Apparently this treaty created conflict between Native American tribes as the Crow tribe "held title" to some of the land set aside in the new treaty. I think one often overlooked but hugely devastating impact of U.S. treaties and the moving around of Native American tribes due to Colonial policy caused Native tribes to come into brutal conflict with one another for territory and resources-- creating both new conflicts (or new alliances) as well as reinforce old rivalries.

This reminds me of Elouise Cobell, the wily, tedious, endless bureaucratic labor that goes into getting the kind of justice that seems so basic and self-evident. Sometimes you have to beat unscrupulous schemers at their own game.

Powerful statement, cuts straight to the point.

Appalling, no integrity, decency, or morality. As one of the last of numerous massacres across the country, it should not be surprising, but things like this never cease to incite outrage.

Reading about this in "Black Elk Speaks", the mixture felt by Black Elk between hope and skepticism was heartbreaking.

1$ in 1882 was worth 25.52$ in today's money.

I visited the Gordon Stockade in the Black Hills, just outside of Custer State Park --- it is the recreation of an "illegal" lodge fortress built as protection from Lakota attacks during the 1874 gold rush.

The way I have come to interpret this is the United States government, in terms of policy, was allowing the settlers to do their "dirty work" for them, and reprieving themselves of responsibility. Leadership in the U.S. govt may have even been content with the discovery of gold at the time because it made more immediately possible something that they viewed as inevitable, or schemed eventually to do once they had garnered up enough strength anyways.

During the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, "This building of homes for us is all nonsense. We don't want you to build any for us; we would all die." -The Kiowa Chief Santana. Many stated that they did not believe in the promises of food, clothing, and farming tools, and they were mostly right. Very sad that the Native Americans were killed for going on the "warpath" but were given no possible other course of action by the Indian Peace Commission that they could see.

I see many problems with the headright system and do not understand it, but I especially do not understand the tying of Osage citizenship to the Mineral Estate.

The Mississippi is was a geographical feature, but it was also an important political feature. The phrases "East of the Mississippi" and "West of the Mississippi" are used throughout the treaty, and I've noticed, throughout many treaties; not only between the U.S. and myriad Native American tribes, but also between various Colonial nations (for example, the Treaty of Paris and the Louisiana Purchase). It is interesting how the river acted as a pathway for the western expansion of the U.S., and also as a barrier which defined borders for Colonial nations and, as a consequence, the Native Americans they dispossessed. There are probably many reasons for the political emphasis on the Mississippi, as the Mississippi River basin served vital functions for communication and transportation (water from parts or all of 31 states drains into it!). However, a part of me also thinks that as the U.S. set its sights Westward, the Mississippi became a motivating milestone that it wanted to surpass, or a step-stone from infancy to manifest destiny. By the same token it also became a convincing promise of perpetual peace to Indians who were forcibly removed from the lands East of the Mississippi that was doomed to be broken. I wonder if, with knowledge of the giant waves of colonial immigration into the Northwest territory and and the Mississippi territory in the early 19th century, the people who wrote these treaties sending Native American tribe from the East of the Mississippi to the West of the Mississippi knew that it would not be long until the United States sets its yearnful eye on the lands to the East of the Great River that the eastern Natives had been removed to.

The new Agua Caliente (band of Cahuilla Indians) Casino just opened, less than a mile away from my apartment. I've watched construction over the past eight or so months. They seem like they are doing well!

This is quite dramatic and misleading. Today there are about 56 million acres of reservation land in the U.S. There are 2.3 billion acres of land in the United States as a country. If the existing reservation land of Native Americans was double, they would still own a very tiny tiny decimal of one percent of the total land in the U.S.

I hope that this was also a landmark case in that it helped signal the ability for those who are being wronged (even if by legislators) to be represented fairly in a court of law.

Native Americans are absolutely right to cite history as justification for their right to these resources, but it isn't surprising that such justifications would fall on deaf ears. The fact is if the priority of the U.S. was to be consistent/moral or to substantiate/uphold its moral authority by not contradicting the values upon which is what supposed to have been founded, then it should have protected and maintained the promises it made in its various treaties such as promises it made to various tribes to provide, protection, health care, education, sovereignty, religious freedom, protection of hunting and fishing rights and resources, etc. However over the centuries, the tendency of the U.S. government proved itself in various repeated ways to be to prioritize convenience and short-term political gain.

