American Indians Timeline
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21000BC-18000BC In 2008 researchers reported that DNA evidence indicated that 95% of native Americans had descended from 6 women of this period. It was believed that the women had lived in Beringia, a land bridge that stretched from Asia to North America during this time.
(SFC, 3/14/08, p.A12)
12300BC In 2008 scientists reported that fossilized human feces found in 8 caves near Paisley, Ore., dated to about this time. The coprolites contained DNA with characteristics matching those of living Amerindians.
(SFC, 4/4/08, p.A4)(Econ, 4/5/08, p.84)
10300 BC In 2021 it was reported that scientists have unearthed evidence of a milestone in human culture, the earliest-known use of tobacco, in the remnants of a hearth built by early inhabitants of North America's interior about this time in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert. Until then, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago.
(Reuters, 10/11/21)
8024BC In 1976 scientists in southern California scientists unearthed skeletal remains dating to about this time and among the oldest ever found in the Western Hemisphere.
(AP, 1/15/12)
6500 BC A skeleton of about this age was found in July, 1996, by the Columbia River in Kennewick, Wa. It became known as the "Kennewick Man" or "Richland Man." The 9,200 year old bones were later studied and determined to be most closely related to Asian people, particularly the Ainu of northern Japan. It was concluded in 2000 that he was an American Indian. The bones were dated to 7514-7324 BC. DNA testing in 2015 showed a close relationship to at least one Native American population in Washington and dated him to about 6,500BC.
(SFC, 10/16/99, p.A11)(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A7)(SFC, 9/26/00, p.A5)(Econ, 7/16/05, p.76)(SFC, 6/19/15, p.A18)
6000BC The Wappo Indians settle in the area northern California around Mt. Konocti 8,000 years ago. The eruption of Mt. Konocti millions of years earlier left a fissure in the earth through which ground water reaches the hot magma at 4,000 feet, and resurfaces as Indian Springs’ three thermal geysers at 212 degrees. The water rises through old sea beds adding rich mineral and salt traces.
(Flyer on Indian Springs, 7/95)
c6000BC The Hokan Indians preceded the Miwoks in Northern California.
(SFEC, 10/4/98, p.B5)
4500BC In 2014 San Francisco construction workers discovered human remains at the site of the new Transbay Transit Center that dated to about this time.
(SFC, 10/21/14, p.D1)
3000BC Excavations for the SF Civic Center BART Station in 1969 unearthed a female skeleton that dated back to about this time.
(SFC, 8/3/13, p.C3)
1500BC The Basketmaker culture of the Ancient Pueblo People began about this time and continued until about AD 500 with the beginning of the Pueblo I Era. In 2014 archeologists discovered an ancient village built during the Basketmaker period with 50-70 pit houses organized in rings on about 66 acres Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.
(SFC, 10/11/14, p.A8)
200-1215 The Fremont people lived in Utah and etched into rock designs of animals and people.
(SFEC, 3/14/99, p.T8,9)
c300-1300 The Anasazis inhabited the Canyon de Chelly and the Canyon del Muerto in northeast Arizona over this period.
(SFEC, 11/29/98, p.T8)
500 The northern California Emeryville Shellmound, CA-Ala 309, dates to about this time.
(Buckeye, Winter 04/05)
500-700 Evidence in 2005 suggested that Polynesians visited California during this period and transferred their canoe building technology to the local Chumash and Gabrielino Indians.
(SFC, 6/20/05, p.A5)
c600-1300 Pueblo Indians built their Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde (Colorado).
(SFC, 7/25/00, p.A3)
750 Native peoples in southwest Colorado started building stone houses above ground, first one-story, then two. Ruins of these are scattered over the landscape and have the look of ones the Pueblo Indians-Hopi, Zuni and others of the Southwest live in today. They added beans, an important source of protein, to their diets, and began making simple grayware pots. They had bows and arrows.
(HN, 2/11/97)
800 Ohlone Indians occupied the cliffs near Mussel Rock, later Daly City, Ca., beginning from about this time.
(http://tinyurl.com/6sn59u9)
c1000 The Cahokia settlement in Southern Illinois numbered about 30,000.
(SFC, 3/20/99, p.B4)
c1000 In Montana polychromatic rock drawings were made at Weatherman Draw, also known as the Valley of the Chiefs.
(SFC, 6/22/01, p.A7)
1000-1400 Indians inhabited an area at the junction of 2 creeks between Walnut Creek and Lafayette, Ca. A burial site was found there in 1904. In 2004 some 80 sets of human remains was found during the construction of the Hidden Oaks housing development.
(SFC, 6/22/04, p.A1)
1050 An Anasazi trade center in New Mexico offered pottery, turquoise and buffalo meat.
(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R49)
c1150 A group of Anasazi villages in southwest Colorado were suddenly abandoned during a period of severe drought. In 2000 evidence showed that a raiding party had swept through the area, killed the inhabitants and ate their flesh.
(SFC, 9/6/00, p.A3)
1170 Madoc, a Welsh prince, is reputed to have discovered America. Many believe that he and his followers initially settled in the Georgia/Tennessee/ Kentucky area, eventually moving to the Upper Missouri, where they were assimilated into a tribe of the Mandans. New evidence is also emerging about a small band of Madoc's followers who remained in the Ohio area and are called “White Madoc."
(www.madoc1170.com/home.htm)
1200 The Anasazi in southwest Colorado began building their cliff dwellings. Population was thriving. They were making corrugated pottery and handsomely decorated black and white pottery.
(HN, 2/11/97)
1250 The Anasazi in southwest Colorado fought a battle against unknown enemies. Number of kivas built greatly increased. Quality of workmanship in building decreased. People began to leave.
(HN, 2/11/97)
c1275 Indian settlers built a town called Atsina on top of El Morro (New Mexico).
(SSFC, 4/10/05, p.F9)
1280 By this time the Anasazi Indian culture of the American southwest, 15 to 20 thousand people, disappeared from the Four Corners region. All the Anasazi were gone from Mesa Verde. They probably moved south and broke up into present-day Pueblo tribes. Anasazi means enemy ancestors in Navajo. In 2017 DNA evidence revealed that the cliff-dwelling people had raised turkeys and migrated with them to the Rio Grande valley of northern New Mexico during a devastating drought.
(SFC, 5/19/96, T-1)(HN, 2/11/97)(AM, 9/01, p.44)(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A8)
1300 The Arapaho and Cheyenne Indian Nations settled the Colorado area about this time.
(Time, 1990s Almanac CD)
c1300 The Mississippian people, the largest pre-Columbian culture north of Mexico, built the earthen city of Cahokia about this time. The site, discovered in southwestern Illinois, probably served as a religious center and may have had a population of up to 80,000. The Mississippians arose around 800 AD and remained a powerful influence until about the time of the first European explorers. The loose-knit theocracy held sway over much of present-day Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio and, not surprisingly, Mississippi. They also had settlements extending sporadically into the upper Midwest and across the western plains. The largest of the earthen mounds at Cahokia, called Monks Mound, is 700 feet wide, 100 feet tall and 1000 feet long--representing a colossal public works program and a government stable enough to order the construction.
(HNQ, 1/29/01)
1350 The Fremont Indians, who had lived in Utah’s Range Creek Canyon since about 200, disappeared from the archeological record.
(WSJ, 1/31/06, p.B6)(Sm, 3/06, p.74)
1494 Feb 2, Columbus began the practice using Indians as slaves.
(HN, 2/2/01)
1500-1530 The so-called Mantle site, a settlement on the North shore of Lake Ontario, was occupied by the Wendat (Huron). Excavations at the site, between 2003 and 2005, uncovered its 98 longhouses, a palisade of three rows (a fence made of heavy wooden stakes and used for defense) and about 200,000 artifacts. Scientists estimate between 1,500 and 1,800 individuals inhabited the site.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_Site,_Wendat_%28Huron%29_Ancestral_Village)
1520 Jul 14, Hernando Cortes fought the Aztecs at the Battle of Otumba, Mexico.
(MC, 7/14/02)
1541 May 8, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto discovered and crossed the Mississippi River, which he called Rio de Espiritu Santo. He encountered the Cherokee Indians, who numbered about 25,000 and inhabited the area from the Ohio River to the north to the Chattahoochee in present day Georgia, and from the valley of the Tennessee east across the Great Smoky Mountains to the Piedmont of the Carolinas.
(NG, 5/95, p.78)(AP, 5/8/97)(HN, 5/8/99)
1542 Nov 22, New laws were passed in Spain giving protection against the enslavement of Indians in America.
(HN, 11/22/98)
1542-1834 The native population of California dropped during this period from about 350,000 to 150,000 due to European diseases, abuse and suicides.
(SSFC, 11/28/21, p.J1)
1559 Aug 14, Spanish explorer Tristan de Luna entered Pensacola Bay, Florida. 1,500 Spanish settlers sailed from Vera Cruz to found a settlement on Pensacola Bay in Florida, but were repulsed by hostile Indians. The location of the Spanish settlement founded in the area of Pensacola, Fl., remained a mystery until 2016 when amateur archaeologist Tom Garner stumbled upon some shards of 16th century Spanish pottery.
(HN, 8/14/98)(TL-MB, 1988, p.19)(AP, 3/24/06)
1565 Sep 20, A Spanish fleet under Pedro Menendez de Aviles wiped out some 350 Frenchmen at Fort Caroline, in Florida. Spanish forces under Pedro Menendez massacred a band of French Huguenots that posed a potential threat to Spanish hegemony in the area. They also took advantage of the local Timucuan Indian tribe. Artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues managed to escape and return to France, where he painted watercolors depicting the local botany. His alleged paintings of Indians living nearby were later thrown into question.
(WSJ, 8/3/95, p.A-8)(Arch, 1/05, p.47)(WSJ, 7/18/08, p.W8)(Arch, 5/05, p.31)(Arch, 1/06, p.25)
1566 Spanish conquistador Juan Pardo arrived the Spanish settlement at Santa Elena, on what later became known as Parris Island, South Carolina. He marched into the interior and founded Fort San Juan next to a Catawba town called Joara. Fort San Juan was burned down by the Catawba after about 18 months. Santa Elena was the first capital of Spanish colonial Florida.
{Spain}
(Sm, 3/06, p.33)(SFC, 7/27/16, p.A6)
1571 Feb 2, All eight members of a Jesuit mission in Virginia were murdered by Indians who pretended to be their friends.
(HN, 2/2/99)
1571 Feb 9, Algonquin Indians attacked the Jesuit mission on the Virginia peninsula killing Fr. Juan Bautista de Segura and 4 other remaining priests.
(AH, 2/06, p.15)
1604 Jun 26, French explorer Samuel de Champlain, Pierre Dugua and 77 others landed on the island of St. Croix and made friends with the native Passamaquoddy Indians. It later became part of Maine on the US-Canadian border.
(PacDis, Spring/'94, p. 43)(SSFC, 6/20/04, p.D10)
1607 May 24, Captain Christopher Newport and 105 followers founded the colony of Jamestown on the mouth of the James River in Virginia. They had left England with 144 members, 39 died on the way over. The colony was near the large Indian village of Werowocomoco, home of Pocahontas, the daughter Powhatan, an Algonquin chief. In 2003 archeologists believed that they had found the site of the village. [see May 13-14]
(HN, 5/24/99)(SFC, 5/7/03, p.A2)
1607 May 26, Some 200 Indian warriors stormed the unfinished stockade at Jamestown, Va. 2 settlers were killed and 10 seriously wounded before they were repulsed by cannon fire from the colonists’ 3 moored ships.
(ON, 2/07, p.7)
1607 Jun 15, Colonists in North America completed James Fort in Jamestown. Hostilities with the Indians ended as ambassadors said their emperor, Powhatan, had commanded local chiefs to live in peace with the English.
(HN, 6/15/98)(ON, 2/07, p.7)
1608 Jan, John Smith met with the Indian emperor Powhatan at Werocomoco on the Pamunkey River. He studied the Powhattan language and culture. The Powhattans were an aggressive tribe and under Chief Powhatan’s leadership, they had conquered and subjugated more than 20 other tribes. Pocahontas was a Powhattan Indian girl of 10-11 years when she new Smith in Virginia. Records of the colony were kept by William Strachey, its official historian. The Powhattans were an aggressive tribe and under Chief Powhattan’s leadership, they conquered and subjugated more than 20 other tribes. Before coming to Virginia, John Smith had served as a mercenary in Hungary and was wounded, captured and sold into slavery by his Turkish adversaries; he escaped by killing his owner.
(WSJ, 6/13/95, p.A-18)(ON, 2/07, p.8)
1613 The colonists at Jamestown kidnapped Pocahontas and held for ransom to force her father to free some English hostages and to return some stolen tools.
(ON, 2/07, p.9)
1614 Apr 5, American Indian princess Pocahontas (d.1617) married English Jamestown colonist John Rolfe in Virginia. Having converted to Christianity, she went by the name Lady Rebecca. Their marriage brought a temporary peace between the English settlers and the Algonquians.
(HN, 5/5/97)(SFEC, 10/15/00, p.T12)(AP, 4/5/08)
1616 In a letter to Queen Anne, Capt. John Smith recalled that Pocahontas had saved the colony at Jamestown from "death, famine, and utter confusion."
(WSJ, 6/13/95, p.A-18)
1616 American Indian princess Pocahontas and her husband, Jamestown colonist John Rolfe, sailed to England with their infant son.
(ON, 2/07, p.9)
1617 Jan 6, Pocahontas, American Indian princess, attended a court masque with King James I and Queen Anne.
(ON, 2/07, p.9)
1616 Jan 20, The French explorer Samuel de Champlain arrived to winter in a Huron Indian village after being wounded in a battle with Iroquois in New France.
(HN, 1/20/99)
1616-1619 An epidemic, possibly viral hepatitis from contact with Europeans, ravaged the Wampanoag confederacy in Massachusetts. The Great Dying helped to make possible the Pilgrim settlement in 1620.
(Econ, 8/11/07, p.49)(AP, 7/8/21)
1617 Mar 21, Pocahontas (Rebecca Rolfe) was buried at the parish church of St. George in Gravesend, England. As Pocahontas and John Rolfe prepared to sail back to Virginia, she died reportedly of either small pox or pneumonia. In 2003 Paula Gunn Allen authored "Pocahontas "Medicine Woman, Spy, entrepreneur, Diplomat."
(AP, 4/5/97)(HN, 5/5/97)(SFEC, 10/15/00, p.T12)(HN, 3/21/01)(SSFC, 10/19/03, p.M5)
1621 Oct, The first American Thanksgiving was held in Massachusetts' Plymouth colony in 1621 to give thanks for a bountiful harvest. 51 Pilgrims served codfish, sea bass and turkeys while their 90 Wampanoag guests contributed venison to the feast. After the survival of their first colony through a bitter winter and the subsequent gathering of the harvest in the autumn, Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford issued a thanksgiving proclamation. During the three-day October thanksgiving the Pilgrims feasted on wild turkey and venison with their Native American guests. American Indians introduced cranberries to the white settlers. In 2006 Godfrey Hodgson, British historian, authored “A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving." Hodgson said that there were no turkeys in the region.
(SSFC, 11/16/03, p.C11)(Econ, 12/18/04, p.122)(SSFC, 11/12/06, p.M1)
1622 Mar 22, The Powhattan Confederacy massacred 350 colonists in Virginia, a quarter of the population. On Good Friday more than 300 colonists in and around Jamestown, Virginia, were massacred by the Powhattan Indians. The massacre was led by the Powhattan chief Opechancanough and began a costly 22-year war against the English. Opechancanough hoped that killing one quarter of Virginia’s colonists would put an end to the European threat. The result of the massacre was just the opposite, however, as English survivors regrouped and pushed the Powhattans far into the interior. Opechancanough launched his final campaign in 1644, when he was nearly 100 years old and almost totally blind. He was then captured and executed.
(WSJ, 10/19/98, p.A24)(HNPD, 10/23/98)
1623 Miles Standish and his men killed Wituwamat and other members of the Neponset Band of the Massachusett Tribe because Standish suspected Wituwamat of plotting against the fledgling English colony. Wituwamat was beheaded and his head displayed atop Plymouth Colony’s meetinghouse as a warning. In 2021 the Native American Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag called on Boston University to change the name of a dorm that honors Myles Standish, the military leader of the Pilgrims.
(AP, 9/21/21)
1626 May 4, Dutch explorer Peter Minuit (~1594-1638), director-general of New Netherlands, bought Manhattan Island for 60 guilders (about $24 in 1839 dollars) worth of cloth and buttons. Minuit conducted the transaction with Seyseys, chief of the Canarsees, who were only too happy to accept valuable merchandise in exchange for an island that was actually mostly controlled by the Weckquaesgeeks. The Sixty guilders were valued at approximately $1,060 in 2013. The site of the deal was later marked by Peter Minuit Plaza at South Street and Whitehall Street.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Minuit)(AP, 5/4/97)(HN, 5/4/98)(WSJ, 11/19/99, p.W10)
1628 May 1, A May festival in Quincy, Mass., degenerated into an orgy with Indian women.
(MC, 5/1/02)
1630 Feb 22, Indians introduced pilgrims to popcorn at Thanksgiving.
(MC, 2/22/02)
1630 Jul 12, New Amsterdam's governor bought Gull Island from Indians for cargo and renamed it Oyster Island. It later became Ellis Island.
(MC, 7/12/02)
1632 The French explorer Etienne Brule was killed by the Huron Indians for unknown reasons.
(HNQ, 6/29/98)
1636 Jun, Roger Williams founded Providence, Rhode Island, on land purchased from the Narragansett Indians.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence,_Rhode_Island)
1636 Jul 20, John Oldham, trader in Mass., was murdered by Indians.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1637 May 26, The Connecticut English militia and their Mohegan allies killed over 600 Pequot Indians at their village at Mystic. The survivors were parceled out to other tribes. Those given to the Mohegans eventually became the Mashantucket Pequots.
(AH, 6/07, p.18)(www.dowdgen.com/dowd/document/pequots.html)
1642 Feb 25, Dutch settlers slaughtered lower Hudson Valley Indians in New Netherland, North America, who sought refuge from Mohawk attackers.
(HN, 2/25/99)
1643 Roger Williams of Providence, Rhode Island, published “A Key into the Language of America," a dictionary of the Narragansett Indian language and a commentary on the culture and customs of the southern New England Indians. The work was printed in England by Gregory Dexter.
(AH, 4/07, p.27)
1645 Aug 9, Settlers in New Amsterdam gained peace with the Indians after conducting talks with the Mohawks.
(HN, 8/9/98)
1646 Oct 28, The 1st Protestant church assembly for Indians took place in Massachusetts.
(MC, 10/28/01)
1646 A treaty with Virginia Indians required the state to protect the Mattaponi from "enemies," but only on the reservation in King William County. The peace treaty unraveled the powerful confederation of local Indian tribes and large amounts of land were ceded to English settlers.
(SFC, 6/4/97, p.A7)(AH, 6/07, p.27)
1649 Iroquois attacks and starvation decimated the Huron nation from some 12,000 to a few hundred.
(AH, 4/01, p.33)
1653 Nov 5, The Iroquois League signed a peace treaty with the French, vowing not to wage war with other tribes under French protection.
(HN, 11/5/98)
1656 Oct 25, A party of Oneida Indians killed 3 Frenchmen near Montreal. In response Gov. Gen. Louis d’Ailleboust arrested a hunting party of 12 Mohawks and Onondagas and ordered the arrest of all Iroquois in the French colonies.
(AH, 4/01, p.34)
1659 Cornelius Meylin, patroon of Staten Island, wrote in his recollections that Staten Island was acquired in 1630 in exchange for "kittles, axes, Hoos, wampum, drilling awles, Jews Harps and diverse small wares." Wampum was also referred to as peag or seawan by Native Americans and consisted of strung cylindrical beads made from polished shells. It was formerly used by some North American Indians as currency and jewelry. It was also used to record events, as a medium of communication and sometimes for ceremonial and spiritual purposes.
(WSJ, 11/19/99, p.W10)(HNQ, 3/23/02)
1675 Jun 20, King Philip’s War began when Indians--retaliating for the execution of three of their people who had been charged with murder by the English--massacred colonists at Swansea, Plymouth colony. Abenaki, Massachusetts, Mohegan & Wampanoag Indians formed an anti English front. Wampanoag warriors attacked livestock and looted farms.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philip%27s_War)(AH, 6/02, p.46)
1675 Jun 23, An English youth shot a Marauding Wampanoag warrior.
(AH, 6/02, p.46)
1675 Sep 9, Colonial authorities officially declared war on the Wampanoag Indians. The war soon spread to include the Abenaki, Norwottock, Pocumtuck and Agawam warriors.
(MC, 9/9/01)(AH, 6/02, p.47)
1676 Feb 10, In King Philip’s War Narragansett and Nipmuck Indians raided Lancaster, Mass. Over 35 villagers were killed and 24 were taken captive including Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711) and her 3 children. Rowlandson was freed after 11 weeks and an account of her captivity was published posthumously in 1682.
(AH, 6/02, p.48)(Econ, 2/21/09, p.83)(http://tinyurl.com/cvrhcv)
1676 Apr 18, Sudbury, Massachusetts, was attacked by Indians.
(HN, 4/18/98)
1676 Aug 28, Indian chief King Philip, also known as Metacom, was killed by English soldiers, ending the war between Indians and colonists.
(HN, 8/28/98)
1680 Aug 10, Pueblo Indians took possession of Santa Fe, N.M., after driving out the Spanish. They destroyed almost all of the Spanish churches in Taos and Santa Fe. The Pueblo Revolt, also known as Popé's Rebellion, was an uprising of most of the indigenous Pueblo people against the Spanish colonizers in the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, present day New Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt killed 400 Spaniards and drove the remaining 2,000 settlers out of the province.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt)(AP, 8/21/97)(SFEC, 6/21/98, Z1 p.8)
1680 Aug 21, New Mexico Governor Antonio de Otermín, barricaded in the Palace of the Governors, sallied outside the palace with all of his available men and forced the Puebloans to retreat with heavy losses. He then led the Spaniards out of Santa Fe and retreated southward along the Rio Grande, headed for El Paso del Norte. The Puebloans shadowed the Spaniards but did not attack. This marked the end of the Pueblo Revolt.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt)
1680 Kateri Tekakwitha (b.1656), known as the "Lily of the Mohawks," died in Canada. She was born to a pagan Iroquois father and an Algonquin Christian mother in upstate New York. Her parents and only brother died when she was 4 during a smallpox epidemic that left her badly scarred and with impaired eyesight. She went to live with her uncle, a Mohawk, and was baptized Catholic by Jesuit missionaries. But she was ostracized and persecuted by other natives for her faith. In 2012 she was named a saint in the Catholic church.
(AP, 10/20/12)
1683 Jun 23, William Penn signed a friendship treaty with Lenni Lenape Indians in Pennsylvania. It became the only treaty "not sworn to, nor broken."
(HN, 6/23/98)(MC, 6/23/02)
1683 Secatogue Indians deeded land on the South Shore of Long Island to William Nicoll.
(WSJ, 10/9/07, p.D6)
1686 The Lenape Indians allegedly sold land along the Lehigh River to William Penn.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1686 Two Mohican Indians signed a mortgage for their land in Schaghticoke, New York, with simple markings. It was notarized by Robert Livingston, whose family became one of the greatest agricultural landlords and int'l. merchants in the colony of New York.
(WSJ, 11/19/99, p.W10)
1689 Aug 25, The Iroquois took Montreal.
(MC, 8/25/02)
1690 Feb 8, Some 200 French and Indian troops burned Schenectady, NY, and massacred about 60 people to avenge Iraquois raids on Canada.
(AH, 2/05, p.17)
1700s Several dozen members of the Calusa Indian tribe, nicknamed "The Fierce Ones," escaped from Florida to Cuba in the early 1700s after Spanish soldiers and other tribes overran their region.
(AP, 3/14/04)
1704 English forces attacked Apalachee Indians in Florida driving them into slavery and exile. Some 800 Apalachee fled west to French-held Mobile.
(WSJ, 3/9/05, p.A1)
1708 Aug 29, French Canadian and Indian forces attacked the village of Haverhill, Mass., killing 16 settlers.
(AP, 8/29/08)
1710 Mohawk and Mohican chiefs from Canada visited Queen Anne in London on a diplomatic mission.
(Econ 7/1/17, p.29)
1711 Sep 22, The Tuscarora Indian War began with a massacre of settlers in North Carolina, following white encroachment that included the enslaving of Indian children.
(HN, 9/22/98)
1715 Apr 15, Uprising of Yamasse Indians in South Carolina.
(MC, 4/15/02)
1722 The original Iroquois League, often known as the Five Nations (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations) became the Six Nations after the Tuscarora nation joined the League.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois)
1725 Feb 20, New Hampshire militiamen partook in the first recorded scalping of Indians by whites in North America. 10 sleeping Indians were scalped by whites for scalp bounty.
(HN, 2/20/99)(MC, 2/20/02)
1725 May 8, John Lovewell, US Indian fighter, died in battle.
(MC, 5/8/02)
1729 Nov 28, Natchez Indians massacred most of the 300 French settlers and soldiers at Fort Rosalie, Louisiana.
(HN, 11/28/98)
1730 The French arrived in Swanton, Vermont, and the plague followed. The local Abenaki Indians faded into the woods.
(SFC, 12/13/02, p.J7)
1736 May 26, In northwestern Mississippi, British and Chickasaw Indians defeated a combined force of French soldiers and Choctaw Indians at the Battle of Ackia, thus opening the region to English settlement.
(AHD, 1971, p.11)(HN, 5/26/98)
1736 Aug 8, Mahomet Weyonomon, a Mohegan sachem or leader, died of smallpox while waiting to see King George II to complain directly about British settlers encroaching on tribal lands in the Connecticut colony. The tribal chief was buried in an unmarked grave in a south London churchyard.
(AP, 11/22/06)(http://tinyurl.com/ymbn3c)
1750 Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian, joined the Christian mission of Gnadenhutten, founded by Swiss Moravian settlers in the Lehigh Valley town of Bethlehem.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1750 The Ais Indians of Florida were wiped out. In 2004 a site on Hutchinson Island, inhabited by the Ais, revealed 2 thousand year old burials.
(Arch, 1/05, p.13)
1754 Apr, Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian, joined the Iroquois Indians in the Wyoming Valley along the banks of the Susquehanna River.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1754 May 28, Col. George Washington helped defeat French and Indians at Ft. Duquesne, Pitts.
(MC, 5/28/02)
1754 Jul 3, George Washington surrendered the small, circular Fort Necessity (later Pittsburgh) in southwestern Pennsylvania to the French, leaving them in control of the Ohio Valley. This marked the beginning of the French and Indian War also called the 7 Years' War. In 2005 Fred Anderson authored “The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War."
(HN, 7/13/98)(Arch, 1/05, p.46)(WSJ, 12/14/05, p.D15)
1754 Nov 29, The Gnadenhutten mission, Pa., was attacked by renegade Lenape Indians and 11 white people were killed.
(ON, 1/03, p.7)
1755 Sep 8, British forces under William Johnson defeated the French and the Indians at the Battle of Lake George, N.Y.
(HN, 9/8/98)
1755 Dec 31, Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian, led 30 Lenape Indians on a raid against English plantations along the Delaware River. Over the next few days his band killed 7 men and took 5 prisoners.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1756 Apr 14, Gov. Glen of South Carolina protested against 900 Acadia Indians.
(MC, 4/14/02)
1756 May 15, French and Indian War broke out between France and England, with final defeat of the French coming in 1763 with the British victory at the Battle of Quebec on the Plains of Abraham. [see May 17]
(MC, 5/15/02)
1756 May 17, Britain declared war on France, beginning the French and Indian War. England hoped to conquer Canada. [see May 15]
(HN, 5/17/98)(HNPD, 9/13/98)
1756 Nov 12, Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian, spoke with Gov. Denny at Easton, Pa., to discuss grievances.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1758 Jul 8, During the French and Indian War a British attack on Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga, New York, was foiled by the French. Some 3,500 Frenchmen defeated the British army of 15,000, which lost 2,000 men.
(HN, 7/8/98)(AH, 10/02, p.27)
1758 Aug 29, New Jersey Legislature formed the 1st Indian reservation.
(MC, 8/29/01)
1758 Sep 18, James Abercromby was replaced as supreme commander of British forces after his defeat by French commander, the Marquis of Montcalm, at Fort Ticonderoga during the French and Indian War.
(HN, 9/18/98)
1760 Feb 16, Cherokee Indians held hostage at Fort St. George, SC, were killed in revenge for Indian attacks on frontier settlements.
(HN, 2/16/99)(MC, 2/16/02)
1760 Aug 7, Ft. Loudon, Tennessee, surrendered to Cherokee Indians.
(MC, 8/7/02)
1761 French and Indians forces in the Ohio Valley were defeated.
(ON, 1/03, p.7)
1761 In western North Carolina British soldiers razed Kituwha, the heart of the Cherokee Nation. Punitive raids here were repeated in 1776.
(Arch, 9/02, p.70)
1763 Feb 10, Britain, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years’ War, aka the French-Indian War. France ceded Canada to England and gave up all her territories in the New World except New Orleans and a few scattered islands including St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland.
(HN, 2/10/97)(AP, 2/10/97)(AP, 2/10/08)(AH, 2/06, p.55)
1763 Apr 19, Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian leader, burned to death while sleeping in his cabin in the Wyoming Valley, Pa. The fire destroyed the whole Indian village. A few days later settlers from Connecticut arrived to resume their construction of a town.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1763 May 7, Indian chief Pontiac began his attack on a British fort in present-day Detroit, Michigan.
(HN, 5/7/99)
1763 Jul 24, Ottawa Chief Pontiac led an uprising in the wild, distant lands that would one day become Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
(HN, 7/24/98)
1763 Oct 7, George III of Great Britain issued a royal proclamation reserving for the crown the right to acquire land from western tribes. This closed lands in North America north and west of Alleghenies to white settlement and ended the acquisition efforts of colonial land syndicates. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 guaranteed Indian rights to land and self-government.
(www.bloorstreet.com/200block/rp1763.htm)(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)(Econ, 9/16/06, p.46)
1763 British forces, under orders from Sir Jeffrey Amherst, distributed smallpox-infected blankets among American Indians in the 1st known case of its use as a biological weapon.
(SFC, 10/19/01, p.A17)(NW, 10/14/02, p.50)
1764 Nov 16, Indians surrendered to British in Indian War of Chief Pontiac.
(MC, 11/16/01)
1766 Jul 24, At Fort Ontario, Canada, Ottawa chief Pontiac and William Johnson signed a peace agreement.
(HN, 7/24/98)
1766 Jonathan Carver, an American-born British army officer, set out to cross the American continent, but was stopped in Minnesota by a war between the Sioux and Chippewa.
(SFC, 1/31/04, p.D12)
1767 Oct 9, The survey party of Mason and Dixon came to a halt after 233 miles when Indians of the Six Nations said they had reached the end of their commission. [see Oct 18]
(ON, 2/04, p.10)
1768 Nov 5, William Johnson, the northern Indian Commissioner, signed a treaty with the Iroquois Indians to acquire much of the land between the Tennessee and Ohio rivers for future settlement.
(HN, 11/5/98)
1769 Apr 20, Ottawa Chief Pontiac (b~1720) was murdered by an Indian in Cahokia.
(WUD, 1994, p.1117)(HN, 4/20/98)
1775 Mar 17, Richard Henderson, a North Carolina judge, representing the Transylvania Company, met with three Cherokee Chiefs (Oconistoto, chief warrior and first representative of the Cherokee Nation or tribe of Indians, and Attacuttuillah and Sewanooko) to purchase (for the equivalent of $50,000) all the land lying between the Ohio, Kentucky and Cumberland rivers; some 17 to 20 million acres. It was known as the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals or The Henderson Purchase. The purchase was later declared invalid but land cession was not reversed.
(www.tngenweb.org/cessions/17750317.html)
1775 James Adair (~65) authored “The History of the American Indians," based on his experiences living in their midst. In 2005 Kathryn E. Holland Braund edited a new edition.
(WSJ, 2/11/05, p.W6)
1776 Spanish explorers encountered the native Havasupai Indians in Arizona.
(SSFC, 2/19/06, p.F4)
1777 Nov 15, The Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation, precursor to the U.S. Constitution. The structure of the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy of six major northeastern tribes. The matrilineal society of the Iroquois later inspired the suffragist movement.
(AP, 11/15/97)(SFEC, 4/19/98, BR p.2)
1777 In San Francisco an Ohlone man name Chamis (20) became the first adult Indian to be baptized at Mission Dolores.
(SFC, 11/2/19, p.C4)
1778 Aug 31, British killed 17 Stockbridge Indians in Bronx during Revolution.
(MC, 8/31/01)
1778 Sep 7, Shawnee Indians attacked and laid siege to Boonesborough, Kentucky.
(HN, 9/7/98)
1778 Sep 17, The 1st treaty between the US and Indian tribes was signed at Fort Pitt.
(MC, 9/17/01)
1778 Nov 11, British redcoats, Tory rangers and Seneca Indians in central New York state killed more than 40 people in the Cherry Valley Massacre. A regiment of 800 Tory rangers under Butler (1752-1781) and 500 Native forces under the Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant (1742-1807), fell upon the settlement, killing 47, including 32 noncombatants, mostly by tomahawk.
(www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Cherry-Valley-Massacre)(AP, 11/11/07)
1781 Jul 17, Yuma Indians in southern California attacked two missions killing all the men but two and enslaving the women and children. They were upset after a Spanish officer let a large horse herd loose to graze in Yuma fields.
(SFC, 12/13/14, p.C2)
1781 Jul 18, Yuma Indians in southern California ambushed Spanish Capt. Fernando Rivera y Moncada and his soldiers. Rivera had been ordered to recruit settlers in Sinaloa and Sonora and lead them through the desert over the Anza trail to a new settlement called Los Angeles. Rivera and all his soldiers were killed.
(SFC, 12/13/14, p.C2)
1781-1782 Smallpox, reduced the Mandans, a Missouri River tribe of 40,000 people, down to 2,000 survivors. They partially recovered, increasing their numbers to some 12,000 by 1837.
(www.madoc1170.com/madoc.htm)
1782 Mar 8, The Gnadenhutten massacre took place as some 90 Christian Delaware Indians were slain by militiamen in Ohio in retaliation for raids carried out by other Indians.
(AP, 3/8/98)(AH, 4/07, p.14)
1784 The British gave their Indian allies from New York a large parcel of land southwest of Toronto after they fled to Canada following the American war of independence. In 2006 the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy claimed that part of this land had been sold without their proper consent for a new housing development in Caledonia.
(Econ, 9/16/06, p.46)
1785 Jan 21, Chippewa, Delaware, Ottawa and Wyandot Indians signed a treaty of Fort McIntosh, ceding present-day Ohio to the United States.
(HN, 1/21/99)
1790 May, John Tanner (9) was kidnapped from his home in northern Kentucky by Shawnee Indians. He was taken to an area near what later became Saginaw, Michigan, where he learned the Ojibway language. After about 2 years he was sold to a woman named Net-no-kwa, who took him up to northern Michigan and later to Manitoba, Canada.
(ON, 4/10, p.4)(http://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/ky.boone.tanner.j.kidnapd.html)
1790 Oct 3, John Ross, Chief of the United Cherokee Nation from 1839 to 1866, was born near Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Although his father was Scottish and his mother only part Cherokee, Ross was named Tsan-Usdi (Little John) and raised in the Cherokee tradition. A settled people with successful farms, strong schools, and a representative government, the Cherokee resided on 43,000 square miles of land they had held for centuries.
(LCTH, 10/3/99)
1790 The US Trade and Intercourse Act prohibited states from acquiring land from Indians without federal approval.
(SFC, 1/13/99, p.A9)(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)
1791 Nov 3, Gen. St. Clair moved his force of approximately 1,400 men to some high ground on the upper Wabash River. St. Clair was looking for the forces of Michikinikwa (Chief Little Turtle 1752-1812), who had recently defeated Gen. Josiah Harmar’s (1753-1813) army. St. Clair deployed only minimal sentry positions. [see Nov 4]
(DoW, 1999, p.168)
1791 Nov 4, General Arthur St. Clair, governor of Northwest Territory, was badly defeated by a large Indian army near Fort Wayne. Miami Indian Chief Little Turtle (1752-1812) led the powerful force of Miami, Wyandot, Iroquois, Shawnee, Delaware, Ojibwa and Potawatomi that inflicted the greatest defeat ever suffered by the U.S. Army at the hands of North American Indians. Some 623 regulars led by General Arthur St. Clair were killed and 258 wounded on the banks of the Wabash River near present day Fort Wayne, Indiana. The staggering defeat moved Congress to authorize a larger army in 1792.
(HNQ, 8/10/98)(HN, 11/4/98)
1792 A US military campaign led by General Arthur St. Clair against Native Americans in Ohio ended in complete disaster. Of the 1,400 US regulars and militia who set out in pursuit of Native Americans, some 650 were killed and 250 wounded when adversaries caught them unprepared for battle. Lawmakers launched the first congressional investigation of US executive branch actions. President George Washington responded with wary cooperation, aware he was setting precedents for presidents to come.
(CSM, 7/26/17)
1794 Aug 20, American General "Mad Anthony" Wayne defeated the Ohio Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the Northwest territory, ending Indian resistance in the area.
(HN, 8/20/98)
1794 Nov 11, The Treaty of Canandaigua was signed at Canandaigua, New York, by fifty sachems and war chiefs representing the Grand Council of the Six Nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy (including the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora tribes), and by Timothy Pickering, official agent of President George Washington. The Canandaigua Treaty, a Treaty Between the United States of America and the Tribes of Indians Called the Six Nations, was signed.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Canandaigua)
1794 Twenty horse soldiers were dispatched from the Presidio of San Francisco to quell an Ohlone rebellion in the Santa Cruz mountains.
(SFC, 9/29/14, p.A1)
1795 Spring, Some 300 Indians fled Mission Dolores in San Francisco following a year of food shortages and disease that killed over 200. They sought refuge in the East Bay hills and Napa.
(SFC, 9/26/03, p.D15)
1795-1840 New York state and local governments entered into 26 treaties and several purchase agreements with the Oneida Indians to acquire all but 32 of 270,000 acres. Almost none of the transactions were approved by Congress as required by a 1790 law.
(SFC, 1/13/99, p.A9)
1804 Mar 26, Congress ordered the removal of Indians east of the Mississippi to Louisiana.
(HN, 3/25/98)
1804 Aug 31, Louis and Clark held a council with local Sioux Indian chiefs in what is now eastern North Dakota.
(ON, 4/12, p.9)
1804 Oct 26, Lewis and Clark accepted an invitation to camp for the winter near a cluster of villages inhabited by the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians.
(ON, 4/12, p.10)
1804 Nov, Lewis and Clark hired French-Canadian fur trapper Toussaint Charbonneau as an interpreter, with the understanding that Sacagawea, who was only about 16 and pregnant, would come along to interpret the Shoshone language. She and another woman had been purchased by Charbonneau, who lived among the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians, to be his wives.
(HN, 2/11/99)(HNQ, 12/1/99)
1805 Feb 11, At Fort Mandan ND Sacajawea (16), the Shoshoni guide for Lewis & Clark, gave birth to a son, with Meriwether Lewis serving as midwife. Sacagawea, the young Native American girl who aided the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was of the Lemhi Shoshones, who made their home in what is now southeastern Idaho and southwestern Montana. About 1800 Sacagawea was captured by a Hidatsa raiding party at the Three Forks of the Missouri River. Sometime in 1804, she and another woman were purchased by French-Canadian fur trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, who lived among the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians, to be his wives.
(HN, 2/11/99)(HNQ, 12/1/99)(AH, 2/05, p.17)
1805 Apr 7, The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery resumed their journey to the headwaters of the Missouri River.
(ON, 4/12, p.10)
1805 Aug 17, Sacagawea, while traveling with the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery, reunited with her brother Cameahwait, a Shoshoni Indian chief on the Lemhi River (Idaho).
(ON, 4/12, p.12)(http://sacajaweahome.com/august.htm)
1805 Aug 30, The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery resumed their westward journey with 29 horses and 6 guides provided by Shoshoni Chief Cameahwait. They spent the next 4 weeks crossing the Bitterroot Mountains (Idaho).
