We Shall Remain

In 1621, Wampanoag leader Massasoit negotiates to provide help to the ailing Pilgrims from the Mayflower, who are on the brink of disaster, because he thinks this alliance will ensure protection for his tribe from the threatening Narragansett tribe. For the next fifty years, events prove that Massasoit was wrong, as continuing European immigration, deaths from widespread new diseases, and overuse of natural resources push the interaction between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims to war led by Metacomet, Massasoit's son.

In 1805, Indians in the Northwest Territory were feeling the threat of westward expansion by European-American pioneers. Tecumseh, a Shawnee, brought regional tribes together into a confederacy with the common goal of saving their ancestral lands and establishing a separate Indian nation state. Tecumseh was killed in battle in 1813.

In years of trading with European Americans, many Cherokee members also adopted aspects of European-American religion, government, and education to establish their standing with the United States government and retain recognition of their rights to their homeland as a sovereign nation. But President Andrew Jackson gained passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, and proceeded to remove especially the Southeastern Five Civilized Tribes. On May 26, 1838, U S troops forcibly began to remove the Cherokee and their enslaved African Americans from their land to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) west of the Mississippi River. More than 4,000 people died of disease and starvation along the Trail of Tears.

Apache Geronimo and his fierce band of warriors refused to accept the expansion of the United States and Mexican into his tribe's land on the Plains. They earned the distinction of being one of the last major forces of Native American resistance before their eventual surrender in 1886. Geronimo became the most famous Native American of his time.

At a time of increasing Indian activism, the American Indian Movement's last stand at Wounded Knee in 1973 brought attention to the desperate conditions of Indian reservation life. Around 200 American Indians engaged in a 71-day standoff at the Pine Ridge Reservation with the US government, demanding redress for grievances, some of which were of 100 years' standing.