This situation in particular gets to me a lot. Politicians using their power and influence to exploit demographic differences for their own advantage (in order to retain or increase their power and influence). Then this exploitation creating divisions and tensions between the individuals that make up those demographics. It seems obvious that once these divisions/tensions are created, people in power can then come back in and exploit or reinforce those divisions for selfish reasons again. Unfortunately it seems to me like discrimination and divisiveness often thrive on greed and greed often thrives on discrimination, and these things can reinforce one another in something like a cycle.

I never thought about this... It is really significant that policy that categorizes people as members (and gives them access to the benefits or subjects them to penalties for membership) based on ancestry can potentially affect the growth or diminishment of things like culture or language.

I wonder the extent to which concepts related to blood quantum may be relevant in the world as it has become "a smaller place" and people from different backgrounds generally are increasingly coming together.

As we progressing in this semester and the history is getting more recent, we see more and more people having to argue that Native Americans do not want to live in extreme poverty in response to people who suggest the opposite. I view it as people employing the just-world fallacy in order to turn a blind eye and absolve their own consciences. People in their bias tend to dismiss the living conditions of entire displaced and disenfranchised populations as them reaping what they sow.

Did the Book of Mormon know that Jesus and the other prophets in the Old and New Testaments would not have been white?

Federal policy hindered the development of commercial agriculture for Native Americans in many ways.<br> The heirship policy caused the Natives to lose millions of acres of cultivable land, and many private Native lands were divided into areas too small to support commercial farming. Cattle raising and even subsistence agriculture on the Great Plains and the West became impossible for Natives due to a lack of capital and credit to purchase farming implements, seeds, or livestock. Thus the BIA leased allotted Native land to white cattlemen.

During my trip to South Dakota and the time I spent in the Black Hills, I learned about the Pine Ridge reservation; mostly that there appears to be far too much suffering and displacement occurring today. Statistics say that unemployment rate on the reservation is now at 80 to 90 percent and alcoholism is still a prominent issue. At the time I was reading the book "Black Elk Speaks" which spoke about how the Lakota suffered as a result of Western expansion. In the book it talked at length about how they had held on adamantly to the hope for their own future as a Nation and people. I hope that both Natives and non-Natives become more aware of these problems and succeed in dramatically improving these circumstances in all the ways that we can and as quickly as possible.

"Pigeonholing" is endemic to the media and human nature, and I think this is definitely something to be aware of today. When a group of people act out with a set of goals or ideas that go against a media outlet's agenda, the media outlet will take advantage on any potentially controversial actions (or actions that they can spin as controversial) done by those people and use it to discredit the goals or ideas of that group. Media outlets aren't the only ones guilty of this; we as individuals and even governments are! That being said, I am glad that the New York Times article included this quote. "Ideas are bulletproof," and creating discomfort has been used throughout history by underrepresented voices to be heard.

It's poignant and heartrending that Natives have such strength, resilience, and cohesion in the face of difficult and unjust circumstances

So Native American interests shouldn't be taken into account... meanwhile the argument for termination in the first place was that it was in the interest of Native Americans.

This reminds me of litigation between the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians and water agencies over rights to groundwater in the aquifer beneath the Coachella Valley. Many federal and state courts have recognized that the reserved water rights of Indian tribes applies to groundwater underlying reservations. However legal issues which include quantifying the Tribe’s share and whether there is a right to water of a certain quality have not been resolved.

This is important --- it isn't just U.S. history that shows how treaties are nothing more than pieces of paper with writing on them if they are not enforced and protected by both parties. Incentives to break treaties inevitably spring up for one or both parties, which is why the word of the two parties at the time is not enough to ensure that the terms will be kept in perpetuity. This is part of the reason why the United Nations was created after WWII as international postwar peacekeeping organization with an International Court of Justice.

This reminds me of a quote from Star Wars: "You call this a diplomatic solution?" "No, I call it aggressive negotiations."

