British Relations with the Native American Groups Were Threatened by Colonial Expansion

British relations with the Native American groups were threatened by colonial expansion following the French and Indian War (1754-1763). As a result of that war, France ceded its claim to all land east of the Mississippi River. The British colonists began to push settlement westward beyond the Appalachian Mountains more aggressively. In an attempt to control the situation, the British government issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This act established a boundary along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains and forbade settlement west of this line. However, the colonists were difficult to restrain, and the colonists’ victory over the British in the American Revolution put Native American policy completely under the colonists’ control.
During the Revolutionary War, Native Americans had the power to affect the fortunes of the newly independent United States. Many of the North American tribes were militarily powerful and possessed vast areas of land. They were also diplomatically astute and had enhanced their position by developing trade not only with the Americans but also with the British, French, and Spanish. The American patriots needed to maintain good relationships with native peoples to prevent hostilities and to encourage the transfer of land. Even before the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Continental Congress established a committee on Native American policy. The three appointed commissioners were to ensure that good relationships were maintained with various tribal groups. After colonists had achieved full independence, the Congress continued the British policy of negotiating treaties with Native Americans in most matters concerning land and settlement rights.[1]

As part of the government’s Revolutionary War strategy, the Continental Congress concluded a treaty with the Delaware confederacy in 1778. This group of native peoples had migrated from the Delaware River into Ohio and western Pennsylvania as Europeans settled on their lands. The treaty established a military alliance between the newly formed American government and the Delaware. It also promised that Congress would accept the Delaware if they decided to form their own state and seek entry into the union. This offer indicated that members of the Continental Congress regarded Native Americans as independent peoples who were not directly under the government’s control.

A series of laws called the Trade and Intercourse Acts (see Native Americans: The Trade andIntercourseActs) further defined the U.S. government’s relationship with native groups. These acts, passed between 1790 and 1834, established federal control over all relations with Native Americans. Federal control meant that only Congress, not states or private parties, could negotiate treaties, obtain lands, and trade with Native Americans. The government could also require special licenses for traders or passports for citizens entering Native American lands. This system allowed federal officials to monitor individual interaction with the tribes and to reduce the risk of misunderstandings and hostilities.

Despite these precautions, relationships deteriorated as the government increased pressure on Native Americans to cede their lands. American expansion continued westward across the Appalachian Mountains. [2]

During the 18th century, Native Americans were sought as allies in clashes between European colonial powers. The British sought to guarantee their Native American allies the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River as a refuge and buffer zone. This land was attractive to the settlers in the 13 colonies, however, and access to it was one cause of the American Revolution. Some settlers moved west even before the Revolution ended. The success of the colonies in the Revolution was a major defeat for Native Americans, who lost their British allies. The United States had no reason to seek alliances with native peoples after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 removed the French and Spanish as threats to the new country.

The new United States quickly moved to allow settlement of the West, despite earlier treaties with tribal groups. By the 1820s and 1830s, the federal government, the states, and pioneer pressure had forcibly removed entire groups to areas west of the Mississippi. The United States established a pattern of removing native peoples to land considered worthless, then forcibly uprooting these groups once again when white settlers sought to expand into the territory (see Westward Movement: The Frontier to the Mississippi). [3]

Illinois (people) were a confederacy of native North American tribes of the Algonquian linguistic group, originally occupying the region comprising the present state of Illinois and parts of Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The entire group consisted of the related tribes of the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Moingwena, Peoria, and Tamaroa. Illinois place-names reflect the existence of these groups.

Very little is known about the culture of the Illinois, which seems to have resembled that of the Miami and Shawnee. Polygamy was apparently practiced. The Illinois were often unsuccessful in intertribal warfare; they were easily driven from their villages by invading tribes such as the Sioux, Fox, and Iroquois. At the time of their earliest contact with white people, their dead were not buried, but wrapped instead in skins and fastened to trees; the skeletons, however, were apparently buried later.

