Native American Rights: A History of Resistance and Survival
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Homework type: History essay
Added: 23.01.2026 at 12:05
Summary:
Explore the history of Native American rights and resistance, learning about their enduring fight for justice, cultural survival, and nationhood in US history.
Native American Civil Rights: A Chronicle of Resistance, Loss, and Endurance
The struggle for Native American civil rights stands as one of the most complex and enduring battles in the history of the United States. It is a narrative shaped by dispossession, forced assimilation, legal marginalisation, and persistent resistance. Unlike other civil rights movements, the Native American quest for justice is deeply entwined with unique questions of nationhood, land tenure, and cultural survival. This essay explores the origins and development of Native American civil rights, emphasising both the destructive legacies of settler expansion and the resourcefulness and resilience of Native peoples in their long fight for recognition.---
The Richness of Pre-Contact Societies and Early Dispossession
Long before European settlers crossed the Atlantic, the lands that would become the United States were home to a diverse tapestry of Indigenous nations. From the agricultural communities of the Iroquois Confederacy in the Northeast to the semi-nomadic buffalo hunters of the Plains, Indigenous societies displayed sophisticated governance, vibrant spiritual traditions, and complex social bonds. Land was held not as private property but as a communal trust, linking people to their ancestors and to the natural world. The poet Alice Oswald, in her explorations of land and memory, echoes something, albeit indirectly, of the Indigenous reverence for place—a reverence later misunderstood and exploited by the newcomers.Initial contact between colonists and Native peoples was sporadic, often conducted at arm’s length through treaties that recognised tribal sovereignty in principle. These early agreements—however unequal—testify to some degree of mutual recognition. Yet, the difference in worldviews was fundamental: for many colonists, land ownership entailed individual deeds and perpetual transfer; for Indigenous nations, stewardship passed through kin and custom, inseparable from spiritual beliefs.
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Expansion, Wars, and Displacement: The Setting of Systematic Injustice
The conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865 marked a turning point, unleashing a tide of westward migration, supported in part by the imperial-minded dogma of Manifest Destiny. This belief—fuelled by religious conviction and economic ambition—held that Americans were destined to settle the continent ‘from sea to shining sea.’ With the Homestead Act enticing settlers westwards, and the construction of railways physically linking remote settlements, pressure on Native lands became relentless.Militarisation followed close behind. Regular troops, diverted during the Civil War, were replaced by militia units frequently hostile to Indigenous people. A sequence of bloody episodes ensued. The Dakota War of 1862 saw an uprising of Sioux communities driven by broken treaties and desperation, culminating in brutal reprisals by the US Army. Red Cloud’s War a few years later was perhaps the only conflict in which Native resistance compelled the United States to abandon its military posts in the heart of Sioux territory—albeit temporarily. The infamous Sand Creek Massacre provides a grim example of the period’s violence: in 1864, Colorado militiamen slaughtered Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers, mostly women and children, under a flag of supposed truce. Such events left deep scars—the trauma passed from generation to generation—a precursor to what Irish poet Seamus Heaney called a “bogland” of memory and suffering.
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Laws and Treaties: The Promise and Betrayal of Recognition
Legal recognition of tribal rights was, on paper, central to US-Indian relations. Celebrated agreements such as the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868, and the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, promised peace, land, and government support in exchange for ‘civilising’ influences. Yet, these treaties were consistently undermined, either rewritten at will by government agents or openly disregarded in the face of settler encroachment. Unlike the British-Māori Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa New Zealand—a flawed but persistent legal touchpoint—US treaties with Native nations had no enduring ballast.The Supreme Court’s 1871 declaration that Congress wielded unilateral power to abrogate treaties ensured that tribal sovereignty existed merely at the government’s convenience. Laws were manipulated to transfer immense tracts of land to non-Native ownership and to erode the institutional base of Indigenous societies. For Native Americans, the law was less a shield than a weapon wielded against them; much like the Scottish Highland clearances, these legal reforms were carried out in the name of ‘improvement’, but resulted in the hollowing out of entire communities.