Quotes like these in Star Wars subtly suggest how the Jedi were supposed to be a diplomatic entity serving as neutral arbitrators in a conflict. Before the Clone Wars, the Jedi were people who you could rely on to make decisions based not on what was best for the government of The Republic and it's agenda, but on what was right and just. In reality the Jedi ended up taking on the role of soldiers; effectively carrying out the unjust and oppressive philosophies they claimed they were defending people from. I view the dualism between the philosophy behind vs. the application of Western Law (with its principles of civil rights and equality before the law) this way in regards to how it affected marginalized populations in America. Western Law is in theory supposed to function as an impartial check on the selfish interests of government power and a guardian of individual rights. Instead it ended up being a mere pretense for an instrument of control, a way for those in power to regulate and punish people not in power. Many European-Americans claimed they were duty-bound to disseminate those principles of Western civilization to what they viewed as primitive and backwards cultures. However like the Jedi, many were blind to their own hypocrisy in their mission.

I imagine that many of these treaties were organized by Americans on a sort of bureaucratic ladder or chain which resulted in Natives getting cheated. The U.S. American treaty-making parties are tasked by their higher-ups simply to get results. The interpreters are tasked by the U.S. American treaty-making parties to get the Natives to sign at all costs. This is done in self-interest by U.S. authorities, as well as by U.S. treaty-makers and interpreters, who want to advance their own positions by effectively completing the treaty-making tasks assigned to them. (What is ironic is that this means that they are doing the opposite of being good negotiators and diplomats in the process.) Therefore the Natives are either told lies about the content of the treaties, or they are not given context about the real consequences of the treaty, which only the U.S. Americans are privy to (because it is in their own best interest and not the Natives).

I would like to see how this policy has adapted to being implemented today. I imagine a problem like this has never been more widespread and relevant due to the prominence of online shopping, shipping around the world, and inauthentic mass produced items.

Exactly, this applies to the mentality that demands forgetting about the disenfranchisement on Natives, as a method to justify disenfranchising them further.

It stands to reason that the ultimate outcome of this policy would have been to increase the number of people who identify with Native and African American communities. A result of being disenfranchised by White society means Natives and African Americans would be more socially co-responsible as communities to persevere. It is very neat to think of Native arts and crafts as a way for Natives who came together to embrace what society told them was their disadvantage, and turn it into a means for success and prosperity.

I read some more about Treaties like Medicine Creek, Point No Point, and Quinault and learned that these treaties gave up huge swaths of the Pacific Coast, Pudget Sound and Columbia River regions of Washington. The Northwest Pacific Tribes of Washington, once spread out across the area, weren’t just giving up their right to exist on some land; they were forced to relinquish right to all of their formerly inhabited lands and surrounding areas, and subsist on very small and undesirable bits. For example, The Treaty of Medicine Creek ceded 9,060 square km to the United States in exchange for the establishment of three reservations, however the original reservation established by the Medicine Creek Treaty for the Nisqually tribe was only 5.2 square kilometers.

Natives were receptive to being put on reservations (in the sense that they would rather unwillingly be forced onto the reservations rather than suffer fighting in losing wars against the U.S.). However the locations chosen by the U.S. as reservations such as the reservation for the Nisqually, and the reservation laid out for the Skokomish tribe in the Point No Point Treaty were more difficult for the tribes to accept. The lifestyle and culture of many Northwest Pacific tribes revolved around hunting salmon which was either made more difficult or perhaps at times impossible for the tribes to continue doing at the reservations. Furthermore the Nisqually had apparently adopted farming and the Treaty ceded their prime farmland and left them with essentially unlivable shrubland, causing the Puget Sound War. Skokomish leaders during the Point No Point treaty were concerned that they would not be able to find sufficient food at their reservation.

The policy of the Washington Territory governor Isaac Stevens in the 1850s could be described as to “consolidate” the Natives tribes of Washington, or to move tribes far from their homeland to a reservation to be occupied by several unrelated tribes. This kind of language is jarring from a modern perspective but at the time it reflects exactly what the philosophy behind these policies was: Native Americans were inert blocks of wood, or chess pieces that they could move around wherever they wanted, persecuting those who reacted to such treatment. The “negotiations” behind treaties like this were about as diplomatic as an agreement reached by a defenseless person being threatened at gunpoint, and because in essence this they were.

