The Indian Wars: A Change of Worlds

In Pre-Columbian America, millions of Native Americans were spread across the continents, made up of a large number of unique civilizations and tribes. As the Spanish began exploring what they called the New World in the 1400s, the world they knew began to change forever.

The first English settlement of Jamestown leads to the English dominating the East Coast. As they push up against Native American lands to the west, conflict becomes inevitable.

French settlers set up forts and trading posts across Canada, and partnered with the Native Americans in order to trap game. As tensions between the French and English colonists boiled over into the French and Indian War, the Native tribes provided assistance to their trading partners in hopes of driving the English out.

After overthrowing their monarch, the United States government begins their own relationship with the Native Americans. But the country pushes expansion still further west, the country begins to break its treaties with the Native Americans.

While the United States fights itself in the Civil War, the western border territories find themselves engaged in the Dakota War of 1862, a bloody conflict between settlers and the Native Americans.

The slaughter of the buffalo populations in the western United States is used to corral Native Americans into reservations. But these reservations were still not far enough from the reach of the United States.

In the 20th Century, and to this day, Native American tribes continue to fight against the government for their rights and safety. But a final battle appeared in the form of mass media, and the popularity of the Western film genre in the 1940s and 1950s painted a damaging stereotype of Native Americans into the consciousness of the American people.