Government Policies & Expansion
The 1803 land purchase from France that nearly doubled the size of the United States.
What is the Louisiana Purchase?
Land designated by the U.S. government (primarily in present-day Oklahoma) where numerous relocated tribes were forcibly moved.
What is Indian Territory?
The 7th U.S. President who championed and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Who is Andrew Jackson?
The 1876 battle in Montana where Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defeated Lieutenant Colonel George Custer's forces.
What is the Battle of the Little Bighorn?
The official policy and pressure forcing Indigenous peoples to adopt white American culture, language, and customs.
What is Assimilation?
The 19th-century belief that the United States was divinely destined to expand across the North American continent.
What is Manifest Destiny?
The painful 1830s forced relocation of the Cherokee and other southeastern tribes to the West, during which thousands died.
What is the Trail of Tears?
The Shawnee leader who sought to form a united Indigenous confederacy to resist white territorial expansion in the early 1800s.
Who is Tecumseh?
The 1866–1868 armed conflict led by an Oglala Lakota leader against U.S. forts on the Bozeman Trail, resulting in a U.S. retreat.
What is Red Cloud's War?
Government-sponsored boarding institutions established to separate Indigenous children from their families and eliminate their cultural identity.
What are Indian Boarding Schools?
The 1830 federal law signed by President Andrew Jackson authorizing the forced relocation of Indigenous nations to lands west of the Mississippi River.
What is the Indian Removal Act?
The 1864 forced march of thousands of Diné (Navajo) people to an internment site in eastern New Mexico.
What is the Navajo Long Walk?
The Bedonkohe Apache leader who resisted U.S. and Mexican military forces for decades before surrendering in 1886.
Who is Geronimo?
The 1877 conflict where Chief Joseph led his people on a long retreat toward Canada to escape forced reservation placement.
What is the Nez Perce War?
The U.S. Army officer who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School to forcibly assimilate Indigenous youth.
Who is Richard Henry Pratt?
A federal system that restricted Indigenous nations to specific, designated areas of land, limiting their access to traditional resources.
What is the Reservation System?
The reservation and internment site near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where Diné and Mescalero Apache people endured severe hardship and disease.
What is Bosque Redondo?
The Hunkpapa Lakota spiritual and political leader who resisted U.S. land seizures and inspired victory at the Little Bighorn.
Who is Sitting Bull?
The tragic 1890 massacre where U.S. troops killed hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek.
What is the Wounded Knee Massacre?
The 1887 federal law that divided communal tribal lands into individual private allotments, stripping millions of acres from tribes.
What is the Dawes Act?
Formal legal agreements signed between sovereign nations and the U.S. government, which were frequently violated by federal policies.
What is a Treaty?
Expansionist policies driven by the 7th U.S. President that aggressively promoted white settlement and Indigenous dispossession.
What is Jacksonian Expansion?
The Northern Paiute spiritual leader who founded the Ghost Dance movement to promote spiritual renewal and hope.
Who is Wovoka?
A late 19th-century spiritual movement that promised cultural restoration, viewed with suspicion and panic by U.S. authorities.
What is the Ghost Dance?
The 1924 legislation that granted U.S. citizenship to all Indigenous Americans born within the country.
What is the Indian Citizenship Act?