The US treatment of native Americans has been less than satisfactory, if not straight up genocidal. To this day, most of the remaining native Americans have to live in reservations with subpar living standards. Atrocities against natives will certainly happen due to colonization and white supremacy, but is there any way that their conditions can improve compared to OTL?
Best case scenario for native Americans in the US
- Thread starter Onedotman
- Start date
Killing Andrew Jackson during War of 1812 would help bit. Without him there is chances for bit better times for natives altough it is still not going to be great.
Perhaps best would be if USA loses ARW and Brits remain there. Then there might be better treatment. Or then USA on whatever reason doesn't expand much from pre-Louisiana purchase borders. One way would be that Tecumseh succeeds on his campaigns.
But generally I don't think that there would be much better fate for natives without changing hearts of Americans and them deciding that it is not really right to mass kill natives and them just should assimilate to American society.
Perhaps best would be if USA loses ARW and Brits remain there. Then there might be better treatment. Or then USA on whatever reason doesn't expand much from pre-Louisiana purchase borders. One way would be that Tecumseh succeeds on his campaigns.
But generally I don't think that there would be much better fate for natives without changing hearts of Americans and them deciding that it is not really right to mass kill natives and them just should assimilate to American society.
Is the POD compulsorily after the foundation of the USA? Or are you asking about their presence in the region of North America, that is now the United States?
The former, since the thread title explicitly says "native Americans in the US".
Aside from a lucky run of presidents sympathetic to the natives, I don't see how you could significantly change how the US is going to treat Native Americans in their drive to go from sea to shining sea. Maybe the British win the War of 1812 and get all lands west of the Mississippi, but given the OTL British colonial empire it's not exactly the greatest of improvements.
The majority of Canada’s (mis)treatment of natives occurred after the Americans succeeded in their rebellion against the British for reasons that involved wishing to colonise indigenous held regions that the British had signed treaties with and were mostly respecting. To be frank after the American beast was set loose to expand across the Americas, the cat was out of the bag. This isn’t to say natives were treated well prior but there were at least some breaks on further settlement.
Though saying that, the British winning even more during the War of 1812 is my preferred PoD. It secures the Iroquois via Tecumseh’s reforms and gives them a chance to develop and adapt and also gives the Comanche a chance as they were doing fairly well against the Spanish-Mexicans until American settler encroachment following the Louisiana purchase caused ecological collapse during an especially perilous plague assault inducing fragility in the Imperial Comanche.
With two large and powerful Indigenous realms that OTL have demonstrated an ability to adapt and trade to create structures able to resist settler forces for a time, I think it helps provides a model for other indigenous peoples to create their own models and also blocks off a lot of North America from European settlers.
i do think a successful American Revolution but a greater American loss (or an American loss if you want to claim Americans drew that conflict) in 1812 is the best PoD. The Americans remaining under British rule means the British will eventually be pressured by settlers to allow further settlement even if they for a while wanted to at least pretend to have honour enough to stick to signed treaties.
If you can change things before the US is created then France holding Louisiana and Quebec would mean a much better treatment of the natives since Louisiana is underpopulated meaning that the French rely on the natives for defense and since the relationship between the natives and French were much better than those with the British.
If after the US' independence then not getting Louisiana by Napoleon, Britain caring enough in 1812 to create a North-Western Confederation and Mexico not inviting any US settlers as it would delay the expansion West by a lot.
If after the US' independence then not getting Louisiana by Napoleon, Britain caring enough in 1812 to create a North-Western Confederation and Mexico not inviting any US settlers as it would delay the expansion West by a lot.
By the way, I just came across this scenario (coupled with a successful Reconstruction) which suggests a better American treatment of native people (ie. actually upholding the treaties signed with them), under a more effective Bureau of Indian Affairs.
bguy
Donor
I don't think killing Andrew Jackson would actually help much. Jackson himself believed that the Indian Removal Act was necessary to prevent the Cherokee from being massacred in Georgia.