(ON, 4/12, p.12)
1805 Sep 23, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike paid $2,000 to buy from the Sioux a 9-square-mile tract at the mouth of the Minnesota River that would be used to establish a military post, Fort Snelling.
(HN, 9/23/98)
1806 In San Francisco an epidemic of measles and flu killed 343 of the 850 native people at the Dolores Street mission.
(SSFC, 9/20/15, p.A14)
1811 Nov 7, Gen. William Henry Harrison won a battle against the Shawnee Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe in the Indiana territory. Tenskwatawa, the brother of Shawnee leader Tecumseh, was engaged in the Battle of the Wabash, aka Battle of Tippecanoe, in spite of his brother’s strict admonition to avoid it. The battle near the Tippecanoe River with the regular and militia forces of Indiana Territory Governor William Henry Harrison, took place while Tecumseh was out of the area seeking support for a united Indian movement. The battle, which was a nominal victory for Harrison’s forces, effectively put an end to Tecumseh’s dream of a pan-Indian confederation. Harrison’s leadership in the battle also provided a useful campaign slogan for his presidential bid in 1840.
(HFA, ‘96, p.46)(HNQ, 5/28/98)(HN, 11/7/98)
1813 Aug 30, Creek Indians massacred over 500 whites at Fort Mims Alabama.
(HN, 8/30/98)
1813 Oct 5, In Canada the Battle of the Thames, also known as the Battle of Moraviantown, was decisive in the War of 1812. Some 600 British regulars and 1,000 Indian allies under British Major General Henry Procter and Shawnee leader Tecumseh were greatly outnumbered and quickly defeated by US forces under the command of Maj. Gen. William Henry Harrison. Tecumseh (45) was killed in this battle. US Col. Richard Mentor Johnson led troops in the Battle of the Thames and was said to have killed Tecumseh, a claim that he later used to his political advantage.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Thames)
1813 Oct 15, During the land defeat of the British on the Thames River in Canada, the Indian chief Tecumseh, now a brigadier general with the British Army (War of 1812), was killed. [see Oct 5]
(HN, 10/15/98)
1813 Nov 3, American troops destroy the Indian village of Tallushatchee in the Mississippi Valley. US troops under Gen Coffee destroyed an Indian village at Talladega, Ala.
(HN, 11/3/99)(MC, 11/3/01)
1814 Mar 27, General Jackson led U.S. soldiers who killed 700 Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend, La. [in Northern Alabama] Jackson lost 49 men.
(SFEC, 2/16/97, BR p.4)(HN, 3/27/99)
1814 Mar 29, In the Battle at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, Andrew Jackson beat the Creek Indians. [see Mar 27]
(MC, 3/29/02)
1814 Jul 22, Five Indian tribes in Ohio made peace with the United States and declared war on Britain.
(HN, 7/22/98)
1814 Aug 9, Andrew Jackson and the Creek Indians signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, giving the whites 23 million acres of Mississippi Creek territory. This ended Indian resistance in the region and opened the doors to pioneers after the conclusion of the War of 1812.
(HN, 8/9/98)(HNQ, 8/13/99)
1816 Jul 27, US troops destroyed the Seminole Fort Apalachicola, to punish the Indians for harboring runaway slaves.
(MC, 7/27/02)
1817 Nov 20, 1st Seminole War began in Florida. [see Nov 27]
(MC, 11/20/01)
1817 Nov 27, US soldiers attacked a Florida Indian village and began the Seminole War. [see Nov 20]
(MC, 11/27/01)
1818 Apr 7, Gen. Andrew Jackson captured St. Marks, Fla., from the Seminole Indians.
(MC, 4/7/02)
1818 Apr 18, A regiment of Indians and blacks was defeated at the Battle of Suwann, in Florida, ending the first Seminole War.
(HN, 4/18/99)
1818 Oct 19, US and Chickasaw Indians signed a treaty.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1819 Mar 3, The Civilization Fund Act was created by the United States legislature to encourage activities of benevolent societies in providing education for Native Americans and also authorized an annuity to stimulate the "civilization process."
(http://wapedia.mobi/en/The_Civilization_Fund_Act_of_1819)
1822 Feb 9, The American Indian Society organized.
(MC, 2/9/02)
1823 José Antonio Vizcarra, the governor of New Mexico, waged war against the Navajo. Vizcarra and a column of 1,500 soldiers advanced through the west of the state, and their route took them through Chaco Canyon where they discovered a city of the Anasazi, the ancestors of the Pueblo Native Americans.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Antonio_Vizcarra)
1824 Mar 11, The U.S. War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A lifelong friend and trusted aide of Ulysses S. Grant, Ely Parker rose to the top in two worlds, that of his native Seneca Indian tribe and the white man's world at large. He went on to become the first Indian to lead the Bureau.
(HN, 3/11/98)
1825 Jan 27, Congress approved Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), clearing the way for forced relocation of the Eastern Indians on the "Trail of Tears."
(HN, 1/27/99)
1825 Feb 12, Creek Indian treaty signed. Tribal chiefs agreed to turn over all their land in Georgia to the government and migrate west by Sept 1, 1826.
(MC, 2/12/02)
1825 The Bureau of Indian Affairs began as an office of the War Department that dealt with what white Americans saw as the "Indian problem."
(SFC, 9/9/00, p.A3)
1827 Nov 15, Creek Indians lost all their property in US.
(MC, 11/15/01)
1828 Feb 21, The first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix, the 1st American Indian newspaper in US, was printed, both in English and in the newly invented Cherokee alphabet.
(HN, 2/21/98)(MC, 2/21/02)
1828 May 6, The Cherokee Indians were forced to sign a treaty giving up their Arkansas Reservation for a new home in what later became Oklahoma. This led to a split in the tribe as one group moved to Oklahoma and others stayed behind and became known as the Lost Cherokees.
(Econ, 3/11/06, p.28)(http://digital.library.okstate.edu/KAPPLER/Vol2/treaties/che0288.htm)
1829-1837 Andrew Jackson was President of the US. In 2001 Robert V. Remini authored "Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars."
(A&IP, ESM, p.96b, photo)(SSFC, 7/15/01, DB p.63)
1830 May 28, Congress authorized Indian removal from all states to western prairie.
(HN, 5/28/98)
1830 Jul 15, Three Indian tribes, Sioux, Sauk & Fox, signed a treaty giving the US most of Minnesota, Iowa & Missouri.
(MC, 7/15/02)
1830 Pres. Andrew Jackson forced Thomas L. McKenney from his job as the 1st US superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Jackson disagreed with McKenney’s opinion that “the Indian was, in his intellectual and moral structure, our equal."
(WSJ, 3/15/06, p.D16)
1832 Apr 8, Some 300 American troops of the 6th Infantry left Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, to confront the Sauk Indians in what would become known as the Black Hawk War.
(HN, 4/8/99)
1832 Aug 2, Troops under General Henry Atkinson massacred Sauk Indian men, women and children who were followers of Black Hawk at the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin. Black Hawk himself finally surrendered three weeks later, bringing the Black Hawk War to an end.
(HN, 8/2/98)
1832 Aug 27, Black Hawk, leader of Sauk-Indians, gave himself up.
(MC, 8/27/01)
1832 Oct 14, Blackfeet Indians attacked American Fur Company trappers near Montana’s Jefferson River, killing one.
(HN, 10/14/98)
1834 Jun 30, Congress passed the final Indian Intercourse Act. In addition to regulating relations between Indians living on Indian land and non-Indians, this final act identified an area known as "Indian country". This land was described as being "…all that part of the United States west of the Mississippi and not within the states of Missouri and Louisiana, or the territory of Arkansas…" This is the land that became known as Indian Territory. Oklahoma was declared Indian Territory.
(SFCM, 3/9/08, p.20)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Intercourse_Act)
1834 In California some 60,000 native Indians had died by this time in the Catholic missions. Missionaries had baptized about 80,000.
(SSFC, 9/20/15, p.A14)
1834 Mexico granted Don Salvio Pacheco 18,000 acres in northern California known as Monte del Diablo, which included what would later became Concord and Walnut Creek. The family later donated land to the government for roads and public buildings. The area was originally inhabited by the Bolbones Indians.
(SFC, 12/31/99, p.A22)(SFC, 5/26/01, p.A13)(SFC, 7/17/06, p.B5)
1834-1880 The native population of California dropped during this period from about 150,000 to 18,000 due mostly to mass murder by gold seekers and settlers.
(SSFC, 11/28/21, p.J1)
1835 Aug 18, The last Pottawatomie Indians left Chicago.
(MC, 8/18/02)
1835 Dec 30, Cherokees were forced to move across the Mississippi River after gold was discovered in Georgia. A minority faction of Cherokee agreed to the emigration of the whole tribe from their lands by signing the Treaty of New Echota. The Treaty of New Echota resulted in the cession of all Cherokee land to the U.S. and provided for the transportation of the Cherokee Indians to land beyond the Mississippi. The removal of the Cherokee was completed by 1838.
(NG, 5/95, p.86)(HNQ, 6/21/98)(MC, 12/30/01)
1836 May 19, Comanche warriors in Texas attacked Fort Parker and kidnapped Cynthia Ann Parker (9) and several others. She was recaptured by whites in 1860 and was forced to live among whites until her death in 1871. Her son Quanah (d.1911) escaped capture and grew up to become leader of the Quahadi, the most feared subset of the Comanche. In 2010 S.C. Gwynne authored “Empire of the Southern Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History."
(Econ, 6/19/10, p.85)(www.lone-star.net/mall/texasinfo/CynthiaAnnParker.htm)
1837 Oct 1, A treaty was made with the Winnebago Indians.
(MC, 10/1/01)
1837 Oct 21, During the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), under a flag of truce during peace talks, U.S. troops under Gen. Thomas S. Jesup (1788-1860) sieged the Indian Seminole Chief Osceola in Florida and sent to a jail in North Carolina, where he later died. Jesup's trickery outraged the American public.
(HN, 10/21/98)(DoW, 1999, p.435)
1837 Dec 25, In the Battle of Okeechobee US forces defeated the Seminole Indians.
(MC, 12/25/01)
1837 A smallpox epidemic hit northern California and decimated the North Bay Indians. It was later believed to have originated at Fort Ross.
(SFC, 5/16/19, p.B4)
1837 In California Jose Maria Amador led a "recapturing expedition." They found and murdered 200 Indians.
(SFC, 12/31/00, BR p.12)
1837 A treaty with the Chippewa Indians in Minnesota guaranteed their right to hunt and fish and gather wild rice on territory relinquished to the federal government.
(SFC, 3/25/99, p.A8)
1837-1844 Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall published their 3-volume work: “The Indian Tribes of North American."
(WSJ, 3/15/06, p.D16)
1838 Aug, Some 12,000 Cherokee Indians in 13 ragtag parties followed the Trail of Tears on a 116-day journey west 800 miles to eastern Oklahoma. Estimates have placed the death toll in camps and in transit as high as 4,000. They followed the trail already set by the Choctaw out of Mississippi, the Creek from Alabama, the Chickasaw from Arkansas and Mississippi, and the Seminole from Florida. The Cherokee brought with them enslaved Black people. Native American nations in the South had purchased slaves as laborers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
(NG, 5/95, p.82)(www.crystalinks.com/cherokee2.html)(SFC, 2/25/21, p.A6)
1838 A smallpox epidemic north of San Francisco killed over 60,000 Indians.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1842 Aug 14, Seminole War ended and the Indians were moved from Florida to Oklahoma.
(MC, 8/14/02)
1846 US Army forces under the command of John C. Fremont conducted a murderous attack on Sacramento River Maidu Indian villages.
(www.nativeamericancaucus.com/history.shtml)
1847 Jan 24, 1,500 New Mexican Indians and Mexicans were defeated by US Col. Price.
(MC, 1/24/02)
1847 Nov 29, A small group of Cayuse Indians assaulted the Whitman Mission, Walla Walla, Washington, at the time sheltering 74 people, most of them emigrants. The attackers killed 13 people, including Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. It temporarily ended Protestant missionary efforts in the Oregon country. The Whitman Creek massacre set off the Cayuse War (1848).
(www.legendsofamerica.com/wa-whitmanmassacre.html)
1847 Miners of Don Miguel Peralta discovered gold about this time in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. His family abandoned the claim after their mining party was massacred by Apache Indians.
(AHHT, 10/02, p.16)(AH, 10/02, p.16)(www.ghostradiox.com/qfg/legend_peralta.asp)
1847 Members of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma collected $170 and sent the money to Dublin to help feed the Irish during a potato famine. The money would be worth about $4,400 in 2018.
(AP, 3/13/18)
1849 Apr 19, California's first legislature passed the "Act for the Protection, Punishment and Government of Indians." Section 20 provided that, upon the petition of a white man to a justice of the peace, one or more Indians could be made that petitioner's slave. It became law on April 22, 1850 and was not repealed until 1937.
(https://tinyurl.com/y5uvtzub)(SSFC, 11/28/21, p.J1)
1850 Apr 22, A California law known as the Indian Slavery Act, which allowed the enslavement of Indians, went into effect.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)(SSFC, 1/2/22, p.E7)
1850 Sep 27, The US Donation land Act was enacted. It allowed Americans to stake claims that would become valid after treaties were negotiated with Indian tribes and ratified by Congress.
(SSFC, 2/27/11, p.G2)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_Land_Claim_Act)
1850 Dec 17, In California some 500 Indians in the Yosemite region attacked a store on the Fresno River owned by James Savage. A clerk and two other whites were killed and the $25,000 in cash and goods were taken. This marked the beginning of the Mariposa Indian War. Savage had employed some 500 Yokut Indians to pan for gold.
(SFC, 5/16/15, p.C2)
1850 Laws in California were passed that allowed the enslavement of Indians.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1851 Jan 5, California's 1st Gov. Peter Hardeman Burnett in his State of the State address called Indians "savages" and said a "war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct".
(SSFC, 11/28/21, p.J1)
1851 Jul 23, Sioux Indians and US signed the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1851 Sep 17, The Fort Laramie Treaty was signed between the US government treaty commissioners and representatives of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations. The Sioux pledged not to harass the wagon trains traveling the Oregon Trail in exchange for a $50,000 annuity. The treaty did not last long. Some 12,000 American Indians gathered at Fort Laramie for a peace council with the US. The government agreed that 12 million acres of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Indians would remain free of settlement (eastern Montana, northeastern Wyoming and western North Dakota). In 1949 Congress authorized a forced relocation to build the Garrison Dam in North Dakota. In 1986 Martin Cross won a settlement of $149.2 million for the unjust taking of reservation land. In 2004 Paul VanDevelder authored “Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation."
(http://tinyurl.com/n7d26ok)(HT, 3/97, p.43)(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)
1851 California Governor Peter Burnett said that unless the Indians were sent east of the Sierras, "a war of extermination would continue to be waged until the Indian race should become extinct."
(HN, 4/29/00)(WW, 6/99)
1851 Fewer than 100,000 Indians remained in California.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1852 Jul, In California a group of squatters led by a Major Harvey illegally encroached on Indian reservation lands on the Kings River. A number of “old squaws" were killed.
(SFC, 5/23/15, p.C2)
1852 The Hopi people of northern Arizona arranged for a diplomatic packet to reach Pres. Fillmore via a delegation of 5 prominent men from the Tewas of Tesuque Pueblo in New Mexico, who sought legal protection from Anglo and Hispanic settlers.
(NH, 11/1/04, p.26)
1853 Oct 19, Juana Maria, the last living native of San Nicholas, the southernmost Channel Island, died in Santa Barbara weeks after she was found living by herself on the island. Her story later inspired Scott O'Dell's book: "Island of the Blue Dolphins" (1960).
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juana_Maria)(SSFC, 6/17/18, p.F2)
1854 In Keshena Falls, Wisconsin, the Menomonee (people of the wild rice) Chiefs Oshkosh and Keshena met with federal Indian agents and agreed to retain only 275,000 acres from their original 9 ½ million acres. As part of the settlement the chiefs and their followers were promised eternal government protection. In 1954 Congress voted to withdraw that support.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.235)
1854 White settlers in Del Norte County, Ca., ambushed and killed 30 Tolowa Indians at the Etculet village on Lake Earl.
(SFEC, 7/16/00, p.B1)
1855 The US government signed a treaty with some American Indians that gave them permanent rights to their existing lands. The Makah tribe of Washington secured a right to hunt whales in exchange for ceding title to their land. In 1972 the Marine Mammals Protection Act prohibited the slaughter of whales without a permit.
(SFEC, 6/15/97, Par. p.5)(SFC,10/24/97, p.A9)(SSFC, 7/13/08, p.E4)
1855 Nez Perce elders agreed to sell most of their land to the US government. They retained some 10 thousand square miles as a reservation in the area where Washington, Oregon and Idaho meet. Gold was soon discovered in the area and in 1863 the US government called for a new deal.
(ON, 3/04, p.1)
1856 Aug 11, A band of rampaging settlers in California killed four Yokut Indians. The settlers had heard unproven rumors of Yokut atrocities.
(HN, 8/11/99)
1856 Apr 28, Yokut Indians repelled an attack on their land by 100 would-be Indian fighters in California.
(HN, 4/28/00)
1856 Apr 29, During the Tule River War Yokut Indians repelled a second attack by the 'Petticoat Rangers,' a band of civilian Indian fighters-some wearing body armor-at Four Creeks, California. The Yokuts lived along the shores of Tulare Lake in the Central Valley, which disappeared by 1900 due to water diversion and farming.
(HN, 4/29/00)(WW, 6/99)
1856 The Mendocino Indian Reservation was established in northern California near the mouth of the Noyo River.
(SFC, 4/28/12, p.A6)
1857 Sep 11, The Mountain Meadows Massacre of the Fancher emigrant wagon train in Utah Territory was carried out by Mormons fearful of an impending invasion by the US Army. Church patriarch and adopted son of Brigham Young, John Doyle Lee, offered safe passage to the nearly 150 men, women and children on the Fancher train from Arkansas crossing Mormon Utah bound for California, if they left their weapons, livestock and wagons behind-ostensibly to appease hostile Indians. All but the youngest children were slaughtered. Lee, who first blamed the massacre on Paiute Indians, was excommunicated in 1870 and tried, convicted and executed in 1877 for his role in the killings. 120 settlers were killed; 17 children, all under 7, were spared. In 2002 Will Bagley authored “Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows." In 2011 the site was dedicated as a national historic landmark.
(SFC, 10/23/02, p.H4)(AP, 9/11/07)(SFC, 9/12/11, p.A4)
1857 In northern California Fort Bragg was established by Lt. Horatio Gates Gibson to keep control of the natives confined to the newly established Mendocino Indian Reservation. He named the camp Fort Bragg after Capt. Braxton Bragg, his former commanding officer. Bragg later served as Confederate general in the Civil War.
(SFC, 7/23/15, p.A6)
1858 Feb 19, Leschi, a Nisqually American Indian leader from the Puget Sound region, was hanged a mile east of Fort Steilacoom. On June 10, 1857, he had been convicted of the murder of Abrams Moses, and was sentenced to hang. Appeals to the Supreme Court delayed the initial hanging. In 2004 seven judges at a Historical Court of Inquiry and Justice unanimously decided that regardless of who shot Moses, “The killing was a legitimate act of war, immune from prosecution." Consequently, Leschi was declared “exonerated" of Abrams Moses’ murder. In 2011 Richard Kluger authored “The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America."
(http://forejustice.org/wc/chief_leschi/chief_leschi.htm)(SSFC, 2/27/11, p.G1)
1860 Feb 26, White settlers massacred a band of Wiyot Indians at the village of Tuluwat on Indian Island near Eureka, Ca. At least 60 women, children and elders were killed. Bret Harte, newspaper reporter in Arcata, fed the news to newspapers in San Francisco. On Oct. 21, 2019, the tribe regained control of Indian Island, the site of the massacre.
(SFC, 2/28/04, p.D1)(AP, 10/21/19)
1860 Apr 30, Navaho Indians attacked Fort Defiance (Canby).
(MC, 4/30/02)
1860 Jun 9, The first dime novel: "Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter," written by Ann Sophia Stephens (1813-1886), was published by Beadle and Adams in NYC.
(AP, 6/9/02)(www.niulib.niu.edu/badndp/dn01.html)
1860 More laws in California were passed that allowed the enslavement of Indians.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1860 California’s Legislature decreed that “Negroes, Mongolians and Indians shall not be allowed into public schools."
(SFC, 4/15/17, p.C2)
1860-1940 Silver Horn, artist, was a Kiowa Indian born in what later became Oklahoma. His work included ledger-book drawings and hide paintings that recorded Kiowa history and culture.
(SFC, 4/19/00, p.A28)
1861 Feb 7, The general council of the Choctaw Indian nation adopted a resolution declaring allegiance with the South "in the event a permanent dissolution of the American Union takes place."
(AP, 2/7/07)
1861 Feb 18, At Fort Wise, Kansas, Indian tribes ceded possessions, enough to constitute two great States of the Union, retaining only a small district for themselves on both sides of the Arkansas river, which included the country around Fort Lyon.
(http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/peace.htm)
1861 Apr 30, President Lincoln ordered Federal Troops to evacuate Indian Territory.
(MC, 4/30/02)
1861 Aug 12, Texas rebels were attacked by Apaches.
(MC, 8/12/02)
1862 Jul 2, Pres. Abraham Lincoln signed an act granting land for state agricultural colleges. The Morrill Act allowed for the transfer and sale of federal lands to colleges to help establish their campus, or bolster an existing one. But many millions of those acres were actually confiscated from Native American tribes.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Land-Grant_Acts)(AP, 10/14/21)
1862 Aug 8, Minnesota’s 5th Infantry fought the Sioux Indians in Redwood, Minn., and 24 soldiers were killed.
(SFC, 2/7/03, p.A23)
1862 Aug 18, A Sioux Uprising began uprising in Minnesota. It resulted in more than 800 white settlers dead and 38 Sioux Indians condemned and hanged. The Minnesota Uprising began when four young Sioux murdered five white settlers at Acton. The Santee Sioux, who lived on a long, narrow reservation on the south side of the Minnesota River, were reacting to broken government promises and corrupt Indian agents. a military court sentenced 303 Sioux to die, but President Abraham Lincoln reduced the list. The 38 hangings took place on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minn.
(MC, 8/18/02)(HNQ, 1/4/00)
1862 Sep 21, 300 Indians were sentenced to hang in Mankato, Minnesota.
(MC, 9/21/01)
1862 Aug 22, Santee Sioux attacked Fort Ridgely.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1862 Dec 6, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of 39 of the 303 convicted Indians who participated in the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota. They were to be hanged on Dec. 26. The Dakota Indians were going hungry when food and money from the federal government was not distributed as promised. They led a massacre that left over 400 white people dead. The uprising was put down and 300 Indians were sentenced to death. Pres. Lincoln reduced the number to 39, who were hanged. The government then nullified the 1851 treaty.
(WSJ, 2/5/98, p.A6)(HN, 12/6/98)
1862 Dec 26, In Minnesota 38 Santee Sioux were hanged in Mankato for their part in the Sioux Uprising. This marked the end of the US-Dakota War. In 2012 a memorial was unveiled for the 38 hanged men, the largest mass execution in US history.
(HN, 12/26/98)(SFC, 12/27/12, p.A8)
1863 The US government paid a group of Nez Perce Indians $265,000 for some 6 million acres in the area of Lewiston, Oregon.
(ON, 3/04, p.1)
1863 The Treaty of Ruby Valley with the Western Shoshone Indians assured their ownership of property that later became a US nuclear test site. The treaty stated that the presence of US settlements will not negate Indian sovereignty.
(SFC, 7/12/97, p.E4)(SFEC, 8/29/99, Z1 p.7)
1864 May 15, In mid-May about daylight Major Downing succeeded in surprising the Cheyenne village of Cedar Bluffs, in a small canon about 60 miles north of the South Platte river. “We commenced shooting. I ordered the men to commence killing them. They lost, as I am informed, some 26 killed and 30 wounded. My own loss was one killed and one wounded. I burnt up their lodges and everything I could get hold of. I took no prisoners. We got out of ammunition and could not pursue them."
(http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/peace.htm)
1864 Nov 29, In retaliation for an Indian attack on a party of immigrants near Denver, 750 members of a Colorado militia unit, led by Colonel John M. Chivington, attacked an unsuspecting village of Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians camped on Sand Creek in present-day Kiowa County. Some 300 [163] Indians were killed in the attack, including women and children, many of whose bodies were mutilated. Ten soldiers died in the attack. The Sand Creek Massacre, as this incident came to be called, provoked a savage struggle between Indians and the white settlers. It also generated two Congressional investigations into the actions of Chivington and his men. The House Committee on the Conduct of the War concluded that Chivington had "deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the varied and savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty."
(HNPD, 11/29/98)(HN, 11/29/98)(SFC, 9/15/00, p.A9)(SSFC, 2/1/04, p.C13)
1864-1865 Army Col. Kit Carson, directed by Brig. Gen. James Carleton, forced the move of some 9,000 Dineh Navajo from Canyon de Chelly in Arizona to the Bosque Redondo reservation near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. About half the people survived in what came to be known as the Long Walk. In 2006 Hampton sides authored “Blood and Thunder: An epic of the American West," an account of the Navaho move.
(SFC, 1/3/97, p.A26)(SFEC, 5/4/97, z1 p.4)(SSFC, 1/7/01, p.T9)(WSJ, 10/7/06, p.P12)
1865 Jan 7, Cheyenne and Sioux warriors attacked Julesburg, Colo., in retaliation for the Sand Creek Massacre.
(HN, 1/7/99)
1865 In northern California a surprise attack by settlers wiped out nearly all the Indians of the Yahi tribe, south of Mt. Lassen. Rancher Norman Kingsley and three others shot 30 Yahi, including babies and young children, on Mill Creek. Remnants hid in the mountains for 40 years until there was but one survivor, Ishi, who emerged in 1911.
(SFC, 2/19/99, p.A1)(SFC, 9/6/14, p.C1)
1865-1890 Wars against the native American Indians were fought during this period in the Pacific Northwest. In 2003 Peter Cozzens edited: “Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890: The Wars for the Pacific Northwest."
(AH, 6/03, p.62)
1866 Jul, The Sioux war on the Powder river commenced. When it commenced General St. George Cook, in command at Omaha, forbade within the limits of his command the sale of arms and ammunition to Indians.
(http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/peace.htm)
1866 Sep 1, Manuelito, the last Navaho chief, turned himself in at Fort Wingate, New Mexico.
(MC, 9/1/02)
1866 Dec 21, Indians led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse killed Captain William J. Fetterman and 79 other men who had ventured out from Fort Phil Kearny to cut wood. U.S. Army Captain William J. Fetterman once boasted, "Give me 80 men and I'll march through the whole Sioux nation!" When Lakota warriors under the overall leadership of Chief Red Cloud gathered around Fort Phil Kearny (in what is now Wyoming), Fetterman got command of his 80 men. Disobeying the orders of his commander, Colonel Henry B Carrington, not to proceed beyond the Lodge Trail Ridge, Fetterman pursued a band of retreating Indians--and rode right into a waiting trap, allegedly laid by the Ogallala warrior Crazy Horse. Fetterman, his executive officer and 78 troopers were wiped out.
(HNPD, 12/21/98)(HN, 12/21/98)
1866 Dec 26, Native American’s handed the U.S. Army their worst defeat prior to Little Big Horn at the Fetterman Fight in Powder River County in the Dakota territory. [see Dec 21]
(HN, 12/26/98)
1866 In California the Chico Courant newspaper called for the extermination of Indians.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1866 Pres. Andrew Johnson signed an executive order that removed the Shoalwater Bay Indians in Washington state from their villages and onto a 1-sq. mile reservation. By 2000 erosion took away over half the tribal land and miscarriages stood at 4 times the expected rate.
(SFEC, 3/26/00, p.A8)
1866 Freed Cherokee slaves were adopted into the tribe under a treaty with the US government. In 2007 the Cherokee Nation voted to revoke citizenship to descendants of the slaves. In 2017 a US district judge ruled that Cherokee Freedmen have a right to tribal citizenship under the 1866 treaty.
(SFC, 3/5/07, p.A2)(SFC, 9/1/17, p.A6)
1867 Oct 21, Many leaders of the Kiowa, Comanche and Kiowa-Apache signed a peace treaty at Medicine Lodge, Kan. Comanche Chief Quanah Parker refused to accept the treaty terms.
(HN, 10/21/98)
1868 Jan 7, A US Indian Peace Commission filed a report to the Pres. Johnson.
(http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/peace.htm)
1868 Apr 29, The US government and the Sioux Indians signed a treaty that ended Red Cloud’s War. The 1868 treaty at Fort Laramie (Wyoming Territory) made the Black Hills part of the Great Sioux Reservation.
(http://tinyurl.com/me6pfxd)(Econ, 8/2/08, p.37)(AH, 6/03, p.36)
1868 Sep 17, The Battle of Beecher's Island began, in which Major George "Sandy" Forsyth and 50 volunteers held off 500 Sioux and Cheyenne in eastern Colorado.
(HN, 9/17/98)
1868 Nov 27, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer’s 7th Cavalry killed Chief Black Kettle (b.1801) and about 100 Cheyenne (mostly women and children) on the Washita River near present day Cheyenne, Oklahoma.
(www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/blackkettle.htm)
1868 Navaho Indians living under confinement near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, were allowed to return to their homelands in Arizona following a visit by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Some 7,100 survivors of the 1864 Long Walk had been released onto a New Mexico reservation of 5,500 acres. The Navajo returned to Hopi land where 3.5 million acres, 1/6th of their former homeland, was returned.
(SFC, 1/3/97, p.A26)(SFEC, 5/4/97, z1 p.4)(WSJ, 10/7/06, p.P12)
1870 Jan 1, In Texas Comanche Indians stole Adolph Korn (10) near the settlement of Castell on the Llano River. The boy spent 3 years with the Indians and upon his return spoke only Comanche, ate raw meat and refused to sleep indoors.
(AH, 6/07, p.60)
1870 Jan 23, American army forces, looking for Mountain Chief's band of hostile Blackfoot Indians, fell instead upon Heavy Runner's peaceable Piegan band in Montana and killed 173, many of them women and children.
(www.legendsofamerica.com/NA-Blackfoot.html)(SSFC, 12/25/05, p.M2)
1870 Jun 9, Washington: Pres Grant met with Sioux chief Red Cloud.
(MC, 6/9/02)
1870 California’s state school law was again changed and stipulated that only blacks and Indians need be educated in separate schools.
(SFC, 4/15/17, p.C2)
1871 Mar 3, Congress passed the Indian Appropriation Act, which revoked the sovereignty of Indian nations and made Native Americans wards of the American government. The act eliminated the necessity of treaty negotiating and established the policy that tribal affairs could be managed by the U.S. government without tribal consent.
(HNQ, 5/15/98)
1871 Apr 30, Anglo and Mexican vigilantes killed 118 Apaches at Camp Grant, Arizona, and kidnapped 28 children.
(www.desertusa.com/mag98/april/stories/campgrant1.html)
1871 May 17, Gen. Sherman, Indian fighter, escaped in ambulance from the Comanche.
(MC, 5/17/02)
1871 Aug, Joseph became chief of Nez Perce Indians in the Wallowa Valley, Oregon.
(ON, 3/04, p.1)
1871 Brit Johnson, a black Texas ranch foreman, was killed by Kiowa raiders. His home life had been shattered in 1864 when an Indian raiding party killed his son and captured his wife along with 2 of their other children. He reportedly ransomed back his family in 1865 and continued searching for other stolen children before he was killed. Author Alan Le May (1899-1964) later used his story as a model in his novel “The Searchers" (1954).
(AH, 6/07, p.64)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Searchers_%28film%29)
1872 Aug 14, Chief Joseph met in council with some 40 settlers in the Wallowa Valley and ordered them to leave the Nez Perce Indian land.
(ON, 3/04, p.2)
1872 Oct 12, Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise (d.1874) signed a peace treaty with Special Indian Commissioner, General Oliver Otis Howard (1830-1909), in the Arizona Territory.
(HN, 10/12/98)(ON, 4/07, p.8)
1872 Dec 28, A U.S. Army force defeated a group of Apache warriors at Salt River Canyon, Arizona Territory, with 57 Indians killed but only one soldier.
(HN, 12/28/98)
1872 The Osage Indians purchased close to 2,300 square miles in the Oklahoma Territory from the Cherokee and created the Osage Reservation.
(SFCM, 3/9/08, p.20)
1868 Navaho Indians in New Mexico were allowed to return to their homelands in Arizona.
(SSFC, 1/7/01, p.T9)
1872 Nov 28, The Modoc War of 1872-73 began in Siskiyou County, northern California when fighting broke out between Modoc Chief Captain Jack and a cavalry detail led by Captain James Jackson. At Lava Beds National Monument in northern California 52 [60] Modoc warriors held off over 1,000 US Army troops for five months. The 4 year conflict was described in the 1997 book "Hell with the Fire Out" by Arthur Quinn, a re-creation of the war from eye-witness accounts.
(SFC,10/16/96,zz1p.1)(SFEC, 4/6/97, BR p.5)(SFEC, 10/25/98, p.T9)(HN, 11/28/98)
1873 Jun 16, Pres. Grant signed an executive order that permitted Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce to live in the Wallowa Valley, Oregon, to perpetuity.
(SFEC, 6/15/97, Par. p.5)(ON, 3/04, p.2)
1873 Oct 3, Captain Jack and three other Modoc Indians were hanged in Oregon for the murder of General Edward Canby.
(HN, 10/3/98)
1873 Nov 19, James Reed and two accomplices robbed the Watt Grayson family of $30,000 in the Choctaw Nation.
(HN, 11/19/98)
1874 Jun 8, Cochise (b.~1810), Chiricahua Apache war chief (his name meant “his nose") and leader of the Chokonen band, died on a reservation in the Dragoon Mountains in southeastern Arizona.
(http://tinyurl.com/aqhkr)
1874 Jul 2, Colonel Custer departed from Fort Abraham Lincoln with some 1,000 soldiers and 70 Indian scouts on a 1200 mile expedition to chart the Black Hills of eastern Wyoming western South Dakota, land which belonged to the Sioux. The expedition returned on August 30.
(AH, 6/03, p.37)
1874 Aug 2, Gold was discovered in the Black Hills of western South Dakota during an expedition led by Colonel Custer. The land belonged to the Sioux but was invaded by prospectors. Sioux leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull retaliated.
(HT, 3/97, p.43)(AH, 6/03, p.37)
1874 Sep 28, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie (d.1889) raided a war camp of Comanche and Kiowa at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, slaughtering 2,000 of their horses.
(HN, 9/28/98)(SFCM, 3/11/01, p.53)
1874 Oct 4, Kiowa leader Santanta, known as "the Orator of the Plains," surrenders in Darlington, Texas. He was later sent to the state penitentiary, where he committed suicide October 11, 1878.
(HN, 10/4/98)
1874 Francis Amasa Walker, a former Union Army general and Boston native, authored "The Indian Question," a treatise that justified forcibly removing tribes from their lands and confining them to remote reservations.
(AP, 10/14/21)
1874 Capt. James Cass of Bristol, England, built a wharf and pier named Cass Landing on the north end of Morro Bay, Ca., to facilitate the loading of ships carrying lumber, staples and dairy products between the Central Coast and San Francisco. It became the town of Cayucos, carved from the Morro y Cayucos Rancho. The name was after a unique plank canoe (cayuco) invented by the local Chumash Indians.
(SSFC, 1/4/09, p.E6)
1874 The California state Supreme Court in Ward vs. Flood upheld a law authorizing racial segregation in public schools. Blacks and Indians were granted the right to establish separate schools.
(SSFC, 5/16/04, p.E5)(SFC, 4/15/17, p.C2)
1874-1875 The Gatling gun was first used against the Comanche Indians at the Battle of Red River in the Texas Panhandle.
(SFC, 3/18/00, p.B4)
1875 Jun, Nez Perce Chief Joseph learned that had rescinded the executive order of 1873 and reopened the Wallowa Valley to white settlement.
(ON, 3/04, p.2)
1875 The Quahadi Comanches, led by Quanah Parker (c.1852-1911), gave up their fight and settled on Indian Territory in Oklahoma after hunters slaughtered the great buffalo herds of the Texas panhandle.
(Econ, 6/19/10, p.85)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanah_Parker)
1876 Mar 17, Gen. Crook destroyed Cheyenne and Ogallala-Sioux Indian camps.
(MC, 3/17/02)
1876 Jun 17, General George Crook’s command was attacked and bested on the Rosebud River by 1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Crazy Horse.
(HN, 6/17/98)
1876 Jun 25, In the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana, Gen. George A. Custer and some 250 men in his 7th Cavalry were massacred by the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. To crush the Plains Indians and drive them onto reservations, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and more than 600 7th Cavalrymen and Indian scouts advanced on an Indian encampment in the Little Bighorn Valley of Montana. Custer's main concern was to keep the Indians from escaping, but on this day, he faced the biggest alliance of hostile Plains Indians--mostly Sioux and Cheyenne--ever gathered in one place. Custer and his entire personal command, about 210 soldiers, were wiped out. The site is near a region where paleontologist Prof. Edward Drinker Cope dug for dinosaur fossils just a few days after the massacre. Custer and his cavalrymen had attacked an encampment of 2,000 to 4,000 Lakota, Cheyenne and other Indians. Up to 300 Indians possessed Henry and Winchester repeating rifles.
(WSJ, 11/1/94, p.1)(SFC, 6/28/96, p.A5)(AP, 6/25/97)(HNPD, 6/25/99)(Econ, 5/8/10, p.82)
1876 Jul 17, At Warbonnet Creek, Nebraska, Buffalo Bill Cody took the scalp of Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hair (Yellow Hand) following a duel.
(http://tinyurl.com/a4ja2)(WSJ, 12/13/05, p.D8)
1876 Aug 15, US law removed Indians from Black Hills after gold find. Sioux leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull led their warriors to protect their lands from invasion by prospectors following the discovery of gold. This led to the Great Sioux Campaign staged from Fort Laramie. Gold was discovered in Deadwood in the Dakota territory by Quebec brothers Fred and Moses Manuel. The mine was incorporated in California on Nov 5, 1877, as the Homestake Mining Company.
(HT, 3/97, p.43)(WSJ, 1/5/00, p.CA1)(MC, 8/15/02)
1876 Sep, Sitting Bull, a legendary Hunkpapa Sioux chief and medicine man, led an escape to Canada in the vengeful aftermath of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Even though he had not fought in the June 25 massacre, the medicine man was considered a threat by white authorities because his visions of victory had encouraged the uprising. In 1881 famine forced Sitting Bull's band back to a reservation in the United States. Throughout the mid-1880s, Sitting Bull won international fame as the prototype of the American Indian when he joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show on tour. Sitting Bull returned to the reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where he was killed in 1890 during a struggle with Indian police.
(HNPD, 9/27/98)
1876 Nov 25, Colonel Ronald MacKenzie destroyed Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife’s village, in the Bighorn Mountains near the Red Fork of the Powder River, during the so-called Great Sioux War.
(HN, 11/25/98)
1876 In Canada the Indian Act was enacted by the Parliament under the provisions of Section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which provides Canada's federal government exclusive authority to legislate in relation to "Indians and Lands Reserved for Indians." The statute concerns registered Indians (that is, First Nations peoples of Canada), their bands, and the system of Indian reserves.
(Econ, 3/28/09, p.46)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Act)
1877 May 6, Chief Crazy Horse surrendered to U.S. troops in Nebraska. Crazy Horse brought General Custer to his end.
(HN, 5/6/99)
1877 May 7, Indian chief Sitting Bull entered Canada with a trail of Indians after the Battle of Little Big Horn.
(HN, 5/7/99)
1877 May 14, General Howard gave Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces 30 days to leave the Wallowa Valley and settle at Lapwai on the upper Clearwater River.
(ON, 3/04, p.5)
1877 Jun 14, Two Nez Perce Indians killed 3 white men.
(ON, 3/04, p.5)
1877 Jun 15, The US Army under Gen’l. Oliver Otis Howard began to pursue some 800 Nez Perce. The Nez Perce had been ordered to leave the Valley of the Winding Waters (Wallowa Valley) in Oregon.
