Native American Resistance Movement

The purpose of this research is to examine the Native American resistance movement centered in the Great Lakes region and known as the Black Hawk War. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical background and context for the emergence of the movement that led to overt confrontation between the Native American group led by the Sac (Sauk) Chief Black Hawk in Illinois and the United States government, and then to discuss how the salient events began and evaluate the decisive issues in the outcome, not only for the Indians involved but also for the larger, longer-term picture of the relationship between the American government and the Native American population as a whole.

Almost from the earliest days of European settlement in the New World, the colonizing powers were obliged to devise some mode of accommodating preexisting societies that were encountered as the history of Europe in America began to unfold. The need and opportunity for social and governmental organization, whereby problems could be disposed of in an orderly manner, helps explain how the colonial, then nation-state government apparatus found a presence not only among the transplanted Europeans who transplanted and then reshaped European forms of social organization but also among the indigenous peoples whom Euro-American culture, norms, and social structures were displacing from the scene.

To put it another way, the Indians were first and always a problem for a structured, established governm

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conquest and subsequent land grant by the British crown, "which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny, whatever the private and speculative opinions of individuals may be, respecting the original justice of the claim" (Johnson 681). Later, in Cherokee v. Georgia, Marshall referred to the Indian nations as "domestic dependent nations" (25), further limiting the association of the concept of sovereignty with Indians. It is on the basis of the progressive deterioration of sovereignty of Indian nations over the centuries, marked by conversion of Indian lands to non-Indian uses that Snipp says the concept of captive nations really reaches meaning if one refers to "internal colonies" (Snipp 466). Equally, it can be said that the judicial sanction for subsumption of Indian lands is in the background of such events as the Black Hawk War, which was born and died in 1832. The Black Hawk War is grouped with the so-called Indian Wars, the name given to a whole series of wars between Indians and the U.S. Army from the post-Revolutionary to post-Reconstruction periods, marked by Indian resistance to white expansion in the continent. Black Hawk, a chief of the Sac born a year after Pontiac's uprising, was an exact contemporary of Tecumseh, a

Category: History - N