"Jackson might claim his policy was liberal, but that claim didn't make it so. He held out the alternative that the Cherokees might remain in Georgia by submitting to the authority of the state and living like whites. But considering how far the Cherokees had adopted white ways and how little their efforts had won them of respect from their neighbors, such a response would have required a daunting leap of faith. The harsh fact of the matter was that Georgia was determined to expel the Cherokees and take their land. Jackson knew this, and he refused to prevent it.
He was on firmer ground in declaring his policy inescapable. The defenders of the Cherokees were few and mostly far away from Georgia; their persecutors were many and near at hand. Given the racist realities of the time, Jackson was almost certainly correct in contending that for the Cherokees to remain in Georgia risked their extinction. To preserve the Cherokees as a tribe-to enforce Marshall's decision-would have required raising and sending federal troops to Georgia, stationing them there indefinitely, and ordering them to shoot white Georgians who threatened the Indians. Jackson realized that American democracy simply wouldn't sustain such a policy. It was one thing to threaten to use force to preserve the Union; in such an endeavor he could expect broad support from the people who would actually do the fighting. It was another thing to ask white citizens to risk death protecting Indians. They wouldn't do it."
-Andrew Jackson, His Life and Times: pgs. 492-493, H.W. Brands
Thus to actually protect the Native American tribes in the southeast, it's not enough simply to have a president that won't support the Indian Removal Act. Instead you need a president that will actually send federal troops into Georgia to protect the Native American population. I don't know if there is any plausible US president at that time that would be willing to do that.
Maybe, though unless the British are willing to station enough troops on the frontier to keep American settlers from going west, I think you are still going to get a steady stream of settlers invading Native American land. And of course if the British do seriously enforce restrictions on western settlement that is going to create a lot of resentment in the American colonies. If the British end up having to face the choice between risking a second American Revolution or selling out the Native Americans, they will probably choose the later option.
Despite it being perhaps the most commonly remembered aspect of Jackson's presidency, most people don't understand the context in which the Indian Removal Act of 1830 occurred. Jackson and his allies largely represented the moderate position in that debate. At the time the US government had conflicting commitments. In 1802, long before Jackson was a national figure, the US government reached an agreement with the state of Georgia for it to cede its western territory in exchange for a federal guarantee that the Native Americans would be relocated outside of Georgia's new borders. The federal government never followed through in earnest though, which agitated the Georgians. In 1827, the Cherokee formulated a constitution, which to the Georgians looked like an immediate threat that the Cherokee might attempt to form a sovereign state within the borders of Georgia, something that would've violated the constitution. This sparked a flurry of legal suggestions in Georgia, which ranged from essentially annexing the Cherokee unilaterally as non-citizens to using the state militia to evict or slaughter them. Jackson correctly saw that the federal government was losing control of the situation through inaction and therefore attempted to follow through on its prior promises. As terrible as the Trail of Tears was, it was clearly move to prevent a significantly more unjust and violent outcome.
*Ninja'd by bguy who explained this in good detail as well.
Do you mean better for Native Americans as individuals or as nations? The best hope for individuals is probably the US adopting a more assimilationist ideology, as this would give Natives the opportunity to Westernise and become a part of US society.
True, without the consideration of "If we don't take this land, the Americans will" it's quite possible that Canada wouldn't expand as much as IOTL.
I don't think the British would need to actively enforce restrictions to discourage settlement -- simply refusing to protect the settlers ("Look, we have a treaty with this tribe, if you want to try and move there anyway, you're on your own, and don't come crying to us when a band of vengeful Indians turns up and scalps you") would probably be enough. Granted, I'm not sure how politically feasible it'd be to sit back while white settlers are being killed by Indians, even if those settlers are there illegally.
bguy
Donor
Would a lack of support from British regulars without more really be enough to discourage colonialization though? The initial British colonies in what would later become the United States were settled and indeed fought significant wars with the native population (such as King Philip's War) without the colonists having any protection from regular British troops. If the colonists were willing to risk fighting the native population on their own when they were settling New England and New York and the Carolinas why would they be any less willing to risk fighting the native population on their own once they start moving on Ohio and Kentucky and Alabama?