(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A13)(SFEC, 6/15/97, Par p.1)(SSFC, 7/9/06, p.G4)
1877 Jun 16, The Nez Perce War began in the northwestern US. The First Squadron of the First Regiment, the oldest cavalry unit in the US, fought the Apaches and the Nez Perces.
(WUD, 1994, p.964)(WSJ, 12/27/95, p. A-1)(ON, 3/04, p.5)
1877 Aug 10, Col. John Gibbon slaughtered Nez-Perce Indians at Big Hole River.
(MC, 8/10/02)
1877 Aug 22, Nez Perce fled into Yellowstone National Park.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1877 Sep 5, The great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, a cousin of Kicking Bear, was fatally bayoneted at age 36 by a soldier at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. In 1975 Stephen Ambrose authored "Crazy Horse and Custer." In 2002 Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing from the 1955 book "Custer" by Jay Monaghan (d.1980). In 1999 Larry McMurtry authored the biography "Crazy Horse" for the Penguin Lives series. In 2004 Joseph M. Marshall III authored “The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History." In 2006 Kingsley M. Bray authored “Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life."
(SFEC, 2/7/99, Par p.14)(HN, 12/24/99)(SFC, 1/9/02, p.A2)(SSFC, 12/5/04, p.E5)(AH, 10/07, p.62)
1877 Oct 5, Nez Perce Chief Joseph and 418 survivors were captured in the Bear Paw mountains and forced into reservations in Kansas. They surrendered in Montana Territory, after a 1,700-mile trek to reach Canada fell 40 miles short. Nez Perce Chief Joseph surrendered to General O.O. Howard and Colonel Nelson Miles at the Bear Paw ravine in Montana Territory, saying, "Hear me, my chiefs, my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever." The retreat had lasted three months and left 120 Nez Perces dead. Miles had found and surrounded the Nez Perce camp with the help of Sioux and Cheyenne scouts. Many whites, including Howard, admired the Nez Perces' fighting ability and Chief Joseph himself, who was considered humane and eloquent. He died in 1904.
(HFA, '96, p.40)(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A13)(HNPD, 10/5/98)(HN, 10/5/98)
1877 Oct 17, Brigadier General Alfred Terry met with Sitting Bull in Canada to discuss the Indians' return to the United States.
(HN, 10/17/99)
1877 Sep 5, The great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, [Tashunka Witko], was fatally bayoneted at age 36 [27] by a soldier in a (US) Army jail at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. In 1999 Larry McMurtry authored the biography "Crazy Horse" for the Penguin Lives series.
(HN, 9/5/98)(SFEC, 2/7/99, Par p.14)(MC, 9/5/01)
1878 Mar 28, The Hastings College of Law, the law department of the University of California, was founded with a donation of $100,000 by Serranus Clinton Hastings. Hastings (d.1893) donated $100,000 in gold coins to found California’s first law school. It was later reported that he had ordered attacks on native Yuki villages that killed women and children.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serranus_Clinton_Hastings)(NY Times, 10/27/21)
1878 Cheyenne Indians fled to the Powder River home in Wyoming. The Howard Fast novel "Freedom Road" (1941) told their story.
(SFC, 3/13/03, p.A21)
1879 Sep 29, Dissatisfied Ute Indians killed Agent Nathan Meeker and nine others in the "Meeker Massacre."
(HN, 9/29/98)
1879 Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt persuaded Washington to hand over the mothballed Carlisle military barracks in Pennsylvania for use as a school for American Indians. In the early 20th century the school became a football powerhouse, beating Army in 1912. In 1918 the school was turned into a hospital to receive soldiers wounded in WW I.
(WSJ, 1/7/07, p.P9)
1880 Oct 14, Apache leader Victorio was slain in Mexico. [see Oct 15]
(HN, 10/14/98)
1880 Oct 15, Victorio, feared leader of the Minbreno Apache, was killed by Mexican troops in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. [see Oct 14]
(HN, 10/15/98)
1880 Pueblo Chochiti men led anthropologist Adolph F.A. Bandolier to Frijoles Canyon in New Mexico. Bandolier later authored the novel on Pueblo life called “The Delightmakers." Cliff dwelling in the area were preserved (1916) in a national park named after Bandelier.
(SSFC, 8/1/04, p.D7)
1881 Jul 20, Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull, a fugitive since the Battle of the Little Big Horn, surrendered to federal troops.
(AP, 7/20/97)(HN, 7/20/98)
1881 The only recorded 19th-century incident in which Indian scouts turned against the U.S. Army occurred at Cibicue Creek in Arizona Territory. At Cibicue Creek, White Mountain Apache scouts were asked to campaign against their own kin, resulting in a mutiny against the army soldiers. Three of the mutinous scouts were later court-martialed and executed.
(HNQ, 2/27/99)
1882 The US government confined the Havasupai Indians to a 518-acre reservation in Havasu Canyon, Arizona.
(SSFC, 2/19/06, p.F4)
1883 Nov 3, U.S. Supreme Court declared American Indians to be "dependent aliens."
(HN, 11/3/98)
1883 The US Supreme Court ruled that the Dakota Territory court had no jurisdiction in a case in which a member of the Lakota nation killed a fellow member on tribal land. The decision overturned a death sentence and effectively gave exclusive jurisdiction for crimes to tribes. In 1885 US Congress passed the Major Crimes Act taking away the tribes’ authority to prosecute serious crimes such as murder, manslaughter and rape.
(WSJ, 8/13/07, p.A12)
1883-1998 In Canada some 150,000 aboriginal children were removed from their homes and put into residential schools modelled on Victorian poor houses. Half were physically or sexually abused. In 2008 a “truth and reconciliation commission" was set up as part of a settlement of a class-action suit brought by survivors against the government and the churches that operated the schools. Hector-Louis Langevin (1826-1906), Secretary of State for the Provinces, was the architect of the residential school program.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector-Louis_Langevin)(Econ, 6/6/15, p.28)(Econ 7/1/17, p.29)
1884 Nov, The novel "Ramona" by Helen Hunt Jackson was published. It was about a love affair between a half-Indian girl and a Luisea Indian in southern California. It also served a covert tract on Indian oppression in America. In 1990 Valerie Sherer Mathes published "Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy." In 1998 Mathes edited: "The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson."
(SFEC, 12/20/98, BR p.5)
1884 The Crow Indians were confined to a reservation in Montana.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Nation)(Econ, 4/16/15, p.78)
1884 Some 500 Blackfeet Indians in Montana died during the winter from starvation. Reservation agent John Young kept rations on hand for the white people.
(SSFC, 9/9/01, Par p.7)
1885 Mar 3, The United States Congress passed the Major Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 1153). It placed seven major crimes under federal jurisdiction if they are committed by a Native American in Native territory regardless of whether the victim of the crime was Native.
(http://supreme.justia.com/us/437/634/)
1885 Chief Joseph and his band of Nez Perce were allowed to take up residence on the Colville reservation in northern Washington.
(ON, 3/04, p.5)
1885 Canada unjustly imprisoned Cree Chief Poundmaker, or Pihtokahanapiwiyin, for treason. He was jailed for seven months before being released because of bad health in 1886 and died shortly after. In 2019 PM Justin Trudeau, who had been criticized by some indigenous communities, apologized and posthumously exonerated Chief Poundmaker.
(Reuters, 5/24/19)
1886 Apr 11, General Nelson A. Miles arrived at Fort Bowie, Ariz., to begin his assignment to subjugate or destroy a band of Apaches led by Geronimo.
(ON, 10/06, p.1)
1886 Apr 27, A band of Apaches led by Geronimo attacked a ranch west of Fort Huachuca and killed 3 American citizens.
(ON, 10/06, p.1)
1886 Sep 4, Elusive Apache leader Geronimo (1829-1909) surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles (1839-1925) at Skeleton Canyon, Ariz. This ended the last major US-Indian war.
(HN, 9/4/98)(ON, 10/06, p.4)
1887 Feb 8, US Senator Henry Dawes sponsored the Dawes Severalty Act that authorized the survey of Indian territories in the West, in order that the commonly held tribal lands might be broken up into property allotments of 40 to 160 acres. The Dawes Act gave citizenship to Indians living apart from their tribe. Section Six stated that upon completion of a Land Patent process, the allotment holder will become a United States citizen and "be entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens." Native Americans in general did not become citizens until the Snyder Act of 1924.
(NG, 5/95, p.91)(HN, 2/7/97)(AP, 6/2/97)
1887 Feb 8, The Allotment Act (Dawes Act) tried to break up tribal land ownership and awarded individual allotments. Trust accounts were established for both Indian tribes and individual American Indians. The lands were then held in trust, managed by the government and leased out to gas, oil and timber companies. The status of the accounts brought to question in 1996 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs could not account for about 15% of an estimated $450 million held for some 300,000 Indians. In 1999 a federal judge cited Sec. Bruce Babbitt and Robert Rubin in contempt for official deceit in accounting for the trusts that involved some 500,000 Indians.
(SFC, 6/11/96, p.A12)(SFC, 2/23/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 5/3/99, p.A24)
1888 In South Dakota Jesuits founded Red Cloud, a private Catholic school, at the request of Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud.
(Econ, 4/29/17, p.22)
1889 Mar 2, Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Bill, proclaiming unassigned lands in the public domain; the first step toward the famous Oklahoma Land Rush.
(HN, 3/2/99)
1889 Apr 22, The US federal government opened up the Unassigned Lands of Indian Territory to the country's first land run. The Oklahoma land rush officially started at noon as thousands of homesteaders staked claims.
(WSJ, 1/4/96, p.A-8)(AP, 4/22/97)(HN, 4/22/98)
1889 The Great Sioux Reservation of the Dakotas was dismembered into 6 parts.
(Econ, 10/15/05, p.34)
1889 In South Dakota alcohol was banned on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. The ban continued except for a few months in the 1970s. As of 2017 two-thirds adults on the reservation were alcoholics as many purchased alcohol in Whiteclay, a short walk across the state line in Nebraska.
(Econ, 4/29/17, p.22)
1889 The North Pacific Coast Railroad established a train station in Marin County called Manzanita atop a shell mound site previously settled by coastal Miwok Indians. In 1906 a liquor license was granted for an establishment there called Manzanita Villa and in 1916 a building was erected for a hotel and dance hall by Thomas, James and George Moore, SF liquor and cigar dealers. In 1947 new owners built a motel behind the building and renamed it “The Fireside." In 1957 2 skeletons of American Indians were found during renovation. In 2008 the site was re-developed as a new affordable housing complex.
(SFC, 4/21/08, p.B2)
1889 Fr. James Chrysostom Bouchard, SJ, (b.1823), died. His French mother was adopted by the Delaware Lenni-Lenappi tribe after her parents were killed by members of the Comanche tribe. His father was Kistalwa, the Delaware tribe’s chief. After he moved to California his sermons attracted great crowds to the local Jesuit church. He traveled to many Western states, preaching in cities, towns, and mining camps. When he died, a New York newspaper called him "the Father Damen of the West." In 1949 John Bernard McGloin authored “Eloquent Indian."
(GenIV, Winter 04/05)(www.companymagazine.org/v154/preachers.html)
1889-1890 In South Dakota, Sioux warrior Kicking Bear became the leading spokesman for the new Indian religion, the "Ghost Dance," which promised a return to ancient ways for a people disheartened by reservation life. Kicking Bear continued to resist the U.S. Army for several weeks after many of his fellow Sioux were killed in the Massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. Kicking Bird was a Kiowa Chief. Bear’s Head was a Crow chief.
(HNQ, 12/24/99)
1890 Feb 10, Around 11 million acres, ceded to US by Sioux Indians, opened for settlement.
(MC, 2/10/02)
1890 Dec 15, Sioux Indian Chief Sitting Bull and 11 other tribe members were killed in Grand River, S.D., during a fracas with Indian police [US troops]. In an attempt to arrest Sitting Bull at his Standing Rock, South Dakota, cabin, shooting broke out and Lt. Bullhead shot the great Sioux leader. The killing of Indian leader Sitting Bull was one factor that led to the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The reservation was left in disarray when Sioux leader Sitting Bull was killed by Indian police.
(WUD, 1994, p.1680)(AP, 12/15/97)(HN, 12/15/98)(HNQ, 1/5/99)
1890 Dec 28, As Big Foot, another Sioux leader, led his tribe away from the reservation they were surrounded by 7th Cavalry troops at Wounded Knee Creek. The next morning, when the cavalry tried to disarm the Sioux, shots rang out and during the next 6 hours, 146 Sioux men, women and children, including Big Foot, were killed. The 7th Cavalry lost 30 killed.
(HNQ, 1/5/99)
1890 Dec 29, The last major conflict of the Indian wars took place at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota after Colonel James W. Forsyth of the 7th Cavalry tried to disarm Chief Big Foot and his followers. Seventy-year-old Sioux chief Big Foot was killed by the 7th U.S. Cavalry during the massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. Three days later his body was found frozen where he had been killed. The South Dakota reservation had been left in disarray when Sioux leader Sitting Bull was killed by Indian police on December 15, and as Big Foot led his tribe away from the reservation on December 28, they were surrounded by 7th Cavalry troops. The next morning, when the cavalry tried to disarm the Sioux, shots broke out and during the next 6 hours, 146 Sioux men, women and children were killed. The 7th Cavalry lost 30 killed. The Wounded Knee massacre took place in South Dakota as some 300 Sioux Indians were killed by U.S. troops sent to disarm them.
(HFA, '96, p.44)(AP, 12/29/97)(HN, 12/29/98)(HNPD, 12/29/98)
1890 L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) campaigned for an American Indian genocide. In an article for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer of South Dakota He wrote: “Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; it’s better that they should die than live the miserable wretches that they are." In 1919 Baum authored “The Wonderful World of Oz."
(SFC, 2/7/15, p.A7)
1891-1899 During this period the Hopi of Arizona began to produce silver jewelry. A man named Sikyatala learned silversmithing from a Zuni man.
(NH, 11/1/04, p.30)
1891 Sep 18, Harriet Maxwell Converse was 1st white woman to become an Indian chief (her Indian name was Ga-is-wa-noh: the Watcher). She devoted herself to the study and preservation of Native American culture, was a staunch defender of Indian property rights during the 1880s.
(MC, 9/18/01)
1891 The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians had their homeland established in the foothills of the California San Bernardino Mountains by presidential executive order.
(SFEC, 2/13/00, p.D12)
1892 Oct 15, US government convinced the Crow Indians to give up 1.8 million acres of their reservation (in the mountainous area of western Montana) for 50 cents per acre. Presidential proclamation opened this land to settlers.
(MC, 10/15/01)
1892 In New York state the Seneca Indians set up a treaty whereby non-Indian residents of Salamanca, a town built on the Seneca Nation of Indians' Allegany Reservation, paid rent to the Seneca.
(SFC, 8/18/99, p.C14)
1893 Sep 16, Some 50,000 "Sooners" claimed land in the Cherokee Strip during the first day of the Oklahoma land rush.
(AP, 9/16/97)(HN, 9/16/98)
1894 Aug 16, Indian chiefs from the Sioux & Onondaga tribes met to urge their people to renounce Christianity and return to their old Indian faith.
(MC, 8/16/02)
1894 In Alaska the Cape Fox Tlingit Indians moved to Saxman after smallpox reduced their population from some 1000 to 200.
(WSJ, 8/31/01, p.W13)
1899 Edward H. Harriman, chairman of the Union Pacific RR, led a survey expedition along the Alaska coast with 126 passengers aboard a luxury steamer. The 2-month, 9,000 mile journey from Seattle to Siberia included a stop at Cape Fox where the visitors gathered up a items from what looked like an abandoned Tlingit Indian settlement. Much of the plunder was returned in 2001.
(WSJ, 8/31/01, p.W13)
1900 Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) Seattle-based photographer, accompanied ethnographer George bird Grinnell to a reservation Montana took photographs of Blood, Blackfeet and Algonquin Indians gathered there for their annual sun dance. In 1906 he announced plans for 20-volume work documenting Western Indians, The North American Indian. His first volume was published in 1907. The last two volumes appeared in 1930.
(ON, 6/12, p.9)(http://curtis.library.northwestern.edu/curtis/timeline.html)
1901 E.P. Valentine, antiquarian, removed hundreds of Monacan remains from a burial site in Virginia later known as the Hayes Creek Mound. The remains were reburied in 1998.
(Arch, 9/00, p.56)
1902 A massacre by Mexican federal troops, "the Battle of the Sierra Mazatan," killed about 150 Yaqui men, women and children. US anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka came upon some of the bodies while they were still decaying, hacked off the heads with a machete and boiled them to remove the flesh for his study of Mexico's "races." He sent the resulting collection to the New York museum. In 2009 Yaqui Indians buried their lost warriors after a two-year effort to rescue the remains from New York's American Museum of Natural History.
(AP, 11/17/09)
1904 Sep 21, Exiled Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph died in Washington state reportedly of a "broken heart." In 1984 “Chief Joseph’s Own Story" was published.
(HN, 9/21/98)(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A13)
1907 Nov 16, Oklahoma became the 46th US state of the union. Black settlers founded some 30 towns before statehood was achieved. Oklahoma’s Osage Indian Reservation became Osage County, one of the largest in the US.
(WSJ, 11/10/97, p.A1)(NG, 5/95, p.92)(SFCM, 3/9/08, p.20)t
1908 In Mexico at least 5,000 Yaqui had been sold into slavery by this time. During the 34-year rule of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911), the government repeatedly provoked the Yaqui remaining in Sonora to rebellion in order to seize their land for exploitation by investors for both mining and agricultural use.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaqui)
1909 Feb 17, Apache chief Geronimo died of pneumonia at age 80, while still in captivity at Fort Sill, Okla.
(HN, 2/17/99)
1909 Dec 10, Red Cloud, Sioux Indian chief, died.
(MC, 12/10/01)
1911 Aug 28, Ishi (d.1916), a native Yahi Indian, walked out of the forest near Oroville, Ca. He underwent examination at UC medical center in San Francisco and liked to practice "drawing bow" on Parnassus Heights.
(SFC, 7/14/96, Z1 p.2)(SFEC, 12/26/99, p.W4)(SSFC, 2/8/04, p.M1)(SFC, 9/6/14, p.C1)
1912 May 26, Jay Silverheels (d.1980) was born as Harold J. Smith on the Six Nations Indian Reservation, Brantford, Ontario, Canada. He was the son of a Mohawk Indian chief and became an actor who portrayed Tonto on "The Lone Ranger."
(www.imdb.com)
1912 Jul 7, At the Stockholm Olympics Native American Jim Thorpe won a gold medal in the men's pentathlon. On July 15 Thorpe won another gold medal in the men's decathlon
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_at_the_1912_Summer_Olympics)
1912 Nov 9, The football team of Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian School, with running back Jim Thorpe, defeated the Army team, with Dwight D. Eisenhower as linebacker, 27-6. In 2007 Sally Jenkins authored “The Real Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation."
(WSJ, 1/7/07, p.P9)(www.footballfoundation.com/news.php?id=242)
1913 Feb 13, Joaquin Miller (b.1837), known as the "poet of the Sierras," died in Oakland, Ca. Miller had sponsored California’s 1st Arbor Day. His work included "Utopia" (1880) and “Life amongst the Modocs: unwritten history" (1873), an autobiographical novel first published in London. Miller was born as Cincinnatus Hiner Miller near Liberty, Indiana. His secret "California Diary" was unearthed 25 years after his death. In 1919 Oakland purchased his property and in 1928 turned it into a park combined with adjacent undeveloped tracts.
(http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007936641)(SFEM, 4/2/00, p.48)(SSFC, 1/14/07, p.B3)(SSFC, 6/16/13, DB p.17)
1913 Mary McAboy began hand-making Skookum Indian dolls. Skookum was a Siwash Indian word that roughly means bully good.
(SFC, 6/17/98, Z1 p.3)
1915 Sep 18, Reverend Sherman Coolidge (1862-1932), an Arapaho minister and one of the founders of the Society of American Indians (SAI), issued a proclamation declaring the second Saturday of each May as “American Indian Day" and appealing for US citizenship for American Indians.
(http://www.bia.gov/DocumentLibrary/HeritageMonth/index.htm)
1915-1929 Alfred V. Kidder, archeologist, excavated numerous bones of Indians buried in the upper Pecos Valley of New Mexico. In 1999 the bones of nearly 2,000 Indians were returned by Harvard Univ. to New Mexico for burial.
(SFC, 5/19/99, p.A3)
1916 Mar 25, Ishi, the last Yahi Indian in California, died of tuberculosis at the Univ. of California Hospital. His body was cremated but his brain was removed and shipped to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. The documentary film "Ishi, the Last Yahi" was made by John Harrison Quinn (d.2000 at 59). In 2004 Orin Starn authored "Ishi's Brain: In search of the Last "Wild" Indian."
(SFC, 1/26/00, p.A24)(SSFC, 2/8/04, p.M1)(SSFC, 3/20/16, DB p.50)
1916 May 13, The 1st US observance of American Indian Day. American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month originated in 1915 when the president of the Congress of American Indian Associations issued a proclamation declaring the second Saturday in May each year as American Indian Day. The first American Indian Day was celebrated in May 1916, in New York. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed a joint congressional resolution designating November 1990 as National American Indian Heritage Month. Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)(www.aifisf.com/news.htm)
1916 The US federal government relegated the Koi Nation, one of the remaining groups of the Pomo people, to a rancheria near Clear Lake, Ca., that could not support the tribe. Leaders instead settled in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa. A 2019 federal court decision recognized the tribe along with the right to establish a sovereign land base. In 2021 the tribe purchased land for a casino in Sonoma County.
(SFC, 9/16/21, p.C6)
1916 In Utah the US government took land from the Ute Indians for the rights to oil shale reserves. In 2000 84,000 acres were given back.
(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A12)
1917 The Iroquois Confederacy declared war on Germany.
(www.history.army.mil/html/topics/natam/natam-wwii.html)
1919 May 26, Jay Silverheels, actor, was born. He played Tonto in The Lone Ranger TV series
(HN, 5/26/01)
1921 Nov 14, The Cherokee Indians asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review their claim to 1 million acres of land in Texas.
(HN, 11/14/98)
1923 Jan 5, The Senate debated the benefits of Peyote for the American Indian.
(HN, 1/5/99)
1923 Special Indian Commissioner H.J. Hagerman organized the first Navajo Tribal Council which gave him power to act for them in auctioning oil leases. The tribal government was established following the discovery of oil on its reservation.
(SFEC, 5/4/97, Z1 p.4)(SFC, 11/14/11, p.D4)
1924 Mar 20, The Virginia Legislature passed two closely related eugenics laws: SB 219, entitled "The Racial Integrity Act" and SB 281, "An ACT to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases", henceforth referred to as "The Sterilization Act". The Racial Integrity Act (one drop law) required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, and felonized marriage between "white persons" and non-white persons. The law was the most famous ban on miscegenation in the US, and was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. Virginia repealed the sterilization in 1979. In 2001 the House of Delegates voted to express regret for the state’s selecting breeding policies that had forced sterilizations on some 8,000 people. The Senate soon followed suit.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_Integrity_Act_of_1924)(SSFC, 2/4/01, p.A3)(SFC, 2/15/01, p.C16)
1924 Jun 2, Congress granted U.S. citizenship to all American Indians. The Snyder Act Granted full citizenship to all Native Americans born in the U.S.
(AP, 6/2/97)(HN, 6/2/98)(HNQ, 3/1/99)
1927 Apr, The last major battle between the Mexican Army and the Yaqui Indians was fought at Cerro del Gallo Mountain. By employing heavy artillery, machine guns, and planes of the Mexican Air Force to shell, bomb, and strafe Yaqui villages, Mexican authorities eventually prevailed.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaqui)
1927 Oct 19, Marjorie Tallchief, US ballerina (Harkness Ballet), was born.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1934 The US Congress allowed US created tribal governments to replace traditional Indian governing bodies. A US act of Congress, nicknamed the Indian New Deal, endorsed a degree of self rule for Indian tribes.
(SFEC, 5/4/97, z1 p.4)(Econ, 4/7/12, p.35)
1937-1955 Gov. McCarran of Nevada entered legislation on behalf of Italian American squatters on reservation lands of the Pyramid Paiutes.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, BR p.12)
1939 The last person fluent in the Chochenyo, one of eight languages used by the Ohlone people of the San Francisco Bay Area, died.
(SFC, 11/24/12, p.C4)
1941 Frances Macgregor (d.2002 at 95), sociologist and photographer, published ""Twentieth Century Indians." The collection of photos helped prompt Congress to devote more money to Indian reservations.
(SFC, 2/8/02, p.A25)
1941 The Iroquois, the Sioux and the Ojibwe (Chippewa) tribes declared war on Germany. The Iroquois Confederacy, having declared war on Germany in 1917, had never made peace and so automatically became party to World War II.
(Econ, 4/7/12, p.35)(www.history.army.mil/html/topics/natam/natam-wwii.html)
1942 Jun 13, Delegates from the Six Nations Confederacy (Iraquois League) assembled in conference to draft a formal declaration of war. The following day, on the steps of the United States Capitol, a spokesman of the Confederacy said it has entered World War II on its own consent and terms.
(www.combat.ws/S3/BAKISSUE/CMBT04N4/IROQUOIS.HTM)
1944 Jun 6, Cherokee tribal members communicated via radios in their native language on the Normandy beaches.
(SFC, 6/4/98, p.A6)
1944 California Indians were awarded $17 million that was promised in treaties nearly a century earlier. $12 million was deducted for goods and services already given.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.5)
1945 Feb 18, U.S. Marines stormed ashore at Iwo Jima. Navajo code talkers used their native language to communicate by radio on Japanese troop movements.
(HN, 2/18/98)(SFC, 6/4/98, p.A6)
1946 Nov 25, Supreme Court granted Oregon Indians land payment rights from the U.S. government.
(HN, 11/25/98)
1948 Sec. of the Interior J.A. Krug signed a contract relinquishing Indian reservation land for the Garrison Dam.
(SFEC, 4/12/98, BR p.7)
1949 A.J. Liebling, New York reported, arrived in Nevada for Reno divorce, which required a 6-week residency. He began a series of articles for the New Yorker on the Pyramid Paiutes and their struggle with Italian American squatters over water rights. In 1999 the collected stories were edited by Elmer Rusco and published under the title "A Reporter At Large: Dateline: Pyramid Lake, Nevada."
(SFEC, 1/2/00, BR p.12)
c1950s Cherokee Admiral Joseph J. "Jocko" Clark rose to command the U.S. Seventh Fleet during the Korean War, making him the most powerful war chief in American Indian history.
(HNQ, 3/26/00)
1954 US Congress voted to withdraw support to Wisconsin Indians guaranteed in 1854. The Menomonee (people of the wild rice) Chiefs Oshkosh and Keshena met with federal Indian agents in Keshena Falls, Wisconsin, in 1854 and agreed to retain only 275,000 acres from their original 9 1/2 million acres. As part of the settlement the chiefs and their followers were promised eternal government protection.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.235)
1954 The 600-square-mile Garrison Dam in North Dakota, authorized by Congress in 1949, was completed. It covered the ancestral lands of Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Indians.
(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)
1957 The International Labor Organization (ILO) developed and ratified Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention, 1957 (No. 107), an international instrument dedicated to improving the living conditions of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In 1989 it was revised and renamed Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169). Convention 169 recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination within a nation-state.
(http://tinyurl.com/gsrhxrq)(Econ, 2/6/15, p.32)
1957 George Gustav Heye (b.1876), collector of Indian artifacts, died. He and a few rich friends set up a foundation in 1922 that established the Museum of the American Indian. The museum closed in 1994 and the Smithsonian acquired the collection.
(WSJ, 9/21/04, p.D8)
1958 Jul 11, Monument Valley, straddling the Arizona-Utah border, became the 1st Navajo Tribal Park.
(SSFC, 10/6/02, p.C15)
1958 Jul, Mildred Loving (1940-2008), a woman of American Indian and black heritage, and her white husband, Richard (d.1975), were arrested in Virginia within weeks of arriving from Washington DC and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife. In 1967 the US Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.105)
1960 Edmund Wilson and Joseph Mitchell authored “Apologies to the Iroquois." It memorialized the seizure by Robert Moses, the unelected head of the New York Power Authority, of 600 acres by eminent domain for a power reservoir near Niagara Falls.
(www.nyslittree.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/DB.PersonDetail/PersonPK/500.cfm)
1961 William E. Brandon (d.2002) authored "The American Heritage Book of Indians."
(SFC, 5/31/02, p.A27)
1962 The Miccosukee Indian tribe gained federal recognition after its leaders made a state visit to Fidel Castro.
(SFC, 12/29/98, p.A4)
1962 The Lake Oahe reservoir in South Dakota, created by the US Army Corps of Engineers, reduced the Cheyenne River reservation of the Sioux Indians by 100,000 acres.
(Econ, 10/15/05, p.34)
1964 Mar 9, A group of 5 Lakota (Sioux) Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in a peaceful protest. They declared that it should be a Native American cultural center and university.
(SFC, 5/19/96,City Guide, p.7)(G, Summer ‘97, p.4)
1964 The Economic Opportunity Act opened the gates for Indian management of their own affairs.
(SFEC, 2/13/00, BR p.5)
1965 In western New York the Kinzua Dam on the Allegheny River opened. Construction of the dam forced the departure of Pennsylvania's last Native Americans, the Senecas, who now live near Salamanca, New York, on the northern shores of land flooded by the dam.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinzua_Dam)
1968 Apr 11, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968, a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This included a Fair Housing Act and the Indian Civil Rights Act, which limited sentences that tribes could hand down on any charge to six months. In 1968 Congress increased the maximum to one year. The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae - FNMA), established by the government in 1938, became a private, shareholder-owned company as part of the Fair Housing Act.
(http://tinyurl.com/2o3p2q)(http://tinyurl.com/ldx765)(AP, 4/11/98)(SFC, 2/20/98, p.A23)
1968 Dennis Banks (b.1937), an Anishinabe Indian from Minnesota, co-founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) along with Clyde Bellecourt (1936-2022), George Mitchell, Charles Deegan and others. Vernon Bellecourt (1932-2007), an Ojibwe Indian from Minnesota, also helped found the movement.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Banks)(SFC, 10/15/07, p.B6)(SSFC, 1/16/22, p.F9)
1968 The story of the WWII code-talkers was declassified. American Navajo Indians had used their native language as code that the Japanese were unable to break. Chester Nez, the last living Navajo code-breaker died on June 4, 2014, at age 93.
(Econ, 6/21/14, p.90)
1969 May 5, N. Scott Momaday (b.1934) received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for “House Made of Dawn." The Kiowa author was the first American Indian to win the prize. Norman Mailer won the general non-fiction Pulitzer Prize for “Armies of the Night" (1968).
(http://tinyurl.com/5naupa)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Pulitzer_Prize)
1969 Nov 20, A group of 80 Native Americans, all college students, seized Alcatraz Island in the name of "Indians of All Tribes." The occupation lasted 19 months. They offered $24 in beads and cloth to buy the island, demanded an American Indian Univ., museum and cultural center, and listed reasons why the island was a suitable Indian reservation.
(SFEC, 3/8/98, p.W38)
1969 Nov 27, The United American Indians of New England began an annual National Day of Mourning at Plymouth, Mass., on Thanksgiving Day to recall the disease, racism and oppression that the Pilgrims brought in 1620.
(SFC, 11/24/17, p.A8)
1969 The 62-foot-tall Skowhegan Indian statue was built in Skowhegan, Maine.
(NW, 8/26/02, p.51)
1969 A government clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs dropped the Samish Indian nation from the list of recognized tribes. In 2002 the tribe, native to the San Juan Islands and western Skagit County of Washington state, sued for recognition and damages.
(SFC, 10/18/02, p.J8)
1970 May, The US government shut off power and stopped fresh water supplies from the Native American Indians on Alcatraz Island. A fire broke out and each side blamed the other.
(G, Summer ‘97, p.5)(www.nps.gov/alca/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm)
1970 Nov 27, Native American gathered in Plymouth, Mass., to hold their first National Day of Mourning.
(USA Today, 11/27,19, p.4B)
1970 Dec 2, The US Senate voted to give 48,000 acres of New Mexico back to the Taos Indians.
(HN, 12/2/98)
1970 Dee Brown (1908-2002), American writer, published "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," a history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century and their displacement and slaughter by the United States federal government.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Knee)
1970 Tony Hillerman (1925-2008), American writer, introduced Lt. Joe Leaphorn in his first detective novel "The Blessing Way," as an experienced police officer who understood, but did not share his people's traditional belief in a rich spirit world. Officer Jim Chee, introduced in "People of Darkness" (1978), was a younger officer studying to become a "hathaali" — Navajo for "shaman."
(AP, 10/27/08)
1971 Jun 10, Federal marshals, FBI agents and special forces swarmed Alcatraz Island and removed the Native American occupiers: 5 women, 4 children and 6 unarmed men.
(www.nps.gov/alca/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm)
1971 William E. Brandon (d.2002) published "The Magic World," an anthology of American Indian poetry.
(SFC, 5/31/02, p.A27)
1971 The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was approved by Congress. It gave large portions of prime bear habitat to the Alutiiq people, who had hunted and fished on the island for 7,000 years. 10% of the state, 44 million acres of land, was ceded to native tribes.
(NG, Jan. 94, p.141)(SFC, 2/2/00, p.A7)(AH, 10/04, p.42)
1972 Sep 7, The Commissioner of Indian Affairs in a memorandum extended federal recognition to the Chippewa tribe of Sault Ste. Marie in Northern Michigan. The meaning of this federal recognition was further clarified in a memorandum by the Associate Solicitor for Indian Affairs on February 27, 1974.
(http://tinyurl.com/5c8cfu)
1972 Nov 9, The "Trail of Broken Treaties" caravan, an Indian protest, ended in vandalism and chaos at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. The story is told in the 1996 book "Like A Hurricane, The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee" by Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior.
(SFEC, 1/5/97, BR p.8)(http://siouxme.com/lodge/treaties.html)
1973 Feb 27, Members of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. They protested illegal and discriminatory acts on the part of the Pine Ridge Sioux Tribal Council. The FBI was called in and a siege lasted for 69 days with 2 AIM leaders killed. The story is told in the 1996 book "Like A Hurricane, The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee" by Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior.
(SFC, 6/14/96, p.A19)(AP, 2/27/98)(SFC, 12/30/98, p.A17)(SFEC, 1/5/97, BR p.8)
1973 Mar 2, Federal forces surrounded Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which was occupied by members of the militant American Indian Movement who were holding at least 10 hostages.
(HN, 3/2/99)
1973 Canada’s Supreme Court recognized that indigenous title to land existed.
(Econ, 7/5/14, p.31)
1975 Jan 3, President Ford signed Public Law 93-620. This Act, written to enlarge the Grand Canyon National Park, also provided in Section 10 for the enlargement of the adjacent Havasupai Indian Reservation by 185,000 acres and designated a contiguous 95,300 acres of the enlarged National Park as a permanent traditional use area of the Havasupai Indians of Havasu Canyon, Arizona.
(SSFC, 2/19/06, p.F4)(www.tribal-institute.org/envirotext/89.htm)
1975 Jan 4, Pres. Ford signed into law the US Indian Self-Determination Act. It began the transfer of administration from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the tribal governments.
(http://tinyurl.com/6rh5v3y)(Econ, 4/7/12, p.35)
1975 Dec 12, In South Dakota Anna Mae Pictou Aquash (b.1945) was shot to death. American Indian Movement (AIM) members suspected her of being an FBI informant. Her body was found on Feb 24, 1976, on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In 2003 Arlo Looking Cloud (50) was convicted in the murder. John Graham, a Canadian, and Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud, a US citizen, were indicted in 2003 in the United States for Aquash's murder. In 2007 a Canadian court ruled that Graham should be extradited to the United States to face trial. In 2011 Graham was sentenced to serve life in prison.
(SFC, 2/7/04, p.A3)(Reuters, 6/26/07)(www.dickshovel.com/time.html#1976)(SFC, 1/25/11, p.A6)
1976 Scientists in southern California scientists unearthed what were among the oldest skeletal remains ever found in the Western Hemisphere. They dated back nearly 10,000 years. A local tribal group called the Kumeyaay Nation later claimed that the bones, representing at least two people, were their ancestors and demanded them back. In December, 2011, the Univ. of San Diego said it would turn the remains over to the Kumeyaay, although it gave other tribal groups until Jan. 4 to come forward and dispute the claim.
(AP, 1/15/12)
1976 Vermont Gov. Tom Salmon granted the Abenaki Indians recognition. The following year a new governor rescinded recognition.
(SFC, 12/13/02, p.J7)
1977 The Iroquois Indians of North America, or Haudenosaunee as they call themselves, began issuing their own passports.
(Econ, 7/24/10, p.34)
1978 Mar 6, The US Supreme Court in its Oliphant decision ruled that tribes could not try non-Indian defendants in tribal courts. It centered on the arrest of Mark Oliphant, a non-Indian, by tribal police. He argued that the tribal court does not have criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliphant_v._Suquamish_Indian_Tribe)
1978 May 15, The US Supreme Court’s Santa Clara Pueblo vs. Martinez decision held that tribal enrollment issues are an Indian-only matter immune from outside interference.
(SSFC, 4/20/08, p.A11)(http://supreme.justia.com/us/436/49/)
1978 Aug 11, The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) put an end to the persecution of Native American religions.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Religious_Freedom_Act)(Econ, 4/7/12, p.35)
1978 Nov 8, The US Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act because a high number of Native American children were being removed from their homes by public and private agencies. The law gave preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving native American children.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Child_Welfare_Act)(SFC, 3/13/19, p.A6)
1979 Dec 14, The Seminole Tribe opened a high-stakes bingo hall on their reservation at Hollywood, Florida, and the state tried immediately to shut it down. This was followed by a series of court battles leading to a final decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1981 “Seminole Tribe vs. Butterworth." The court ruled in favor of the Seminoles affirming their right to operate their bingo hall.
(http://500nations.com/news/Indian_Casinos/history.asp)
1980 Mar 5, Jay Silverheels (b.1912), son of a Mohawk Indian chief and actor who portrayed Tonto on "The Lone Ranger", died in Woodland Hills, Ca., from a stroke.
(www.imdb.com)
1980 Dr. Edgar S. Cahn (46), author of "Our Brother’s Keeper: The Indian in White America" (1969), and co-founder of the Antioch School of Law (1972), suffered a massive heart attack. While recovering he dreamed up the idea of Time Dollars as a new currency to provide a solution to massive cuts in government spending on social welfare. His idea was that one hour of work equals one service credit. In 1987, while at the London School of Economics, Edgar developed his theoretical explanation for why such a currency should work. He came back to the US and started putting service credits (not yet called Time Dollars) into operation. In 1997 a Time Dollar convention helped new and surviving groups identify “what works." Time Dollars became the backbone of a successful cross-age peer tutoring program in Chicago, a Maine Time Banks Network, and a Time Dollar Youth Court in Washington, DC.
(www.timebanks.org/history-structure.htm)(www.law.udc.edu/?page=ECahn)
1980 Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, Mont., was established.
(SFEC, 7/18/99, Par. p.6)
1981 Jul 1, Tim Giago, an Oglala Sioux writer from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, launched The Lakota Times, the first independently owned Indian newspaper in the US.
(SSFC, 12/23/07, p.F1)
1981 Sep 23, Chief Dan George, actor (Harry & Tonto, Little Big Man), died at 82.
(MC, 9/23/01)
1981 The northwest Chinook Indians filed a petition for recognition with the Interior Dept.
(SFC, 12/31/00, p.A11)
1982 Oct 13, The IOC restored 2 gold medals post mortem from the 1912 Olympics to Jim Thorpe (1888-1953).
(http://nomas-nyc.com/2006/10/solid-gold.html)
1982 Iron Eyes Cody (d.1998 at 94), American Indian actor, published his autobiography: "Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian." In 1970 he played an Indian paddling through a polluted stream in a public service ad.
