OCR Specification focus:
‘reasons for destruction of Native American societies’.
These notes examine why nineteenth-century Native American societies were fractured and diminished, highlighting forces, policies, violence, disease, and environmental change shaping dispossession and cultural disintegration.
Drivers of Destruction: Interacting Causes, 1803–c.1890
The erosion of Native American autonomy resulted from overlapping and mutually reinforcing pressures rather than a single cause. Consider how material change, federal policy, settler actions and cultural suppression aligned.
Ideology and Territorial Hunger
The belief that the republic should span the continent legitimised displacement.
Manifest Destiny: The nineteenth-century conviction that Americans were providentially destined to expand across North America, used to justify territorial acquisition and Native dispossession.
This ideology underpinned land policies, military campaigning and the re-mapping of Indigenous homelands into federal property.
Demographic and Environmental Shocks
Epidemic disease (smallpox, measles, cholera) preceded and followed settlement, reducing populations and weakening social structures that anchored governance and culture.
Bison extermination in the 1860s–70s—accelerated by commercial hide hunters and railroads—decimated Plains economies, food security and spiritual practices linked to the hunt.
Environmental transformation through plough agriculture, fencing and ranching altered resource access, undermining subsistence patterns and intertribal exchange networks.
Federal Land Policy and Legal Reconfiguration
Treaty-making and breaking: Unequal treaties ceded vast territories; subsequent abrogations normalised further loss.
Reservations: Confinement to bounded spaces curtailed mobility, hunting and seasonal cycles, producing dependency on federal rations.
Reservation System: A federal framework allocating bounded lands to tribes, intended to control, “civilise,” and manage Native peoples while freeing surrounding territories for settlers.
Between these measures, Indigenous legal sovereignty was narrowed, replacing tribal jurisdictions with federal oversight and courts.
Economic Transformations and Market Pressures
Railroads opened interior lands, delivered settlers and facilitated extractive booms (gold, silver, copper, timber).
Resource rushes generated violent trespass, vigilante action and political lobbying to displace Indigenous claimants.
Credit and dependency: Trading posts and agency stores embedded communities into volatile market systems; when prices fell or credit collapsed, poverty and leverage increased.
Homesteading and fencing fragmented grazing corridors and sacred landscapes, accelerating land alienation.
Military Conflict and Coercion
“Indian Wars” of the 1860s–70s: Campaigns on the Plains, Southwest and Northwest targeted villages, horse herds and food supplies, amplifying the effects of disease and hunger.
Fortified lines, scouts and telegraph enhanced the army’s reach; winter campaigns exploited seasonal vulnerability.
Massacres and reprisals deepened trauma and dislocation, encouraging relocation to reservations as the only immediate survival strategy.
Assimilationist Policy and Cultural Suppression
Americanisation programmes aimed to replace collective identities with individualised citizenship.
Mission schools and later federal boarding schools removed children, suppressed Native languages, hairstyles and ceremonial life, and imposed Christianity and English literacy.
Paired portraits of Tom Torlino (Navajo) taken in 1882 and 1885 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The controlled contrast and styling emphasise the school’s assimilationist goals—central to the Americanisation pressure on Native societies. Source
Criminalisation of ceremony (e.g., bans on dances and medicine practices) weakened custodians of tradition and curtailed intergenerational transmission of knowledge.
After military defeat narrowed alternatives, assimilation was presented as “benevolent,” masking its destructive cultural effects.
Allotment and the Final Unravelling of Landholding
Allotment in severalty broke communal tenure into individual parcels, easing surplus land sale to settlers and railroads.
Inheritance rules (fractionation, tax foreclosure) and speculation ensured continuing attrition of Native-held acreage.
Allotment (Dawes-style): The division of tribal land into individual plots with “surplus” sold, intended to create yeoman farmers but resulting in massive Indigenous land loss and weakened tribal governance.
By undermining collective control and political authority, allotment hollowed out the institutional base of many societies even where population survival continued.
Gendered and Social Disruption
Patriarchal farming ideals displaced roles held by Native women in agriculture and trade, unsettling household economies.
Leadership erosion occurred as federal agents empowered compliant headmen, sidelining traditional councils and spiritual authorities.
