Native American policies in the United States and Canada Indian Wars in the West from the 1860s to the 1880s, and the building of the railroads during the same period, the process of land dispossession was carried all the way to the Pacific In New Mexico Territory, the Taos Rebellion of 1847 was quickly suppressed and its leaders executed In California, the gold rush from 1849 led to the enslavement and virtual genocide of California’s linguistically diverse and politically disunited Native peoples The early 1850s saw the coalescence of a new reservation policy favoring concentration, in which the federal government negotiated individual treaties with reputed representatives of specific tribes Such treaties most commonly forcibly imposed an exchange of Indian land for cash Treaties also required tribal members to concentrate on reservations that comprised a small fraction of their former holdings With the outbreak of the Civil War, many Plains Indians seized the opportunity to try to regain their lost lands, as in the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 and its aftermath across Dakota Territory to Montana and beyond Similarly, from 1860 to 1864 the Navajo War in New Mexico Territory ended with the defeat of the Navajo and the Navajo Long Walk, or forced migration, out of their ancestral homeland 300 miles east to Bosque Redondo reservation in northwestern New Mexico In the postwar years, Plains Indians’ resistance to white encroachment intensified Their lifeways dramatically transformed by their adoption of the horse from the 1700s, and firearms in the 1800s, the Dakota, Cheyenne, Apache, and many other Plains and western tribes presented the federal government with a formidable adversary A pivotal moment in the mounting conflict came in the aftermath of the systematic violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, which guaranteed in perpetuity Sioux dominion over the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota The Black Hills gold rush from 1874 prompted swarms of white prospectors to enter the region, violating the treaty and stiffening Indian resistance, and culminating in the annihilation of George A Custer’s 7th Cavalry in the Battle of Little Bighorn in southern Montana in summer 1876 by a coalition of tribes led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse The defeat shocked the nation and steeled the federal government’s determination to resolve the Indian problem once and for all After a complex series of aggressive U.S military campaigns, which included the systematic slaughter of the region’s vast buffalo herds, by 1890 all organized armed resistance had been crushed 303 THE DAWES ACT The effort to eliminate Indians’ collective landownership was codified in the Dawes Act (General Allotment Act) of 1887, which required remaining Indian reservation lands to be broken up into individual parcels to male heads of households Efforts to implement the law by the Bureau of Indian Affairs became riddled with corruption and malfeasance and its enforcement was only partial It is estimated that from its passage in 1887 until its repeal in 1934, the Dawes Act resulted in the privatization of 90 million acres, shrinking reservation lands from 138 million to 48 million acres The ostensible goal of the Dawes Act was to facilitate the civilization of Indian peoples by their gradual assimilation into white society This goal was also pursued by the government’s establishment of Indian boarding schools in various parts of the country, in which Native children were forcibly subjected to assimilation, most famously at the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, founded in 1879 By 1900 the Native American population in the United States had shrunk to 237,196 (according to the U.S Census Bureau), from a conservatively estimated to million people four centuries earlier, a demographic decline of around 95 percent CANADA A similar set of processes unfolded in what remained of British North America after 1815, which after 1867 became the quasi-independent Dominion of Canada Through a series of wars, treaties, laws, and court rulings, First Nations peoples (as Native peoples are officially known in contemporary Canada) were systematically stripped of their ancestral lands in ways very similar to those implemented by Canada’s southern neighbor, though with less episodic violence overall In the words of one eminent scholar, compared to their southern neighbors, First Nations peoples in Canada were shot less but starved more often In 1885 the Métis leader Louis Riel launched a major rebellion in Manitoba with the aim of ensuring the ancestral rights of the Métis peoples centered on Winnipeg and the Red River Valley The rebellion was crushed by the Canadian government, and its leader executed With the formation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, most First Nations peoples in the Canadian West recognized the futility of armed resistance and reluctantly consented to treaties relinquishing their land rights in exchange for reservations (often small and in marginal zones), cash, the promise of future annuity payments, hunting and