(SFC, 1/5/99, p.A20)
1982 Maine Indian tribes laid claim to 60% of the state lands and settled for $81.5 million.
(SFC, 12/13/02, p.J7)
1983 The Pequot Indians of Connecticut won federal recognition.
(WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)
1983 Lulie Nall, a Penobscot Indian, died. She had designed a tepee-emblazoned flag for the 19-month American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, that began in 1969. In 2008 the flag was put up for auction and sold for $60,000.
(SFC, 1/24/08, p.A1)(SFC, 1/25/08, p.B2)
1986 William Loren Katz authored "Black Indians," an account of the relations between Black and Native Americans.
(WSJ, 12/20/99, p.A1)
1986 The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation opened its first bingo hall in Connecticut.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.40)
1987 Feb 25, The US Supreme Court ruled that California cannot bar gambling on Indian tribal land. This win by the Cabazon tribe opened the door to Indian gambling nationwide. By 2015 almost half of America’s 566 Native American tribes and villages operated casinos.
(SFC, 5/11/04, p.B8)(WSJ, 9/27/05, p.A1)(http://tinyurl.com/7ub24)(Econ, 1/17/15, p.32)
1988 The US Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
(SFC, 6/26/96, p.A10)
1989 Apr 1, In Canada the Oka conflict began when some 200 Mohawks from the Kanesatake reserve marched though the town of Oka protesting plans to expand the village's nine-hole golf course to 18 holes, saying expansion encroaches on their burial ground. A 78-day standoff began on July 11, 1990 and ended Sep 26, 1990. The Oka Crisis cost the Quebec government an estimated $180 million not including the cost of the army.
(http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-99-500/conflict_war/oka/clip1)
1989 In Connecticut the Mashantucket Pequot Indians began the Pequot Pharmaceutical Network, a small health service for their members and employees. In 10 years it grew to a $15 million business based on drug prices acquired at government rates.
(SFC, 6/19/99, p.A3)
1990 Apr 17, The US Supreme Court in Employment Division v Smith said two members of a native American church had no First Amendment right to unemployment compensation after being fired for ingesting peyote as part of their religious observance.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Division_v._Smith)(Econ, 7/9/16, p.24)
1990 The US government enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
(SFC, 6/1/98, p.A6)(SFC, 9/3/98, p.A10)
1990 In Arizona Gila River Telecommunications Inc. (GRTI) was founded as a nonprofit telephone company. It serviced the 620-square-mile Gila River reservation of the Pima Indians, who had inhabited the area for over 2,000 years.
(WSJ, 7/7/00, p.B1)
1991 In Montana the name of Custer Battlefield National Monument was changed to Little Bighorn Battlefield Monument. A $2 million memorial was dedicated Jun 25,2003.
(WSJ, 6/25/03, p.A1)
1991 In Canada the Algonquins on the Rapid Lake reserve struck a trilateral deal giving them a share in what happens on their traditional territory and a share in any revenues. The Rapid Lake reserve was established for the use of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in 1961. Since forest resources are a provincial jurisdiction, a pilot project about the management of renewable resources (wildlife and forest) was negotiated between the Government of Quebec and the Algonquins of Barriere Lake.
(http://tinyurl.com/y8ka7qbl)(Econ 7/1/17, p.30)
1992 The Mdewakanton Dakota Indians opened their Mystic Lake casino complex on their 248 acres of tribal land in Minnesota.
(WSJ, 2/5/98, p.A1,6)
1992 The Foxwoods Casino, the biggest gaming complex in the Western Hemisphere, opened on the Pequot Reservation at Mashantucket, Conn. The number of Pequot numbered about 550.
(WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)
1993 Southern Ute Indians launched Red Willow, a natural gas production operation. By 2003 the tribe had acquired $1.3 billion in assets.
(WSJ, 6/13/03, p.A1)
1994 Sep 13, Bob Blackbull, Blackfoot Indian, received his first shipment of mustangs in Browning, Montana, and revived a piece of their culture.
(SFC, 9/2/96, p.A3)
1994 The Winnebago nation gave Lance Morgan $9.7 million from its Iowa casino to start a new venture. Morgan formed Nebraska-based Ho-Chunk Inc.
(Econ, 4/5/08, p.71)
1994 In Canada a majority of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake passed a bylaw stipulating that a person must have at least 4 Mohawk great grandparents to live or own property on its 13,000 acre reservation just south of Montreal.
(Econ, 2/27/10, p.44)
1995 Randall Milliken authored "A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810."
{SF, USA, AmerIndian, Books}
(http://tinyurl.com/yy9xssc7)
1996 John Annerino wrote "People of Legend: Native Americans of the Southwest."
(SFEC, 12/8/96, BR p.4)
1996 Brian Bibby wrote "The Fine Art of California Indian Basketry."
(SFEC, 12/8/96, BR p.4)
1996 John Blom and Allen Hayes wrote "Southwestern Pottery: Anasazi to Zuni."
(SFEC, 12/8/96, BR p.4)
1996 Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet woman from Browning, Montana, filed a lawsuit alleging that the US Interior Department mismanaged billions of dollars held in trust by the government. In 2010 the US House of Representatives approved a $3.4 billion government settlement.
(SFC, 7/3/10, p.A4)
1996 In western North Carolina the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation acquired a few hundred acres of ancestral pasture bordering the Tuckasegee River that contained the Kituwha Mound. Legend held that this was the site where God had given the Cherokee their laws and their first fire.
(Arch, 9/02, p.70)
1997 Apr 15, The US military said it would allow American Indian soldiers to use peyote in their religious services.
(SFC, 4/16/97, p.A3)
1997 A concept called "circle sentencing" began on the Mille Lacs Indian Reservation. It involved community-imposed sentences for nonviolent misdemeanors. The program was fashioned after practices by the First Nation Indians in the Yukon Territory.
(SFC, 2/15/99, p.A3)
1998 Jan 20, The Idaho Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe planned to begin a national online lottery called US Lottery. US residents will be restricted by their local state laws.
(SFC, 1/16/98, p.A1)
1998 Mar 6, It was reported that Panama hired a Canadian Indian tribe, the Tsuu T’ina, to clean out unexploded bombs and shells from an area of Empire Range, which US military forces abandoned.
(SFC, 3/6/98, p.A12)
1998 Aug 11, The 308,000 sq.-foot Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center opened in Mashantucket, Conn.
(WSJ, 8/11/98, p.A16)
1998 Sep 2, The Univ. of Nebraska promised to return the bones of 1,702 Indians to tribes for reburial. It also agreed to build a memorial on a campus field where bones were burned over 30 years ago in an incinerator used to dispose diseased animal parts.
(SFC, 9/3/98, p.A10)
1998 Paula Mitchell Marks published "In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival."
(SFEC, 4/12/98, BR p.7)
1998 The Nez Pierce tribe returned to its ancient homeland in Oregon after 121 years of exile.
(SFEC, 2/13/00, BR p.5)
1998 US government officials, charged with mismanaging trust funds for American Indians, shredded 162 boxes of records. This was disclosed by a federal judge in 1999.
(SFC, 12/7/99, p.A6)
1999 Mar 24, The US Supreme Court ruled to uphold an 1837 treaty with the Chippewa Indians for hunting and fishing on 13 million acres of public land in Minnesota.
(SFC, 3/25/99, p.A8)
1999 May 17, In Neah Bay, Washington state, Makah Indian hunters legally killed their first gray whale in 75 years.
(SFC, 5/18/99, p.A3)
1999 Jun 2, American Indians filed a class action law suit against the major tobacco companies charging that they were excluded from the $206 billion settlement reached with 46 states last November.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.A18)
1999 Jun, In Florida the Miccosukee Indians celebrated the opening of their $50 million, 300-room resort and convention center on their 680 acres in Everglades National Park. Meanwhile the price tag for restoring the everglades ecosystem was put at $7.8 billion.
(SFC, 6/5/99, p.A6)
1999 Jun 16, In Santa Fe 34 tribes filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the nation's largest tobacco companies.
(SFC, 6/17/99, p.a3)
1999 Jun 18, The Native American Church of North America made an agreement with US Defense Dept. officials at its 50th annual convention to allow Native Americans to use peyote in religious services.
(SFC, 6/30/99, p.A7)
1999 Sep 28, Groundbreaking was scheduled for the US National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC.
(SFC, 7/22/99, p.A5)
1999 Nov 24, American Indian farmers filed a $19 billion class-action lawsuit against the Agriculture Department for an alleged 20-year history of loan-granting discrimination.
(SFC, 11/25/99, p.A4)
1999 The show "Spirit: A Journey in Dance, Drums and Song" was composed by Peter Buffett. It was largely based on American Indian dance tradition.
(WSJ, 11/26/99, p.W9)
2000 Jan 14, The federal government announced the return of 84,000 acres in northern Utah to the Ute Indians. The land was taken in 1916 for the rights to oil shale reserves.
(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A12)
2000 Apr 29, Clarence Basil Cuts The Rope, artist and member of the Gros Ventre Tribe, died at age 64 in Montana.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.B2)
2000 Sep 8, The Bureau of Indian Affairs marked its 175th birthday and Kevin Grover, head of the bureau, offered a formal apology to American Indians for the misdeeds of the agency.
(SFC, 9/9/00, p.A3)
2000 Nov, In Detroit a casino, 90% owned by the Sault St. Marie Chippewa Indians, opened in Greektown.
(SSFC, 5/27/01, p.A19)
2000 Dec, The Timbisha Shoshone Indians were granted 7,600 acres around Death Valley that included 314 acres within the national park.
(SFC, 1/3/01, p.A2)
2000 Philip Burnham authored "Indian Country, God’s Country: Native Americans and the national Parks."
(SFC, 1/3/01, p.A2)
2000 Dolan H. Eargle Jr. authored "Native California Guide: Weaving the Past and Present." It surveyed 143 present-day California Indian communities.
(SFC, 12/31/00, BR p.12)
2000 Ian Frazier authored "On the Rez," a focus on the Ogallala Sioux Reservation in Pine Ridge, S.D.
(WSJ, 1/14/00, p.W10)
2000 Alvin M. Josephy Jr., historian authored "A Walk Toward Oregon: A Memoir."
(SFEC, 2/13/00, p.5)
2000 The Seminole Nation voted to cast freedmen descendants out of its tribe. The US government in response cut off most federal programs and refused to authorize gaming. The Seminole freedman were later allowed back into the tribe.
(SFC, 3/5/07, p.A2)
2000 In Nevada mine operator Arimetco abandoned a WW II-era mine and left behind a stew of uranium, arsenic and other chemicals. In 1994 the EPA determined that the site qualified for priority Superfund status but did not formally propose the listing until 2016. State regulators had first accused the Anaconda Mining Co. of discharging pollutants there in 1985. In 2018 the local Yerington Paiute Tribe fought against efforts to put the state and current owner Atlantic Richfield in charge of the cleanup, instead of the EPA.
(SSFC, 4/29/18, p.C11)
2001 Jan 1, The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians opened up Tahquitz Canyon near Palm Springs for visitors.
(SSFC, 3/11/01, p.T5)
2001 Feb 23, A US federal appeals court upheld that the US government mismanaged and neglected Native American trust funds.
(SFC, 2/24/01, p.A5)
2001 Mar 10, In Canada the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council of British Columbia signed a treaty with the federal government.
(SSFC, 3/11/01, p.D2)
2001 Jun 10, It was reported that Jamake Highwater, author and TV host, had recently died at age ~59. His over 30 books included "Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey" and "The Sun, He Dies."
(SSFC, 6/10/01, p.A27)
2002 Feb 7, The Cree tribe of northern Quebec under Ted Moses ratified an October deal that ensured 15,000 Cree of receiving no less than $3.5 billion over the next 50 years and a share in benefits derived from their lands.
(SFC, 2/9/02, p.A9)
2002 Feb 8, In Texas a $60 million casino run by the Tigua Indians was shut down following lobbying efforts by religious activist Ralph Reed and Washington lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon. Abramoff and Scanlon then persuaded the tribe to pay $4.2 million to lobby Congress to reopen it. Senate hearings on the process opened in 2004.
(SSFC, 9/26/04, p.A10)
2003 "The New World," a history of American Indians and their influence on the modern Western World by William E. Brandon (d.2002) was to be published.
(SFC, 5/31/02, p.A27)
2003 Elizabeth Seay authored "Searching For Lost City," a look at Native Indian languages in Oklahoma.
(WSJ, 11/28/03, p.W4)
2004 Jun 21, Five of 61 California Indian tribes signed gaming compacts setting standards for future negotiations. They agreed to higher payments in exchange for removing a cap of 2,000 slot machines per tribe.
(SFC, 6/21/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec, Cecilia Fire Thunder (58) took office as chairwoman of the 46,000 member Ogallala Sioux on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
(Econ, 1/29/05, p.32)
2005 Jan, Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Muscogee Indian, exhausted with yet another one of her relatives dying of diabetes, zoned in on fry bread as a culprit and whipped out a column for Indian Country Today declaring it junk food that leads to fat Indians.
(AP, 8/20/05)
2005 Apr 29, In Canada oil companies stopped all engineering work on a natural gas pipeline from the Arctic ocean to the oil sands of Alberta, due to high compensation demands by the Deh Cho First Nation native Indian tribe in Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories. The Deh Cho also sought a new autonomous government and complete ownership of subsurface rights within their 81,000 square mile claim, an area about the size of Nebraska.
(SFC, 5/23/05, p.A1)
2005 Apr, In Arizona the Hualapai Indian tribe began construction of the Skywalk, a glass overhang over the Grand Canyon, to be completed in March, 2007. The $30 million project was initiated by David Jin, a Las Vegas businessman from Shanghai, who planned to collect half of the $25 ticket sales.
(SFC, 12/15/06, p.A33)
2005 In southern California an archeological survey found the remains of a Native American man who died some 10,000 years ago on San Miguel, one of the state's five Channel Islands. In 2018 the remains of the Tuqan man were returned to San Miguel Island by the Santa Ynez Band of the Chumash Indians.
(SFC, 6/15/18, p.A5)
2006 Jan 12, In Palm Springs, Ca., Richard Milanovich, chairman of the Agua Caliente Ban of Cahuilla Indians, apologized to other tribal leaders for the scandal tied to Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He addressed tribal leaders on the 2nd day of a 3-day conference for casino-operating tribes. Abramoff and associates had collected some $66 million from 6 American Indian tribes seeking influence in Washington.
(SFC, 1/13/06, p.B14)
2006 Dec 7, The 3,300-member Seminole Tribe of Florida said it was buying the Hard Rock business in a $965 million deal with Rank Group PLC, a British casino and hotel company.
(SFC, 12/8/06, p.D2)
2006 Viking published “Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places," by Peter Nabokov.
(SSFC, 1/29/06, p.M2)
2007 Jul 16, The Canadian government agreed to disburse C$1.4 billion ($1.3 billion) in aid over 20 years to Quebec's 15,000 Cree to improve health, security and other services for the native Indians.
(Reuters, 7/16/07)
2007 Nov 26, A new study by the University of Michigan bolstered claims that Native Americans are descended from one migrant group that crossed a lost land link from modern Siberia to Alaska. The study examined genes of indigenous people from North to South America and from two Siberian groups.
(AFP, 11/27/07)
2008 Jun 11, Canada, addressing one of the darkest chapters in its history, formally apologized for forcing 150,000 aboriginal children into grim residential schools, where many said they were sexually and physically abused.
(Reuters, 6/12/08)
2008 Aug 7, A US federal judge ruled that American Indian plaintiffs were entitled to $455 million, a fraction of the $47 billion they sought in a year trial for alleged losses on royalties overseen by the Interior Department since 1887.
(SFC, 8/8/08, p.A6)
2008 Nov 28, This day was marked as Native American Heritage Day. US federal legislation set aside the day after Thanksgiving — for this year only — to honor the contributions American Indians have made to the US. Congress passed legislation this year designating the day as Native American Heritage Day, and President George W. Bush signed it last month.
(AP, 11/28/08)
2009 Aug 31, Florida’s Gov. Crist signed a 20-year gambling pact with the Seminole Indian tribe, which agreed to pay Florida $12.5 million a month for 30 months for running, currently illegal, slot machines and blackjack games.
(Econ, 9/5/09, p.40)
2009 Dec 3, The IRS auctioned 7,100 acres of Crow creek Sioux tribal land near Pierre, South Dakota to help pay off over $3 million in back taxes. The land sold for $2.6 million.
(SFC, 12/4/09, p.A15)
2009 Dec 8, The US government announced that it intends to pay $3.4 billion to settle claims that it has mismanaged the revenue in American Indian trust funds. The tentative settlement would resolve a 13-year-old lawsuit over hundreds of thousands of land trust accounts that date to the 19th century.
(SFC, 12/9/09, p.A6)
2010 Apr 6, Wilma Mankiller (64), the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation, died.
(Econ, 4/24/10, p.84)
2010 Apr 21, In Arizona the Havasupai Indian tribe ended a 7-year legal fight with Arizona State Univ. over blood samples members gave to university researchers for diabetes research that were also used to study schizophrenia, inbreeding and ancient population migration. Tribal members called it a case of genetic piracy.
(SFC, 4/22/10, p.A6)
2010 Nov 24, In California Rep. steve Cooley conceded defeat to Dem. Kamala Harris for the office of attorney general. Harris became the state’s first woman, the first African American and the first Indian American in California history to be elected as state attorney general.
(SFC, 11/25/10, p.A1)
2010 Dec 8, Pres. Obama signed legislation to pay American Indians and black farmers some $4.6 billion for government mistreatment over many decades. The legislation settled 4 long-standing Native American water rights in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana.
(SFC, 12/9/10, p.A18)
2011 Jun 20, A US federal judge agreed to a $3.4 billion settlement over mismanaged Indian royalties. The 15-year suit represents the largest ever approved against the US government. This followed a long campaign led by Elouise Cobell (d.2011) of Browning, Mo. Cash payment began to go out in Sep 2014.
(SFC, 6/21/11, p.A4)(SFC, 9/19/14, p.D3)
2011 Jun 26, In Oklahoma the Cherokee Nation election officials declared Bill John Baker as its new leader. He unseated 3-term incumbent Chad Smith by 11 of 15,000 votes.
(SFC, 6/27/11, p.A4)
2011 Aug 22, The Cherokee nation, the USA’s second-largest Indian tribe, formally booted from membership thousands of descendants of black slaves who were brought to Oklahoma more than 170 years ago by Native American owners.
(Reuters, 8/23/11)
2011 Sep 13, A federal order for one of the nation's largest American Indian tribes to restore voting rights and benefits to about 2,800 descendants of members' former slaves threw plans for a special election for a new Cherokee Nation chief into turmoil. The tribe said that it would not be dictated to by the US government over its move to banish African Americans from its citizenship rolls.
(AP, 9/13/11)(Reuters, 9/13/11)
2011 Oct 16, Elouise Cobell (b.1945), treasurer of the Black Feet tribe, died in Montana. She had tenaciously pursued a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating American Indians out of more than a century’s worth of royalties.
(SFC, 10/18/11, p.A6)
2011 Nov 14, It was reported that the Navajo Nation, the largest American Indian tribe, plans to issue its first bonds in a $120 million offering to finance some 50 projects on its 27,000-square-mile reservation in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
(SFC, 11/14/11, p.D4)
2011 Nov, The 685-member Fort Sill Apache won the right to establish a reservation on homelands in southern New Mexico. The US Interior Department approved a proclamation that awards the Fort Sill Apache 30 acres to establish a reservation near Deming.
(AP, 11/24/11)
2011 Dec 13, Pope Benedict XVI approved seven new saints for the Catholic Church, including Hawaii's Mother Marianne and a 17th-century Native American, Caterina Tekakwitha. Marianne cared for leprosy patients on Hawaii's Molokai peninsula in the late 1880s, soon after the death of Father Damien, who was canonized in 2009. Tekakwitha, who lived from 1656-1680 in the US and Canada, became the first Native American to be beatified in 1980.
(AP, 12/19/11)
2012 Feb 9, The Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota sued some of the world’s largest beer makers for $500 million claiming they knowingly contributed to alcohol-related problems on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
(SFC, 2/10/12, p.A14)
2012 Mar 29, In California the SF-based Save the Redwood League donated Four Corners, a 164-acre property in Mendocino County, to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, made up of local native Indian groups.
(SFC, 4/28/12, p.A6)
2012 Oct 12, The US Justice Dept. announced that it will allow members of federally recognized Indian tribes to possess eagle feathers.
(SFC, 10/13/12, p.A4)
2012 Oct 22, Russell Means (b.1939), Oglala Sioux leader of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, SD, died at his ranch in Porcupine, SD.
(SFC, 10/23/12, p.A7)
2012 Dec 8, In Porterville, Ca., Hector Celaya (31), a member of the Tule River Indian Reservation, went on a shooting rampage that left a daughter, his mother and her two brothers dead. The suspect died of a self-inflicted gunshot in a shootout with police.
(AP, 12/10/12)(SFC, 12/28/12, p.D5)
2012 David Treuer authored “Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life." The book centers on the Leech Lake Reservation of Minnesota.
(SSFC, 2/5/12, p.F1)
2013 Jan 5, In Canada aboriginal demonstrators disrupted passenger rail service on routes connecting Toronto with Ottawa and Montreal, a day after PM Harper agreed to meet with First Nations leaders to discuss grievances behind a growing native protest movement.
(Reuters, 1/5/13)
2013 Jan 8, A Canadian federal court ruled that 200,000 Metis and 400,000 First nations’ people living outside reserves should also be considered to be Indians under the constitution.
(Econ, 1/19/13, p.38)
2013 Jan 24, In Canada Theresa Spence, a chief from a remote Ontario reserve, agreed to end her hunger strike after talks with other native groups and opposition political parties. Spence traveled to Ottawa in December and set up camp on a small island in the Ottawa River to raise awareness about living conditions for natives across Canada.
(AP, 1/24/13)
2013 Apr 12, In France a contested auction of dozens of Native American tribal masks went ahead following a Paris court ruling, in spite of appeals for a delay by the Hopi tribe, its supporters including actor Robert Redford, and the US government.
(AP, 4/12/13)
2013 Nov 20, Members of Congress took part in a ceremony bestowing the Congressional Gold Medal to honor 33 tribes tribes for their WWI and WWII contributions as code talkers. Today’s ceremony was for tribes not included in the initial 2008 Gold Medal awards.
(SFC, 11/21/13, p.A5)
2013 Dec 9, A Paris auction of sacred objects from the Hopi and San Carlos Apache Native American tribes kicked off despite objections from the US and activists. The auction fetched more than 550,000 euros. On Dec 11 a US charitable foundation said that it was the anonymous bidder that paid $530,000 for 24 Native American masks in the auction and will return them to the Hopi Nation in Arizona and the San Carlos Apache tribe
(AFP, 12/9/13)(AFP, 12/10/13)(AP, 12/11/13)
2013 Dec 20, Wyoming Governor Matt Mead said his state will challenge a US government ruling that more than one million acres of the western state's land still legally belongs to two Native American tribes.
(Reuters, 12/21/13)
2014 Feb 20, In northern California Cherie Lash Rhoades (44), a member of the Cedarville Rancheria tribe, killed 4 people at the tribe’s headquarters, including 3 members of her own family. She was recently ousted as chairwoman of the tribe and was under investigation over at least $50,000 in missing federal grants. The tribe had just 35 members and owned 26 acres in the area.
(SFC, 2/22/14, p.C3)
2014 Feb, In New Mexico Wilson Joe Chiquito (75) was beaten to death at his home in the Navajo community of Counselor. In 2020 the FBI issued its first poster in a Native American language seeking information on the death of Chiquito.
(https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/wilson-joe-chiquito)(SFC, 4/14/20, p.A3)
2014 May 1, The Navajo Nation and a group led by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and actor Robert Redford said they have agreed on a plan to manage thousands of wild horses on the Navajo reservation and keep the animals from being slaughtered.
(SFC, 5/2/14, p.A7)
2014 Jun 13, Pres. Obama spoke at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota promoting the need to help reservations create jobs. Some 63% of able workers at Standing Rock were unemployed. The 2.3 million-acre reservation was home to some 850 residents.
(SFC, 6/14/14, p.A4)
2014 Jun 26, Canada's Supreme Court recognized native groups' rights over a large swathe of land for the first time in western British Columbia province. The landmark ruling in favor of the semi-nomadic Tsilhqot'in people -- numbering about 3,000 -- could have an impact on similar Native American claims currently pending in court.
(AFP, 6/27/14)
2014 Jul 22, In northern California federal and state agencies launched Operation Yurok on and around Yurok reservation land in Humboldt County that had been taken over by marijuana growers.
(SFC, 7/23/14, p.E2)
2014 Sep 26, In Arizona the Navajo Nation held a signing ceremony for a $554 milion settlement of a 2006 lawsuit over federal government mismanagement of tribal resources.
(SFC, 9/26/14, p.A6)
2014 Nov 13, The US Government Accountability Office said federally run schools for American Indian children have misspent millions of dollars. The Bureau of Indian Education fun by the Interior Dept. overseas some 180 schools for about 41,000 students.
(SFC, 11/13/14, p.A11)
2015 Dec 8, John Trudell (b.1946), American Indian activist and poet, died at his home in Santa Clara County, Ca. In 1969 he was the spokesman for the American Indians who had occupied Alcatraz.
(SFC, 12/10/15, p.D8)
2016 Jan, In South Dakota the Flandreau Santee Siouz, amid fears of a federal raid, destroyed their crop of marijuana abandoning a scheme to develop the nation’s first marijuana resort.
(SFC, 8/4/16, p.A5)
2016 May 3, In New Mexico the body of Ashlynne Mike (11) was found after she and her brother were kidnapped a day earlier near San Juan in the Navajo Nation. Suspect Tom Begaye (27) was soon arrested and faced murder charges.
(http://tinyurl.com/j848mxx)(SFC, 5/7/16, p.A6)
2016 May 17, It was reported that an epidemic of crystal meth addiction on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana has led to sex trafficking amidst poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence. A federal Drug Enforcement Administration report has said number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages.
(Reuters, 5/17/16)
2016 Apr 3, Joseph Medicine Crow (102), last war chief of the Crow tribe, died. He was awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 2009.
(Econ, 4/16/16, p.78)
2016 Jul 19, The US government announced a settlement with the Navajo Nation that will clear the way for cleanup work to continue at abandoned uranium mines in the four corners area.
(SFC, 7/20/16, p.A6)
2016 Nov 18, Kelcy Warren, CEO of Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, said that the Dakota Access oil pipeline won’t be rerouted, but that he would like to meet with the head of an American Indian tribe to try to ease its concerns about the project.
(SFC, 11/19/16, p.A7)
2016 Dec 4, The US Army Corps of Engineers turned down the request for an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline to build under the Missouri River, after months of protests from Native American and climate activists. ETP said it will continue to fight for the line.
(Reuters, 12/5/16)
2016 Dec 9, The Cherokee Nation’s attorney general legalized same-sex marriage for the tribe saying parts of a 2004 tribal law violated the Cherokee Constitution.
(SFC, 12/13/16, p.A5)
2016 Dec 26, In Rhode Island the occupation of a tribal government building by a faction of the Narragansett tribe entered its seventh day. Occupiers included council members who impeached Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas and want him to step down.
(SFC, 12/27/16, p.A6)
2017 Jan 11, Arthur Manuel (b.1951), a leader of Canada’s indigenous “First Nations," died.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.78)
2017 Feb 9, The Native American Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a last-ditch legal challenge to block the $3.8 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline project after the company constructing it won federal permission to tunnel under the Missouri River.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Apr 20, The Cherokee Nation sued distributors and retailers of opioid medications for contributing to an epidemic of opioid abuse in the 14 Oklahoma counties that comprise the Cherokee Nation.
(SFC, 4/21/17, p.A5)
2017 Jun 5, Zachary Bearheels (29) a mentally ill Native American from Oklahoma, died after being shocked 12 times with a Taser, punched and dragged by his hair by two Omaha police officers, both of whom are black. Officer Ryan McClarty was soon ticketed for misdemeanor assault.
(http://newsok.com/article/5557719)(SFC, 7/29/17, p.A5)
2017 Oct 29, Dennis Banks, a co-founder of the American Indian Movement, died in Minnesota. Banks was also a leader of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation.
(SFC, 10/31/17, p.C3)
2018 Sep 12, The San Francisco Board of Appeals voted unanimously for the removal of the "Early Days" statue in the Civic Center. The statue depicting a vaquero and a missionary standing over a fallen American Indian was one of five that make up 800-ton Pioneer Monument shrine.
(SFC, 9/13/18, p.A11)
2018 Sep 27, US Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke said 76 people have been arrested over the last few weeks on drug charges in a sweep of traffickers on reservation land in western North Carolina of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
(AP, 9/28/18)
2018 Nov 6, In Kansas, Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland became the first Native American women elected to Congress.
(AFP, 11/7/18)
2018 Dec 20, A report by the US Commission on Civil Rights said that funding for Native American tribes are woefully inadequate.
(SFC, 12/21/18, p.A6)
2019 Jun 3, A Canadian government report said the deaths of more than a thousand aboriginal women and girls in recent decades was a national genocide.
(Reuters, 6/3/19)
2019 Jun 18, California's Gov. Gavin Newsom formally apologized for the state's role in the "systemic slaughter" of Native Americans.
(SFC, 6/19/19, p.C6)
2019 Jul 26, The US Bureau of Land Management announced a plan to allow off-road vehicles access to archaeologically sensitive land at Utah's Bears Ears National Monument that houses sacred tribal sites.
(AP, 7/26/19)
2019 Jul 26, In North Dakota the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, at the center of tumultuous protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, unveiled a solar farm that came about partly due to the tribe's fierce opposition to the oil pipeline's environmental impact.
(AP, 7/26/19)
2019 Oct 14, A handful of US states celebrated their first Indigenous Peoples' Day as part of a trend to move away from a day honoring Christopher Columbus. Native American advocates have pressed states for the change since 1992.
(SFC, 10/15/19, p.A5)
2019 Oct 24, In Florida the 450-foot Guitar Hotel held its grand opening on Seminole land in Hollywood, once only a trailer park and some smoke shops. At night beams of light will mimic the strings of the guitar shaped structure. It's the latest step in the Seminole Hard Rock empire, which includes naming rights on the Miami-area stadium where the 2020 Super Bowl will be played.
(AP, 10/25/19)
2019 Nov 3, In New Mexico two people died overnight and 14 others were injured during a traditional religious ceremony on the Alamo Navajo Reservation in Socorro County.
(AP, 11/6/19)
2019 Nov 18, In Arizona the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station, one of the largest in the West, was shut down after serving customers for nearly 50 years.
(SFC, 11/19/19, p.A10)
2019 Nov 26, Pres. Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a White House task force on missing and slain American Indians and Alaska Natives.
(SFC, 11/27/19, p.A5)
2019 Dec 31, Three of the most powerful tribes in Oklahoma filed a federal lawsuit against state Gov. Kevin Stitt, asking the court to help resolve a dispute over gambling at tribal casinos. Stitt contends the gaming compacts expire on Jan. 1 and that casino gambling after that date will be illegal. Stitt has signaled he wants to renegotiate the compacts to give the state a larger slice of revenue.
(AP, 12/31/19)
2020 Feb 22, In New York a leadership dispute within the Cayuga Indian Nation took a stunning turn when nation leader Clint Halftown sent bulldozers to demolish a working daycare center, store, schoolhouse and other buildings controlled by tribe members who oppose his authority. The anti-Halftown Unity Council in 2014 claimed control of some of the buildings that were destroyed.
(AP, 2/25/20)
2020 Feb 24, In eastern Canada police moved in morning to clear a rail blockade by an indigenous group that had been stopping freight and passenger traffic for more than two weeks on one of the country's busiest lines. The Tyendinaga Mohawk campaigners had barricaded the line in solidarity with a British Columbia aboriginal band seeking to stop construction of a gas pipeline over its land.
(Reuters, 2/24/20)
2020 Mar 27, The US federal Bureau of Indian Affairs informed that Mashpee Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts that it will be rescinding its reservation designation for more than 300 acres removing the land from federal trust. A court in June rescinded the order saying the move was arbitrary.
(SFC, 3/31/20, p.A4)(SFC, 6/8/20, p.A3)
2020 Apr 8, In New Mexico the death toll from the coronavirus was 16. On the Navajo Nation's reservation in the state the death toll reached 20.
(SFC, 4/10/20, p.A5)
2020 May 5, The US Treasury Department said it will begin distributing $4.8 billion in pandemic-relief funds today to Native American tribal governments in all US states. A newly revised coronavirus mortality model predicts nearly 135,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by early August, almost double previous projections.
(Reuters, 5/5/20)
2020 May 18, The Navajo Nation, spanning across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, reported 69 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the total to 4,071.
(Good Morning America, 5/19/20)
2020 Jul 9, The US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a large chunk of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation, a decision that state and federal officials have warned could throw Oklahoma into chaos.
(AP, 7/9/20)
2020 Jul 10, The Navajo Nation, spanning parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, began a weekend shutdown as the death from the coronavirus rose to 396 with nearly 8,100 cases.
(SFC, 7/13/20, p.A6)
2020 Aug 7, The Crow Tribe in Montana ordered its members to lock down for two weeks beginning today as tribal leaders moved to slow a sharp spike in coronavirus cases and deaths on yet another reservation in the country.
(AP, 8/7/20)
2020 Aug 20, The Kansas City Chiefs said that after speaking with "a group of local leaders from diverse American Indian backgrounds and experiences," the team has decided to prohibit fans from donning headdresses or Native American-themed face paint at Arrowhead Stadium home games.
(The Week, 8/20/20)
2020 Oct 23, In South Dakota the Oglala Sioux Tribe ordered a one-week lockdown of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in response to a surging number of COVID-19 cases in the state.
(AP, 10/24/20)
2020 Nov 25, It was reported that the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska is creating the nation's largest tribal national park (444 acres) on a forested bluff overlooking the Missouri River and a historic site of its people. The new Ioway Tribal National Park will overlook a historic trading village where the Ioway people bartered for buffalo hides and pipestones with other tribes during the 13th to 15th centuries.
(AP, 11/25/20)
2020 Dec 21, Hank Adams (77), one of Indian Country’s most prolific thinkers and strategists, died at St. Peter’s Hospital in Olympia, Washington. Adams was involved with nearly every major event in American Indian history from the 1960s forward.
(AP, 12/24/20)
2021 Feb 12, A US federal judge has rejected a request from a group of Apaches to keep the US Forest Service from transferring a parcel of land to a copper mining company in eastern Arizona. The land known as Oak Flat is set to be transferred to Resolution Copper by March 16.
(AP, 2/12/21)
2021 Feb 26, The Chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador (AFNQL), gathered in a virtual assembly, unanimously voted a resolution to adopt Joyce's Principle. Inspired by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this Principle aims to guarantee all Indigenous peoples the right of equitable access, without any discrimination, to all health and social services, as well as the right to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
(Cision, 3/1/21)
2021 Mar 15, The US Senate confirmed New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland as interior secretary, making her the first Native American to lead a Cabinet department and the first to lead the federal agency that has wielded influence over the nation's tribes for nearly two centuries.
(SFC, 3/16/21, p.A3)
2021 Apr 9, The Navajo Nation issued a stay-at-home order for the weekend after reporting 26 more confirmed COVID-19 cases. The current death toll stood at 1,260.
(AP, 4/9/21)
2021 Apr 23, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that the descendants of the US-based Sinixt nation maintained ancestral land rights even after members moved south in the 19th century, a landmark decision that ends a decade-long legal dispute.
(Reuters, 4/23/21)
2021 May 22, CNN said it has "parted ways" with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). Santorum had recently come under fire for comments he made about Native Americans during a speech to a conservative youth group in April: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here."
(CNN, 5/22/21)
2021 May 29, In Canada the remains of 215 children, some as young as 3 years old, have been found buried on the site of what was once the country's largest Indigenous residential school. The Kamloops in British Columbia school operated between 1890 and 1969, when the federal government took over operations from the Catholic Church and operated it as a day school until it closed in 1978.
(AP, 5/29/21)
2021 Jun 1, The US Supreme Court endorsed Native American tribal police powers, backing the authority of a tribal officer in Montana to stop and search a non-Native American motorist on a public road on reservation land.
(Reuters, 6/1/21)
2021 Jun 5, Leonard Crow Dog (78), a Native American who played a key rold in the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, died in Rapid City, South Dakota. He He had fought to preserve the ancient traditions of his tribe, the Sicangu Lakota.
(SFC, 6/25/21, p.B7)
2021 Jun 24, In Canada an Indigenous group said the remains of as many as 751 people, mainly children, had been found in unmarked graves on the site of a former boarding school in Saskatchewan.
(NY Times, 6/24/21)
2021 Jun 30, A Canadian Indigenous group said a search near, using ground-penetrating radar has found 182 human remains in unmarked graves at a site near a former Catholic Church-run residential school that housed Indigenous children taken from their families near Cranbrook, British Columbia.
(AP, 6/30/21)
2021 Sep 24, The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops officially apologized for their role in the country's notorious residential school system for the first time, after refusing to do so for years despite public pressure.
(Reuters, 9/24/21)
2021 Sep 25, Marie Wilcox (87), guardian of the Wukchumni language, died. She had produced the first known dictionary of the the central California native language.
(SSFC, 10/10/21, p.F8)
2021 Sep 28, It was announced that the three largest US drug distributors will pay more than $75 million to resolve claims they fueled an opioid epidemic in the Cherokee Nation's territory in Oklahoma, marking the first settlement with a tribal government in the litigation over the US addiction crisis.
(Reuters, 9/28/21)
2021 Oct 8, President Joe Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, lending the most significant boost yet to efforts to refocus the federal holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus toward an appreciation of native peoples. Biden also issued a proclamation of Columbus Day, Oct. 11, which is established by Congress.
(AP, 10/8/21)
2021 Nov 19, US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland declared “squaw" to be a derogatory term and said she is taking steps to remove the term from federal government use and to replace other derogatory place names.
(AP, 11/19/21)
2021 Nov 25, Members of Native American tribes gathered in Plymouth, Mass., to mourn Indigenous people worldwide who have suffered centuries of racism and mistreatment in a tradition that began in 1970.
(SFC, 11/26/21, p.A8)
2021 Dec 10, In Canada David Lametti, Minister of Justice and Attorney General launched a consultation, cooperation and engagement process with Indigenous peoples to advance implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.
(CNW Group, 12/10/21)
2021 Dec 12, It was reported that that a federal panel has approved renaming Squaw Mountain in Colorado to Mestaa'ehehe Mountain, after a Cheyenne woman who facilitated relations between white settlers and Native American tribes in the early 19th century.
(SSFC, 12/12/21, p.A18)
2021 Dec 13, Officials said Canada is setting aside C$40 billion ($31.2 billion) to compensate Indigenous children and families in foster care for suffering discrimination, and will start paying out once a protracted lawsuit is settled.
(Reuters, 12/13/21)
2021 Dec 22, A Canadian court approved a settlement in which the government would need to commit at least C$6 billion ($4.68 billion) for safe drinking water infrastructure for First Nations and pay C$1.5 billion in compensation for individuals deprived of clean drinking water.
(Reuters, 12/23/21)
2021 Dec, In California the Save the Redwoods League donated 523 acres of redwood forestland in Mendocino County to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council for stewardship.
(SFC, 1/26/22, p.A8)
2022 Jan 4, The Canadian government announced that it had reached what it called the largest settlement in Canada’s history, paying $31.5 billion to fix the nation’s discriminatory child welfare system and compensate the Indigenous people harmed by it.
(NY Times, 1/4/22)
2022 Jan 11, Clyde Bellecourt (85), a co-founder of the American Indian Movement (1968), died at his home in Minneapolis, Minn.
(SSFC, 1/16/22, p.F9)
2022 Feb 1, Hundreds of Native American tribes agreed to a tentative settlement of $590 million with Johnson & Johnson and the country's three largest drug distributors.
(SFC, 2/2/22, p.A9)
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21000BC-18000BC In 2008 researchers reported that DNA evidence indicated that 95% of native Americans had descended from 6 women of this period. It was believed that the women had lived in Beringia, a land bridge that stretched from Asia to North America during this time.