Alcohol and dependency economies exacerbated social strain, often deliberately used to leverage land cessions.
Law, Violence and Impunity
Asymmetrical justice: Territorial and federal courts rarely punished settler violence, normalising vigilantism and cattlemen’s intimidation.
Policing on reservations—via agency police and later courts of Indian offences—imposed external legal norms that clashed with customary law.
Intellectual and Cartographic Power
Surveying and mapping rendered Indigenous homelands as gridded commodities, translating kinship landscapes into saleable parcels.
Ethnographic paternalism depicted Native cultures as “vanishing,” rationalising urgent assimilation and funding for coercive schooling.
How the Causes Interlocked
Material collapse (bison loss, disease) created immediate crises.
Policy instruments (treaties, reservations, allotment) converted crisis into permanent dispossession.
Cultural programmes (schools, bans on ceremony) sought to erase collective identity.
Economic integration (railroads, markets) completed the transformation by embedding communities in a system that rewarded land alienation.
Ideology (Manifest Destiny) made each step appear inevitable and righteous to contemporaries.
Thinking Like a Historian
Track chronology and causation: demographic shocks often precede policy shifts; policy then institutionalises loss.
Evaluate agency and resistance: despite destruction, communities adapted, negotiated and resisted—important for interpreting continuity alongside rupture.
Use key evidence: treaty texts, reservation maps, school regulations, railroad charters, and testimonies illuminate how structural forces translated into daily unfreedom.
FAQ
Beyond causing hunger, the loss of the bison undermined cultural identity and ceremonial practices that were central to Plains life.
It also eroded military strength, as horses and hides—essential for mobility and warfare—were diminished.
The collapse of the bison economy reduced independence, forcing tribes into reliance on federal rations and markets.
Treaties were frequently signed under duress, often with unrepresentative signatories.
Once land was ceded, the U.S. government often failed to uphold promised protections, annuities, or services.
This constant erosion of trust fragmented leadership, fostered disillusionment, and removed the security of landholding that underpinned community survival.
The Dawes Act divided communal land into individual plots, undermining collective landholding traditions.
Traditional councils lost authority to manage shared land.
Tribal unity was weakened as individuals were incentivised to sell or lose land through tax foreclosures.
Political sovereignty eroded as federal agents gained greater control over Native affairs.
Boarding schools removed children from their homes for long periods, severing intergenerational bonds.
They discouraged use of Native languages, replacing them with English instruction.
Families were stigmatised if children returned with new identities, disrupting kinship ties and weakening cultural continuity.
Settler vigilantes frequently attacked Native groups with little fear of legal consequences.
Federal and territorial courts rarely punished such violence, creating a culture of impunity.
Reservation police enforced external laws that conflicted with customary systems, further undermining Indigenous justice and authority.
Practice Questions
Question 1 (2 marks)
Identify two ways in which the destruction of the bison contributed to the weakening of Native American societies in the nineteenth century.
Question 1 (2 marks)
Award 1 mark for each valid point identified.
Possible answers include:
Removal of a central food source, leading to starvation and dependency. (1 mark)
Loss of spiritual and cultural practices linked to the bison hunt. (1 mark)
Collapse of the Plains economy and trade networks. (1 mark)
Weakening of military resistance, as tribes lost access to horses and provisions. (1 mark)
Maximum 2 marks.
Question 2 (6 marks)
Explain how federal government policies contributed to the destruction of Native American societies in the period 1830–1890.
Question 2 (6 marks)
Level 1 (1–2 marks): Generalised assertions with little or no supporting detail, e.g. “Government policies took away land.”
Level 2 (3–4 marks): Some explanation with limited detail or range, e.g. reference to the reservation system or broken treaties, but lacking depth or balance.
Level 3 (5–6 marks): Clear explanation with supporting detail and range. Students may mention:
The Indian Removal Act (1830), forcing tribes from their lands. (1–2 marks if explained clearly)
The reservation system, restricting mobility and fostering dependency. (1–2 marks if explained clearly)
The Dawes Act (1887), breaking communal landholding and leading to significant land loss. (1–2 marks if explained clearly)
Federal support for railroads and settlers, which accelerated displacement. (credit if explained clearly)
Maximum 6 marks.
