colony's founder, William Penn, who hoped to encourage settlement in the colony. Describing the physical appearance, diet, shelter, rituals and mannerisms of the Lenni-Lenape,…

Red Cloud, an Oglala Lakota chief, led a two year war against white settlers and railroad outposts between 1866 and 1868. Red Cloud's War, sometimes called the Powder River War, took place in parts of the Wyoming and Montana territories that were…

Native American warriors in the 19th century attacked the various people and institutions that threatened their way of life on the Great Plains. As these reports from various federal agents, including the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and General…

Native American warriors in the 19th century resisted the various people and institutions that threatened their way of life on the Great Plains. In these speeches to federal agents during the Indian Wars of the 1860s, Indigenous leaders attempt to…

Federal bureaucrats devised several methods to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream American values and culture. One strategy involved trying to change Native Americans' traditional sense of communally held land to a belief in individually…

The Dawes Act of 1887 sought to assimilate Native Americans by, among other things, transforming their traditional uses and attitudes about land and land ownership to more mainstream American values of private ownership and settled farming. Some…

White settlers found all sorts of ways to defend the destruction of Native American communities. The Manifest Destiny ideology held that Americans' westward march was sanctioned by God. Social Darwinists adopted the idea of "survival of the fittest,"…

Richard Pratt, an officer of the United States Cavalry, became obsessed with the assimilation of Indians into U.S. "civilization." Pratt believed that Indians could only survive if they adapted the values of the white man; it was necessary to "kill…

With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States gained over half a million square miles of new lands in the Southwest. However, American settlers who traveled west to settle the land were not moving into unoccupied territory. …