The Illinois were loyal to the French in the French wars, first against neighboring tribes and later against the English. After the American Revolution ended in 1783, the United States government had difficulty in subduing the Illinois, although the tribes had already been greatly weakened by struggles with the Iroquois in the 17th century and with the tribes around the Great Lakes in the 18th century. By 1809, when survivors of only the Kaskaskia and Peoria tribes remained, the Illinois moved west of the Mississippi River. In recent times there were a few hundred Illinois concentrated in the northeastern section of Oklahoma.[4]

In the 17th century European explorers encountered the Illinois, or Illiniwek, a confederation of Algonquian-speaking peoples that included the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Moingwena, Peoria, and Tamaroa peoples. In the middle of that century, Iroquois peoples began entering Illinois to search for more furs to trade with Europeans. In the 17th and 18th centuries, disease and intertribal warfare reduced the strength of the Illinois; they were easily driven from their villages by invading Iroquois, Fox, and Sioux peoples. Their lands eventually fell into the possession of other peoples, including the Sac (Sauk), Fox, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi, the last closely related to both the Ojibwa and the Ottawa peoples.[5]

In the Midwest, however, beginning in around 200 BC groups of people organized into wide trading networks and began building large mound-covered tombs for their leaders and for use as centers for religious activities. These peoples, called the Hopewell, raised some maize, but were more dependent on types of foods also used during the Archaic period. The Hopewell culture declined sometime after about AD 400.

By 750 a new culture developed in the Midwest. Called the Mississippian culture, it was based on intensive maize agriculture, and its people built large towns with earth platforms, or mounds, supporting temples and rulers’ residences. Across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis, Missouri, the Mississippians built the city of Cahokia, which may have had a population of 20,000. Cahokia contained hundreds of mounds. Its principal temple was built on the largest, a mound 30 m (100 ft) high and roughly about 110 m (about 360 ft) long and about 49 m (about 160 ft) wide (the largest such mound in North America, now part of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Illinois). During this time period, maize agriculture also became important in the Atlantic region, but no cities were built. See also Mound Builders.

The presence of Europeans in the Eastern Woodlands dates from at least AD 1000, when colonists from Iceland tried to settle Newfoundland. Throughout the 1500s, European fishers and whalers used the coast of Canada. European settlement of the region began in the 1600s. It was not strongly resisted, partly because terrible epidemics had spread among the Native Americans of this region through contact with European fishers and with Spanish explorers in the Southeast. By this time the Mississippian cities had also disappeared, probably as a consequence of the epidemics.

The Native American peoples of the Eastern Woodlands included the Iroquois and a number of Algonquian-speaking peoples, including the Lenape, also known as the Delaware; the Micmac; the Narragansett; the Shawnee; the Potawatomi; the Menominee; and the Illinois. Some Eastern Woodlands peoples moved west in the 19th century; others remain throughout the region, usually in their own small communities.[6]

Archaic peoples hunted mostly deer, small game, and birds, and they harvested fruits, nuts, and the seeds of wild plants, using stone slabs for grinding seeds into flour.[7]

Native American cuisine included potatoes, corn, codfish, molasses, pumpkin and other squashes, sweet potatoes, and peanuts.[8]

The games and other recreational activities of Native Americans have had much in common with those of peoples elsewhere. Children traditionally played with dolls and with miniature figures and implements, imitating adult activities; in groups they played tag, the one who was “it” often pretending to be a jaguar or similar animal. Youths and adults played games with balls—rubber balls in Mesoamerica and northern South America, hide or fiber balls elsewhere.[9]

Outside the kingdoms of Mesoamerica and the Andes, trade was often carried on by traveling parties who were received in each village by its chief, who supervised business as the people gathered around the trader. In many areas, including California and the Eastern Woodlands, small shells or shell beads—called wampum in the Eastern Woodlands—were used as money. Because traders carried their goods on their backs or in canoes, trade goods were usually relatively light, small items. Furs and bright-colored feathers were valued in trade nearly everywhere. In western North America dried salmon, fish oil, and fine baskets were major trade products, and in eastern North America expertly tanned deer hides, copper, pipe-bowl stone, pearls, and conch shells were widely traded.[10]

Housing and Construction

Modes of shelter, like food, show adaptation to environment. Some houses appear simple. The tepee of the Plains peoples constitutes efficient housing for people who must move camp to hunt; tepees are easily portable and quickly erected or taken down, and an inner liner hung from midway up the tepee allows ventilation without drafts, so that the enclosed space is comfortable even in winter.[11]