In March of 1621, in what is now southeastern Massachusetts, Massasoit, the leading sachem of the Wampanoag, sat down to negotiate with a ragged group of English colonists. Hungry, dirty, and sick, the pale-skinned foreigners were struggling to stay alive; they were in desperate need of Native help. Massasoit's people had lately been decimated by unexplained sickness, leaving them vulnerable to the rival Narragansett. The Wampanoag thought that a tactical alliance with the foreigners would provide a way to protect his people and hold his Native enemies at bay. A half-century later, as a brutal war flared between the English colonists and a confederation of New England Indians. Five decades of English immigration, mistreatment, lethal epidemics, and environmental degradation had brought the Indians and their way of life to the brink of disaster. Led by Metacom, Massasoit’s son, the Wampanoag and their allies fought back against the English, nearly pushing them into the sea.
In the spring of 1805, Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee, fell into a trance so deep that those around him believed he had died. When he finally stirred, he claimed to have met the Master of Life and told those who crowded around to listen that the Indians were in dire straits because they had adopted white culture and rejected traditional spiritual ways. The vision sparked a spiritual revival movement that drew thousands of adherents from tribes across the Midwest. His elder brother, Tecumseh, would harness the energies of that renewal to create an unprecedented military and political confederacy committed to stopping white westward expansion. The brothers came close to creating an Indian nation that would exist alongside the United States. The dream of an independent Indian state may have died at the Battle of the Thames, when Tecumseh was killed fighting alongside his British allies, but the great Shawnee warrior would live on as a potent symbol of Native pride and pan-Indian identity.
The Cherokee would call it “The Trail Where They Cried.” On May 26, 1838, federal troops forced thousands of Cherokee from their homes. Over 4,000 died along the way. For years the Cherokee had resisted removal from their land in every way they knew. Convinced that white America rejected Native Americans because they were “savages,” Cherokee leaders established a republic with a European-style legislature and legal system. Many Cherokee became Christian and adopted westernized education for their children. Their visionary principal chief, John Ross, would even take the Cherokee case to the Supreme Court, where he won a crucial recognition of tribal sovereignty that still resonates. Though in the end the Cherokee embrace of “civilization” and their landmark legal victory proved no match for white land hunger and military power, the Cherokee people were able, with characteristic ingenuity, to build a new life in Oklahoma, far from the land that had sustained them for generations.
In February of 1909, the Chiricahua Apache medicine man Geronimo lay on his deathbed. He summoned his nephew to his side, whispering, “I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.” Born around 1820, Geronimo grew into a leading warrior and healer. He became the focus of the fury of terrified white settlers and the growing tensions that divided Apaches. To supporters, he remained the embodiment of proud resistance, the upholder of the old Chiricahua ways. To other Apaches, especially those who had come to see the white man’s path as the only viable road, Geronimo was a stubborn troublemaker whose actions needlessly brought the enemy’s wrath down on his own people. At a time when surrender to the reservation and acceptance of the white man’s civilization seemed to be the Indians’ only realistic options, Geronimo and his tiny band of Chiricahuas fought on and became the last Native American fighting force to capitulate formally.
On the night of February 27, 1973, fifty-four cars rolled into a small hamlet on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Within hours, some 200 Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement (AIM) activists had seized the few major buildings in town and police had cordoned off the area beginning the occupation of Wounded Knee. Demanding redress for grievances the siege lsted for 71 days. With federal troops tightening a cordon around meagerly supplied Indians, the event invited media comparisons with the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee almost a century earlier. In telling the story of this iconic moment, we examine the broad political and economic forces that led to the emergence of AIM as well as the immediate events that triggered the takeover. Though the federal government failed to make good on many of the promises that ended the siege, the event succeeded in bringing the desperate conditions of Indian reservation life to the nation's attention.