Migration

Some thirty to fifty thousand years ago, peoples from Asia migrated across a land bridge, today's Bering Strait, into North America and beyond. Distinct linguistic groups and several complex cultures emerged, such as Hohokam farming and Pueblo culture in the southwestern mesas and a mound-building culture in the Ohio Valley. After 1492 the native populations of the Americas were gradually decimated by a combination of Eurasian germs and Old World arms. By the 1830s Amerindians had been forced to vacate all lands east of the Mississippi, and the U.S. Supreme Court had designated them as domestic dependent nations without sovereignty. By the 1870s white Americans had begun to speak of a "vanishing race," imagining Amerindians as the generic horse-mounted Plains "Indian." Though Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor (1881) initiated a public debate about the denigration of native peoples' cultures, the Dawes General Allotment Act (1887) dissolved tribes—a term for cultural groups that suggests a primitive stage of development—based on the notion (implemented in 1924) that citizenship could only be conferred on individuals. Native Americans were confined to reservations, denied self-government, and deprived of their cultural practices. European-Americans developed the idea that "Indians" were dependent on government handouts. Over the next century, however, migration to the cities by native people and resistance by the American Indian Movement led to a slow reversal of government policies by the 1970s. Armed struggle, legal action, and self-organization by and on behalf of Native Americans forced U.S. governmental institutions and public opinion to revise their notions of "Indians" and to accept varying degrees of Native American self-determination.