An issue in tribal sovereignty. The various tribes affected by this treaty were regarded as one people, however the tribes were culturally, ethnically, and socially, and linguistically diverse. For example, the Nisqually people and the Pallayup people to be regarded as “one people” by this treaty did not speak the language, nor were they even in the same language speaking group. These facts indicate how chaotic and involuntary these treaties must have been for the Natives.

I do wonder if these statement of Dick Gregory regarding civil rights did resonate with at least some of the Native Americans involved, however the leaders in the ongoing case for fishing rights did not reinforce it because at the time they did not want to bite off more than they could chew and end up losing support for their cause as a result (e.g they were picking their battles).

The comparison between the NIYC protest and the Battle of the Little Bighorn is significant because it shows 1) how much diverse Native tribes can accomplish when they act in concert, whether it be a context like war or of modern American politics. It also contrasts the United States' response to Natives in 1876 and 1964, and how the approaches of both had drastically changed and yet also in some ways stayed the same. The Natives could no longer fight the United States in the same ways so they had to fight for their interests within the modern framework of legality and public influence. The United States in the 20th century also no longer suppressed Natives with military campaigns, but was also still seeking to repudiate past promises made through treaties by rhetoric such as labeling Natives as "un-American". This was significant in Native history because so many separate coalitions of Native Americans worked for a common interest, and they worked within the modern framework of politics and influence to accomplish their goals.

It is a tough situation for the Natives because pre-European contact, Natives of Pacific Northwest of the U.S. had a very high population density compared to Native people of other regions. These people had always used their ample natural resources like fish for survival.

However by the 20th century millions of settlers flooded this area from all across the country and for many reasons, founding large communities. The arrival of the large European-American population is what made conservation principles and control measures necessary, yet these standards were also applied to Natives.

Since Natives were at an enormous disadvantage to succeed in a post-European-American settled and industrialized world, being able to use natural resources like hunting and fishing like they had once freely done was of invaluable importance.

However, due to the overuse of resources that really upsurged with the vast population growth of European-Americans, the Natives were expected to adhere to standards of resource conservation.

Unfortunate how discriminatory government policy can cement already existing but unnecessary division within affected populations. This brings to mind the technique of "divide and conquer." Whether or not the U.S. through the Dawes Commission was intentionally trying to divide blacks and Creeks, the effect of the separation from "Freedmen" and Creeks served to encourage divisions, preventing the possibility of cooperation among them that could challenge the system of white supremacy that both groups were being subjected to. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Racism between Creeks and blacks makes efforts more difficult for both blacks and Creeks as marginalized groups to rally and ameliorate their respective situations; as opposed to if the groups were to stand in solidarity and create a unified front that worked against mistreatment by the racist U.S. government policy.

I appreciate statements like this that hold the nation and its states accountable to its own precedents. I believe that a lot of the past actions of federal and state governments have been to deprive Natives of their land and sovereignty, however they also took careful steps not to show themselves as completely undermining the rights of Natives. In essence the tribes retained "de jure" sovereignty and rights while simultaneously having those things "de facto" taken away from them. This Supreme Court case, however, holds the U.S. government accountable to the contracts the U.S. made which explicitly conceded and guaranteed the Natives their rights, independence and legitimacy under law.

This is interesting and I never knew this. This would explain the popularity of spreading Christianity as a motivation and main focus for colonial expansion, and then in the 19th century there is much less focus and mention on spreading Christianity and many white people simply want to get rid of the Natives.

I love this. Learning about Native Americans tribes has taught me how they so often lived their life on the move and this puts into words something I always admire when I think about the traditional lifestyle of many Native American tribes.

By the time Europeans had arrived in America, they had a cemented and very complicated conception of the world and their place in it. Natives who had their own established cultures and lifestyles could not be reasonably expected to adhere to or understand the complex social structures of European society. Especially since those structures were disadvantageous and discriminatory against Natives. Moreover the Natives often understood that behind all the "fluff" of terms and laws and conditions, the Europeans were truly in effect displacing them by brute force.

