Mapping how the U.S. forcibly took Indigenous lands

Not long after the Great American Experiment began, the newly established nation set its sights west. Here’s how a series of conflicts, forged treaties, and forced migration led to the loss of a majority of Indigenous lands.

ERIN BLAKEMORE

For the citizens of the newly established United States, the vast territory of North America (and the land of plenty it represented) seemed theirs for the taking. But these lands, some of the richest on Earth, had already been settled and stewarded for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples.

Though their numbers had already dwindled due to new diseases and conflict with settlers, in 1776 approximately 250,000 Indigenous people still lived within the territory delimited by the current borders of the U.S. The young nation, however, was intent on expansion—and set its sights on Indigenous land.

Over the years, tribal interests and sovereignty would be trampled time and time again. Although land loss is the most visible consequence of dispossession, Indigenous customs, culture, and language (all firmly rooted in the land) were also under attack.

Armed struggles began well before the American Revolution. The tribes that fought alongside the British lost huge swaths of territory when the 1783 Treaty of Paris ceded land to the U.S., despite the document including no mention of the Indigenous people who would be displaced.

As Yale historian and member of the Te-Moak Western Shoshone tribe Ned Blackhawk writes, the Revolution “was not a beginning. Nor was it an end, as its aftermath brought no semblance of peace.” Further battles and violent expropriation were ahead.

These conflicts, spanning over 300 years, are now referred to under the umbrella of the American Indian Wars.

Although tribes fought to defend their ancestral lands, they were increasingly forced to sell or cede them, forging treaties that were broken more often than not. After the War of 1812, the British abandoned their Indigenous allies once again, resulting in further expropriation.

The 1830 Indian Removal Act enabled the U.S. to trade some of its unsettled western lands for settled Indigenous land east of the Mississippi, forcing tens of thousands of Indigenous people to leave their homes and condemning both those who complied and those who resisted to the forced displacement now known as the Trail of Tears, during which many died of exposure.

“Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth?,” Shawnee Chief Tecumseh once mourned. “Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?”

As the fatalities of war and the decimation of the bison caused Indigenous numbers to diminish even more, U.S. land accumulation plowed on, inspired by what was seen as a divine mandate (coined as “Manifest Destiny”) to expand the frontier and impose the “American way of life.”

Indigenous people were forced onto ever shrinking reservations. Legislation such as the 1887 Dawes Act laid waste to traditional, community-held land stewardship, while forced cultural assimilation, compulsory English education, and the ban of many Indigenous languages chipped away at nearly every aspect of Indigenous culture.

However, Indigenous people did not tolerate their oppression in silence. A push for civil rights during the 20th century helped reinvigorate Indigenous pride, but it was too late to save ancestral lands.

Though the true extent of the dispossession is unknown, researchers estimate that nearly 99 percent of Indigenous lands have now been confiscated.

National Geographic