(SFC, 3/14/08, p.A12)
12300BC In 2008 scientists reported that fossilized human feces found in 8 caves near Paisley, Ore., dated to about this time. The coprolites contained DNA with characteristics matching those of living Amerindians.
(SFC, 4/4/08, p.A4)(Econ, 4/5/08, p.84)
10300 BC In 2021 it was reported that scientists have unearthed evidence of a milestone in human culture, the earliest-known use of tobacco, in the remnants of a hearth built by early inhabitants of North America's interior about this time in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert. Until then, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago.
(Reuters, 10/11/21)
8024BC In 1976 scientists in southern California scientists unearthed skeletal remains dating to about this time and among the oldest ever found in the Western Hemisphere.
(AP, 1/15/12)
6500 BC A skeleton of about this age was found in July, 1996, by the Columbia River in Kennewick, Wa. It became known as the "Kennewick Man" or "Richland Man." The 9,200 year old bones were later studied and determined to be most closely related to Asian people, particularly the Ainu of northern Japan. It was concluded in 2000 that he was an American Indian. The bones were dated to 7514-7324 BC. DNA testing in 2015 showed a close relationship to at least one Native American population in Washington and dated him to about 6,500BC.
(SFC, 10/16/99, p.A11)(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A7)(SFC, 9/26/00, p.A5)(Econ, 7/16/05, p.76)(SFC, 6/19/15, p.A18)
6000BC The Wappo Indians settle in the area northern California around Mt. Konocti 8,000 years ago. The eruption of Mt. Konocti millions of years earlier left a fissure in the earth through which ground water reaches the hot magma at 4,000 feet, and resurfaces as Indian Springs’ three thermal geysers at 212 degrees. The water rises through old sea beds adding rich mineral and salt traces.
(Flyer on Indian Springs, 7/95)
c6000BC The Hokan Indians preceded the Miwoks in Northern California.
(SFEC, 10/4/98, p.B5)
4500BC In 2014 San Francisco construction workers discovered human remains at the site of the new Transbay Transit Center that dated to about this time.
(SFC, 10/21/14, p.D1)
3000BC Excavations for the SF Civic Center BART Station in 1969 unearthed a female skeleton that dated back to about this time.
(SFC, 8/3/13, p.C3)
1500BC The Basketmaker culture of the Ancient Pueblo People began about this time and continued until about AD 500 with the beginning of the Pueblo I Era. In 2014 archeologists discovered an ancient village built during the Basketmaker period with 50-70 pit houses organized in rings on about 66 acres Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.
(SFC, 10/11/14, p.A8)
200-1215 The Fremont people lived in Utah and etched into rock designs of animals and people.
(SFEC, 3/14/99, p.T8,9)
c300-1300 The Anasazis inhabited the Canyon de Chelly and the Canyon del Muerto in northeast Arizona over this period.
(SFEC, 11/29/98, p.T8)
500 The northern California Emeryville Shellmound, CA-Ala 309, dates to about this time.
(Buckeye, Winter 04/05)
500-700 Evidence in 2005 suggested that Polynesians visited California during this period and transferred their canoe building technology to the local Chumash and Gabrielino Indians.
(SFC, 6/20/05, p.A5)
c600-1300 Pueblo Indians built their Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde (Colorado).
(SFC, 7/25/00, p.A3)
750 Native peoples in southwest Colorado started building stone houses above ground, first one-story, then two. Ruins of these are scattered over the landscape and have the look of ones the Pueblo Indians-Hopi, Zuni and others of the Southwest live in today. They added beans, an important source of protein, to their diets, and began making simple grayware pots. They had bows and arrows.
(HN, 2/11/97)
800 Ohlone Indians occupied the cliffs near Mussel Rock, later Daly City, Ca., beginning from about this time.
(http://tinyurl.com/6sn59u9)
c1000 The Cahokia settlement in Southern Illinois numbered about 30,000.
(SFC, 3/20/99, p.B4)
c1000 In Montana polychromatic rock drawings were made at Weatherman Draw, also known as the Valley of the Chiefs.
(SFC, 6/22/01, p.A7)
1000-1400 Indians inhabited an area at the junction of 2 creeks between Walnut Creek and Lafayette, Ca. A burial site was found there in 1904. In 2004 some 80 sets of human remains was found during the construction of the Hidden Oaks housing development.
(SFC, 6/22/04, p.A1)
1050 An Anasazi trade center in New Mexico offered pottery, turquoise and buffalo meat.
(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R49)
c1150 A group of Anasazi villages in southwest Colorado were suddenly abandoned during a period of severe drought. In 2000 evidence showed that a raiding party had swept through the area, killed the inhabitants and ate their flesh.
(SFC, 9/6/00, p.A3)
1170 Madoc, a Welsh prince, is reputed to have discovered America. Many believe that he and his followers initially settled in the Georgia/Tennessee/ Kentucky area, eventually moving to the Upper Missouri, where they were assimilated into a tribe of the Mandans. New evidence is also emerging about a small band of Madoc's followers who remained in the Ohio area and are called “White Madoc."
(www.madoc1170.com/home.htm)
1200 The Anasazi in southwest Colorado began building their cliff dwellings. Population was thriving. They were making corrugated pottery and handsomely decorated black and white pottery.
(HN, 2/11/97)
1250 The Anasazi in southwest Colorado fought a battle against unknown enemies. Number of kivas built greatly increased. Quality of workmanship in building decreased. People began to leave.
(HN, 2/11/97)
c1275 Indian settlers built a town called Atsina on top of El Morro (New Mexico).
(SSFC, 4/10/05, p.F9)
1280 By this time the Anasazi Indian culture of the American southwest, 15 to 20 thousand people, disappeared from the Four Corners region. All the Anasazi were gone from Mesa Verde. They probably moved south and broke up into present-day Pueblo tribes. Anasazi means enemy ancestors in Navajo. In 2017 DNA evidence revealed that the cliff-dwelling people had raised turkeys and migrated with them to the Rio Grande valley of northern New Mexico during a devastating drought.
(SFC, 5/19/96, T-1)(HN, 2/11/97)(AM, 9/01, p.44)(SFC, 3/17/17, p.A8)
1300 The Arapaho and Cheyenne Indian Nations settled the Colorado area about this time.
(Time, 1990s Almanac CD)
c1300 The Mississippian people, the largest pre-Columbian culture north of Mexico, built the earthen city of Cahokia about this time. The site, discovered in southwestern Illinois, probably served as a religious center and may have had a population of up to 80,000. The Mississippians arose around 800 AD and remained a powerful influence until about the time of the first European explorers. The loose-knit theocracy held sway over much of present-day Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio and, not surprisingly, Mississippi. They also had settlements extending sporadically into the upper Midwest and across the western plains. The largest of the earthen mounds at Cahokia, called Monks Mound, is 700 feet wide, 100 feet tall and 1000 feet long--representing a colossal public works program and a government stable enough to order the construction.
(HNQ, 1/29/01)
1350 The Fremont Indians, who had lived in Utah’s Range Creek Canyon since about 200, disappeared from the archeological record.
(WSJ, 1/31/06, p.B6)(Sm, 3/06, p.74)
1494 Feb 2, Columbus began the practice using Indians as slaves.
(HN, 2/2/01)
1500-1530 The so-called Mantle site, a settlement on the North shore of Lake Ontario, was occupied by the Wendat (Huron). Excavations at the site, between 2003 and 2005, uncovered its 98 longhouses, a palisade of three rows (a fence made of heavy wooden stakes and used for defense) and about 200,000 artifacts. Scientists estimate between 1,500 and 1,800 individuals inhabited the site.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_Site,_Wendat_%28Huron%29_Ancestral_Village)
1520 Jul 14, Hernando Cortes fought the Aztecs at the Battle of Otumba, Mexico.
(MC, 7/14/02)
1541 May 8, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto discovered and crossed the Mississippi River, which he called Rio de Espiritu Santo. He encountered the Cherokee Indians, who numbered about 25,000 and inhabited the area from the Ohio River to the north to the Chattahoochee in present day Georgia, and from the valley of the Tennessee east across the Great Smoky Mountains to the Piedmont of the Carolinas.
(NG, 5/95, p.78)(AP, 5/8/97)(HN, 5/8/99)
1542 Nov 22, New laws were passed in Spain giving protection against the enslavement of Indians in America.
(HN, 11/22/98)
1542-1834 The native population of California dropped during this period from about 350,000 to 150,000 due to European diseases, abuse and suicides.
(SSFC, 11/28/21, p.J1)
1559 Aug 14, Spanish explorer Tristan de Luna entered Pensacola Bay, Florida. 1,500 Spanish settlers sailed from Vera Cruz to found a settlement on Pensacola Bay in Florida, but were repulsed by hostile Indians. The location of the Spanish settlement founded in the area of Pensacola, Fl., remained a mystery until 2016 when amateur archaeologist Tom Garner stumbled upon some shards of 16th century Spanish pottery.
(HN, 8/14/98)(TL-MB, 1988, p.19)(AP, 3/24/06)
1565 Sep 20, A Spanish fleet under Pedro Menendez de Aviles wiped out some 350 Frenchmen at Fort Caroline, in Florida. Spanish forces under Pedro Menendez massacred a band of French Huguenots that posed a potential threat to Spanish hegemony in the area. They also took advantage of the local Timucuan Indian tribe. Artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues managed to escape and return to France, where he painted watercolors depicting the local botany. His alleged paintings of Indians living nearby were later thrown into question.
(WSJ, 8/3/95, p.A-8)(Arch, 1/05, p.47)(WSJ, 7/18/08, p.W8)(Arch, 5/05, p.31)(Arch, 1/06, p.25)
1566 Spanish conquistador Juan Pardo arrived the Spanish settlement at Santa Elena, on what later became known as Parris Island, South Carolina. He marched into the interior and founded Fort San Juan next to a Catawba town called Joara. Fort San Juan was burned down by the Catawba after about 18 months. Santa Elena was the first capital of Spanish colonial Florida.
{Spain}
(Sm, 3/06, p.33)(SFC, 7/27/16, p.A6)
1571 Feb 2, All eight members of a Jesuit mission in Virginia were murdered by Indians who pretended to be their friends.
(HN, 2/2/99)
1571 Feb 9, Algonquin Indians attacked the Jesuit mission on the Virginia peninsula killing Fr. Juan Bautista de Segura and 4 other remaining priests.
(AH, 2/06, p.15)
1604 Jun 26, French explorer Samuel de Champlain, Pierre Dugua and 77 others landed on the island of St. Croix and made friends with the native Passamaquoddy Indians. It later became part of Maine on the US-Canadian border.
(PacDis, Spring/'94, p. 43)(SSFC, 6/20/04, p.D10)
1607 May 24, Captain Christopher Newport and 105 followers founded the colony of Jamestown on the mouth of the James River in Virginia. They had left England with 144 members, 39 died on the way over. The colony was near the large Indian village of Werowocomoco, home of Pocahontas, the daughter Powhatan, an Algonquin chief. In 2003 archeologists believed that they had found the site of the village. [see May 13-14]
(HN, 5/24/99)(SFC, 5/7/03, p.A2)
1607 May 26, Some 200 Indian warriors stormed the unfinished stockade at Jamestown, Va. 2 settlers were killed and 10 seriously wounded before they were repulsed by cannon fire from the colonists’ 3 moored ships.
(ON, 2/07, p.7)
1607 Jun 15, Colonists in North America completed James Fort in Jamestown. Hostilities with the Indians ended as ambassadors said their emperor, Powhatan, had commanded local chiefs to live in peace with the English.
(HN, 6/15/98)(ON, 2/07, p.7)
1608 Jan, John Smith met with the Indian emperor Powhatan at Werocomoco on the Pamunkey River. He studied the Powhattan language and culture. The Powhattans were an aggressive tribe and under Chief Powhatan’s leadership, they had conquered and subjugated more than 20 other tribes. Pocahontas was a Powhattan Indian girl of 10-11 years when she new Smith in Virginia. Records of the colony were kept by William Strachey, its official historian. The Powhattans were an aggressive tribe and under Chief Powhattan’s leadership, they conquered and subjugated more than 20 other tribes. Before coming to Virginia, John Smith had served as a mercenary in Hungary and was wounded, captured and sold into slavery by his Turkish adversaries; he escaped by killing his owner.
(WSJ, 6/13/95, p.A-18)(ON, 2/07, p.8)
1613 The colonists at Jamestown kidnapped Pocahontas and held for ransom to force her father to free some English hostages and to return some stolen tools.
(ON, 2/07, p.9)
1614 Apr 5, American Indian princess Pocahontas (d.1617) married English Jamestown colonist John Rolfe in Virginia. Having converted to Christianity, she went by the name Lady Rebecca. Their marriage brought a temporary peace between the English settlers and the Algonquians.
(HN, 5/5/97)(SFEC, 10/15/00, p.T12)(AP, 4/5/08)
1616 In a letter to Queen Anne, Capt. John Smith recalled that Pocahontas had saved the colony at Jamestown from "death, famine, and utter confusion."
(WSJ, 6/13/95, p.A-18)
1616 American Indian princess Pocahontas and her husband, Jamestown colonist John Rolfe, sailed to England with their infant son.
(ON, 2/07, p.9)
1617 Jan 6, Pocahontas, American Indian princess, attended a court masque with King James I and Queen Anne.
(ON, 2/07, p.9)
1616 Jan 20, The French explorer Samuel de Champlain arrived to winter in a Huron Indian village after being wounded in a battle with Iroquois in New France.
(HN, 1/20/99)
1616-1619 An epidemic, possibly viral hepatitis from contact with Europeans, ravaged the Wampanoag confederacy in Massachusetts. The Great Dying helped to make possible the Pilgrim settlement in 1620.
(Econ, 8/11/07, p.49)(AP, 7/8/21)
1617 Mar 21, Pocahontas (Rebecca Rolfe) was buried at the parish church of St. George in Gravesend, England. As Pocahontas and John Rolfe prepared to sail back to Virginia, she died reportedly of either small pox or pneumonia. In 2003 Paula Gunn Allen authored "Pocahontas "Medicine Woman, Spy, entrepreneur, Diplomat."
(AP, 4/5/97)(HN, 5/5/97)(SFEC, 10/15/00, p.T12)(HN, 3/21/01)(SSFC, 10/19/03, p.M5)
1621 Oct, The first American Thanksgiving was held in Massachusetts' Plymouth colony in 1621 to give thanks for a bountiful harvest. 51 Pilgrims served codfish, sea bass and turkeys while their 90 Wampanoag guests contributed venison to the feast. After the survival of their first colony through a bitter winter and the subsequent gathering of the harvest in the autumn, Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford issued a thanksgiving proclamation. During the three-day October thanksgiving the Pilgrims feasted on wild turkey and venison with their Native American guests. American Indians introduced cranberries to the white settlers. In 2006 Godfrey Hodgson, British historian, authored “A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving." Hodgson said that there were no turkeys in the region.
(SSFC, 11/16/03, p.C11)(Econ, 12/18/04, p.122)(SSFC, 11/12/06, p.M1)
1622 Mar 22, The Powhattan Confederacy massacred 350 colonists in Virginia, a quarter of the population. On Good Friday more than 300 colonists in and around Jamestown, Virginia, were massacred by the Powhattan Indians. The massacre was led by the Powhattan chief Opechancanough and began a costly 22-year war against the English. Opechancanough hoped that killing one quarter of Virginia’s colonists would put an end to the European threat. The result of the massacre was just the opposite, however, as English survivors regrouped and pushed the Powhattans far into the interior. Opechancanough launched his final campaign in 1644, when he was nearly 100 years old and almost totally blind. He was then captured and executed.
(WSJ, 10/19/98, p.A24)(HNPD, 10/23/98)
1623 Miles Standish and his men killed Wituwamat and other members of the Neponset Band of the Massachusett Tribe because Standish suspected Wituwamat of plotting against the fledgling English colony. Wituwamat was beheaded and his head displayed atop Plymouth Colony’s meetinghouse as a warning. In 2021 the Native American Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag called on Boston University to change the name of a dorm that honors Myles Standish, the military leader of the Pilgrims.
(AP, 9/21/21)
1626 May 4, Dutch explorer Peter Minuit (~1594-1638), director-general of New Netherlands, bought Manhattan Island for 60 guilders (about $24 in 1839 dollars) worth of cloth and buttons. Minuit conducted the transaction with Seyseys, chief of the Canarsees, who were only too happy to accept valuable merchandise in exchange for an island that was actually mostly controlled by the Weckquaesgeeks. The Sixty guilders were valued at approximately $1,060 in 2013. The site of the deal was later marked by Peter Minuit Plaza at South Street and Whitehall Street.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Minuit)(AP, 5/4/97)(HN, 5/4/98)(WSJ, 11/19/99, p.W10)
1628 May 1, A May festival in Quincy, Mass., degenerated into an orgy with Indian women.
(MC, 5/1/02)
1630 Feb 22, Indians introduced pilgrims to popcorn at Thanksgiving.
(MC, 2/22/02)
1630 Jul 12, New Amsterdam's governor bought Gull Island from Indians for cargo and renamed it Oyster Island. It later became Ellis Island.
(MC, 7/12/02)
1632 The French explorer Etienne Brule was killed by the Huron Indians for unknown reasons.
(HNQ, 6/29/98)
1636 Jun, Roger Williams founded Providence, Rhode Island, on land purchased from the Narragansett Indians.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence,_Rhode_Island)
1636 Jul 20, John Oldham, trader in Mass., was murdered by Indians.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1637 May 26, The Connecticut English militia and their Mohegan allies killed over 600 Pequot Indians at their village at Mystic. The survivors were parceled out to other tribes. Those given to the Mohegans eventually became the Mashantucket Pequots.
(AH, 6/07, p.18)(www.dowdgen.com/dowd/document/pequots.html)
1642 Feb 25, Dutch settlers slaughtered lower Hudson Valley Indians in New Netherland, North America, who sought refuge from Mohawk attackers.
(HN, 2/25/99)
1643 Roger Williams of Providence, Rhode Island, published “A Key into the Language of America," a dictionary of the Narragansett Indian language and a commentary on the culture and customs of the southern New England Indians. The work was printed in England by Gregory Dexter.
(AH, 4/07, p.27)
1645 Aug 9, Settlers in New Amsterdam gained peace with the Indians after conducting talks with the Mohawks.
(HN, 8/9/98)
1646 Oct 28, The 1st Protestant church assembly for Indians took place in Massachusetts.
(MC, 10/28/01)
1646 A treaty with Virginia Indians required the state to protect the Mattaponi from "enemies," but only on the reservation in King William County. The peace treaty unraveled the powerful confederation of local Indian tribes and large amounts of land were ceded to English settlers.
(SFC, 6/4/97, p.A7)(AH, 6/07, p.27)
1649 Iroquois attacks and starvation decimated the Huron nation from some 12,000 to a few hundred.
(AH, 4/01, p.33)
1653 Nov 5, The Iroquois League signed a peace treaty with the French, vowing not to wage war with other tribes under French protection.
(HN, 11/5/98)
1656 Oct 25, A party of Oneida Indians killed 3 Frenchmen near Montreal. In response Gov. Gen. Louis d’Ailleboust arrested a hunting party of 12 Mohawks and Onondagas and ordered the arrest of all Iroquois in the French colonies.
(AH, 4/01, p.34)
1659 Cornelius Meylin, patroon of Staten Island, wrote in his recollections that Staten Island was acquired in 1630 in exchange for "kittles, axes, Hoos, wampum, drilling awles, Jews Harps and diverse small wares." Wampum was also referred to as peag or seawan by Native Americans and consisted of strung cylindrical beads made from polished shells. It was formerly used by some North American Indians as currency and jewelry. It was also used to record events, as a medium of communication and sometimes for ceremonial and spiritual purposes.
(WSJ, 11/19/99, p.W10)(HNQ, 3/23/02)
1675 Jun 20, King Philip’s War began when Indians--retaliating for the execution of three of their people who had been charged with murder by the English--massacred colonists at Swansea, Plymouth colony. Abenaki, Massachusetts, Mohegan & Wampanoag Indians formed an anti English front. Wampanoag warriors attacked livestock and looted farms.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philip%27s_War)(AH, 6/02, p.46)
1675 Jun 23, An English youth shot a Marauding Wampanoag warrior.
(AH, 6/02, p.46)
1675 Sep 9, Colonial authorities officially declared war on the Wampanoag Indians. The war soon spread to include the Abenaki, Norwottock, Pocumtuck and Agawam warriors.
(MC, 9/9/01)(AH, 6/02, p.47)
1676 Feb 10, In King Philip’s War Narragansett and Nipmuck Indians raided Lancaster, Mass. Over 35 villagers were killed and 24 were taken captive including Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711) and her 3 children. Rowlandson was freed after 11 weeks and an account of her captivity was published posthumously in 1682.
(AH, 6/02, p.48)(Econ, 2/21/09, p.83)(http://tinyurl.com/cvrhcv)
1676 Apr 18, Sudbury, Massachusetts, was attacked by Indians.
(HN, 4/18/98)
1676 Aug 28, Indian chief King Philip, also known as Metacom, was killed by English soldiers, ending the war between Indians and colonists.
(HN, 8/28/98)
1680 Aug 10, Pueblo Indians took possession of Santa Fe, N.M., after driving out the Spanish. They destroyed almost all of the Spanish churches in Taos and Santa Fe. The Pueblo Revolt, also known as Popé's Rebellion, was an uprising of most of the indigenous Pueblo people against the Spanish colonizers in the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, present day New Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt killed 400 Spaniards and drove the remaining 2,000 settlers out of the province.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt)(AP, 8/21/97)(SFEC, 6/21/98, Z1 p.8)
1680 Aug 21, New Mexico Governor Antonio de Otermín, barricaded in the Palace of the Governors, sallied outside the palace with all of his available men and forced the Puebloans to retreat with heavy losses. He then led the Spaniards out of Santa Fe and retreated southward along the Rio Grande, headed for El Paso del Norte. The Puebloans shadowed the Spaniards but did not attack. This marked the end of the Pueblo Revolt.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt)
1680 Kateri Tekakwitha (b.1656), known as the "Lily of the Mohawks," died in Canada. She was born to a pagan Iroquois father and an Algonquin Christian mother in upstate New York. Her parents and only brother died when she was 4 during a smallpox epidemic that left her badly scarred and with impaired eyesight. She went to live with her uncle, a Mohawk, and was baptized Catholic by Jesuit missionaries. But she was ostracized and persecuted by other natives for her faith. In 2012 she was named a saint in the Catholic church.
(AP, 10/20/12)
1683 Jun 23, William Penn signed a friendship treaty with Lenni Lenape Indians in Pennsylvania. It became the only treaty "not sworn to, nor broken."
(HN, 6/23/98)(MC, 6/23/02)
1683 Secatogue Indians deeded land on the South Shore of Long Island to William Nicoll.
(WSJ, 10/9/07, p.D6)
1686 The Lenape Indians allegedly sold land along the Lehigh River to William Penn.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1686 Two Mohican Indians signed a mortgage for their land in Schaghticoke, New York, with simple markings. It was notarized by Robert Livingston, whose family became one of the greatest agricultural landlords and int'l. merchants in the colony of New York.
(WSJ, 11/19/99, p.W10)
1689 Aug 25, The Iroquois took Montreal.
(MC, 8/25/02)
1690 Feb 8, Some 200 French and Indian troops burned Schenectady, NY, and massacred about 60 people to avenge Iraquois raids on Canada.
(AH, 2/05, p.17)
1700s Several dozen members of the Calusa Indian tribe, nicknamed "The Fierce Ones," escaped from Florida to Cuba in the early 1700s after Spanish soldiers and other tribes overran their region.
(AP, 3/14/04)
1704 English forces attacked Apalachee Indians in Florida driving them into slavery and exile. Some 800 Apalachee fled west to French-held Mobile.
(WSJ, 3/9/05, p.A1)
1708 Aug 29, French Canadian and Indian forces attacked the village of Haverhill, Mass., killing 16 settlers.
(AP, 8/29/08)
1710 Mohawk and Mohican chiefs from Canada visited Queen Anne in London on a diplomatic mission.
(Econ 7/1/17, p.29)
1711 Sep 22, The Tuscarora Indian War began with a massacre of settlers in North Carolina, following white encroachment that included the enslaving of Indian children.
(HN, 9/22/98)
1715 Apr 15, Uprising of Yamasse Indians in South Carolina.
(MC, 4/15/02)
1722 The original Iroquois League, often known as the Five Nations (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations) became the Six Nations after the Tuscarora nation joined the League.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois)
1725 Feb 20, New Hampshire militiamen partook in the first recorded scalping of Indians by whites in North America. 10 sleeping Indians were scalped by whites for scalp bounty.
(HN, 2/20/99)(MC, 2/20/02)
1725 May 8, John Lovewell, US Indian fighter, died in battle.
(MC, 5/8/02)
1729 Nov 28, Natchez Indians massacred most of the 300 French settlers and soldiers at Fort Rosalie, Louisiana.
(HN, 11/28/98)
1730 The French arrived in Swanton, Vermont, and the plague followed. The local Abenaki Indians faded into the woods.
(SFC, 12/13/02, p.J7)
1736 May 26, In northwestern Mississippi, British and Chickasaw Indians defeated a combined force of French soldiers and Choctaw Indians at the Battle of Ackia, thus opening the region to English settlement.
(AHD, 1971, p.11)(HN, 5/26/98)
1736 Aug 8, Mahomet Weyonomon, a Mohegan sachem or leader, died of smallpox while waiting to see King George II to complain directly about British settlers encroaching on tribal lands in the Connecticut colony. The tribal chief was buried in an unmarked grave in a south London churchyard.
(AP, 11/22/06)(http://tinyurl.com/ymbn3c)
1750 Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian, joined the Christian mission of Gnadenhutten, founded by Swiss Moravian settlers in the Lehigh Valley town of Bethlehem.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1750 The Ais Indians of Florida were wiped out. In 2004 a site on Hutchinson Island, inhabited by the Ais, revealed 2 thousand year old burials.
(Arch, 1/05, p.13)
1754 Apr, Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian, joined the Iroquois Indians in the Wyoming Valley along the banks of the Susquehanna River.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1754 May 28, Col. George Washington helped defeat French and Indians at Ft. Duquesne, Pitts.
(MC, 5/28/02)
1754 Jul 3, George Washington surrendered the small, circular Fort Necessity (later Pittsburgh) in southwestern Pennsylvania to the French, leaving them in control of the Ohio Valley. This marked the beginning of the French and Indian War also called the 7 Years' War. In 2005 Fred Anderson authored “The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War."
(HN, 7/13/98)(Arch, 1/05, p.46)(WSJ, 12/14/05, p.D15)
1754 Nov 29, The Gnadenhutten mission, Pa., was attacked by renegade Lenape Indians and 11 white people were killed.
(ON, 1/03, p.7)
1755 Sep 8, British forces under William Johnson defeated the French and the Indians at the Battle of Lake George, N.Y.
(HN, 9/8/98)
1755 Dec 31, Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian, led 30 Lenape Indians on a raid against English plantations along the Delaware River. Over the next few days his band killed 7 men and took 5 prisoners.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1756 Apr 14, Gov. Glen of South Carolina protested against 900 Acadia Indians.
(MC, 4/14/02)
1756 May 15, French and Indian War broke out between France and England, with final defeat of the French coming in 1763 with the British victory at the Battle of Quebec on the Plains of Abraham. [see May 17]
(MC, 5/15/02)
1756 May 17, Britain declared war on France, beginning the French and Indian War. England hoped to conquer Canada. [see May 15]
(HN, 5/17/98)(HNPD, 9/13/98)
1756 Nov 12, Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian, spoke with Gov. Denny at Easton, Pa., to discuss grievances.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1758 Jul 8, During the French and Indian War a British attack on Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga, New York, was foiled by the French. Some 3,500 Frenchmen defeated the British army of 15,000, which lost 2,000 men.
(HN, 7/8/98)(AH, 10/02, p.27)
1758 Aug 29, New Jersey Legislature formed the 1st Indian reservation.
(MC, 8/29/01)
1758 Sep 18, James Abercromby was replaced as supreme commander of British forces after his defeat by French commander, the Marquis of Montcalm, at Fort Ticonderoga during the French and Indian War.
(HN, 9/18/98)
1760 Feb 16, Cherokee Indians held hostage at Fort St. George, SC, were killed in revenge for Indian attacks on frontier settlements.
(HN, 2/16/99)(MC, 2/16/02)
1760 Aug 7, Ft. Loudon, Tennessee, surrendered to Cherokee Indians.
(MC, 8/7/02)
1761 French and Indians forces in the Ohio Valley were defeated.
(ON, 1/03, p.7)
1761 In western North Carolina British soldiers razed Kituwha, the heart of the Cherokee Nation. Punitive raids here were repeated in 1776.
(Arch, 9/02, p.70)
1763 Feb 10, Britain, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years’ War, aka the French-Indian War. France ceded Canada to England and gave up all her territories in the New World except New Orleans and a few scattered islands including St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland.
(HN, 2/10/97)(AP, 2/10/97)(AP, 2/10/08)(AH, 2/06, p.55)
1763 Apr 19, Teedyuscung, a Lenape Indian leader, burned to death while sleeping in his cabin in the Wyoming Valley, Pa. The fire destroyed the whole Indian village. A few days later settlers from Connecticut arrived to resume their construction of a town.
(ON, 1/03, p.6)
1763 May 7, Indian chief Pontiac began his attack on a British fort in present-day Detroit, Michigan.
(HN, 5/7/99)
1763 Jul 24, Ottawa Chief Pontiac led an uprising in the wild, distant lands that would one day become Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
(HN, 7/24/98)
1763 Oct 7, George III of Great Britain issued a royal proclamation reserving for the crown the right to acquire land from western tribes. This closed lands in North America north and west of Alleghenies to white settlement and ended the acquisition efforts of colonial land syndicates. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 guaranteed Indian rights to land and self-government.
(www.bloorstreet.com/200block/rp1763.htm)(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)(Econ, 9/16/06, p.46)
1763 British forces, under orders from Sir Jeffrey Amherst, distributed smallpox-infected blankets among American Indians in the 1st known case of its use as a biological weapon.
(SFC, 10/19/01, p.A17)(NW, 10/14/02, p.50)
1764 Nov 16, Indians surrendered to British in Indian War of Chief Pontiac.
(MC, 11/16/01)
1766 Jul 24, At Fort Ontario, Canada, Ottawa chief Pontiac and William Johnson signed a peace agreement.
(HN, 7/24/98)
1766 Jonathan Carver, an American-born British army officer, set out to cross the American continent, but was stopped in Minnesota by a war between the Sioux and Chippewa.
(SFC, 1/31/04, p.D12)
1767 Oct 9, The survey party of Mason and Dixon came to a halt after 233 miles when Indians of the Six Nations said they had reached the end of their commission. [see Oct 18]
(ON, 2/04, p.10)
1768 Nov 5, William Johnson, the northern Indian Commissioner, signed a treaty with the Iroquois Indians to acquire much of the land between the Tennessee and Ohio rivers for future settlement.
(HN, 11/5/98)
1769 Apr 20, Ottawa Chief Pontiac (b~1720) was murdered by an Indian in Cahokia.
(WUD, 1994, p.1117)(HN, 4/20/98)
1775 Mar 17, Richard Henderson, a North Carolina judge, representing the Transylvania Company, met with three Cherokee Chiefs (Oconistoto, chief warrior and first representative of the Cherokee Nation or tribe of Indians, and Attacuttuillah and Sewanooko) to purchase (for the equivalent of $50,000) all the land lying between the Ohio, Kentucky and Cumberland rivers; some 17 to 20 million acres. It was known as the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals or The Henderson Purchase. The purchase was later declared invalid but land cession was not reversed.
(www.tngenweb.org/cessions/17750317.html)
1775 James Adair (~65) authored “The History of the American Indians," based on his experiences living in their midst. In 2005 Kathryn E. Holland Braund edited a new edition.
(WSJ, 2/11/05, p.W6)
1776 Spanish explorers encountered the native Havasupai Indians in Arizona.
(SSFC, 2/19/06, p.F4)
1777 Nov 15, The Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation, precursor to the U.S. Constitution. The structure of the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy of six major northeastern tribes. The matrilineal society of the Iroquois later inspired the suffragist movement.
(AP, 11/15/97)(SFEC, 4/19/98, BR p.2)
1777 In San Francisco an Ohlone man name Chamis (20) became the first adult Indian to be baptized at Mission Dolores.
(SFC, 11/2/19, p.C4)
1778 Aug 31, British killed 17 Stockbridge Indians in Bronx during Revolution.
(MC, 8/31/01)
1778 Sep 7, Shawnee Indians attacked and laid siege to Boonesborough, Kentucky.
(HN, 9/7/98)
1778 Sep 17, The 1st treaty between the US and Indian tribes was signed at Fort Pitt.
(MC, 9/17/01)
1778 Nov 11, British redcoats, Tory rangers and Seneca Indians in central New York state killed more than 40 people in the Cherry Valley Massacre. A regiment of 800 Tory rangers under Butler (1752-1781) and 500 Native forces under the Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant (1742-1807), fell upon the settlement, killing 47, including 32 noncombatants, mostly by tomahawk.
(www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Cherry-Valley-Massacre)(AP, 11/11/07)
1781 Jul 17, Yuma Indians in southern California attacked two missions killing all the men but two and enslaving the women and children. They were upset after a Spanish officer let a large horse herd loose to graze in Yuma fields.
(SFC, 12/13/14, p.C2)
1781 Jul 18, Yuma Indians in southern California ambushed Spanish Capt. Fernando Rivera y Moncada and his soldiers. Rivera had been ordered to recruit settlers in Sinaloa and Sonora and lead them through the desert over the Anza trail to a new settlement called Los Angeles. Rivera and all his soldiers were killed.
(SFC, 12/13/14, p.C2)
1781-1782 Smallpox, reduced the Mandans, a Missouri River tribe of 40,000 people, down to 2,000 survivors. They partially recovered, increasing their numbers to some 12,000 by 1837.
(www.madoc1170.com/madoc.htm)
1782 Mar 8, The Gnadenhutten massacre took place as some 90 Christian Delaware Indians were slain by militiamen in Ohio in retaliation for raids carried out by other Indians.
(AP, 3/8/98)(AH, 4/07, p.14)
1784 The British gave their Indian allies from New York a large parcel of land southwest of Toronto after they fled to Canada following the American war of independence. In 2006 the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy claimed that part of this land had been sold without their proper consent for a new housing development in Caledonia.
(Econ, 9/16/06, p.46)
1785 Jan 21, Chippewa, Delaware, Ottawa and Wyandot Indians signed a treaty of Fort McIntosh, ceding present-day Ohio to the United States.
(HN, 1/21/99)
1790 May, John Tanner (9) was kidnapped from his home in northern Kentucky by Shawnee Indians. He was taken to an area near what later became Saginaw, Michigan, where he learned the Ojibway language. After about 2 years he was sold to a woman named Net-no-kwa, who took him up to northern Michigan and later to Manitoba, Canada.
(ON, 4/10, p.4)(http://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/ky.boone.tanner.j.kidnapd.html)
1790 Oct 3, John Ross, Chief of the United Cherokee Nation from 1839 to 1866, was born near Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Although his father was Scottish and his mother only part Cherokee, Ross was named Tsan-Usdi (Little John) and raised in the Cherokee tradition. A settled people with successful farms, strong schools, and a representative government, the Cherokee resided on 43,000 square miles of land they had held for centuries.
(LCTH, 10/3/99)
1790 The US Trade and Intercourse Act prohibited states from acquiring land from Indians without federal approval.
(SFC, 1/13/99, p.A9)(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)
1791 Nov 3, Gen. St. Clair moved his force of approximately 1,400 men to some high ground on the upper Wabash River. St. Clair was looking for the forces of Michikinikwa (Chief Little Turtle 1752-1812), who had recently defeated Gen. Josiah Harmar’s (1753-1813) army. St. Clair deployed only minimal sentry positions. [see Nov 4]
(DoW, 1999, p.168)
1791 Nov 4, General Arthur St. Clair, governor of Northwest Territory, was badly defeated by a large Indian army near Fort Wayne. Miami Indian Chief Little Turtle (1752-1812) led the powerful force of Miami, Wyandot, Iroquois, Shawnee, Delaware, Ojibwa and Potawatomi that inflicted the greatest defeat ever suffered by the U.S. Army at the hands of North American Indians. Some 623 regulars led by General Arthur St. Clair were killed and 258 wounded on the banks of the Wabash River near present day Fort Wayne, Indiana. The staggering defeat moved Congress to authorize a larger army in 1792.
(HNQ, 8/10/98)(HN, 11/4/98)
1792 A US military campaign led by General Arthur St. Clair against Native Americans in Ohio ended in complete disaster. Of the 1,400 US regulars and militia who set out in pursuit of Native Americans, some 650 were killed and 250 wounded when adversaries caught them unprepared for battle. Lawmakers launched the first congressional investigation of US executive branch actions. President George Washington responded with wary cooperation, aware he was setting precedents for presidents to come.
(CSM, 7/26/17)
1794 Aug 20, American General "Mad Anthony" Wayne defeated the Ohio Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the Northwest territory, ending Indian resistance in the area.
(HN, 8/20/98)
1794 Nov 11, The Treaty of Canandaigua was signed at Canandaigua, New York, by fifty sachems and war chiefs representing the Grand Council of the Six Nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy (including the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora tribes), and by Timothy Pickering, official agent of President George Washington. The Canandaigua Treaty, a Treaty Between the United States of America and the Tribes of Indians Called the Six Nations, was signed.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Canandaigua)
1794 Twenty horse soldiers were dispatched from the Presidio of San Francisco to quell an Ohlone rebellion in the Santa Cruz mountains.
(SFC, 9/29/14, p.A1)
1795 Spring, Some 300 Indians fled Mission Dolores in San Francisco following a year of food shortages and disease that killed over 200. They sought refuge in the East Bay hills and Napa.
(SFC, 9/26/03, p.D15)
1795-1840 New York state and local governments entered into 26 treaties and several purchase agreements with the Oneida Indians to acquire all but 32 of 270,000 acres. Almost none of the transactions were approved by Congress as required by a 1790 law.
(SFC, 1/13/99, p.A9)
1804 Mar 26, Congress ordered the removal of Indians east of the Mississippi to Louisiana.
(HN, 3/25/98)
1804 Aug 31, Louis and Clark held a council with local Sioux Indian chiefs in what is now eastern North Dakota.
(ON, 4/12, p.9)
1804 Oct 26, Lewis and Clark accepted an invitation to camp for the winter near a cluster of villages inhabited by the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians.
(ON, 4/12, p.10)
1804 Nov, Lewis and Clark hired French-Canadian fur trapper Toussaint Charbonneau as an interpreter, with the understanding that Sacagawea, who was only about 16 and pregnant, would come along to interpret the Shoshone language. She and another woman had been purchased by Charbonneau, who lived among the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians, to be his wives.
(HN, 2/11/99)(HNQ, 12/1/99)
1805 Feb 11, At Fort Mandan ND Sacajawea (16), the Shoshoni guide for Lewis & Clark, gave birth to a son, with Meriwether Lewis serving as midwife. Sacagawea, the young Native American girl who aided the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was of the Lemhi Shoshones, who made their home in what is now southeastern Idaho and southwestern Montana. About 1800 Sacagawea was captured by a Hidatsa raiding party at the Three Forks of the Missouri River. Sometime in 1804, she and another woman were purchased by French-Canadian fur trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, who lived among the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians, to be his wives.
(HN, 2/11/99)(HNQ, 12/1/99)(AH, 2/05, p.17)
1805 Apr 7, The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery resumed their journey to the headwaters of the Missouri River.
(ON, 4/12, p.10)
1805 Aug 17, Sacagawea, while traveling with the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery, reunited with her brother Cameahwait, a Shoshoni Indian chief on the Lemhi River (Idaho).
(ON, 4/12, p.12)(http://sacajaweahome.com/august.htm)
1805 Aug 30, The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery resumed their westward journey with 29 horses and 6 guides provided by Shoshoni Chief Cameahwait. They spent the next 4 weeks crossing the Bitterroot Mountains (Idaho).