The term "emigrating" appears to refer to the Creeks being forced west of the Mississippi, however here I am curious as to why it says emigrating "to" the United States rather than "from" the United States?

In the 1820s, state government leaders in Georgia and other state constantly sought to deny the validity of treaties that recognized tribal sovereignty, and to remove Native Americans from their states. The result of all of their actions towards the Natives shows that they were motivated by a desire to assert jurisdiction over the Natives and subject them to discriminatory policies and systems.

And in contrast the purpose of Corn Tassel's execution was to undermine tribal sovereignty and assert state jurisdiction over the Natives by brute force.

The motivation behind whites forcing Native "removal" is always at odds with my intuition. Since the United States is such a big country, at first glace someone who did not know anything about the history of U.S.-Native American conflict over land might expect for the two populations not to contend for it so much. However, I believe that some of the factors that assumption fails to account for are how much land settlers wanted and the huge (and at the time exploding) population of the U.S. I believe that as U.S.-European civilization expanded they wanted to acquire all the land they could. While the Natives did not need proprietorship of the land itself in the same way, they were also used to surviving on large areas of land. A single tribe could inhabit a territory of several thousands square miles. The fact that U.S. settlers wanted "ownership" to use the land to build on and to appropriate it for uses like agriculture impeded on the Native American way of life. This in my view was at least a major factor that contributed to Natives being "removed" and conflict over land between the U.S. and Natives.

Not only did Eaton sign a treaty with a minority of the original representatives of Choctaws, he gave the remaining Choctaws entirely different terms by threatening them.<br> A very re-occurring theme in treaties during the 19th century during U.S. expansion. In my opinion, the practice of producing and enforcing treaties that were obviously fundamentally unsound had to have been a socially accepted and learned tactic of the various European-American authors of treaties for it to be as common as it was. Kind of a "de-facto" negotiation blueprint.

This is often the approach of European-American leadership to dealing with Natives--- whatever rationalizes the actions they took to achieve their goal for the time being. The United States was after all a country that was founded on the assertion that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. As a result, a lot of time, ink, and false promises were used to justify the actions and policies taken by state and federal governments in the United States.

I had the honor of visiting Glacier National Park next to the Blackfoot Reservation over the summer. To add yet another layer of tragedy to this, the livelihood of the Blackfeet was once the buffalo. Bison hunters were employed by the U.S. government to kill off the bison so that the Blackfeet would remain within the reservation, and as a result the Blackfeet were forced to depend on U.S. Government rations to survive.

I am currently reading a book called "Out of Mao's Shadow" and it is about the struggle for political change in China. The unkept promises made by the U.S. to the Blackfeet remind me of the promises the Chinese Communist Party made to protect the human rights of its people during the Great Leap Forward, a period in which millions of Chinese citizens starved. Cobell reminds me very much of a Chinese dissident named Lin Zhao who never gave up her principles and risked everything in order to boldly call out the party for its wrongs. I am glad that despite having to singlehandedly face off with behemoth, unfair institutions with the U.S. Government who sought to silence her at every turn, Cobell was not detained from following her conscience to the same extent as Zhao, who was forced to become a martyr at a young age.

I am very glad to have been able to read this article and learn about the story of Elouise Cobell. <3

It is ironic considering that Lamberth's frustration was a result of the inability of the Department of Interior and the Department of the Treasury to render fair judgment.

The Dawes Act was clearly written expressly for the purpose of expropriating more land from the Natives. This is during a time of rapid Westward expansion. Settlers came pouring into the Great Plains. U.S. treaties with the Natives made during the 19th century assigning them lands were often made with short-term goals in mind to placate and subdue the Natives. However, in many cases, very shortly after the treaties were signed settlers would continue to push West, and the U.S. Government would then want to take the lands it had promised to the Natives in perpetuity. Furthermore, from what I have read about the Dawes Act and how it affected other tribes on the Great Plains, U.S. officials did not even bother to clearly explain what was being done to the Natives, who no doubt had very little understanding of the law and its ramifications or magnitude. For example, in their interactions with the Comanches, U.S. officials stalled on explaining how much the government would pay for the land that was left over after the Natives got their one hundred sixty acres.

