Page 4 - Were Native Americans the Victims of Genocide?

CHAPTER THREE

The Expansion West

By the time America asserted its independence from England
in 1776, most Native American tribes in the thirteen colonies
had been evicted from their ancestral lands. Several tribes had
been devastated by disease and confl ict with settlers, and their
remnants were pushed west of colonial borders. The tribes that
stayed in the colonies typically were given land as well as hunting
and fi shing rights through treaties with England. Often these piec-
es of land were not part of a tribe’s original homelands. Known
as manors or reservations, the Native Americans were expected
to remain on them, not only to guarantee the safety of the sur-
rounding settlers but also to protect the Indians from harassment
from the colonists. Even as the colonies united to proclaim that
their territories were their own and not subject to distant rule, they
were still hungry to move their borders westward in hopes of en-
larging the new nation.
Standing in their way, though, were various Native American
tribes that had long resisted the settlers’ push westward. Some
sided with the British in the American Revolution to keep colo-
nists from moving them farther off their tribal lands in upstate New
York. This included four of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confed-
eracy. The British used their new allies to conduct raids on colo-
nial farms and settlements. In November 1778 a group of colonial
militia loyal to Britain and a party of Iroquois warriors attacked the
settlers of Cherry Valley, New York. They burned homes, killed
forty-six people, crushed the faces of corpses with tomahawks
and rifl e butts, and scalped several of the dead, including women
and children. Captain Benjamin Warren, who came on the scene
when Continental forces arrived, wrote, “A shocking sight my
eyes never beheld before of savage and brutal barbarity.” Such
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eyewitness accounts spread quickly through border settlements

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