My question to this is what stops the settlers from just forming militias and taking care of the problem themselves. The British have no where near the administrative capacity or will to disarm the settlers.
I think people are vastly overestimating the loyalty of Britain to the natives.
Sure, there was some pressure to keep up with the US, but British management of Australia and New Zealand indigenous peoples where there was no geopolitical threat, as well as its policies in southern Africa where settlers were more of a thing, makes it clear that eventually things were going to go badly for the natives once British aligned settlers start pressuring governments for more land as well.
And yeah, they'd like a buffer state against the US, but they don't really have the local manpower to stop US citizens just crossing the border forever and they're far more likely to eventually sell the natives down the river to maintain their own land claims and Settler interests alongside preferring market access to frequent North American large scale wars. Sure, the natives might retain more lands and a smaller independent nation(s), but it is exceedingly unlikely that the borders of an 1812 victory last forever and Britain is just as likely to sell them out and take remaining marginal lands into Canada, where various native groups can tell you is not some paradise and was functionally not that different than the US in the broad strokes.
Sure, there was some pressure to keep up with the US, but British management of Australia and New Zealand indigenous peoples where there was no geopolitical threat, as well as its policies in southern Africa where settlers were more of a thing, makes it clear that eventually things were going to go badly for the natives once British aligned settlers start pressuring governments for more land as well.
And yeah, they'd like a buffer state against the US, but they don't really have the local manpower to stop US citizens just crossing the border forever and they're far more likely to eventually sell the natives down the river to maintain their own land claims and Settler interests alongside preferring market access to frequent North American large scale wars. Sure, the natives might retain more lands and a smaller independent nation(s), but it is exceedingly unlikely that the borders of an 1812 victory last forever and Britain is just as likely to sell them out and take remaining marginal lands into Canada, where various native groups can tell you is not some paradise and was functionally not that different than the US in the broad strokes.
That doesn’t actually improve the native position that well. This just means there’s a mixed race caste to help the white settlers oppress the natives. Mexico was an example of this, the indigenous peoples ended up fairly loyal to the Crown of Spain but still were put in reductions and continued to lose territories to settler encroachment.
The crown may mean well but their limited ability to directly manage the colonial space just means that the subjugation and dispossession of the natives happens at a slower place.
By the 18th century the autonomy of the Mesoamerican atlpetl were severely reduced and the plagues culling their numbers meant they were struggling to prevent settlers from simply stealing their lands. That the religious orders conveniently to consolidate the rural population for the sake of “teaching them Christ” and “saving them from the plague” into the reduction towns that made them easier to read and control and steal their land was just icing on the cake.
The only way to have the natives treated better is if they themselves create state-like structures able to resist settler encroaches. They don’t even really have to last forever but simply putting up a stronger fight for longer (which is very much possible) helps force the settlers to actually respect the indigenous peoples as actual civilised people worthy of rights and integration.
Though I think while unlikely it is possible for some Indigenous realms to maybe last a good few centuries longer than they did historically. The Comanche were fairly isolated from the settler plague as long as Louisiana remains French and were able to handle themselves against the settler populations in New Mexico and Texas fairly well. They’re basically the North American equivalent of the Dzungar as an adaptable steppe people able to rely on both agriculture and horse nomadism.
It's very difficult on the macro level. The population growth is going to create demand to move west.
You could allow them to form their own states or set up homesteads for individuals. But that's simply forced assimilation. The "kill the Indian, save the man" ethos of the 20th century.
You could allow them to form their own states or set up homesteads for individuals. But that's simply forced assimilation. The "kill the Indian, save the man" ethos of the 20th century.