(ON, 4/12, p.12)
1805 Sep 23, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike paid $2,000 to buy from the Sioux a 9-square-mile tract at the mouth of the Minnesota River that would be used to establish a military post, Fort Snelling.
(HN, 9/23/98)
1806 In San Francisco an epidemic of measles and flu killed 343 of the 850 native people at the Dolores Street mission.
(SSFC, 9/20/15, p.A14)
1811 Nov 7, Gen. William Henry Harrison won a battle against the Shawnee Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe in the Indiana territory. Tenskwatawa, the brother of Shawnee leader Tecumseh, was engaged in the Battle of the Wabash, aka Battle of Tippecanoe, in spite of his brother’s strict admonition to avoid it. The battle near the Tippecanoe River with the regular and militia forces of Indiana Territory Governor William Henry Harrison, took place while Tecumseh was out of the area seeking support for a united Indian movement. The battle, which was a nominal victory for Harrison’s forces, effectively put an end to Tecumseh’s dream of a pan-Indian confederation. Harrison’s leadership in the battle also provided a useful campaign slogan for his presidential bid in 1840.
(HFA, ‘96, p.46)(HNQ, 5/28/98)(HN, 11/7/98)
1813 Aug 30, Creek Indians massacred over 500 whites at Fort Mims Alabama.
(HN, 8/30/98)
1813 Oct 5, In Canada the Battle of the Thames, also known as the Battle of Moraviantown, was decisive in the War of 1812. Some 600 British regulars and 1,000 Indian allies under British Major General Henry Procter and Shawnee leader Tecumseh were greatly outnumbered and quickly defeated by US forces under the command of Maj. Gen. William Henry Harrison. Tecumseh (45) was killed in this battle. US Col. Richard Mentor Johnson led troops in the Battle of the Thames and was said to have killed Tecumseh, a claim that he later used to his political advantage.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Thames)
1813 Oct 15, During the land defeat of the British on the Thames River in Canada, the Indian chief Tecumseh, now a brigadier general with the British Army (War of 1812), was killed. [see Oct 5]
(HN, 10/15/98)
1813 Nov 3, American troops destroy the Indian village of Tallushatchee in the Mississippi Valley. US troops under Gen Coffee destroyed an Indian village at Talladega, Ala.
(HN, 11/3/99)(MC, 11/3/01)
1814 Mar 27, General Jackson led U.S. soldiers who killed 700 Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend, La. [in Northern Alabama] Jackson lost 49 men.
(SFEC, 2/16/97, BR p.4)(HN, 3/27/99)
1814 Mar 29, In the Battle at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, Andrew Jackson beat the Creek Indians. [see Mar 27]
(MC, 3/29/02)
1814 Jul 22, Five Indian tribes in Ohio made peace with the United States and declared war on Britain.
(HN, 7/22/98)
1814 Aug 9, Andrew Jackson and the Creek Indians signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, giving the whites 23 million acres of Mississippi Creek territory. This ended Indian resistance in the region and opened the doors to pioneers after the conclusion of the War of 1812.
(HN, 8/9/98)(HNQ, 8/13/99)
1816 Jul 27, US troops destroyed the Seminole Fort Apalachicola, to punish the Indians for harboring runaway slaves.
(MC, 7/27/02)
1817 Nov 20, 1st Seminole War began in Florida. [see Nov 27]
(MC, 11/20/01)
1817 Nov 27, US soldiers attacked a Florida Indian village and began the Seminole War. [see Nov 20]
(MC, 11/27/01)
1818 Apr 7, Gen. Andrew Jackson captured St. Marks, Fla., from the Seminole Indians.
(MC, 4/7/02)
1818 Apr 18, A regiment of Indians and blacks was defeated at the Battle of Suwann, in Florida, ending the first Seminole War.
(HN, 4/18/99)
1818 Oct 19, US and Chickasaw Indians signed a treaty.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1819 Mar 3, The Civilization Fund Act was created by the United States legislature to encourage activities of benevolent societies in providing education for Native Americans and also authorized an annuity to stimulate the "civilization process."
(http://wapedia.mobi/en/The_Civilization_Fund_Act_of_1819)
1822 Feb 9, The American Indian Society organized.
(MC, 2/9/02)
1823 José Antonio Vizcarra, the governor of New Mexico, waged war against the Navajo. Vizcarra and a column of 1,500 soldiers advanced through the west of the state, and their route took them through Chaco Canyon where they discovered a city of the Anasazi, the ancestors of the Pueblo Native Americans.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Antonio_Vizcarra)
1824 Mar 11, The U.S. War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A lifelong friend and trusted aide of Ulysses S. Grant, Ely Parker rose to the top in two worlds, that of his native Seneca Indian tribe and the white man's world at large. He went on to become the first Indian to lead the Bureau.
(HN, 3/11/98)
1825 Jan 27, Congress approved Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), clearing the way for forced relocation of the Eastern Indians on the "Trail of Tears."
(HN, 1/27/99)
1825 Feb 12, Creek Indian treaty signed. Tribal chiefs agreed to turn over all their land in Georgia to the government and migrate west by Sept 1, 1826.
(MC, 2/12/02)
1825 The Bureau of Indian Affairs began as an office of the War Department that dealt with what white Americans saw as the "Indian problem."
(SFC, 9/9/00, p.A3)
1827 Nov 15, Creek Indians lost all their property in US.
(MC, 11/15/01)
1828 Feb 21, The first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix, the 1st American Indian newspaper in US, was printed, both in English and in the newly invented Cherokee alphabet.
(HN, 2/21/98)(MC, 2/21/02)
1828 May 6, The Cherokee Indians were forced to sign a treaty giving up their Arkansas Reservation for a new home in what later became Oklahoma. This led to a split in the tribe as one group moved to Oklahoma and others stayed behind and became known as the Lost Cherokees.
(Econ, 3/11/06, p.28)(http://digital.library.okstate.edu/KAPPLER/Vol2/treaties/che0288.htm)
1829-1837 Andrew Jackson was President of the US. In 2001 Robert V. Remini authored "Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars."
(A&IP, ESM, p.96b, photo)(SSFC, 7/15/01, DB p.63)
1830 May 28, Congress authorized Indian removal from all states to western prairie.
(HN, 5/28/98)
1830 Jul 15, Three Indian tribes, Sioux, Sauk & Fox, signed a treaty giving the US most of Minnesota, Iowa & Missouri.
(MC, 7/15/02)
1830 Pres. Andrew Jackson forced Thomas L. McKenney from his job as the 1st US superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Jackson disagreed with McKenney’s opinion that “the Indian was, in his intellectual and moral structure, our equal."
(WSJ, 3/15/06, p.D16)
1832 Apr 8, Some 300 American troops of the 6th Infantry left Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, to confront the Sauk Indians in what would become known as the Black Hawk War.
(HN, 4/8/99)
1832 Aug 2, Troops under General Henry Atkinson massacred Sauk Indian men, women and children who were followers of Black Hawk at the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin. Black Hawk himself finally surrendered three weeks later, bringing the Black Hawk War to an end.
(HN, 8/2/98)
1832 Aug 27, Black Hawk, leader of Sauk-Indians, gave himself up.
(MC, 8/27/01)
1832 Oct 14, Blackfeet Indians attacked American Fur Company trappers near Montana’s Jefferson River, killing one.
(HN, 10/14/98)
1834 Jun 30, Congress passed the final Indian Intercourse Act. In addition to regulating relations between Indians living on Indian land and non-Indians, this final act identified an area known as "Indian country". This land was described as being "…all that part of the United States west of the Mississippi and not within the states of Missouri and Louisiana, or the territory of Arkansas…" This is the land that became known as Indian Territory. Oklahoma was declared Indian Territory.
(SFCM, 3/9/08, p.20)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Intercourse_Act)
1834 In California some 60,000 native Indians had died by this time in the Catholic missions. Missionaries had baptized about 80,000.
(SSFC, 9/20/15, p.A14)
1834 Mexico granted Don Salvio Pacheco 18,000 acres in northern California known as Monte del Diablo, which included what would later became Concord and Walnut Creek. The family later donated land to the government for roads and public buildings. The area was originally inhabited by the Bolbones Indians.
(SFC, 12/31/99, p.A22)(SFC, 5/26/01, p.A13)(SFC, 7/17/06, p.B5)
1834-1880 The native population of California dropped during this period from about 150,000 to 18,000 due mostly to mass murder by gold seekers and settlers.
(SSFC, 11/28/21, p.J1)
1835 Aug 18, The last Pottawatomie Indians left Chicago.
(MC, 8/18/02)
1835 Dec 30, Cherokees were forced to move across the Mississippi River after gold was discovered in Georgia. A minority faction of Cherokee agreed to the emigration of the whole tribe from their lands by signing the Treaty of New Echota. The Treaty of New Echota resulted in the cession of all Cherokee land to the U.S. and provided for the transportation of the Cherokee Indians to land beyond the Mississippi. The removal of the Cherokee was completed by 1838.
(NG, 5/95, p.86)(HNQ, 6/21/98)(MC, 12/30/01)
1836 May 19, Comanche warriors in Texas attacked Fort Parker and kidnapped Cynthia Ann Parker (9) and several others. She was recaptured by whites in 1860 and was forced to live among whites until her death in 1871. Her son Quanah (d.1911) escaped capture and grew up to become leader of the Quahadi, the most feared subset of the Comanche. In 2010 S.C. Gwynne authored “Empire of the Southern Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History."
(Econ, 6/19/10, p.85)(www.lone-star.net/mall/texasinfo/CynthiaAnnParker.htm)
1837 Oct 1, A treaty was made with the Winnebago Indians.
(MC, 10/1/01)
1837 Oct 21, During the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), under a flag of truce during peace talks, U.S. troops under Gen. Thomas S. Jesup (1788-1860) sieged the Indian Seminole Chief Osceola in Florida and sent to a jail in North Carolina, where he later died. Jesup's trickery outraged the American public.
(HN, 10/21/98)(DoW, 1999, p.435)
1837 Dec 25, In the Battle of Okeechobee US forces defeated the Seminole Indians.
(MC, 12/25/01)
1837 A smallpox epidemic hit northern California and decimated the North Bay Indians. It was later believed to have originated at Fort Ross.
(SFC, 5/16/19, p.B4)
1837 In California Jose Maria Amador led a "recapturing expedition." They found and murdered 200 Indians.
(SFC, 12/31/00, BR p.12)
1837 A treaty with the Chippewa Indians in Minnesota guaranteed their right to hunt and fish and gather wild rice on territory relinquished to the federal government.
(SFC, 3/25/99, p.A8)
1837-1844 Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall published their 3-volume work: “The Indian Tribes of North American."
(WSJ, 3/15/06, p.D16)
1838 Aug, Some 12,000 Cherokee Indians in 13 ragtag parties followed the Trail of Tears on a 116-day journey west 800 miles to eastern Oklahoma. Estimates have placed the death toll in camps and in transit as high as 4,000. They followed the trail already set by the Choctaw out of Mississippi, the Creek from Alabama, the Chickasaw from Arkansas and Mississippi, and the Seminole from Florida. The Cherokee brought with them enslaved Black people. Native American nations in the South had purchased slaves as laborers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
(NG, 5/95, p.82)(www.crystalinks.com/cherokee2.html)(SFC, 2/25/21, p.A6)
1838 A smallpox epidemic north of San Francisco killed over 60,000 Indians.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1842 Aug 14, Seminole War ended and the Indians were moved from Florida to Oklahoma.
(MC, 8/14/02)
1846 US Army forces under the command of John C. Fremont conducted a murderous attack on Sacramento River Maidu Indian villages.
(www.nativeamericancaucus.com/history.shtml)
1847 Jan 24, 1,500 New Mexican Indians and Mexicans were defeated by US Col. Price.
(MC, 1/24/02)
1847 Nov 29, A small group of Cayuse Indians assaulted the Whitman Mission, Walla Walla, Washington, at the time sheltering 74 people, most of them emigrants. The attackers killed 13 people, including Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. It temporarily ended Protestant missionary efforts in the Oregon country. The Whitman Creek massacre set off the Cayuse War (1848).
(www.legendsofamerica.com/wa-whitmanmassacre.html)
1847 Miners of Don Miguel Peralta discovered gold about this time in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. His family abandoned the claim after their mining party was massacred by Apache Indians.
(AHHT, 10/02, p.16)(AH, 10/02, p.16)(www.ghostradiox.com/qfg/legend_peralta.asp)
1847 Members of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma collected $170 and sent the money to Dublin to help feed the Irish during a potato famine. The money would be worth about $4,400 in 2018.
(AP, 3/13/18)
1849 Apr 19, California's first legislature passed the "Act for the Protection, Punishment and Government of Indians." Section 20 provided that, upon the petition of a white man to a justice of the peace, one or more Indians could be made that petitioner's slave. It became law on April 22, 1850 and was not repealed until 1937.
(https://tinyurl.com/y5uvtzub)(SSFC, 11/28/21, p.J1)
1850 Apr 22, A California law known as the Indian Slavery Act, which allowed the enslavement of Indians, went into effect.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)(SSFC, 1/2/22, p.E7)
1850 Sep 27, The US Donation land Act was enacted. It allowed Americans to stake claims that would become valid after treaties were negotiated with Indian tribes and ratified by Congress.
(SSFC, 2/27/11, p.G2)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_Land_Claim_Act)
1850 Dec 17, In California some 500 Indians in the Yosemite region attacked a store on the Fresno River owned by James Savage. A clerk and two other whites were killed and the $25,000 in cash and goods were taken. This marked the beginning of the Mariposa Indian War. Savage had employed some 500 Yokut Indians to pan for gold.
(SFC, 5/16/15, p.C2)
1850 Laws in California were passed that allowed the enslavement of Indians.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1851 Jan 5, California's 1st Gov. Peter Hardeman Burnett in his State of the State address called Indians "savages" and said a "war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct".
(SSFC, 11/28/21, p.J1)
1851 Jul 23, Sioux Indians and US signed the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux.
(MC, 7/23/02)
1851 Sep 17, The Fort Laramie Treaty was signed between the US government treaty commissioners and representatives of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations. The Sioux pledged not to harass the wagon trains traveling the Oregon Trail in exchange for a $50,000 annuity. The treaty did not last long. Some 12,000 American Indians gathered at Fort Laramie for a peace council with the US. The government agreed that 12 million acres of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Indians would remain free of settlement (eastern Montana, northeastern Wyoming and western North Dakota). In 1949 Congress authorized a forced relocation to build the Garrison Dam in North Dakota. In 1986 Martin Cross won a settlement of $149.2 million for the unjust taking of reservation land. In 2004 Paul VanDevelder authored “Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation."
(http://tinyurl.com/n7d26ok)(HT, 3/97, p.43)(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)
1851 California Governor Peter Burnett said that unless the Indians were sent east of the Sierras, "a war of extermination would continue to be waged until the Indian race should become extinct."
(HN, 4/29/00)(WW, 6/99)
1851 Fewer than 100,000 Indians remained in California.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1852 Jul, In California a group of squatters led by a Major Harvey illegally encroached on Indian reservation lands on the Kings River. A number of “old squaws" were killed.
(SFC, 5/23/15, p.C2)
1852 The Hopi people of northern Arizona arranged for a diplomatic packet to reach Pres. Fillmore via a delegation of 5 prominent men from the Tewas of Tesuque Pueblo in New Mexico, who sought legal protection from Anglo and Hispanic settlers.
(NH, 11/1/04, p.26)
1853 Oct 19, Juana Maria, the last living native of San Nicholas, the southernmost Channel Island, died in Santa Barbara weeks after she was found living by herself on the island. Her story later inspired Scott O'Dell's book: "Island of the Blue Dolphins" (1960).
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juana_Maria)(SSFC, 6/17/18, p.F2)
1854 In Keshena Falls, Wisconsin, the Menomonee (people of the wild rice) Chiefs Oshkosh and Keshena met with federal Indian agents and agreed to retain only 275,000 acres from their original 9 ½ million acres. As part of the settlement the chiefs and their followers were promised eternal government protection. In 1954 Congress voted to withdraw that support.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.235)
1854 White settlers in Del Norte County, Ca., ambushed and killed 30 Tolowa Indians at the Etculet village on Lake Earl.
(SFEC, 7/16/00, p.B1)
1855 The US government signed a treaty with some American Indians that gave them permanent rights to their existing lands. The Makah tribe of Washington secured a right to hunt whales in exchange for ceding title to their land. In 1972 the Marine Mammals Protection Act prohibited the slaughter of whales without a permit.
(SFEC, 6/15/97, Par. p.5)(SFC,10/24/97, p.A9)(SSFC, 7/13/08, p.E4)
1855 Nez Perce elders agreed to sell most of their land to the US government. They retained some 10 thousand square miles as a reservation in the area where Washington, Oregon and Idaho meet. Gold was soon discovered in the area and in 1863 the US government called for a new deal.
(ON, 3/04, p.1)
1856 Aug 11, A band of rampaging settlers in California killed four Yokut Indians. The settlers had heard unproven rumors of Yokut atrocities.
(HN, 8/11/99)
1856 Apr 28, Yokut Indians repelled an attack on their land by 100 would-be Indian fighters in California.
(HN, 4/28/00)
1856 Apr 29, During the Tule River War Yokut Indians repelled a second attack by the 'Petticoat Rangers,' a band of civilian Indian fighters-some wearing body armor-at Four Creeks, California. The Yokuts lived along the shores of Tulare Lake in the Central Valley, which disappeared by 1900 due to water diversion and farming.
(HN, 4/29/00)(WW, 6/99)
1856 The Mendocino Indian Reservation was established in northern California near the mouth of the Noyo River.
(SFC, 4/28/12, p.A6)
1857 Sep 11, The Mountain Meadows Massacre of the Fancher emigrant wagon train in Utah Territory was carried out by Mormons fearful of an impending invasion by the US Army. Church patriarch and adopted son of Brigham Young, John Doyle Lee, offered safe passage to the nearly 150 men, women and children on the Fancher train from Arkansas crossing Mormon Utah bound for California, if they left their weapons, livestock and wagons behind-ostensibly to appease hostile Indians. All but the youngest children were slaughtered. Lee, who first blamed the massacre on Paiute Indians, was excommunicated in 1870 and tried, convicted and executed in 1877 for his role in the killings. 120 settlers were killed; 17 children, all under 7, were spared. In 2002 Will Bagley authored “Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows." In 2011 the site was dedicated as a national historic landmark.
(SFC, 10/23/02, p.H4)(AP, 9/11/07)(SFC, 9/12/11, p.A4)
1857 In northern California Fort Bragg was established by Lt. Horatio Gates Gibson to keep control of the natives confined to the newly established Mendocino Indian Reservation. He named the camp Fort Bragg after Capt. Braxton Bragg, his former commanding officer. Bragg later served as Confederate general in the Civil War.
(SFC, 7/23/15, p.A6)
1858 Feb 19, Leschi, a Nisqually American Indian leader from the Puget Sound region, was hanged a mile east of Fort Steilacoom. On June 10, 1857, he had been convicted of the murder of Abrams Moses, and was sentenced to hang. Appeals to the Supreme Court delayed the initial hanging. In 2004 seven judges at a Historical Court of Inquiry and Justice unanimously decided that regardless of who shot Moses, “The killing was a legitimate act of war, immune from prosecution." Consequently, Leschi was declared “exonerated" of Abrams Moses’ murder. In 2011 Richard Kluger authored “The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America."
(http://forejustice.org/wc/chief_leschi/chief_leschi.htm)(SSFC, 2/27/11, p.G1)
1860 Feb 26, White settlers massacred a band of Wiyot Indians at the village of Tuluwat on Indian Island near Eureka, Ca. At least 60 women, children and elders were killed. Bret Harte, newspaper reporter in Arcata, fed the news to newspapers in San Francisco. On Oct. 21, 2019, the tribe regained control of Indian Island, the site of the massacre.
(SFC, 2/28/04, p.D1)(AP, 10/21/19)
1860 Apr 30, Navaho Indians attacked Fort Defiance (Canby).
(MC, 4/30/02)
1860 Jun 9, The first dime novel: "Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter," written by Ann Sophia Stephens (1813-1886), was published by Beadle and Adams in NYC.
(AP, 6/9/02)(www.niulib.niu.edu/badndp/dn01.html)
1860 More laws in California were passed that allowed the enslavement of Indians.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1860 California’s Legislature decreed that “Negroes, Mongolians and Indians shall not be allowed into public schools."
(SFC, 4/15/17, p.C2)
1860-1940 Silver Horn, artist, was a Kiowa Indian born in what later became Oklahoma. His work included ledger-book drawings and hide paintings that recorded Kiowa history and culture.
(SFC, 4/19/00, p.A28)
1861 Feb 7, The general council of the Choctaw Indian nation adopted a resolution declaring allegiance with the South "in the event a permanent dissolution of the American Union takes place."
(AP, 2/7/07)
1861 Feb 18, At Fort Wise, Kansas, Indian tribes ceded possessions, enough to constitute two great States of the Union, retaining only a small district for themselves on both sides of the Arkansas river, which included the country around Fort Lyon.
(http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/peace.htm)
1861 Apr 30, President Lincoln ordered Federal Troops to evacuate Indian Territory.
(MC, 4/30/02)
1861 Aug 12, Texas rebels were attacked by Apaches.
(MC, 8/12/02)
1862 Jul 2, Pres. Abraham Lincoln signed an act granting land for state agricultural colleges. The Morrill Act allowed for the transfer and sale of federal lands to colleges to help establish their campus, or bolster an existing one. But many millions of those acres were actually confiscated from Native American tribes.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Land-Grant_Acts)(AP, 10/14/21)
1862 Aug 8, Minnesota’s 5th Infantry fought the Sioux Indians in Redwood, Minn., and 24 soldiers were killed.
(SFC, 2/7/03, p.A23)
1862 Aug 18, A Sioux Uprising began uprising in Minnesota. It resulted in more than 800 white settlers dead and 38 Sioux Indians condemned and hanged. The Minnesota Uprising began when four young Sioux murdered five white settlers at Acton. The Santee Sioux, who lived on a long, narrow reservation on the south side of the Minnesota River, were reacting to broken government promises and corrupt Indian agents. a military court sentenced 303 Sioux to die, but President Abraham Lincoln reduced the list. The 38 hangings took place on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minn.
(MC, 8/18/02)(HNQ, 1/4/00)
1862 Sep 21, 300 Indians were sentenced to hang in Mankato, Minnesota.
(MC, 9/21/01)
1862 Aug 22, Santee Sioux attacked Fort Ridgely.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1862 Dec 6, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of 39 of the 303 convicted Indians who participated in the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota. They were to be hanged on Dec. 26. The Dakota Indians were going hungry when food and money from the federal government was not distributed as promised. They led a massacre that left over 400 white people dead. The uprising was put down and 300 Indians were sentenced to death. Pres. Lincoln reduced the number to 39, who were hanged. The government then nullified the 1851 treaty.
(WSJ, 2/5/98, p.A6)(HN, 12/6/98)
1862 Dec 26, In Minnesota 38 Santee Sioux were hanged in Mankato for their part in the Sioux Uprising. This marked the end of the US-Dakota War. In 2012 a memorial was unveiled for the 38 hanged men, the largest mass execution in US history.
(HN, 12/26/98)(SFC, 12/27/12, p.A8)
1863 The US government paid a group of Nez Perce Indians $265,000 for some 6 million acres in the area of Lewiston, Oregon.
(ON, 3/04, p.1)
1863 The Treaty of Ruby Valley with the Western Shoshone Indians assured their ownership of property that later became a US nuclear test site. The treaty stated that the presence of US settlements will not negate Indian sovereignty.
(SFC, 7/12/97, p.E4)(SFEC, 8/29/99, Z1 p.7)
1864 May 15, In mid-May about daylight Major Downing succeeded in surprising the Cheyenne village of Cedar Bluffs, in a small canon about 60 miles north of the South Platte river. “We commenced shooting. I ordered the men to commence killing them. They lost, as I am informed, some 26 killed and 30 wounded. My own loss was one killed and one wounded. I burnt up their lodges and everything I could get hold of. I took no prisoners. We got out of ammunition and could not pursue them."
(http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/peace.htm)
1864 Nov 29, In retaliation for an Indian attack on a party of immigrants near Denver, 750 members of a Colorado militia unit, led by Colonel John M. Chivington, attacked an unsuspecting village of Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians camped on Sand Creek in present-day Kiowa County. Some 300 [163] Indians were killed in the attack, including women and children, many of whose bodies were mutilated. Ten soldiers died in the attack. The Sand Creek Massacre, as this incident came to be called, provoked a savage struggle between Indians and the white settlers. It also generated two Congressional investigations into the actions of Chivington and his men. The House Committee on the Conduct of the War concluded that Chivington had "deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the varied and savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty."
(HNPD, 11/29/98)(HN, 11/29/98)(SFC, 9/15/00, p.A9)(SSFC, 2/1/04, p.C13)
1864-1865 Army Col. Kit Carson, directed by Brig. Gen. James Carleton, forced the move of some 9,000 Dineh Navajo from Canyon de Chelly in Arizona to the Bosque Redondo reservation near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. About half the people survived in what came to be known as the Long Walk. In 2006 Hampton sides authored “Blood and Thunder: An epic of the American West," an account of the Navaho move.
(SFC, 1/3/97, p.A26)(SFEC, 5/4/97, z1 p.4)(SSFC, 1/7/01, p.T9)(WSJ, 10/7/06, p.P12)
1865 Jan 7, Cheyenne and Sioux warriors attacked Julesburg, Colo., in retaliation for the Sand Creek Massacre.
(HN, 1/7/99)
1865 In northern California a surprise attack by settlers wiped out nearly all the Indians of the Yahi tribe, south of Mt. Lassen. Rancher Norman Kingsley and three others shot 30 Yahi, including babies and young children, on Mill Creek. Remnants hid in the mountains for 40 years until there was but one survivor, Ishi, who emerged in 1911.
(SFC, 2/19/99, p.A1)(SFC, 9/6/14, p.C1)
1865-1890 Wars against the native American Indians were fought during this period in the Pacific Northwest. In 2003 Peter Cozzens edited: “Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890: The Wars for the Pacific Northwest."
(AH, 6/03, p.62)
1866 Jul, The Sioux war on the Powder river commenced. When it commenced General St. George Cook, in command at Omaha, forbade within the limits of his command the sale of arms and ammunition to Indians.
(http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/peace.htm)
1866 Sep 1, Manuelito, the last Navaho chief, turned himself in at Fort Wingate, New Mexico.
(MC, 9/1/02)
1866 Dec 21, Indians led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse killed Captain William J. Fetterman and 79 other men who had ventured out from Fort Phil Kearny to cut wood. U.S. Army Captain William J. Fetterman once boasted, "Give me 80 men and I'll march through the whole Sioux nation!" When Lakota warriors under the overall leadership of Chief Red Cloud gathered around Fort Phil Kearny (in what is now Wyoming), Fetterman got command of his 80 men. Disobeying the orders of his commander, Colonel Henry B Carrington, not to proceed beyond the Lodge Trail Ridge, Fetterman pursued a band of retreating Indians--and rode right into a waiting trap, allegedly laid by the Ogallala warrior Crazy Horse. Fetterman, his executive officer and 78 troopers were wiped out.
(HNPD, 12/21/98)(HN, 12/21/98)
1866 Dec 26, Native American’s handed the U.S. Army their worst defeat prior to Little Big Horn at the Fetterman Fight in Powder River County in the Dakota territory. [see Dec 21]
(HN, 12/26/98)
1866 In California the Chico Courant newspaper called for the extermination of Indians.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.4)
1866 Pres. Andrew Johnson signed an executive order that removed the Shoalwater Bay Indians in Washington state from their villages and onto a 1-sq. mile reservation. By 2000 erosion took away over half the tribal land and miscarriages stood at 4 times the expected rate.
(SFEC, 3/26/00, p.A8)
1866 Freed Cherokee slaves were adopted into the tribe under a treaty with the US government. In 2007 the Cherokee Nation voted to revoke citizenship to descendants of the slaves. In 2017 a US district judge ruled that Cherokee Freedmen have a right to tribal citizenship under the 1866 treaty.
(SFC, 3/5/07, p.A2)(SFC, 9/1/17, p.A6)
1867 Oct 21, Many leaders of the Kiowa, Comanche and Kiowa-Apache signed a peace treaty at Medicine Lodge, Kan. Comanche Chief Quanah Parker refused to accept the treaty terms.
(HN, 10/21/98)
1868 Jan 7, A US Indian Peace Commission filed a report to the Pres. Johnson.
(http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/peace.htm)
1868 Apr 29, The US government and the Sioux Indians signed a treaty that ended Red Cloud’s War. The 1868 treaty at Fort Laramie (Wyoming Territory) made the Black Hills part of the Great Sioux Reservation.
(http://tinyurl.com/me6pfxd)(Econ, 8/2/08, p.37)(AH, 6/03, p.36)
1868 Sep 17, The Battle of Beecher's Island began, in which Major George "Sandy" Forsyth and 50 volunteers held off 500 Sioux and Cheyenne in eastern Colorado.
(HN, 9/17/98)
1868 Nov 27, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer’s 7th Cavalry killed Chief Black Kettle (b.1801) and about 100 Cheyenne (mostly women and children) on the Washita River near present day Cheyenne, Oklahoma.
(www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/blackkettle.htm)
1868 Navaho Indians living under confinement near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, were allowed to return to their homelands in Arizona following a visit by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Some 7,100 survivors of the 1864 Long Walk had been released onto a New Mexico reservation of 5,500 acres. The Navajo returned to Hopi land where 3.5 million acres, 1/6th of their former homeland, was returned.
(SFC, 1/3/97, p.A26)(SFEC, 5/4/97, z1 p.4)(WSJ, 10/7/06, p.P12)
1870 Jan 1, In Texas Comanche Indians stole Adolph Korn (10) near the settlement of Castell on the Llano River. The boy spent 3 years with the Indians and upon his return spoke only Comanche, ate raw meat and refused to sleep indoors.
(AH, 6/07, p.60)
1870 Jan 23, American army forces, looking for Mountain Chief's band of hostile Blackfoot Indians, fell instead upon Heavy Runner's peaceable Piegan band in Montana and killed 173, many of them women and children.
(www.legendsofamerica.com/NA-Blackfoot.html)(SSFC, 12/25/05, p.M2)
1870 Jun 9, Washington: Pres Grant met with Sioux chief Red Cloud.
(MC, 6/9/02)
1870 California’s state school law was again changed and stipulated that only blacks and Indians need be educated in separate schools.
(SFC, 4/15/17, p.C2)
1871 Mar 3, Congress passed the Indian Appropriation Act, which revoked the sovereignty of Indian nations and made Native Americans wards of the American government. The act eliminated the necessity of treaty negotiating and established the policy that tribal affairs could be managed by the U.S. government without tribal consent.
(HNQ, 5/15/98)
1871 Apr 30, Anglo and Mexican vigilantes killed 118 Apaches at Camp Grant, Arizona, and kidnapped 28 children.
(www.desertusa.com/mag98/april/stories/campgrant1.html)
1871 May 17, Gen. Sherman, Indian fighter, escaped in ambulance from the Comanche.
(MC, 5/17/02)
1871 Aug, Joseph became chief of Nez Perce Indians in the Wallowa Valley, Oregon.
(ON, 3/04, p.1)
1871 Brit Johnson, a black Texas ranch foreman, was killed by Kiowa raiders. His home life had been shattered in 1864 when an Indian raiding party killed his son and captured his wife along with 2 of their other children. He reportedly ransomed back his family in 1865 and continued searching for other stolen children before he was killed. Author Alan Le May (1899-1964) later used his story as a model in his novel “The Searchers" (1954).
(AH, 6/07, p.64)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Searchers_%28film%29)
1872 Aug 14, Chief Joseph met in council with some 40 settlers in the Wallowa Valley and ordered them to leave the Nez Perce Indian land.
(ON, 3/04, p.2)
1872 Oct 12, Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise (d.1874) signed a peace treaty with Special Indian Commissioner, General Oliver Otis Howard (1830-1909), in the Arizona Territory.
(HN, 10/12/98)(ON, 4/07, p.8)
1872 Dec 28, A U.S. Army force defeated a group of Apache warriors at Salt River Canyon, Arizona Territory, with 57 Indians killed but only one soldier.
(HN, 12/28/98)
1872 The Osage Indians purchased close to 2,300 square miles in the Oklahoma Territory from the Cherokee and created the Osage Reservation.
(SFCM, 3/9/08, p.20)
1868 Navaho Indians in New Mexico were allowed to return to their homelands in Arizona.
(SSFC, 1/7/01, p.T9)
1872 Nov 28, The Modoc War of 1872-73 began in Siskiyou County, northern California when fighting broke out between Modoc Chief Captain Jack and a cavalry detail led by Captain James Jackson. At Lava Beds National Monument in northern California 52 [60] Modoc warriors held off over 1,000 US Army troops for five months. The 4 year conflict was described in the 1997 book "Hell with the Fire Out" by Arthur Quinn, a re-creation of the war from eye-witness accounts.
(SFC,10/16/96,zz1p.1)(SFEC, 4/6/97, BR p.5)(SFEC, 10/25/98, p.T9)(HN, 11/28/98)
1873 Jun 16, Pres. Grant signed an executive order that permitted Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce to live in the Wallowa Valley, Oregon, to perpetuity.
(SFEC, 6/15/97, Par. p.5)(ON, 3/04, p.2)
1873 Oct 3, Captain Jack and three other Modoc Indians were hanged in Oregon for the murder of General Edward Canby.
(HN, 10/3/98)
1873 Nov 19, James Reed and two accomplices robbed the Watt Grayson family of $30,000 in the Choctaw Nation.
(HN, 11/19/98)
1874 Jun 8, Cochise (b.~1810), Chiricahua Apache war chief (his name meant “his nose") and leader of the Chokonen band, died on a reservation in the Dragoon Mountains in southeastern Arizona.
(http://tinyurl.com/aqhkr)
1874 Jul 2, Colonel Custer departed from Fort Abraham Lincoln with some 1,000 soldiers and 70 Indian scouts on a 1200 mile expedition to chart the Black Hills of eastern Wyoming western South Dakota, land which belonged to the Sioux. The expedition returned on August 30.
(AH, 6/03, p.37)
1874 Aug 2, Gold was discovered in the Black Hills of western South Dakota during an expedition led by Colonel Custer. The land belonged to the Sioux but was invaded by prospectors. Sioux leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull retaliated.
(HT, 3/97, p.43)(AH, 6/03, p.37)
1874 Sep 28, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie (d.1889) raided a war camp of Comanche and Kiowa at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, slaughtering 2,000 of their horses.
(HN, 9/28/98)(SFCM, 3/11/01, p.53)
1874 Oct 4, Kiowa leader Santanta, known as "the Orator of the Plains," surrenders in Darlington, Texas. He was later sent to the state penitentiary, where he committed suicide October 11, 1878.
(HN, 10/4/98)
1874 Francis Amasa Walker, a former Union Army general and Boston native, authored "The Indian Question," a treatise that justified forcibly removing tribes from their lands and confining them to remote reservations.
(AP, 10/14/21)
1874 Capt. James Cass of Bristol, England, built a wharf and pier named Cass Landing on the north end of Morro Bay, Ca., to facilitate the loading of ships carrying lumber, staples and dairy products between the Central Coast and San Francisco. It became the town of Cayucos, carved from the Morro y Cayucos Rancho. The name was after a unique plank canoe (cayuco) invented by the local Chumash Indians.
(SSFC, 1/4/09, p.E6)
1874 The California state Supreme Court in Ward vs. Flood upheld a law authorizing racial segregation in public schools. Blacks and Indians were granted the right to establish separate schools.
(SSFC, 5/16/04, p.E5)(SFC, 4/15/17, p.C2)
1874-1875 The Gatling gun was first used against the Comanche Indians at the Battle of Red River in the Texas Panhandle.
(SFC, 3/18/00, p.B4)
1875 Jun, Nez Perce Chief Joseph learned that had rescinded the executive order of 1873 and reopened the Wallowa Valley to white settlement.
(ON, 3/04, p.2)
1875 The Quahadi Comanches, led by Quanah Parker (c.1852-1911), gave up their fight and settled on Indian Territory in Oklahoma after hunters slaughtered the great buffalo herds of the Texas panhandle.
(Econ, 6/19/10, p.85)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanah_Parker)
1876 Mar 17, Gen. Crook destroyed Cheyenne and Ogallala-Sioux Indian camps.
(MC, 3/17/02)
1876 Jun 17, General George Crook’s command was attacked and bested on the Rosebud River by 1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Crazy Horse.
(HN, 6/17/98)
1876 Jun 25, In the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana, Gen. George A. Custer and some 250 men in his 7th Cavalry were massacred by the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. To crush the Plains Indians and drive them onto reservations, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and more than 600 7th Cavalrymen and Indian scouts advanced on an Indian encampment in the Little Bighorn Valley of Montana. Custer's main concern was to keep the Indians from escaping, but on this day, he faced the biggest alliance of hostile Plains Indians--mostly Sioux and Cheyenne--ever gathered in one place. Custer and his entire personal command, about 210 soldiers, were wiped out. The site is near a region where paleontologist Prof. Edward Drinker Cope dug for dinosaur fossils just a few days after the massacre. Custer and his cavalrymen had attacked an encampment of 2,000 to 4,000 Lakota, Cheyenne and other Indians. Up to 300 Indians possessed Henry and Winchester repeating rifles.
(WSJ, 11/1/94, p.1)(SFC, 6/28/96, p.A5)(AP, 6/25/97)(HNPD, 6/25/99)(Econ, 5/8/10, p.82)
1876 Jul 17, At Warbonnet Creek, Nebraska, Buffalo Bill Cody took the scalp of Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hair (Yellow Hand) following a duel.
(http://tinyurl.com/a4ja2)(WSJ, 12/13/05, p.D8)
1876 Aug 15, US law removed Indians from Black Hills after gold find. Sioux leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull led their warriors to protect their lands from invasion by prospectors following the discovery of gold. This led to the Great Sioux Campaign staged from Fort Laramie. Gold was discovered in Deadwood in the Dakota territory by Quebec brothers Fred and Moses Manuel. The mine was incorporated in California on Nov 5, 1877, as the Homestake Mining Company.
(HT, 3/97, p.43)(WSJ, 1/5/00, p.CA1)(MC, 8/15/02)
1876 Sep, Sitting Bull, a legendary Hunkpapa Sioux chief and medicine man, led an escape to Canada in the vengeful aftermath of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Even though he had not fought in the June 25 massacre, the medicine man was considered a threat by white authorities because his visions of victory had encouraged the uprising. In 1881 famine forced Sitting Bull's band back to a reservation in the United States. Throughout the mid-1880s, Sitting Bull won international fame as the prototype of the American Indian when he joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show on tour. Sitting Bull returned to the reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where he was killed in 1890 during a struggle with Indian police.
(HNPD, 9/27/98)
1876 Nov 25, Colonel Ronald MacKenzie destroyed Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife’s village, in the Bighorn Mountains near the Red Fork of the Powder River, during the so-called Great Sioux War.
(HN, 11/25/98)
1876 In Canada the Indian Act was enacted by the Parliament under the provisions of Section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which provides Canada's federal government exclusive authority to legislate in relation to "Indians and Lands Reserved for Indians." The statute concerns registered Indians (that is, First Nations peoples of Canada), their bands, and the system of Indian reserves.
(Econ, 3/28/09, p.46)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Act)
1877 May 6, Chief Crazy Horse surrendered to U.S. troops in Nebraska. Crazy Horse brought General Custer to his end.
(HN, 5/6/99)
1877 May 7, Indian chief Sitting Bull entered Canada with a trail of Indians after the Battle of Little Big Horn.
(HN, 5/7/99)
1877 May 14, General Howard gave Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces 30 days to leave the Wallowa Valley and settle at Lapwai on the upper Clearwater River.
(ON, 3/04, p.5)
1877 Jun 14, Two Nez Perce Indians killed 3 white men.
(ON, 3/04, p.5)
1877 Jun 15, The US Army under Gen’l. Oliver Otis Howard began to pursue some 800 Nez Perce. The Nez Perce had been ordered to leave the Valley of the Winding Waters (Wallowa Valley) in Oregon.
