Native American Lynching
(contextual overview)
The lynching of Native Americans is an aspect of American history directly related to the history of white colonization. The violent history coincides with a white supremist ideology; a doctrine based on a belief in the inherent superiority of the white race over all other races. It was the colonists' faith in this doctrine that motivated and was then used to justify the lynching of Native Americans, the violent taking of their lands, and the repression of their cultural practices.
Beginning in the 1600s, the colonist began a brutal massacre of different Native Americans tribes. This massacre resulted in the death of over nine million Native Americans by 1700. According to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, the methods used to kill Native Americans during this genocidal period included lynching and the introduction of diseases by the colonists, forced migration among other tactics (12-16). This hideous treatment of Native Americans continued into the 1700s, when many were captured and made to work on plantations with African American slaves. Many rebelled and ran away from plantation life. Within the larger public sphere, fear of insurrection caused whites to separate their slaves from rebel Native American groups.
1776 marks an important moment in American history; the signing of the Declaration of Independence. However, this event did not liberate the Native Americans from violent treatment, nor from the dominating structure that the colonists imposed upon them. For example, Zinn claims that a section from the Declaration charges the King of England with “inciting slave rebellions and Indian attacks.” It reads: “[H]e has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions”(74). The reference to Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages” and the fact that the Declaration condemns the King of England for uniting with them are both indicators that the feeling of white supremacy was ever-present among the colonists and that the Declaration did not liberate Native Americans from the colonists' violent rule.
Following the signing of the Declaration of Independence, abuses against Native Americans continued. For example, in 1775 Massachusetts legislation was signed that promised a bounty for every male “Indian” scalp obtained. A more contemporary historical fact that reveals the longstanding oppression against Native Americans; by 1969 four hundred treaties that were signed to protect the Native Americans had been broken. In November of 1969, a landmark event occurred. A group of Native Americans landed on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay with the intention of occupying it. They “offered to buy Alcatraz in glass beads and red cloth, the price paid [to] Indians for Manhattan Island over three hundred years earlier” (Zinn 518). The federal government responded six months later with federal forces that invaded and physically removed the Native Americans. This event, which occurred thirty five years ago, confirms that the historical oppression and violence against Native Americans is still prevalent and that the feelings of white supremacy that fueled the colonist are still prevalent in the United States government.
Work Cited
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper-Collins, 1980.
Lynching and Native Americans
The first Spanish explorers in North America found the continent already inhabited. Native Americans had migrated throughout the western world for thousands of years. This migration came to an abrupt halt when Europeans took over and claimed this part of the world as their own. Though the Native Americans helped many Spanish and French colonists, whom they taught how to hunt, fish, and take care of themselves, these new “discoverers” still took the land, violated their hosts and began a frantic hunt for natural resources.
By the seventeenth century in many of the early colonies, there were three times as many whites as Indians. This ratio increased steadily with the arrival of more and more Europeans. In his essay “Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895 to 1995” R. David Edmunds writes:
[I]n 1893, both the frontier and Indian people seemed to be part of the past…In 1890, the United States Bureau of the Census had reported that the frontier had vanished and that the Indian population had fallen to 248,253. Native Americans had played a major role in the history of the frontier, but the frontier was gone. For Turner and other historians, Indian people and their role in American history were also on the road to oblivion. (Edmunds 717)
President Andrew Jackson created the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This act gave territory, in what is now Oklahoma and Kansas, to Native Americans who would give up their “ancestral holdings”. This act guaranteed that the Indians could live on the new land as long as they wanted. Many refused to leave their homelands and these Native Americans stayed to fight a losing battle that usually ended in death and destruction.
The Europeans eventually stripped the Native Americans of much of their lands. In their efforts to retrieve their land, Native Americans who fought back over time were subjected to numerous forms of violence, such as raping, scalping and lynching, among other acts. Nevertheless, groups such as the Lokota, Sioux and Cheyenne have historically and continue to fight European and white invasion and to organized movements and groups to this end. One such movement was the American Indian Movement (AIM) which reached it heights in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement had powerful men and women leaders. For example, a region activist in this movement was Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. Born on March 27, 1945, Aquash was the child of Micmac native people. She grew up in a world of poverty where government influenced living conditions were substandard. She saw how her people were treated compared to whites and she realized there should be equality.
In 1968 Aquash volunteered at Boston’s Indian Council Headquarters. She worked as a counselor teaching young Native Americans to remain positive. When she joined AIM she quickly rose in the ranks of Native American activism. Aquash was involved in many plots and schemes which led to jail sentences. One such plot led to her death and her hands brutally cut from her body.
While traveling with a friend, Aquash was arrested for a Raid on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. She and others were suspected of being FBI agent “killers.”[1] Native Americans had long been harassed, tortured and murdered by the U.S. police state. Aquash was a part of a movement and group that resisted and fought back against this oppression. This resistance led to the deaths of two FBI agents on June 26, 1975. Aquash was arrested on suspicion of involvement and then released on bail. Fearing for her life, Aquash went underground. She was captured in Oregon and fled again. This final sojourn she never recovered from.
On February 24, 1976, a Lakota rancher found Aquash's dead body while riding the perimeter of his property. Her body's deteriorated condition indicated that she had been dead for some time. The body was initially taken to the Pine Ridge Public Health Service for an autopsy. The cause of her death was deemed exposure, and, as no one was able to identify her, she was buried as a "Jane Doe." Her hands were cut off and sent to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., for possible identification.[2]
Today, Aquash’s murder reeks of conspiracy and suspicion. The Micmac people felt that the government cutting off her hands was as act of unnecessary cruelty. It was also intended, they believe, to cover up Aquash’s murder. When her body was exumed and finally returned to her people, it was discovered that she had a “.32 caliber bullet hole at the base of [her] skull.”[3] Aquash fought for justice for her people and was brutally dismembered and murdered for her beliefs. Aquash’s violent treatment is just one example of the trials that Native Americans have endured to achieve a certain measure of equality.
Works Cited
Edmunds, R. David. "Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895-1995." The American Historical
Review 100.2 (1995): 717-740.
[1] “Anna Mae Pictou Aquash 1945-1976,” Biography Resource Center, 2001, <http://www.nativemetiswomenscouncil.com/files/Anna_Mae_Pictou_Aquash.htm>.