It is one thing to read it, but the potential for bold individuals like Elouise Cobell to turn an idea into action and make such a difference in the lives of others through willpower, intellect and perseverance is spectacular.

Meanwhile by this time a majority of the Cherokee had already become farmers and adopted lifestyles similar to those of neighboring European Americans. Also in the 19th Century Native Americans of various tribes, including the Cherokee had already proved time and time again to be extremely commendable at maneuvering within the United States political system which was set up against them. It often blows me away the amount of resilience, social-intelligence, mental fortitude, and conviction so many Native American leaders displayed in protecting the interests of the tribe against the behemoth prejudiced U.S. Government which was largely self-interested in its own goals of expansion and dominion.

When I looked into the Cherokee Nation case I found that the state of Georgia passed laws attempting to take away basic rights of Natives in order to force them to give up their homeland move to lands West of the Mississippi River. Two justices dissented the decision, arguing that the Cherokee were independent and pointed out that the United States had treated them as a “foreign state” with which it made treaties in the past. They held that the laws that George passed were “repugnant” with reference to the treaties the U.S. had made with the Cherokees.

I agree with the comments my classmates have already made about this kind of language that emphasizes an ideal of a permanent peace. It seems like it is all too common for treaties to be made between Natives and the American government that include overzealous expectations of a permanent harmony, only for more disputes and conflicts to break out shortly thereafter.

The leadership and optimistic endeavors of the tribal leaders in the face of such discouraging disadvantages is virtuous by any standards. They worked within and played the game by rules that were often set up against them.

My interpretation is that this treaty is a good example of how Americans would push boundaries and use treaties strategically to put themselves in a favorable position to gain more. As Americans advanced Westward terms of treaties were broken. The Americans were powerful and had endlessly large populations by comparison to those of the Natives, so the Natives tended to lose more people, territory, and resources to Americans. The language used by Americans in the treaties often conveys ideals of mutual benefit and eternal deference to the terms of the treaty, however, the Natives often progressively had to give more ground, while American settlers would in turn increase their ambitions as the years went by.

The notion of the Territorial Government “a barbaric dominion within a civilized republic” implies irreconcilability between the two parties. It assumes that the Native Americans cannot do as the author says, and “give no just cause for complaint” or “be allowed to prepare themselves for the change in their relation with the United States.” It must assume this in order to justify continuing its design of “the strong to rob the weak.”

I believe today's style of education with its focus on data is very ingrained in our culture. Non-grading and the studies supporting it may sound refreshing, but I believe many people would be skeptical to embrace any other method. Higher-learning institutions have existed for thousands of years and only in the past few centuries has quantitative evaluation of student performance gradually risen to prominence. However, in everybody's daily life, in our culture and, across all sectors of society, it has become the norm and expectation for large institutions including universities to adhere to strict, data-driven methods that prioritize principles like calculability, efficiency, predictability, and control.<br> To me, non-grading is just a small piece of a much larger story. It represents an attempt at something like "de-McDonaldization" in education; an idea that has broad-ranging implications. People are socialized in educational institutions. Therefore, if universities socialized people in a more de-McDonaldized way, the logical consequence is it will cause those students to spread those new methods, principles, and philosophies to the rest of society (which would certainly have its potential pros and cons). However, these large-scale societal changes to our currently data-driven society will be enormously challenging to realize.

Trying out new educational methods in a class at a time like this is a step in a potentially different and new direction. People often say the first steps are the biggest steps, and I am excited to be a part of it and see what it's like!

I have learned a lot about Native Americans recently and discovered that Native American history and culture (from Paleo-Indians to European colonization) is a big interest of mine. Over the past couple months I have read books like "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee", "Black Elk Speaks", and "Empire of the Summer Moon." I have been doing a lot of research about Native American populations that lived in the Southwest, Great Plains, Great Lakes areas of the United States. This class is a good way for me to learn more specifically about the relationship between the U.S. Government and Indians; something that I am less motivated to learn about on my own but is just as integral to getting a better idea of the complete Native American story.