(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A13)(SFEC, 6/15/97, Par p.1)(SSFC, 7/9/06, p.G4)
1877 Jun 16, The Nez Perce War began in the northwestern US. The First Squadron of the First Regiment, the oldest cavalry unit in the US, fought the Apaches and the Nez Perces.
(WUD, 1994, p.964)(WSJ, 12/27/95, p. A-1)(ON, 3/04, p.5)
1877 Aug 10, Col. John Gibbon slaughtered Nez-Perce Indians at Big Hole River.
(MC, 8/10/02)
1877 Aug 22, Nez Perce fled into Yellowstone National Park.
(MC, 8/22/02)
1877 Sep 5, The great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, a cousin of Kicking Bear, was fatally bayoneted at age 36 by a soldier at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. In 1975 Stephen Ambrose authored "Crazy Horse and Custer." In 2002 Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing from the 1955 book "Custer" by Jay Monaghan (d.1980). In 1999 Larry McMurtry authored the biography "Crazy Horse" for the Penguin Lives series. In 2004 Joseph M. Marshall III authored “The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History." In 2006 Kingsley M. Bray authored “Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life."
(SFEC, 2/7/99, Par p.14)(HN, 12/24/99)(SFC, 1/9/02, p.A2)(SSFC, 12/5/04, p.E5)(AH, 10/07, p.62)
1877 Oct 5, Nez Perce Chief Joseph and 418 survivors were captured in the Bear Paw mountains and forced into reservations in Kansas. They surrendered in Montana Territory, after a 1,700-mile trek to reach Canada fell 40 miles short. Nez Perce Chief Joseph surrendered to General O.O. Howard and Colonel Nelson Miles at the Bear Paw ravine in Montana Territory, saying, "Hear me, my chiefs, my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever." The retreat had lasted three months and left 120 Nez Perces dead. Miles had found and surrounded the Nez Perce camp with the help of Sioux and Cheyenne scouts. Many whites, including Howard, admired the Nez Perces' fighting ability and Chief Joseph himself, who was considered humane and eloquent. He died in 1904.
(HFA, '96, p.40)(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A13)(HNPD, 10/5/98)(HN, 10/5/98)
1877 Oct 17, Brigadier General Alfred Terry met with Sitting Bull in Canada to discuss the Indians' return to the United States.
(HN, 10/17/99)
1877 Sep 5, The great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, [Tashunka Witko], was fatally bayoneted at age 36 [27] by a soldier in a (US) Army jail at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. In 1999 Larry McMurtry authored the biography "Crazy Horse" for the Penguin Lives series.
(HN, 9/5/98)(SFEC, 2/7/99, Par p.14)(MC, 9/5/01)
1878 Mar 28, The Hastings College of Law, the law department of the University of California, was founded with a donation of $100,000 by Serranus Clinton Hastings. Hastings (d.1893) donated $100,000 in gold coins to found California’s first law school. It was later reported that he had ordered attacks on native Yuki villages that killed women and children.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serranus_Clinton_Hastings)(NY Times, 10/27/21)
1878 Cheyenne Indians fled to the Powder River home in Wyoming. The Howard Fast novel "Freedom Road" (1941) told their story.
(SFC, 3/13/03, p.A21)
1879 Sep 29, Dissatisfied Ute Indians killed Agent Nathan Meeker and nine others in the "Meeker Massacre."
(HN, 9/29/98)
1879 Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt persuaded Washington to hand over the mothballed Carlisle military barracks in Pennsylvania for use as a school for American Indians. In the early 20th century the school became a football powerhouse, beating Army in 1912. In 1918 the school was turned into a hospital to receive soldiers wounded in WW I.
(WSJ, 1/7/07, p.P9)
1880 Oct 14, Apache leader Victorio was slain in Mexico. [see Oct 15]
(HN, 10/14/98)
1880 Oct 15, Victorio, feared leader of the Minbreno Apache, was killed by Mexican troops in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. [see Oct 14]
(HN, 10/15/98)
1880 Pueblo Chochiti men led anthropologist Adolph F.A. Bandolier to Frijoles Canyon in New Mexico. Bandolier later authored the novel on Pueblo life called “The Delightmakers." Cliff dwelling in the area were preserved (1916) in a national park named after Bandelier.
(SSFC, 8/1/04, p.D7)
1881 Jul 20, Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull, a fugitive since the Battle of the Little Big Horn, surrendered to federal troops.
(AP, 7/20/97)(HN, 7/20/98)
1881 The only recorded 19th-century incident in which Indian scouts turned against the U.S. Army occurred at Cibicue Creek in Arizona Territory. At Cibicue Creek, White Mountain Apache scouts were asked to campaign against their own kin, resulting in a mutiny against the army soldiers. Three of the mutinous scouts were later court-martialed and executed.
(HNQ, 2/27/99)
1882 The US government confined the Havasupai Indians to a 518-acre reservation in Havasu Canyon, Arizona.
(SSFC, 2/19/06, p.F4)
1883 Nov 3, U.S. Supreme Court declared American Indians to be "dependent aliens."
(HN, 11/3/98)
1883 The US Supreme Court ruled that the Dakota Territory court had no jurisdiction in a case in which a member of the Lakota nation killed a fellow member on tribal land. The decision overturned a death sentence and effectively gave exclusive jurisdiction for crimes to tribes. In 1885 US Congress passed the Major Crimes Act taking away the tribes’ authority to prosecute serious crimes such as murder, manslaughter and rape.
(WSJ, 8/13/07, p.A12)
1883-1998 In Canada some 150,000 aboriginal children were removed from their homes and put into residential schools modelled on Victorian poor houses. Half were physically or sexually abused. In 2008 a “truth and reconciliation commission" was set up as part of a settlement of a class-action suit brought by survivors against the government and the churches that operated the schools. Hector-Louis Langevin (1826-1906), Secretary of State for the Provinces, was the architect of the residential school program.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector-Louis_Langevin)(Econ, 6/6/15, p.28)(Econ 7/1/17, p.29)
1884 Nov, The novel "Ramona" by Helen Hunt Jackson was published. It was about a love affair between a half-Indian girl and a Luisea Indian in southern California. It also served a covert tract on Indian oppression in America. In 1990 Valerie Sherer Mathes published "Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy." In 1998 Mathes edited: "The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson."
(SFEC, 12/20/98, BR p.5)
1884 The Crow Indians were confined to a reservation in Montana.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Nation)(Econ, 4/16/15, p.78)
1884 Some 500 Blackfeet Indians in Montana died during the winter from starvation. Reservation agent John Young kept rations on hand for the white people.
(SSFC, 9/9/01, Par p.7)
1885 Mar 3, The United States Congress passed the Major Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 1153). It placed seven major crimes under federal jurisdiction if they are committed by a Native American in Native territory regardless of whether the victim of the crime was Native.
(http://supreme.justia.com/us/437/634/)
1885 Chief Joseph and his band of Nez Perce were allowed to take up residence on the Colville reservation in northern Washington.
(ON, 3/04, p.5)
1885 Canada unjustly imprisoned Cree Chief Poundmaker, or Pihtokahanapiwiyin, for treason. He was jailed for seven months before being released because of bad health in 1886 and died shortly after. In 2019 PM Justin Trudeau, who had been criticized by some indigenous communities, apologized and posthumously exonerated Chief Poundmaker.
(Reuters, 5/24/19)
1886 Apr 11, General Nelson A. Miles arrived at Fort Bowie, Ariz., to begin his assignment to subjugate or destroy a band of Apaches led by Geronimo.
(ON, 10/06, p.1)
1886 Apr 27, A band of Apaches led by Geronimo attacked a ranch west of Fort Huachuca and killed 3 American citizens.
(ON, 10/06, p.1)
1886 Sep 4, Elusive Apache leader Geronimo (1829-1909) surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles (1839-1925) at Skeleton Canyon, Ariz. This ended the last major US-Indian war.
(HN, 9/4/98)(ON, 10/06, p.4)
1887 Feb 8, US Senator Henry Dawes sponsored the Dawes Severalty Act that authorized the survey of Indian territories in the West, in order that the commonly held tribal lands might be broken up into property allotments of 40 to 160 acres. The Dawes Act gave citizenship to Indians living apart from their tribe. Section Six stated that upon completion of a Land Patent process, the allotment holder will become a United States citizen and "be entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens." Native Americans in general did not become citizens until the Snyder Act of 1924.
(NG, 5/95, p.91)(HN, 2/7/97)(AP, 6/2/97)
1887 Feb 8, The Allotment Act (Dawes Act) tried to break up tribal land ownership and awarded individual allotments. Trust accounts were established for both Indian tribes and individual American Indians. The lands were then held in trust, managed by the government and leased out to gas, oil and timber companies. The status of the accounts brought to question in 1996 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs could not account for about 15% of an estimated $450 million held for some 300,000 Indians. In 1999 a federal judge cited Sec. Bruce Babbitt and Robert Rubin in contempt for official deceit in accounting for the trusts that involved some 500,000 Indians.
(SFC, 6/11/96, p.A12)(SFC, 2/23/99, p.A1)(WSJ, 5/3/99, p.A24)
1888 In South Dakota Jesuits founded Red Cloud, a private Catholic school, at the request of Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud.
(Econ, 4/29/17, p.22)
1889 Mar 2, Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Bill, proclaiming unassigned lands in the public domain; the first step toward the famous Oklahoma Land Rush.
(HN, 3/2/99)
1889 Apr 22, The US federal government opened up the Unassigned Lands of Indian Territory to the country's first land run. The Oklahoma land rush officially started at noon as thousands of homesteaders staked claims.
(WSJ, 1/4/96, p.A-8)(AP, 4/22/97)(HN, 4/22/98)
1889 The Great Sioux Reservation of the Dakotas was dismembered into 6 parts.
(Econ, 10/15/05, p.34)
1889 In South Dakota alcohol was banned on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. The ban continued except for a few months in the 1970s. As of 2017 two-thirds adults on the reservation were alcoholics as many purchased alcohol in Whiteclay, a short walk across the state line in Nebraska.
(Econ, 4/29/17, p.22)
1889 The North Pacific Coast Railroad established a train station in Marin County called Manzanita atop a shell mound site previously settled by coastal Miwok Indians. In 1906 a liquor license was granted for an establishment there called Manzanita Villa and in 1916 a building was erected for a hotel and dance hall by Thomas, James and George Moore, SF liquor and cigar dealers. In 1947 new owners built a motel behind the building and renamed it “The Fireside." In 1957 2 skeletons of American Indians were found during renovation. In 2008 the site was re-developed as a new affordable housing complex.
(SFC, 4/21/08, p.B2)
1889 Fr. James Chrysostom Bouchard, SJ, (b.1823), died. His French mother was adopted by the Delaware Lenni-Lenappi tribe after her parents were killed by members of the Comanche tribe. His father was Kistalwa, the Delaware tribe’s chief. After he moved to California his sermons attracted great crowds to the local Jesuit church. He traveled to many Western states, preaching in cities, towns, and mining camps. When he died, a New York newspaper called him "the Father Damen of the West." In 1949 John Bernard McGloin authored “Eloquent Indian."
(GenIV, Winter 04/05)(www.companymagazine.org/v154/preachers.html)
1889-1890 In South Dakota, Sioux warrior Kicking Bear became the leading spokesman for the new Indian religion, the "Ghost Dance," which promised a return to ancient ways for a people disheartened by reservation life. Kicking Bear continued to resist the U.S. Army for several weeks after many of his fellow Sioux were killed in the Massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. Kicking Bird was a Kiowa Chief. Bear’s Head was a Crow chief.
(HNQ, 12/24/99)
1890 Feb 10, Around 11 million acres, ceded to US by Sioux Indians, opened for settlement.
(MC, 2/10/02)
1890 Dec 15, Sioux Indian Chief Sitting Bull and 11 other tribe members were killed in Grand River, S.D., during a fracas with Indian police [US troops]. In an attempt to arrest Sitting Bull at his Standing Rock, South Dakota, cabin, shooting broke out and Lt. Bullhead shot the great Sioux leader. The killing of Indian leader Sitting Bull was one factor that led to the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The reservation was left in disarray when Sioux leader Sitting Bull was killed by Indian police.
(WUD, 1994, p.1680)(AP, 12/15/97)(HN, 12/15/98)(HNQ, 1/5/99)
1890 Dec 28, As Big Foot, another Sioux leader, led his tribe away from the reservation they were surrounded by 7th Cavalry troops at Wounded Knee Creek. The next morning, when the cavalry tried to disarm the Sioux, shots rang out and during the next 6 hours, 146 Sioux men, women and children, including Big Foot, were killed. The 7th Cavalry lost 30 killed.
(HNQ, 1/5/99)
1890 Dec 29, The last major conflict of the Indian wars took place at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota after Colonel James W. Forsyth of the 7th Cavalry tried to disarm Chief Big Foot and his followers. Seventy-year-old Sioux chief Big Foot was killed by the 7th U.S. Cavalry during the massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. Three days later his body was found frozen where he had been killed. The South Dakota reservation had been left in disarray when Sioux leader Sitting Bull was killed by Indian police on December 15, and as Big Foot led his tribe away from the reservation on December 28, they were surrounded by 7th Cavalry troops. The next morning, when the cavalry tried to disarm the Sioux, shots broke out and during the next 6 hours, 146 Sioux men, women and children were killed. The 7th Cavalry lost 30 killed. The Wounded Knee massacre took place in South Dakota as some 300 Sioux Indians were killed by U.S. troops sent to disarm them.
(HFA, '96, p.44)(AP, 12/29/97)(HN, 12/29/98)(HNPD, 12/29/98)
1890 L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) campaigned for an American Indian genocide. In an article for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer of South Dakota He wrote: “Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; it’s better that they should die than live the miserable wretches that they are." In 1919 Baum authored “The Wonderful World of Oz."
(SFC, 2/7/15, p.A7)
1891-1899 During this period the Hopi of Arizona began to produce silver jewelry. A man named Sikyatala learned silversmithing from a Zuni man.
(NH, 11/1/04, p.30)
1891 Sep 18, Harriet Maxwell Converse was 1st white woman to become an Indian chief (her Indian name was Ga-is-wa-noh: the Watcher). She devoted herself to the study and preservation of Native American culture, was a staunch defender of Indian property rights during the 1880s.
(MC, 9/18/01)
1891 The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians had their homeland established in the foothills of the California San Bernardino Mountains by presidential executive order.
(SFEC, 2/13/00, p.D12)
1892 Oct 15, US government convinced the Crow Indians to give up 1.8 million acres of their reservation (in the mountainous area of western Montana) for 50 cents per acre. Presidential proclamation opened this land to settlers.
(MC, 10/15/01)
1892 In New York state the Seneca Indians set up a treaty whereby non-Indian residents of Salamanca, a town built on the Seneca Nation of Indians' Allegany Reservation, paid rent to the Seneca.
(SFC, 8/18/99, p.C14)
1893 Sep 16, Some 50,000 "Sooners" claimed land in the Cherokee Strip during the first day of the Oklahoma land rush.
(AP, 9/16/97)(HN, 9/16/98)
1894 Aug 16, Indian chiefs from the Sioux & Onondaga tribes met to urge their people to renounce Christianity and return to their old Indian faith.
(MC, 8/16/02)
1894 In Alaska the Cape Fox Tlingit Indians moved to Saxman after smallpox reduced their population from some 1000 to 200.
(WSJ, 8/31/01, p.W13)
1899 Edward H. Harriman, chairman of the Union Pacific RR, led a survey expedition along the Alaska coast with 126 passengers aboard a luxury steamer. The 2-month, 9,000 mile journey from Seattle to Siberia included a stop at Cape Fox where the visitors gathered up a items from what looked like an abandoned Tlingit Indian settlement. Much of the plunder was returned in 2001.
(WSJ, 8/31/01, p.W13)
1900 Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) Seattle-based photographer, accompanied ethnographer George bird Grinnell to a reservation Montana took photographs of Blood, Blackfeet and Algonquin Indians gathered there for their annual sun dance. In 1906 he announced plans for 20-volume work documenting Western Indians, The North American Indian. His first volume was published in 1907. The last two volumes appeared in 1930.
(ON, 6/12, p.9)(http://curtis.library.northwestern.edu/curtis/timeline.html)
1901 E.P. Valentine, antiquarian, removed hundreds of Monacan remains from a burial site in Virginia later known as the Hayes Creek Mound. The remains were reburied in 1998.
(Arch, 9/00, p.56)
1902 A massacre by Mexican federal troops, "the Battle of the Sierra Mazatan," killed about 150 Yaqui men, women and children. US anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka came upon some of the bodies while they were still decaying, hacked off the heads with a machete and boiled them to remove the flesh for his study of Mexico's "races." He sent the resulting collection to the New York museum. In 2009 Yaqui Indians buried their lost warriors after a two-year effort to rescue the remains from New York's American Museum of Natural History.
(AP, 11/17/09)
1904 Sep 21, Exiled Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph died in Washington state reportedly of a "broken heart." In 1984 “Chief Joseph’s Own Story" was published.
(HN, 9/21/98)(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A13)
1907 Nov 16, Oklahoma became the 46th US state of the union. Black settlers founded some 30 towns before statehood was achieved. Oklahoma’s Osage Indian Reservation became Osage County, one of the largest in the US.
(WSJ, 11/10/97, p.A1)(NG, 5/95, p.92)(SFCM, 3/9/08, p.20)t
1908 In Mexico at least 5,000 Yaqui had been sold into slavery by this time. During the 34-year rule of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911), the government repeatedly provoked the Yaqui remaining in Sonora to rebellion in order to seize their land for exploitation by investors for both mining and agricultural use.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaqui)
1909 Feb 17, Apache chief Geronimo died of pneumonia at age 80, while still in captivity at Fort Sill, Okla.
(HN, 2/17/99)
1909 Dec 10, Red Cloud, Sioux Indian chief, died.
(MC, 12/10/01)
1911 Aug 28, Ishi (d.1916), a native Yahi Indian, walked out of the forest near Oroville, Ca. He underwent examination at UC medical center in San Francisco and liked to practice "drawing bow" on Parnassus Heights.
(SFC, 7/14/96, Z1 p.2)(SFEC, 12/26/99, p.W4)(SSFC, 2/8/04, p.M1)(SFC, 9/6/14, p.C1)
1912 May 26, Jay Silverheels (d.1980) was born as Harold J. Smith on the Six Nations Indian Reservation, Brantford, Ontario, Canada. He was the son of a Mohawk Indian chief and became an actor who portrayed Tonto on "The Lone Ranger."
(www.imdb.com)
1912 Jul 7, At the Stockholm Olympics Native American Jim Thorpe won a gold medal in the men's pentathlon. On July 15 Thorpe won another gold medal in the men's decathlon
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_at_the_1912_Summer_Olympics)
1912 Nov 9, The football team of Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian School, with running back Jim Thorpe, defeated the Army team, with Dwight D. Eisenhower as linebacker, 27-6. In 2007 Sally Jenkins authored “The Real Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation."
(WSJ, 1/7/07, p.P9)(www.footballfoundation.com/news.php?id=242)
1913 Feb 13, Joaquin Miller (b.1837), known as the "poet of the Sierras," died in Oakland, Ca. Miller had sponsored California’s 1st Arbor Day. His work included "Utopia" (1880) and “Life amongst the Modocs: unwritten history" (1873), an autobiographical novel first published in London. Miller was born as Cincinnatus Hiner Miller near Liberty, Indiana. His secret "California Diary" was unearthed 25 years after his death. In 1919 Oakland purchased his property and in 1928 turned it into a park combined with adjacent undeveloped tracts.
(http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007936641)(SFEM, 4/2/00, p.48)(SSFC, 1/14/07, p.B3)(SSFC, 6/16/13, DB p.17)
1913 Mary McAboy began hand-making Skookum Indian dolls. Skookum was a Siwash Indian word that roughly means bully good.
(SFC, 6/17/98, Z1 p.3)
1915 Sep 18, Reverend Sherman Coolidge (1862-1932), an Arapaho minister and one of the founders of the Society of American Indians (SAI), issued a proclamation declaring the second Saturday of each May as “American Indian Day" and appealing for US citizenship for American Indians.
(http://www.bia.gov/DocumentLibrary/HeritageMonth/index.htm)
1915-1929 Alfred V. Kidder, archeologist, excavated numerous bones of Indians buried in the upper Pecos Valley of New Mexico. In 1999 the bones of nearly 2,000 Indians were returned by Harvard Univ. to New Mexico for burial.
(SFC, 5/19/99, p.A3)
1916 Mar 25, Ishi, the last Yahi Indian in California, died of tuberculosis at the Univ. of California Hospital. His body was cremated but his brain was removed and shipped to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. The documentary film "Ishi, the Last Yahi" was made by John Harrison Quinn (d.2000 at 59). In 2004 Orin Starn authored "Ishi's Brain: In search of the Last "Wild" Indian."
(SFC, 1/26/00, p.A24)(SSFC, 2/8/04, p.M1)(SSFC, 3/20/16, DB p.50)
1916 May 13, The 1st US observance of American Indian Day. American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month originated in 1915 when the president of the Congress of American Indian Associations issued a proclamation declaring the second Saturday in May each year as American Indian Day. The first American Indian Day was celebrated in May 1916, in New York. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed a joint congressional resolution designating November 1990 as National American Indian Heritage Month. Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)(www.aifisf.com/news.htm)
1916 The US federal government relegated the Koi Nation, one of the remaining groups of the Pomo people, to a rancheria near Clear Lake, Ca., that could not support the tribe. Leaders instead settled in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa. A 2019 federal court decision recognized the tribe along with the right to establish a sovereign land base. In 2021 the tribe purchased land for a casino in Sonoma County.
(SFC, 9/16/21, p.C6)
1916 In Utah the US government took land from the Ute Indians for the rights to oil shale reserves. In 2000 84,000 acres were given back.
(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A12)
1917 The Iroquois Confederacy declared war on Germany.
(www.history.army.mil/html/topics/natam/natam-wwii.html)
1919 May 26, Jay Silverheels, actor, was born. He played Tonto in The Lone Ranger TV series
(HN, 5/26/01)
1921 Nov 14, The Cherokee Indians asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review their claim to 1 million acres of land in Texas.
(HN, 11/14/98)
1923 Jan 5, The Senate debated the benefits of Peyote for the American Indian.
(HN, 1/5/99)
1923 Special Indian Commissioner H.J. Hagerman organized the first Navajo Tribal Council which gave him power to act for them in auctioning oil leases. The tribal government was established following the discovery of oil on its reservation.
(SFEC, 5/4/97, Z1 p.4)(SFC, 11/14/11, p.D4)
1924 Mar 20, The Virginia Legislature passed two closely related eugenics laws: SB 219, entitled "The Racial Integrity Act" and SB 281, "An ACT to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases", henceforth referred to as "The Sterilization Act". The Racial Integrity Act (one drop law) required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, and felonized marriage between "white persons" and non-white persons. The law was the most famous ban on miscegenation in the US, and was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. Virginia repealed the sterilization in 1979. In 2001 the House of Delegates voted to express regret for the state’s selecting breeding policies that had forced sterilizations on some 8,000 people. The Senate soon followed suit.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_Integrity_Act_of_1924)(SSFC, 2/4/01, p.A3)(SFC, 2/15/01, p.C16)
1924 Jun 2, Congress granted U.S. citizenship to all American Indians. The Snyder Act Granted full citizenship to all Native Americans born in the U.S.
(AP, 6/2/97)(HN, 6/2/98)(HNQ, 3/1/99)
1927 Apr, The last major battle between the Mexican Army and the Yaqui Indians was fought at Cerro del Gallo Mountain. By employing heavy artillery, machine guns, and planes of the Mexican Air Force to shell, bomb, and strafe Yaqui villages, Mexican authorities eventually prevailed.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaqui)
1927 Oct 19, Marjorie Tallchief, US ballerina (Harkness Ballet), was born.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1934 The US Congress allowed US created tribal governments to replace traditional Indian governing bodies. A US act of Congress, nicknamed the Indian New Deal, endorsed a degree of self rule for Indian tribes.
(SFEC, 5/4/97, z1 p.4)(Econ, 4/7/12, p.35)
1937-1955 Gov. McCarran of Nevada entered legislation on behalf of Italian American squatters on reservation lands of the Pyramid Paiutes.
(SFEC, 1/2/00, BR p.12)
1939 The last person fluent in the Chochenyo, one of eight languages used by the Ohlone people of the San Francisco Bay Area, died.
(SFC, 11/24/12, p.C4)
1941 Frances Macgregor (d.2002 at 95), sociologist and photographer, published ""Twentieth Century Indians." The collection of photos helped prompt Congress to devote more money to Indian reservations.
(SFC, 2/8/02, p.A25)
1941 The Iroquois, the Sioux and the Ojibwe (Chippewa) tribes declared war on Germany. The Iroquois Confederacy, having declared war on Germany in 1917, had never made peace and so automatically became party to World War II.
(Econ, 4/7/12, p.35)(www.history.army.mil/html/topics/natam/natam-wwii.html)
1942 Jun 13, Delegates from the Six Nations Confederacy (Iraquois League) assembled in conference to draft a formal declaration of war. The following day, on the steps of the United States Capitol, a spokesman of the Confederacy said it has entered World War II on its own consent and terms.
(www.combat.ws/S3/BAKISSUE/CMBT04N4/IROQUOIS.HTM)
1944 Jun 6, Cherokee tribal members communicated via radios in their native language on the Normandy beaches.
(SFC, 6/4/98, p.A6)
1944 California Indians were awarded $17 million that was promised in treaties nearly a century earlier. $12 million was deducted for goods and services already given.
(SFEC, 9/20/98, Z1 p.5)
1945 Feb 18, U.S. Marines stormed ashore at Iwo Jima. Navajo code talkers used their native language to communicate by radio on Japanese troop movements.
(HN, 2/18/98)(SFC, 6/4/98, p.A6)
1946 Nov 25, Supreme Court granted Oregon Indians land payment rights from the U.S. government.
(HN, 11/25/98)
1948 Sec. of the Interior J.A. Krug signed a contract relinquishing Indian reservation land for the Garrison Dam.
(SFEC, 4/12/98, BR p.7)
1949 A.J. Liebling, New York reported, arrived in Nevada for Reno divorce, which required a 6-week residency. He began a series of articles for the New Yorker on the Pyramid Paiutes and their struggle with Italian American squatters over water rights. In 1999 the collected stories were edited by Elmer Rusco and published under the title "A Reporter At Large: Dateline: Pyramid Lake, Nevada."
(SFEC, 1/2/00, BR p.12)
c1950s Cherokee Admiral Joseph J. "Jocko" Clark rose to command the U.S. Seventh Fleet during the Korean War, making him the most powerful war chief in American Indian history.
(HNQ, 3/26/00)
1954 US Congress voted to withdraw support to Wisconsin Indians guaranteed in 1854. The Menomonee (people of the wild rice) Chiefs Oshkosh and Keshena met with federal Indian agents in Keshena Falls, Wisconsin, in 1854 and agreed to retain only 275,000 acres from their original 9 1/2 million acres. As part of the settlement the chiefs and their followers were promised eternal government protection.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.235)
1954 The 600-square-mile Garrison Dam in North Dakota, authorized by Congress in 1949, was completed. It covered the ancestral lands of Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Indians.
(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)
1957 The International Labor Organization (ILO) developed and ratified Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention, 1957 (No. 107), an international instrument dedicated to improving the living conditions of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In 1989 it was revised and renamed Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169). Convention 169 recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination within a nation-state.
(http://tinyurl.com/gsrhxrq)(Econ, 2/6/15, p.32)
1957 George Gustav Heye (b.1876), collector of Indian artifacts, died. He and a few rich friends set up a foundation in 1922 that established the Museum of the American Indian. The museum closed in 1994 and the Smithsonian acquired the collection.
(WSJ, 9/21/04, p.D8)
1958 Jul 11, Monument Valley, straddling the Arizona-Utah border, became the 1st Navajo Tribal Park.
(SSFC, 10/6/02, p.C15)
1958 Jul, Mildred Loving (1940-2008), a woman of American Indian and black heritage, and her white husband, Richard (d.1975), were arrested in Virginia within weeks of arriving from Washington DC and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife. In 1967 the US Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.105)
1960 Edmund Wilson and Joseph Mitchell authored “Apologies to the Iroquois." It memorialized the seizure by Robert Moses, the unelected head of the New York Power Authority, of 600 acres by eminent domain for a power reservoir near Niagara Falls.
(www.nyslittree.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/DB.PersonDetail/PersonPK/500.cfm)
1961 William E. Brandon (d.2002) authored "The American Heritage Book of Indians."
(SFC, 5/31/02, p.A27)
1962 The Miccosukee Indian tribe gained federal recognition after its leaders made a state visit to Fidel Castro.
(SFC, 12/29/98, p.A4)
1962 The Lake Oahe reservoir in South Dakota, created by the US Army Corps of Engineers, reduced the Cheyenne River reservation of the Sioux Indians by 100,000 acres.
(Econ, 10/15/05, p.34)
1964 Mar 9, A group of 5 Lakota (Sioux) Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in a peaceful protest. They declared that it should be a Native American cultural center and university.
(SFC, 5/19/96,City Guide, p.7)(G, Summer ‘97, p.4)
1964 The Economic Opportunity Act opened the gates for Indian management of their own affairs.
(SFEC, 2/13/00, BR p.5)
1965 In western New York the Kinzua Dam on the Allegheny River opened. Construction of the dam forced the departure of Pennsylvania's last Native Americans, the Senecas, who now live near Salamanca, New York, on the northern shores of land flooded by the dam.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinzua_Dam)
1968 Apr 11, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968, a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This included a Fair Housing Act and the Indian Civil Rights Act, which limited sentences that tribes could hand down on any charge to six months. In 1968 Congress increased the maximum to one year. The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae - FNMA), established by the government in 1938, became a private, shareholder-owned company as part of the Fair Housing Act.
(http://tinyurl.com/2o3p2q)(http://tinyurl.com/ldx765)(AP, 4/11/98)(SFC, 2/20/98, p.A23)
1968 Dennis Banks (b.1937), an Anishinabe Indian from Minnesota, co-founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) along with Clyde Bellecourt (1936-2022), George Mitchell, Charles Deegan and others. Vernon Bellecourt (1932-2007), an Ojibwe Indian from Minnesota, also helped found the movement.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Banks)(SFC, 10/15/07, p.B6)(SSFC, 1/16/22, p.F9)
1968 The story of the WWII code-talkers was declassified. American Navajo Indians had used their native language as code that the Japanese were unable to break. Chester Nez, the last living Navajo code-breaker died on June 4, 2014, at age 93.
(Econ, 6/21/14, p.90)
1969 May 5, N. Scott Momaday (b.1934) received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for “House Made of Dawn." The Kiowa author was the first American Indian to win the prize. Norman Mailer won the general non-fiction Pulitzer Prize for “Armies of the Night" (1968).
(http://tinyurl.com/5naupa)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Pulitzer_Prize)
1969 Nov 20, A group of 80 Native Americans, all college students, seized Alcatraz Island in the name of "Indians of All Tribes." The occupation lasted 19 months. They offered $24 in beads and cloth to buy the island, demanded an American Indian Univ., museum and cultural center, and listed reasons why the island was a suitable Indian reservation.
(SFEC, 3/8/98, p.W38)
1969 Nov 27, The United American Indians of New England began an annual National Day of Mourning at Plymouth, Mass., on Thanksgiving Day to recall the disease, racism and oppression that the Pilgrims brought in 1620.
(SFC, 11/24/17, p.A8)
1969 The 62-foot-tall Skowhegan Indian statue was built in Skowhegan, Maine.
(NW, 8/26/02, p.51)
1969 A government clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs dropped the Samish Indian nation from the list of recognized tribes. In 2002 the tribe, native to the San Juan Islands and western Skagit County of Washington state, sued for recognition and damages.
(SFC, 10/18/02, p.J8)
1970 May, The US government shut off power and stopped fresh water supplies from the Native American Indians on Alcatraz Island. A fire broke out and each side blamed the other.
(G, Summer ‘97, p.5)(www.nps.gov/alca/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm)
1970 Nov 27, Native American gathered in Plymouth, Mass., to hold their first National Day of Mourning.
(USA Today, 11/27,19, p.4B)
1970 Dec 2, The US Senate voted to give 48,000 acres of New Mexico back to the Taos Indians.
(HN, 12/2/98)
1970 Dee Brown (1908-2002), American writer, published "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," a history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century and their displacement and slaughter by the United States federal government.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Knee)
1970 Tony Hillerman (1925-2008), American writer, introduced Lt. Joe Leaphorn in his first detective novel "The Blessing Way," as an experienced police officer who understood, but did not share his people's traditional belief in a rich spirit world. Officer Jim Chee, introduced in "People of Darkness" (1978), was a younger officer studying to become a "hathaali" — Navajo for "shaman."
(AP, 10/27/08)
1971 Jun 10, Federal marshals, FBI agents and special forces swarmed Alcatraz Island and removed the Native American occupiers: 5 women, 4 children and 6 unarmed men.
(www.nps.gov/alca/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm)
1971 William E. Brandon (d.2002) published "The Magic World," an anthology of American Indian poetry.
(SFC, 5/31/02, p.A27)
1971 The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was approved by Congress. It gave large portions of prime bear habitat to the Alutiiq people, who had hunted and fished on the island for 7,000 years. 10% of the state, 44 million acres of land, was ceded to native tribes.
(NG, Jan. 94, p.141)(SFC, 2/2/00, p.A7)(AH, 10/04, p.42)
1972 Sep 7, The Commissioner of Indian Affairs in a memorandum extended federal recognition to the Chippewa tribe of Sault Ste. Marie in Northern Michigan. The meaning of this federal recognition was further clarified in a memorandum by the Associate Solicitor for Indian Affairs on February 27, 1974.
(http://tinyurl.com/5c8cfu)
1972 Nov 9, The "Trail of Broken Treaties" caravan, an Indian protest, ended in vandalism and chaos at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. The story is told in the 1996 book "Like A Hurricane, The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee" by Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior.
(SFEC, 1/5/97, BR p.8)(http://siouxme.com/lodge/treaties.html)
1973 Feb 27, Members of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. They protested illegal and discriminatory acts on the part of the Pine Ridge Sioux Tribal Council. The FBI was called in and a siege lasted for 69 days with 2 AIM leaders killed. The story is told in the 1996 book "Like A Hurricane, The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee" by Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior.
(SFC, 6/14/96, p.A19)(AP, 2/27/98)(SFC, 12/30/98, p.A17)(SFEC, 1/5/97, BR p.8)
1973 Mar 2, Federal forces surrounded Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which was occupied by members of the militant American Indian Movement who were holding at least 10 hostages.
(HN, 3/2/99)
1973 Canada’s Supreme Court recognized that indigenous title to land existed.
(Econ, 7/5/14, p.31)
1975 Jan 3, President Ford signed Public Law 93-620. This Act, written to enlarge the Grand Canyon National Park, also provided in Section 10 for the enlargement of the adjacent Havasupai Indian Reservation by 185,000 acres and designated a contiguous 95,300 acres of the enlarged National Park as a permanent traditional use area of the Havasupai Indians of Havasu Canyon, Arizona.
(SSFC, 2/19/06, p.F4)(www.tribal-institute.org/envirotext/89.htm)
1975 Jan 4, Pres. Ford signed into law the US Indian Self-Determination Act. It began the transfer of administration from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the tribal governments.
(http://tinyurl.com/6rh5v3y)(Econ, 4/7/12, p.35)
1975 Dec 12, In South Dakota Anna Mae Pictou Aquash (b.1945) was shot to death. American Indian Movement (AIM) members suspected her of being an FBI informant. Her body was found on Feb 24, 1976, on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In 2003 Arlo Looking Cloud (50) was convicted in the murder. John Graham, a Canadian, and Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud, a US citizen, were indicted in 2003 in the United States for Aquash's murder. In 2007 a Canadian court ruled that Graham should be extradited to the United States to face trial. In 2011 Graham was sentenced to serve life in prison.
(SFC, 2/7/04, p.A3)(Reuters, 6/26/07)(www.dickshovel.com/time.html#1976)(SFC, 1/25/11, p.A6)
1976 Scientists in southern California scientists unearthed what were among the oldest skeletal remains ever found in the Western Hemisphere. They dated back nearly 10,000 years. A local tribal group called the Kumeyaay Nation later claimed that the bones, representing at least two people, were their ancestors and demanded them back. In December, 2011, the Univ. of San Diego said it would turn the remains over to the Kumeyaay, although it gave other tribal groups until Jan. 4 to come forward and dispute the claim.
(AP, 1/15/12)
1976 Vermont Gov. Tom Salmon granted the Abenaki Indians recognition. The following year a new governor rescinded recognition.
(SFC, 12/13/02, p.J7)
1977 The Iroquois Indians of North America, or Haudenosaunee as they call themselves, began issuing their own passports.
(Econ, 7/24/10, p.34)
1978 Mar 6, The US Supreme Court in its Oliphant decision ruled that tribes could not try non-Indian defendants in tribal courts. It centered on the arrest of Mark Oliphant, a non-Indian, by tribal police. He argued that the tribal court does not have criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliphant_v._Suquamish_Indian_Tribe)
1978 May 15, The US Supreme Court’s Santa Clara Pueblo vs. Martinez decision held that tribal enrollment issues are an Indian-only matter immune from outside interference.
(SSFC, 4/20/08, p.A11)(http://supreme.justia.com/us/436/49/)
1978 Aug 11, The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) put an end to the persecution of Native American religions.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Religious_Freedom_Act)(Econ, 4/7/12, p.35)
1978 Nov 8, The US Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act because a high number of Native American children were being removed from their homes by public and private agencies. The law gave preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving native American children.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Child_Welfare_Act)(SFC, 3/13/19, p.A6)
1979 Dec 14, The Seminole Tribe opened a high-stakes bingo hall on their reservation at Hollywood, Florida, and the state tried immediately to shut it down. This was followed by a series of court battles leading to a final decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1981 “Seminole Tribe vs. Butterworth." The court ruled in favor of the Seminoles affirming their right to operate their bingo hall.
(http://500nations.com/news/Indian_Casinos/history.asp)
1980 Mar 5, Jay Silverheels (b.1912), son of a Mohawk Indian chief and actor who portrayed Tonto on "The Lone Ranger", died in Woodland Hills, Ca., from a stroke.
(www.imdb.com)
1980 Dr. Edgar S. Cahn (46), author of "Our Brother’s Keeper: The Indian in White America" (1969), and co-founder of the Antioch School of Law (1972), suffered a massive heart attack. While recovering he dreamed up the idea of Time Dollars as a new currency to provide a solution to massive cuts in government spending on social welfare. His idea was that one hour of work equals one service credit. In 1987, while at the London School of Economics, Edgar developed his theoretical explanation for why such a currency should work. He came back to the US and started putting service credits (not yet called Time Dollars) into operation. In 1997 a Time Dollar convention helped new and surviving groups identify “what works." Time Dollars became the backbone of a successful cross-age peer tutoring program in Chicago, a Maine Time Banks Network, and a Time Dollar Youth Court in Washington, DC.
(www.timebanks.org/history-structure.htm)(www.law.udc.edu/?page=ECahn)
1980 Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, Mont., was established.
(SFEC, 7/18/99, Par. p.6)
1981 Jul 1, Tim Giago, an Oglala Sioux writer from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, launched The Lakota Times, the first independently owned Indian newspaper in the US.
(SSFC, 12/23/07, p.F1)
1981 Sep 23, Chief Dan George, actor (Harry & Tonto, Little Big Man), died at 82.
(MC, 9/23/01)
1981 The northwest Chinook Indians filed a petition for recognition with the Interior Dept.
(SFC, 12/31/00, p.A11)
1982 Oct 13, The IOC restored 2 gold medals post mortem from the 1912 Olympics to Jim Thorpe (1888-1953).
(http://nomas-nyc.com/2006/10/solid-gold.html)
1982 Iron Eyes Cody (d.1998 at 94), American Indian actor, published his autobiography: "Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian." In 1970 he played an Indian paddling through a polluted stream in a public service ad.
