Lynching and Native Americans

Lynching and Native Americans

The first Spanish explorers in North America found the continent already inhabited. Native Americans had migrated throughout the western world for thousands of years. This migration came to an abrupt halt when Europeans took over and claimed this part of the world as their own. Though the Native Americans helped many Spanish and French colonists, whom they taught how to hunt, fish, and take care of themselves, these new “discoverers” still took the land, violated their hosts and began a frantic hunt for natural resources.

By the seventeenth century in many of the early colonies, there were three times as many whites as Indians. This ratio increased steadily with the arrival of more and more Europeans. In his essay ­­“Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895 to 1995” R. David Edmunds writes:

[I]n 1893, both the frontier and Indian people seemed to be part of the past…In 1890, the United States Bureau of the Census had reported that the frontier had vanished and that the Indian population had fallen to 248,253. Native Americans had played a major role in the history of the frontier, but the frontier was gone. For Turner and other historians, Indian people and their role in American history were also on the road to oblivion. (Edmunds 717)

President Andrew Jackson created the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This act gave territory, in what is now Oklahoma and Kansas, to Native Americans who would give up their “ancestral holdings”. This act guaranteed that the Indians could live on the new land as long as they wanted. Many refused to leave their homelands and these Native Americans stayed to fight a losing battle that usually ended in death and destruction.

The Europeans eventually stripped the Native Americans of much of their lands. In their efforts to retrieve their land, Native Americans who fought back over time were subjected to numerous forms of violence, such as raping, scalping and lynching, among other acts. Nevertheless, groups such as the Lokota, Sioux and Cheyenne have historically and continue to fight European and white invasion and to organized movements and groups to this end. One such movement was the American Indian Movement (AIM) which reached it heights in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement had powerful men and women leaders. For example, a region activist in this movement was Anna Mae Pictou Aquash.