Читать книгу The Bravest Hunter - Michael Newell - Страница 5

Manifest Destiny was an unofficial, unwritten doctrine supported by the U.S. government in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century that implied the government would secure and control all land between the two great oceans. This doctrine was likely the impetus for the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, which pushed Mexican rule from California, Nevada, Utah, part of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to its current borders. The doctrine was also the likely incentive for reining in free-roaming Native American people, who lived their lives and raised their families on Great Plains lands teeming with herds of buffalo. Soon, between buffalo hunters and the U.S. military, the herds were decimated. Plains tribes, because of a lack of a food source, had their possessions declared contraband and confiscated, forcing the Indian people into a new, dependent way of life.

Targeting tribes in the southern and eastern areas of the U.S., the Indian Removal Act in 1830 passed during Andrew Jackson’s term as president. This act precipitated the U.S. military force-marching Indian people from southern and eastern lands to new lands the government dubbed “Indian Territory” known today as Oklahoma. The forced march is known as the “Trail of Tears.”

The U.S. government insisted that each displaced tribe sign a treaty agreeing to the displacement. However, a segment of defiant Seminoles, led by Osceola,9 and many of his followers escaped into the Florida Everglades, where the terrain and cover allowed them to fight off the soldiers pursuing them well into the 1850s. Those Seminoles remain in Florida to this day.

A few Cherokees were able to avoid apprehension by melding into a portion of what is now North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains; these groups survived.

A small portion of the Muscogee Creek Indians, known as the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, was able to keep a fraction of their lands in Alabama as a reward for aiding the U.S. against the Northern Creek “Red Sticks” in the Creek War of 1813–1814.

Many of the western tribes eventually defeated by U.S. troops were sequestered-in-place on reservations and became wholly dependent on the government for food, shelter and clothing. Many of these reservations still exist and have become tribal towns, at times referred to as agency towns.10

In Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, each head of household relocated there received a quarter-section of land or 160 acres, with the presumption that they would farm their land like non-Indian people. That didn’t happen. Small groups of tribal people banded around matriarchs or patriarchs and founded villages, which later became tribal towns, and they only farmed enough land to sustain their needs.

When the federal government realized that many of the original allotments were underutilized, the U.S. repurchased the unused land for ten cents an acre. Then, the government allotted those reacquired lands to non-Indian homesteaders, thereby ending the concept of “Indian Territory” and paving the way for non-Indian settlements and Oklahoma statehood.

As a result, Indian people, who could no longer exist the way they had for enumerable generations, lived in poverty until the 1980s. Unemployment and underemployment among Indian people were as high as 40 percent, with rampant alcoholism and drug abuse taking the lives of too many tribal youths

Then, something changed. The Indians discovered a new enterprise: bingo.

9 A prominent Seminole leader, never signed the relocation treaty. The name Osceola presently exists among many Seminole citizens.

10 See Crow Agency, Montana.