(SFC, 1/5/99, p.A20)
1982 Maine Indian tribes laid claim to 60% of the state lands and settled for $81.5 million.
(SFC, 12/13/02, p.J7)
1983 The Pequot Indians of Connecticut won federal recognition.
(WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)
1983 Lulie Nall, a Penobscot Indian, died. She had designed a tepee-emblazoned flag for the 19-month American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, that began in 1969. In 2008 the flag was put up for auction and sold for $60,000.
(SFC, 1/24/08, p.A1)(SFC, 1/25/08, p.B2)
1986 William Loren Katz authored "Black Indians," an account of the relations between Black and Native Americans.
(WSJ, 12/20/99, p.A1)
1986 The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation opened its first bingo hall in Connecticut.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.40)
1987 Feb 25, The US Supreme Court ruled that California cannot bar gambling on Indian tribal land. This win by the Cabazon tribe opened the door to Indian gambling nationwide. By 2015 almost half of America’s 566 Native American tribes and villages operated casinos.
(SFC, 5/11/04, p.B8)(WSJ, 9/27/05, p.A1)(http://tinyurl.com/7ub24)(Econ, 1/17/15, p.32)
1988 The US Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
(SFC, 6/26/96, p.A10)
1989 Apr 1, In Canada the Oka conflict began when some 200 Mohawks from the Kanesatake reserve marched though the town of Oka protesting plans to expand the village's nine-hole golf course to 18 holes, saying expansion encroaches on their burial ground. A 78-day standoff began on July 11, 1990 and ended Sep 26, 1990. The Oka Crisis cost the Quebec government an estimated $180 million not including the cost of the army.
(http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-99-500/conflict_war/oka/clip1)
1989 In Connecticut the Mashantucket Pequot Indians began the Pequot Pharmaceutical Network, a small health service for their members and employees. In 10 years it grew to a $15 million business based on drug prices acquired at government rates.
(SFC, 6/19/99, p.A3)
1990 Apr 17, The US Supreme Court in Employment Division v Smith said two members of a native American church had no First Amendment right to unemployment compensation after being fired for ingesting peyote as part of their religious observance.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Division_v._Smith)(Econ, 7/9/16, p.24)
1990 The US government enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
(SFC, 6/1/98, p.A6)(SFC, 9/3/98, p.A10)
1990 In Arizona Gila River Telecommunications Inc. (GRTI) was founded as a nonprofit telephone company. It serviced the 620-square-mile Gila River reservation of the Pima Indians, who had inhabited the area for over 2,000 years.
(WSJ, 7/7/00, p.B1)
1991 In Montana the name of Custer Battlefield National Monument was changed to Little Bighorn Battlefield Monument. A $2 million memorial was dedicated Jun 25,2003.
(WSJ, 6/25/03, p.A1)
1991 In Canada the Algonquins on the Rapid Lake reserve struck a trilateral deal giving them a share in what happens on their traditional territory and a share in any revenues. The Rapid Lake reserve was established for the use of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in 1961. Since forest resources are a provincial jurisdiction, a pilot project about the management of renewable resources (wildlife and forest) was negotiated between the Government of Quebec and the Algonquins of Barriere Lake.
(http://tinyurl.com/y8ka7qbl)(Econ 7/1/17, p.30)
1992 The Mdewakanton Dakota Indians opened their Mystic Lake casino complex on their 248 acres of tribal land in Minnesota.
(WSJ, 2/5/98, p.A1,6)
1992 The Foxwoods Casino, the biggest gaming complex in the Western Hemisphere, opened on the Pequot Reservation at Mashantucket, Conn. The number of Pequot numbered about 550.
(WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)
1993 Southern Ute Indians launched Red Willow, a natural gas production operation. By 2003 the tribe had acquired $1.3 billion in assets.
(WSJ, 6/13/03, p.A1)
1994 Sep 13, Bob Blackbull, Blackfoot Indian, received his first shipment of mustangs in Browning, Montana, and revived a piece of their culture.
(SFC, 9/2/96, p.A3)
1994 The Winnebago nation gave Lance Morgan $9.7 million from its Iowa casino to start a new venture. Morgan formed Nebraska-based Ho-Chunk Inc.
(Econ, 4/5/08, p.71)
1994 In Canada a majority of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake passed a bylaw stipulating that a person must have at least 4 Mohawk great grandparents to live or own property on its 13,000 acre reservation just south of Montreal.
(Econ, 2/27/10, p.44)
1995 Randall Milliken authored "A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810."
{SF, USA, AmerIndian, Books}
(http://tinyurl.com/yy9xssc7)
1996 John Annerino wrote "People of Legend: Native Americans of the Southwest."
(SFEC, 12/8/96, BR p.4)
1996 Brian Bibby wrote "The Fine Art of California Indian Basketry."
(SFEC, 12/8/96, BR p.4)
1996 John Blom and Allen Hayes wrote "Southwestern Pottery: Anasazi to Zuni."
(SFEC, 12/8/96, BR p.4)
1996 Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet woman from Browning, Montana, filed a lawsuit alleging that the US Interior Department mismanaged billions of dollars held in trust by the government. In 2010 the US House of Representatives approved a $3.4 billion government settlement.
(SFC, 7/3/10, p.A4)
1996 In western North Carolina the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation acquired a few hundred acres of ancestral pasture bordering the Tuckasegee River that contained the Kituwha Mound. Legend held that this was the site where God had given the Cherokee their laws and their first fire.
(Arch, 9/02, p.70)
1997 Apr 15, The US military said it would allow American Indian soldiers to use peyote in their religious services.
(SFC, 4/16/97, p.A3)
1997 A concept called "circle sentencing" began on the Mille Lacs Indian Reservation. It involved community-imposed sentences for nonviolent misdemeanors. The program was fashioned after practices by the First Nation Indians in the Yukon Territory.
(SFC, 2/15/99, p.A3)
1998 Jan 20, The Idaho Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe planned to begin a national online lottery called US Lottery. US residents will be restricted by their local state laws.
(SFC, 1/16/98, p.A1)
1998 Mar 6, It was reported that Panama hired a Canadian Indian tribe, the Tsuu T’ina, to clean out unexploded bombs and shells from an area of Empire Range, which US military forces abandoned.
(SFC, 3/6/98, p.A12)
1998 Aug 11, The 308,000 sq.-foot Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center opened in Mashantucket, Conn.
(WSJ, 8/11/98, p.A16)
1998 Sep 2, The Univ. of Nebraska promised to return the bones of 1,702 Indians to tribes for reburial. It also agreed to build a memorial on a campus field where bones were burned over 30 years ago in an incinerator used to dispose diseased animal parts.
(SFC, 9/3/98, p.A10)
1998 Paula Mitchell Marks published "In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival."
(SFEC, 4/12/98, BR p.7)
1998 The Nez Pierce tribe returned to its ancient homeland in Oregon after 121 years of exile.
(SFEC, 2/13/00, BR p.5)
1998 US government officials, charged with mismanaging trust funds for American Indians, shredded 162 boxes of records. This was disclosed by a federal judge in 1999.
(SFC, 12/7/99, p.A6)
1999 Mar 24, The US Supreme Court ruled to uphold an 1837 treaty with the Chippewa Indians for hunting and fishing on 13 million acres of public land in Minnesota.
(SFC, 3/25/99, p.A8)
1999 May 17, In Neah Bay, Washington state, Makah Indian hunters legally killed their first gray whale in 75 years.
(SFC, 5/18/99, p.A3)
1999 Jun 2, American Indians filed a class action law suit against the major tobacco companies charging that they were excluded from the $206 billion settlement reached with 46 states last November.
(SFC, 6/4/99, p.A18)
1999 Jun, In Florida the Miccosukee Indians celebrated the opening of their $50 million, 300-room resort and convention center on their 680 acres in Everglades National Park. Meanwhile the price tag for restoring the everglades ecosystem was put at $7.8 billion.
(SFC, 6/5/99, p.A6)
1999 Jun 16, In Santa Fe 34 tribes filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the nation's largest tobacco companies.
(SFC, 6/17/99, p.a3)
1999 Jun 18, The Native American Church of North America made an agreement with US Defense Dept. officials at its 50th annual convention to allow Native Americans to use peyote in religious services.
(SFC, 6/30/99, p.A7)
1999 Sep 28, Groundbreaking was scheduled for the US National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC.
(SFC, 7/22/99, p.A5)
1999 Nov 24, American Indian farmers filed a $19 billion class-action lawsuit against the Agriculture Department for an alleged 20-year history of loan-granting discrimination.
(SFC, 11/25/99, p.A4)
1999 The show "Spirit: A Journey in Dance, Drums and Song" was composed by Peter Buffett. It was largely based on American Indian dance tradition.
(WSJ, 11/26/99, p.W9)
2000 Jan 14, The federal government announced the return of 84,000 acres in northern Utah to the Ute Indians. The land was taken in 1916 for the rights to oil shale reserves.
(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A12)
2000 Apr 29, Clarence Basil Cuts The Rope, artist and member of the Gros Ventre Tribe, died at age 64 in Montana.
(SFC, 4/3/00, p.B2)
2000 Sep 8, The Bureau of Indian Affairs marked its 175th birthday and Kevin Grover, head of the bureau, offered a formal apology to American Indians for the misdeeds of the agency.
(SFC, 9/9/00, p.A3)
2000 Nov, In Detroit a casino, 90% owned by the Sault St. Marie Chippewa Indians, opened in Greektown.
(SSFC, 5/27/01, p.A19)
2000 Dec, The Timbisha Shoshone Indians were granted 7,600 acres around Death Valley that included 314 acres within the national park.
(SFC, 1/3/01, p.A2)
2000 Philip Burnham authored "Indian Country, God’s Country: Native Americans and the national Parks."
(SFC, 1/3/01, p.A2)
2000 Dolan H. Eargle Jr. authored "Native California Guide: Weaving the Past and Present." It surveyed 143 present-day California Indian communities.
(SFC, 12/31/00, BR p.12)
2000 Ian Frazier authored "On the Rez," a focus on the Ogallala Sioux Reservation in Pine Ridge, S.D.
(WSJ, 1/14/00, p.W10)
2000 Alvin M. Josephy Jr., historian authored "A Walk Toward Oregon: A Memoir."
(SFEC, 2/13/00, p.5)
2000 The Seminole Nation voted to cast freedmen descendants out of its tribe. The US government in response cut off most federal programs and refused to authorize gaming. The Seminole freedman were later allowed back into the tribe.
(SFC, 3/5/07, p.A2)
2000 In Nevada mine operator Arimetco abandoned a WW II-era mine and left behind a stew of uranium, arsenic and other chemicals. In 1994 the EPA determined that the site qualified for priority Superfund status but did not formally propose the listing until 2016. State regulators had first accused the Anaconda Mining Co. of discharging pollutants there in 1985. In 2018 the local Yerington Paiute Tribe fought against efforts to put the state and current owner Atlantic Richfield in charge of the cleanup, instead of the EPA.
(SSFC, 4/29/18, p.C11)
2001 Jan 1, The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians opened up Tahquitz Canyon near Palm Springs for visitors.
(SSFC, 3/11/01, p.T5)
2001 Feb 23, A US federal appeals court upheld that the US government mismanaged and neglected Native American trust funds.
(SFC, 2/24/01, p.A5)
2001 Mar 10, In Canada the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council of British Columbia signed a treaty with the federal government.
(SSFC, 3/11/01, p.D2)
2001 Jun 10, It was reported that Jamake Highwater, author and TV host, had recently died at age ~59. His over 30 books included "Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey" and "The Sun, He Dies."
(SSFC, 6/10/01, p.A27)
2002 Feb 7, The Cree tribe of northern Quebec under Ted Moses ratified an October deal that ensured 15,000 Cree of receiving no less than $3.5 billion over the next 50 years and a share in benefits derived from their lands.
(SFC, 2/9/02, p.A9)
2002 Feb 8, In Texas a $60 million casino run by the Tigua Indians was shut down following lobbying efforts by religious activist Ralph Reed and Washington lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon. Abramoff and Scanlon then persuaded the tribe to pay $4.2 million to lobby Congress to reopen it. Senate hearings on the process opened in 2004.
(SSFC, 9/26/04, p.A10)
2003 "The New World," a history of American Indians and their influence on the modern Western World by William E. Brandon (d.2002) was to be published.
(SFC, 5/31/02, p.A27)
2003 Elizabeth Seay authored "Searching For Lost City," a look at Native Indian languages in Oklahoma.
(WSJ, 11/28/03, p.W4)
2004 Jun 21, Five of 61 California Indian tribes signed gaming compacts setting standards for future negotiations. They agreed to higher payments in exchange for removing a cap of 2,000 slot machines per tribe.
(SFC, 6/21/04, p.A1)
2004 Dec, Cecilia Fire Thunder (58) took office as chairwoman of the 46,000 member Ogallala Sioux on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
(Econ, 1/29/05, p.32)
2005 Jan, Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Muscogee Indian, exhausted with yet another one of her relatives dying of diabetes, zoned in on fry bread as a culprit and whipped out a column for Indian Country Today declaring it junk food that leads to fat Indians.
(AP, 8/20/05)
2005 Apr 29, In Canada oil companies stopped all engineering work on a natural gas pipeline from the Arctic ocean to the oil sands of Alberta, due to high compensation demands by the Deh Cho First Nation native Indian tribe in Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories. The Deh Cho also sought a new autonomous government and complete ownership of subsurface rights within their 81,000 square mile claim, an area about the size of Nebraska.
(SFC, 5/23/05, p.A1)
2005 Apr, In Arizona the Hualapai Indian tribe began construction of the Skywalk, a glass overhang over the Grand Canyon, to be completed in March, 2007. The $30 million project was initiated by David Jin, a Las Vegas businessman from Shanghai, who planned to collect half of the $25 ticket sales.
(SFC, 12/15/06, p.A33)
2005 In southern California an archeological survey found the remains of a Native American man who died some 10,000 years ago on San Miguel, one of the state's five Channel Islands. In 2018 the remains of the Tuqan man were returned to San Miguel Island by the Santa Ynez Band of the Chumash Indians.
(SFC, 6/15/18, p.A5)
2006 Jan 12, In Palm Springs, Ca., Richard Milanovich, chairman of the Agua Caliente Ban of Cahuilla Indians, apologized to other tribal leaders for the scandal tied to Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He addressed tribal leaders on the 2nd day of a 3-day conference for casino-operating tribes. Abramoff and associates had collected some $66 million from 6 American Indian tribes seeking influence in Washington.
(SFC, 1/13/06, p.B14)
2006 Dec 7, The 3,300-member Seminole Tribe of Florida said it was buying the Hard Rock business in a $965 million deal with Rank Group PLC, a British casino and hotel company.
(SFC, 12/8/06, p.D2)
2006 Viking published “Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places," by Peter Nabokov.
(SSFC, 1/29/06, p.M2)
2007 Jul 16, The Canadian government agreed to disburse C$1.4 billion ($1.3 billion) in aid over 20 years to Quebec's 15,000 Cree to improve health, security and other services for the native Indians.
(Reuters, 7/16/07)
2007 Nov 26, A new study by the University of Michigan bolstered claims that Native Americans are descended from one migrant group that crossed a lost land link from modern Siberia to Alaska. The study examined genes of indigenous people from North to South America and from two Siberian groups.
(AFP, 11/27/07)
2008 Jun 11, Canada, addressing one of the darkest chapters in its history, formally apologized for forcing 150,000 aboriginal children into grim residential schools, where many said they were sexually and physically abused.
(Reuters, 6/12/08)
2008 Aug 7, A US federal judge ruled that American Indian plaintiffs were entitled to $455 million, a fraction of the $47 billion they sought in a year trial for alleged losses on royalties overseen by the Interior Department since 1887.
(SFC, 8/8/08, p.A6)
2008 Nov 28, This day was marked as Native American Heritage Day. US federal legislation set aside the day after Thanksgiving — for this year only — to honor the contributions American Indians have made to the US. Congress passed legislation this year designating the day as Native American Heritage Day, and President George W. Bush signed it last month.
(AP, 11/28/08)
2009 Aug 31, Florida’s Gov. Crist signed a 20-year gambling pact with the Seminole Indian tribe, which agreed to pay Florida $12.5 million a month for 30 months for running, currently illegal, slot machines and blackjack games.
(Econ, 9/5/09, p.40)
2009 Dec 3, The IRS auctioned 7,100 acres of Crow creek Sioux tribal land near Pierre, South Dakota to help pay off over $3 million in back taxes. The land sold for $2.6 million.
(SFC, 12/4/09, p.A15)
2009 Dec 8, The US government announced that it intends to pay $3.4 billion to settle claims that it has mismanaged the revenue in American Indian trust funds. The tentative settlement would resolve a 13-year-old lawsuit over hundreds of thousands of land trust accounts that date to the 19th century.
(SFC, 12/9/09, p.A6)
2010 Apr 6, Wilma Mankiller (64), the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation, died.
(Econ, 4/24/10, p.84)
2010 Apr 21, In Arizona the Havasupai Indian tribe ended a 7-year legal fight with Arizona State Univ. over blood samples members gave to university researchers for diabetes research that were also used to study schizophrenia, inbreeding and ancient population migration. Tribal members called it a case of genetic piracy.
(SFC, 4/22/10, p.A6)
2010 Nov 24, In California Rep. steve Cooley conceded defeat to Dem. Kamala Harris for the office of attorney general. Harris became the state’s first woman, the first African American and the first Indian American in California history to be elected as state attorney general.
(SFC, 11/25/10, p.A1)
2010 Dec 8, Pres. Obama signed legislation to pay American Indians and black farmers some $4.6 billion for government mistreatment over many decades. The legislation settled 4 long-standing Native American water rights in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana.
(SFC, 12/9/10, p.A18)
2011 Jun 20, A US federal judge agreed to a $3.4 billion settlement over mismanaged Indian royalties. The 15-year suit represents the largest ever approved against the US government. This followed a long campaign led by Elouise Cobell (d.2011) of Browning, Mo. Cash payment began to go out in Sep 2014.
(SFC, 6/21/11, p.A4)(SFC, 9/19/14, p.D3)
2011 Jun 26, In Oklahoma the Cherokee Nation election officials declared Bill John Baker as its new leader. He unseated 3-term incumbent Chad Smith by 11 of 15,000 votes.
(SFC, 6/27/11, p.A4)
2011 Aug 22, The Cherokee nation, the USA’s second-largest Indian tribe, formally booted from membership thousands of descendants of black slaves who were brought to Oklahoma more than 170 years ago by Native American owners.
(Reuters, 8/23/11)
2011 Sep 13, A federal order for one of the nation's largest American Indian tribes to restore voting rights and benefits to about 2,800 descendants of members' former slaves threw plans for a special election for a new Cherokee Nation chief into turmoil. The tribe said that it would not be dictated to by the US government over its move to banish African Americans from its citizenship rolls.
(AP, 9/13/11)(Reuters, 9/13/11)
2011 Oct 16, Elouise Cobell (b.1945), treasurer of the Black Feet tribe, died in Montana. She had tenaciously pursued a lawsuit that accused the federal government of cheating American Indians out of more than a century’s worth of royalties.
(SFC, 10/18/11, p.A6)
2011 Nov 14, It was reported that the Navajo Nation, the largest American Indian tribe, plans to issue its first bonds in a $120 million offering to finance some 50 projects on its 27,000-square-mile reservation in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
(SFC, 11/14/11, p.D4)
2011 Nov, The 685-member Fort Sill Apache won the right to establish a reservation on homelands in southern New Mexico. The US Interior Department approved a proclamation that awards the Fort Sill Apache 30 acres to establish a reservation near Deming.
(AP, 11/24/11)
2011 Dec 13, Pope Benedict XVI approved seven new saints for the Catholic Church, including Hawaii's Mother Marianne and a 17th-century Native American, Caterina Tekakwitha. Marianne cared for leprosy patients on Hawaii's Molokai peninsula in the late 1880s, soon after the death of Father Damien, who was canonized in 2009. Tekakwitha, who lived from 1656-1680 in the US and Canada, became the first Native American to be beatified in 1980.
(AP, 12/19/11)
2012 Feb 9, The Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota sued some of the world’s largest beer makers for $500 million claiming they knowingly contributed to alcohol-related problems on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
(SFC, 2/10/12, p.A14)
2012 Mar 29, In California the SF-based Save the Redwood League donated Four Corners, a 164-acre property in Mendocino County, to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, made up of local native Indian groups.
(SFC, 4/28/12, p.A6)
2012 Oct 12, The US Justice Dept. announced that it will allow members of federally recognized Indian tribes to possess eagle feathers.
(SFC, 10/13/12, p.A4)
2012 Oct 22, Russell Means (b.1939), Oglala Sioux leader of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, SD, died at his ranch in Porcupine, SD.
(SFC, 10/23/12, p.A7)
2012 Dec 8, In Porterville, Ca., Hector Celaya (31), a member of the Tule River Indian Reservation, went on a shooting rampage that left a daughter, his mother and her two brothers dead. The suspect died of a self-inflicted gunshot in a shootout with police.
(AP, 12/10/12)(SFC, 12/28/12, p.D5)
2012 David Treuer authored “Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life." The book centers on the Leech Lake Reservation of Minnesota.
(SSFC, 2/5/12, p.F1)
2013 Jan 5, In Canada aboriginal demonstrators disrupted passenger rail service on routes connecting Toronto with Ottawa and Montreal, a day after PM Harper agreed to meet with First Nations leaders to discuss grievances behind a growing native protest movement.
(Reuters, 1/5/13)
2013 Jan 8, A Canadian federal court ruled that 200,000 Metis and 400,000 First nations’ people living outside reserves should also be considered to be Indians under the constitution.
(Econ, 1/19/13, p.38)
2013 Jan 24, In Canada Theresa Spence, a chief from a remote Ontario reserve, agreed to end her hunger strike after talks with other native groups and opposition political parties. Spence traveled to Ottawa in December and set up camp on a small island in the Ottawa River to raise awareness about living conditions for natives across Canada.
(AP, 1/24/13)
2013 Apr 12, In France a contested auction of dozens of Native American tribal masks went ahead following a Paris court ruling, in spite of appeals for a delay by the Hopi tribe, its supporters including actor Robert Redford, and the US government.
(AP, 4/12/13)
2013 Nov 20, Members of Congress took part in a ceremony bestowing the Congressional Gold Medal to honor 33 tribes tribes for their WWI and WWII contributions as code talkers. Today’s ceremony was for tribes not included in the initial 2008 Gold Medal awards.
(SFC, 11/21/13, p.A5)
2013 Dec 9, A Paris auction of sacred objects from the Hopi and San Carlos Apache Native American tribes kicked off despite objections from the US and activists. The auction fetched more than 550,000 euros. On Dec 11 a US charitable foundation said that it was the anonymous bidder that paid $530,000 for 24 Native American masks in the auction and will return them to the Hopi Nation in Arizona and the San Carlos Apache tribe
(AFP, 12/9/13)(AFP, 12/10/13)(AP, 12/11/13)
2013 Dec 20, Wyoming Governor Matt Mead said his state will challenge a US government ruling that more than one million acres of the western state's land still legally belongs to two Native American tribes.
(Reuters, 12/21/13)
2014 Feb 20, In northern California Cherie Lash Rhoades (44), a member of the Cedarville Rancheria tribe, killed 4 people at the tribe’s headquarters, including 3 members of her own family. She was recently ousted as chairwoman of the tribe and was under investigation over at least $50,000 in missing federal grants. The tribe had just 35 members and owned 26 acres in the area.
(SFC, 2/22/14, p.C3)
2014 Feb, In New Mexico Wilson Joe Chiquito (75) was beaten to death at his home in the Navajo community of Counselor. In 2020 the FBI issued its first poster in a Native American language seeking information on the death of Chiquito.
(https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/wilson-joe-chiquito)(SFC, 4/14/20, p.A3)
2014 May 1, The Navajo Nation and a group led by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and actor Robert Redford said they have agreed on a plan to manage thousands of wild horses on the Navajo reservation and keep the animals from being slaughtered.
(SFC, 5/2/14, p.A7)
2014 Jun 13, Pres. Obama spoke at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota promoting the need to help reservations create jobs. Some 63% of able workers at Standing Rock were unemployed. The 2.3 million-acre reservation was home to some 850 residents.
(SFC, 6/14/14, p.A4)
2014 Jun 26, Canada's Supreme Court recognized native groups' rights over a large swathe of land for the first time in western British Columbia province. The landmark ruling in favor of the semi-nomadic Tsilhqot'in people -- numbering about 3,000 -- could have an impact on similar Native American claims currently pending in court.
(AFP, 6/27/14)
2014 Jul 22, In northern California federal and state agencies launched Operation Yurok on and around Yurok reservation land in Humboldt County that had been taken over by marijuana growers.
(SFC, 7/23/14, p.E2)
2014 Sep 26, In Arizona the Navajo Nation held a signing ceremony for a $554 milion settlement of a 2006 lawsuit over federal government mismanagement of tribal resources.
(SFC, 9/26/14, p.A6)
2014 Nov 13, The US Government Accountability Office said federally run schools for American Indian children have misspent millions of dollars. The Bureau of Indian Education fun by the Interior Dept. overseas some 180 schools for about 41,000 students.
(SFC, 11/13/14, p.A11)
2015 Dec 8, John Trudell (b.1946), American Indian activist and poet, died at his home in Santa Clara County, Ca. In 1969 he was the spokesman for the American Indians who had occupied Alcatraz.
(SFC, 12/10/15, p.D8)
2016 Jan, In South Dakota the Flandreau Santee Siouz, amid fears of a federal raid, destroyed their crop of marijuana abandoning a scheme to develop the nation’s first marijuana resort.
(SFC, 8/4/16, p.A5)
2016 May 3, In New Mexico the body of Ashlynne Mike (11) was found after she and her brother were kidnapped a day earlier near San Juan in the Navajo Nation. Suspect Tom Begaye (27) was soon arrested and faced murder charges.
(http://tinyurl.com/j848mxx)(SFC, 5/7/16, p.A6)
2016 May 17, It was reported that an epidemic of crystal meth addiction on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana has led to sex trafficking amidst poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence. A federal Drug Enforcement Administration report has said number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages.
(Reuters, 5/17/16)
2016 Apr 3, Joseph Medicine Crow (102), last war chief of the Crow tribe, died. He was awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 2009.
(Econ, 4/16/16, p.78)
2016 Jul 19, The US government announced a settlement with the Navajo Nation that will clear the way for cleanup work to continue at abandoned uranium mines in the four corners area.
(SFC, 7/20/16, p.A6)
2016 Nov 18, Kelcy Warren, CEO of Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, said that the Dakota Access oil pipeline won’t be rerouted, but that he would like to meet with the head of an American Indian tribe to try to ease its concerns about the project.
(SFC, 11/19/16, p.A7)
2016 Dec 4, The US Army Corps of Engineers turned down the request for an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline to build under the Missouri River, after months of protests from Native American and climate activists. ETP said it will continue to fight for the line.
(Reuters, 12/5/16)
2016 Dec 9, The Cherokee Nation’s attorney general legalized same-sex marriage for the tribe saying parts of a 2004 tribal law violated the Cherokee Constitution.
(SFC, 12/13/16, p.A5)
2016 Dec 26, In Rhode Island the occupation of a tribal government building by a faction of the Narragansett tribe entered its seventh day. Occupiers included council members who impeached Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas and want him to step down.
(SFC, 12/27/16, p.A6)
2017 Jan 11, Arthur Manuel (b.1951), a leader of Canada’s indigenous “First Nations," died.
(Econ, 1/28/17, p.78)
2017 Feb 9, The Native American Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a last-ditch legal challenge to block the $3.8 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline project after the company constructing it won federal permission to tunnel under the Missouri River.
(Reuters, 2/9/17)
2017 Apr 20, The Cherokee Nation sued distributors and retailers of opioid medications for contributing to an epidemic of opioid abuse in the 14 Oklahoma counties that comprise the Cherokee Nation.
(SFC, 4/21/17, p.A5)
2017 Jun 5, Zachary Bearheels (29) a mentally ill Native American from Oklahoma, died after being shocked 12 times with a Taser, punched and dragged by his hair by two Omaha police officers, both of whom are black. Officer Ryan McClarty was soon ticketed for misdemeanor assault.
(http://newsok.com/article/5557719)(SFC, 7/29/17, p.A5)
2017 Oct 29, Dennis Banks, a co-founder of the American Indian Movement, died in Minnesota. Banks was also a leader of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation.
(SFC, 10/31/17, p.C3)
2018 Sep 12, The San Francisco Board of Appeals voted unanimously for the removal of the "Early Days" statue in the Civic Center. The statue depicting a vaquero and a missionary standing over a fallen American Indian was one of five that make up 800-ton Pioneer Monument shrine.
(SFC, 9/13/18, p.A11)
2018 Sep 27, US Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke said 76 people have been arrested over the last few weeks on drug charges in a sweep of traffickers on reservation land in western North Carolina of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
(AP, 9/28/18)
2018 Nov 6, In Kansas, Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland became the first Native American women elected to Congress.
(AFP, 11/7/18)
2018 Dec 20, A report by the US Commission on Civil Rights said that funding for Native American tribes are woefully inadequate.
(SFC, 12/21/18, p.A6)
2019 Jun 3, A Canadian government report said the deaths of more than a thousand aboriginal women and girls in recent decades was a national genocide.
(Reuters, 6/3/19)
2019 Jun 18, California's Gov. Gavin Newsom formally apologized for the state's role in the "systemic slaughter" of Native Americans.
(SFC, 6/19/19, p.C6)
2019 Jul 26, The US Bureau of Land Management announced a plan to allow off-road vehicles access to archaeologically sensitive land at Utah's Bears Ears National Monument that houses sacred tribal sites.
(AP, 7/26/19)
2019 Jul 26, In North Dakota the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, at the center of tumultuous protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, unveiled a solar farm that came about partly due to the tribe's fierce opposition to the oil pipeline's environmental impact.
(AP, 7/26/19)
2019 Oct 14, A handful of US states celebrated their first Indigenous Peoples' Day as part of a trend to move away from a day honoring Christopher Columbus. Native American advocates have pressed states for the change since 1992.
(SFC, 10/15/19, p.A5)
2019 Oct 24, In Florida the 450-foot Guitar Hotel held its grand opening on Seminole land in Hollywood, once only a trailer park and some smoke shops. At night beams of light will mimic the strings of the guitar shaped structure. It's the latest step in the Seminole Hard Rock empire, which includes naming rights on the Miami-area stadium where the 2020 Super Bowl will be played.
(AP, 10/25/19)
2019 Nov 3, In New Mexico two people died overnight and 14 others were injured during a traditional religious ceremony on the Alamo Navajo Reservation in Socorro County.
(AP, 11/6/19)
2019 Nov 18, In Arizona the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station, one of the largest in the West, was shut down after serving customers for nearly 50 years.
(SFC, 11/19/19, p.A10)
2019 Nov 26, Pres. Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a White House task force on missing and slain American Indians and Alaska Natives.
(SFC, 11/27/19, p.A5)
2019 Dec 31, Three of the most powerful tribes in Oklahoma filed a federal lawsuit against state Gov. Kevin Stitt, asking the court to help resolve a dispute over gambling at tribal casinos. Stitt contends the gaming compacts expire on Jan. 1 and that casino gambling after that date will be illegal. Stitt has signaled he wants to renegotiate the compacts to give the state a larger slice of revenue.
(AP, 12/31/19)
2020 Feb 22, In New York a leadership dispute within the Cayuga Indian Nation took a stunning turn when nation leader Clint Halftown sent bulldozers to demolish a working daycare center, store, schoolhouse and other buildings controlled by tribe members who oppose his authority. The anti-Halftown Unity Council in 2014 claimed control of some of the buildings that were destroyed.
(AP, 2/25/20)
2020 Feb 24, In eastern Canada police moved in morning to clear a rail blockade by an indigenous group that had been stopping freight and passenger traffic for more than two weeks on one of the country's busiest lines. The Tyendinaga Mohawk campaigners had barricaded the line in solidarity with a British Columbia aboriginal band seeking to stop construction of a gas pipeline over its land.
(Reuters, 2/24/20)
2020 Mar 27, The US federal Bureau of Indian Affairs informed that Mashpee Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts that it will be rescinding its reservation designation for more than 300 acres removing the land from federal trust. A court in June rescinded the order saying the move was arbitrary.
(SFC, 3/31/20, p.A4)(SFC, 6/8/20, p.A3)
2020 Apr 8, In New Mexico the death toll from the coronavirus was 16. On the Navajo Nation's reservation in the state the death toll reached 20.
(SFC, 4/10/20, p.A5)
2020 May 5, The US Treasury Department said it will begin distributing $4.8 billion in pandemic-relief funds today to Native American tribal governments in all US states. A newly revised coronavirus mortality model predicts nearly 135,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by early August, almost double previous projections.
(Reuters, 5/5/20)
2020 May 18, The Navajo Nation, spanning across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, reported 69 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the total to 4,071.
(Good Morning America, 5/19/20)
2020 Jul 9, The US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a large chunk of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation, a decision that state and federal officials have warned could throw Oklahoma into chaos.
(AP, 7/9/20)
2020 Jul 10, The Navajo Nation, spanning parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, began a weekend shutdown as the death from the coronavirus rose to 396 with nearly 8,100 cases.
(SFC, 7/13/20, p.A6)
2020 Aug 7, The Crow Tribe in Montana ordered its members to lock down for two weeks beginning today as tribal leaders moved to slow a sharp spike in coronavirus cases and deaths on yet another reservation in the country.
(AP, 8/7/20)
2020 Aug 20, The Kansas City Chiefs said that after speaking with "a group of local leaders from diverse American Indian backgrounds and experiences," the team has decided to prohibit fans from donning headdresses or Native American-themed face paint at Arrowhead Stadium home games.
(The Week, 8/20/20)
2020 Oct 23, In South Dakota the Oglala Sioux Tribe ordered a one-week lockdown of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in response to a surging number of COVID-19 cases in the state.
(AP, 10/24/20)
2020 Nov 25, It was reported that the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska is creating the nation's largest tribal national park (444 acres) on a forested bluff overlooking the Missouri River and a historic site of its people. The new Ioway Tribal National Park will overlook a historic trading village where the Ioway people bartered for buffalo hides and pipestones with other tribes during the 13th to 15th centuries.
(AP, 11/25/20)
2020 Dec 21, Hank Adams (77), one of Indian Country’s most prolific thinkers and strategists, died at St. Peter’s Hospital in Olympia, Washington. Adams was involved with nearly every major event in American Indian history from the 1960s forward.
(AP, 12/24/20)
2021 Feb 12, A US federal judge has rejected a request from a group of Apaches to keep the US Forest Service from transferring a parcel of land to a copper mining company in eastern Arizona. The land known as Oak Flat is set to be transferred to Resolution Copper by March 16.
(AP, 2/12/21)
2021 Feb 26, The Chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador (AFNQL), gathered in a virtual assembly, unanimously voted a resolution to adopt Joyce's Principle. Inspired by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this Principle aims to guarantee all Indigenous peoples the right of equitable access, without any discrimination, to all health and social services, as well as the right to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
(Cision, 3/1/21)
2021 Mar 15, The US Senate confirmed New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland as interior secretary, making her the first Native American to lead a Cabinet department and the first to lead the federal agency that has wielded influence over the nation's tribes for nearly two centuries.
(SFC, 3/16/21, p.A3)
2021 Apr 9, The Navajo Nation issued a stay-at-home order for the weekend after reporting 26 more confirmed COVID-19 cases. The current death toll stood at 1,260.
(AP, 4/9/21)
2021 Apr 23, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that the descendants of the US-based Sinixt nation maintained ancestral land rights even after members moved south in the 19th century, a landmark decision that ends a decade-long legal dispute.
(Reuters, 4/23/21)
2021 May 22, CNN said it has "parted ways" with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). Santorum had recently come under fire for comments he made about Native Americans during a speech to a conservative youth group in April: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here."
(CNN, 5/22/21)
2021 May 29, In Canada the remains of 215 children, some as young as 3 years old, have been found buried on the site of what was once the country's largest Indigenous residential school. The Kamloops in British Columbia school operated between 1890 and 1969, when the federal government took over operations from the Catholic Church and operated it as a day school until it closed in 1978.
(AP, 5/29/21)
2021 Jun 1, The US Supreme Court endorsed Native American tribal police powers, backing the authority of a tribal officer in Montana to stop and search a non-Native American motorist on a public road on reservation land.
(Reuters, 6/1/21)
2021 Jun 5, Leonard Crow Dog (78), a Native American who played a key rold in the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, died in Rapid City, South Dakota. He He had fought to preserve the ancient traditions of his tribe, the Sicangu Lakota.
(SFC, 6/25/21, p.B7)
2021 Jun 24, In Canada an Indigenous group said the remains of as many as 751 people, mainly children, had been found in unmarked graves on the site of a former boarding school in Saskatchewan.
(NY Times, 6/24/21)
2021 Jun 30, A Canadian Indigenous group said a search near, using ground-penetrating radar has found 182 human remains in unmarked graves at a site near a former Catholic Church-run residential school that housed Indigenous children taken from their families near Cranbrook, British Columbia.
(AP, 6/30/21)
2021 Sep 24, The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops officially apologized for their role in the country's notorious residential school system for the first time, after refusing to do so for years despite public pressure.
(Reuters, 9/24/21)
2021 Sep 25, Marie Wilcox (87), guardian of the Wukchumni language, died. She had produced the first known dictionary of the the central California native language.
(SSFC, 10/10/21, p.F8)
2021 Sep 28, It was announced that the three largest US drug distributors will pay more than $75 million to resolve claims they fueled an opioid epidemic in the Cherokee Nation's territory in Oklahoma, marking the first settlement with a tribal government in the litigation over the US addiction crisis.
(Reuters, 9/28/21)
2021 Oct 8, President Joe Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, lending the most significant boost yet to efforts to refocus the federal holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus toward an appreciation of native peoples. Biden also issued a proclamation of Columbus Day, Oct. 11, which is established by Congress.
(AP, 10/8/21)
2021 Nov 19, US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland declared “squaw" to be a derogatory term and said she is taking steps to remove the term from federal government use and to replace other derogatory place names.
(AP, 11/19/21)
2021 Nov 25, Members of Native American tribes gathered in Plymouth, Mass., to mourn Indigenous people worldwide who have suffered centuries of racism and mistreatment in a tradition that began in 1970.
(SFC, 11/26/21, p.A8)
2021 Dec 10, In Canada David Lametti, Minister of Justice and Attorney General launched a consultation, cooperation and engagement process with Indigenous peoples to advance implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.
(CNW Group, 12/10/21)
2021 Dec 12, It was reported that that a federal panel has approved renaming Squaw Mountain in Colorado to Mestaa'ehehe Mountain, after a Cheyenne woman who facilitated relations between white settlers and Native American tribes in the early 19th century.
(SSFC, 12/12/21, p.A18)
2021 Dec 13, Officials said Canada is setting aside C$40 billion ($31.2 billion) to compensate Indigenous children and families in foster care for suffering discrimination, and will start paying out once a protracted lawsuit is settled.
(Reuters, 12/13/21)
2021 Dec 22, A Canadian court approved a settlement in which the government would need to commit at least C$6 billion ($4.68 billion) for safe drinking water infrastructure for First Nations and pay C$1.5 billion in compensation for individuals deprived of clean drinking water.
(Reuters, 12/23/21)
2021 Dec, In California the Save the Redwoods League donated 523 acres of redwood forestland in Mendocino County to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council for stewardship.
(SFC, 1/26/22, p.A8)
2022 Jan 4, The Canadian government announced that it had reached what it called the largest settlement in Canada’s history, paying $31.5 billion to fix the nation’s discriminatory child welfare system and compensate the Indigenous people harmed by it.
(NY Times, 1/4/22)
2022 Jan 11, Clyde Bellecourt (85), a co-founder of the American Indian Movement (1968), died at his home in Minneapolis, Minn.
(SSFC, 1/16/22, p.F9)
2022 Feb 1, Hundreds of Native American tribes agreed to a tentative settlement of $590 million with Johnson & Johnson and the country's three largest drug distributors.
(SFC, 2/2/22, p.A9)
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Subject = AmerIndian
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