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The Machinery of Assimilation: Boarding Schools and Allotment
From the late nineteenth century, policymakers in Washington shifted from confrontational to assimilationist strategies, convinced by prevailing racial theories that Indigenous cultures could—and should—be erased. Central to this project was the reservation system: Native Americans were uprooted from ancestral territories and herded onto often arid, marginal land. There, tribal governance structures were systematically dismantled; ceremonial practices outlawed; communal living replaced by imposed ‘Western’ systems.The network of federally funded boarding schools best illustrates the psychological violence of these years. Indian children were removed from their families and educated in the ways of the ‘civilised’ world—uniforms, regimented routines, English-only instruction, and brutal suppression of Native languages and customs. "Kill the Indian, save the man," was the chilling ideology underpinning these institutions. Children returned home often unable to speak the language of their parents or participate fully in the cultural life of their own people. In England, the stories of loss and forced cultural change—such as the relocation of Welsh communities in the Tryweryn Valley—offer a distant but recognisable echo of these generational ruptures.
The Dawes Act of 1887, meanwhile, advanced the disintegration of Indigenous society by parcelling reservation land into individual allotments. Designed to create a class of Native farmers modelled on the American yeoman ideal, it resulted in catastrophic land loss: surplus land was sold off to white settlers, and most Native Americans found themselves with neither land nor livelihood. The communal relationships that had defined many nations were further frayed—mirroring, in some respects, the enclosure movement’s impact on rural England centuries earlier.
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Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Persistence
Yet even amid near-total legal and social displacement, Native Americans did not relinquish their identity, nor their claim to justice. Warfare was only one response; legal advocacy and pragmatic adaptation were others. Figures such as Chief Red Cloud and Sitting Bull became bywords for courage and savvy negotiation, sometimes fighting, sometimes suing, sometimes bargaining—always striving to secure the future of their peoples. In everyday life, families maintained medicine bundles and oral traditions, wove winter counts into hides, and found ways to pass on forbidden stories, in defiance of government bans.The dawn of the twentieth century saw the emergence of Native-led advocacy groups such as the Society of American Indians, seeking legal reforms and recognition of tribal self-government. While severely hampered by lack of political power and divided opinion over strategies of resistance and assimilation, these organisations laid the foundations for the more visible civil rights activism that followed in later generations.
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Themes: Land, Law, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation
Land runs like an artery through the story of Native American civil rights. Loss of territory entailed more than economic hardship; it meant rupture with the ancestors and with the patterns of life that sustained meaning. Campaigns for the restoration of sacred sites and treaty lands—echoed in recent decades at places like Standing Rock—are grounded in centuries of dispossession.At the heart of the struggle lies the conflict between assimilation and sovereignty. The US government repeatedly sought to offer citizenship or individual property upon the condition of cultural erasure. For Native nations, civil rights meant not mere inclusion within the majority society, but the right to exist as distinct peoples, governing their own affairs and educating the next generation in their own traditions.
In literary terms, the Native struggle resembles the tragic arcs depicted by classic British writers such as Thomas Hardy, where characters are buffeted by larger social and historical tides. But unlike Hardy’s protagonists, Native Americans refused to surrender to fate. Their story, marked by loss, is also one of refusal—a determination to remember, adapt, and assert dignity.
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Conclusion: The Legacy and Ongoing Relevance of the Native American Civil Rights Struggle
The legacy of nineteenth-century policies—war, forced removal, legal chicanery, and systematic cultural oppression—continues to shape the lives of Native Americans today. While progress has been made, with recent legislative recognitions and the revival of languages and ceremonies, the central pillars of the civil rights struggle—land, cultural preservation, legal sovereignty—remain to be fully addressed. This history offers lessons in the capacity for resilience under pressure, and a cautionary tale to all who would see the law as a mechanism for justice rather than a mask for power.Just as the British experience of decolonisation forced reevaluations of identity, justice, and national history, so too does the Native American quest for civil rights demand a reckoning in the United States. In considering these intertwined histories, the urgent relevance of past injustices becomes apparent, and the importance of continuing the long fight for recognition, truth, and reconciliation is made ever more clear.
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