Initiated during the French and Indian War (Seven Years War) in the 1750s and 1760s, informal, irregular warfare consisting of killing women, children, and the elderly became a common means of conquering opposition. This approach would continue to be employed by Scots-Irish settlers during violent acts against Indigenous communities.

Pictured here is "Washington as Captain in the French and Indian War" by Junius Brutus Stearns (ca.1851).

Violence persisted against Native American groups, particularly during the Ohio Country and Mississippi Valley conquests circa 1770 and 1780. Though the professional, organized U.S. Military would later be established in the 1810s, informal warfare between settlers and Indigenous communities continued.

The Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) dominates the Northeast portion of the United States and Southeast Canada. The five nations comprising the confederacy served as a balance of power in the colonial wars between England and France.

Delegates of the Constitutional Convention sign the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Constitution drew from several elements of the Haudenosaunee's "Great Law of Peace," including provisions for removing a leader from power, designating various branches of power, and determining who has the power to declare war.

Coinciding with the War of 1812, the Creek War broke out, mainly between the Upper and Lower Creek Indians, who disagreed on the best way to deal with the Euro-American invasion of their lands. The Red Sticks, a militant faction of Upper Creeks led by Red Eagle (William Weatherford) were formed during this time. The war ended with the Treaty of Fort Jackson of 1814, in which the Muskogee and Creek Nations were forced to assimilate and were punished for protecting their lands. Then a major general, Andrew Jackson insisted on wording the treaty as just retribution against the Creeks for what the United States considered “aggression and duplicity,” demanding that lands be ceded to the U.S. as a form of war reparations.

The New Republic of Mexico offers land grants to Euro-Americans to develop regions of Texas. This leads to an Euro-American majority in the area, the mass-genocide and diaspora of Indigenous communities, and the eventual United States' cession of Texas in the 1840s.

Via the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe warns European colonists against further colonization in the Americas, signaling the United States' intention to annex or dominate former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific.

The following year, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States, immediately initiating U.S. policies based on racial cleansing of Indigenous peoples for the purpose of Euro-American dominance and expansion.

After gold was discovered in Georgia, the Indian Removal Act enacted by the Jacksonian administration was "negotiated." It was a treaty that would cede all Cherokee lands to the government in exchange for land in "Indian Territory" (or lands west of the Mississippi).

Sixteen thousand individuals from the Cherokee nation were force-marched in the dead of winter off of their homeland to the area of Oklahoma; half of them perished on the journey. Other Native nations east of the Mississippi, including the Muskogees and Seminoles suffered similar death rates, while the Chickasaws and Choctaws lost around 15%. This displacement caused by the signing of the Indian Removal Act would be identified as the Trail of Tears. Similar incidents of Indigenous displacement would continue well into the 1870s.

During westward expansion and at the end of the war with Mexico in 1848, the vast majority in the newly annexed U.S. territories were Navajos, Apaches, and Utes (who had resisted for centuries all colonization efforts by the Spanish, the Mexican authorities, and the new colonial regime of the United States.)

Goyathlay (b.1829 - 1900), known as Geronimo and leader of the Chiricahua Apaches, was most famous for leading the final decade of Apache resistance. He would never be captured by Mexican and Euro-American soldiers, who sought to apprehend him for resistance against Indigenous removal.

Mexico and the United States sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war with Mexico. The United States expands into former Mexican and Spanish territories, from Texas to northern California. More Indigenous peoples, including the Navajos, Apaches, Utes, and Mexican farmers and ranchers, are forced from their homes due to these cessessions or forced into enslaved labor.

In the years between the Mexican War and Civil War, Gila Apache leader, Mangas Coloradas, maintained the Apaches' traditional lands and way of life against the insurgent U.S. Army Dragoons. Engaging in strategies of total war, the Army Dragoons were employed to attack Apache villages, destroy agriculture, and slaughter women and children while young men were engaged elsewhere fighting.

Due to President Abraham Lincoln's promotion to "open" Indigenous lands for poor settlers, the Chicksaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee people (occupying the "Indian Territory" of present-day Oklahoma) ally with the Confederate State Army (CSA). Along with gold rushes, this promotion incentivized settlers to squat on Indigenous lands, resulting in Native communities' alliances with CSA in attempts to thwart and divide the Union's plans for Western expansion.

The first Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed between the U.S. and several Plains groups, including the Cheyenne, Lakota, Arapaho, Assiniboine, Crow, Mandan, Gros Ventre, Shoshone, Arikara,and Hidatsa. The provisions of the treaty assured safe passage for settlers through Indian territory and the tribes’ title to the land itself was affirmed. This treaty was an unsuccessful attempt to resolve violent disputes between various Plains groups who had long been archenemies of one another.

Two Leggings, a Crow warrior, described to a chronicler the four important “coups” of a novice-warrior. In order of importance were striking an enemy with a gun or bow, the cutting of an enemy’s horse from a tipi door, the recovery of an enemy’s weapon in battle, and the riding down of an enemy. The winner of all four could decorate his war shirt, similar to the one here, with four beaded or porcupine-quill strips, one running from shoulder to wrist on each sleeve and one over each shoulder from front to back.

Scorched-earth campaign ensues against the Apaches to relinquish them of their lands in New Mexico. The Civil War era marks a period of search and destroy missions by U.S. armies in order to drive out and eradicate Indigenous populations.

Black Kettle was a prominent leader of the displaced and captive Cheyennes and Arapahos near Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. While complying to reservation ordinances and prohibited from hunting buffalo for food, the Cheyennes and Arapahos were attacked without warning by the First and Third Colorado Volunteers of the U.S. militia. This attack, known as the Sand Creek Massacre, transpired into the killing of over a hundred Indigenous peoples, burning of tepees, and looting of the reservation.

President Lincoln, wanting to direct professional soldiers of the West to fight in the Civil War in the East, calls for volunteers located from Texas to California. These settlers fight Indigenous peoples and pursue ethnic cleansing to achieve the necessary population balance for their Western annexes to attain statehood.

The Homestead Act grants 1.5 million homesteads to settlers west of the Mississippi, comprising nearly three hundred million acres (a half-million square miles) of confiscated Indigenous land.

The Morrill Act transfers large tracts of Indigenous land to the states to establish land grant universities.

The Pacific Railroad Act provides private companies with nearly two hundred million acres of Indigenous land.

With these land grabs, the U.S. government broke multiple treaties with Indigenous nations.

On the brink of starvation, the Dakota Sioux rise against Scandinavian and German settlers to reclaim their land in Minnesota. In December 1862, President Lincoln sent Union troops to extinguish this uprising, ultimately selecting thirty-eight Indigenous prisoners to hang in lieu of the original three hundred captured - the largest mass execution in United States history. Little Crow, a prominent leader of this Dakota Sioux uprising, would avoid capture and imprisonment by the U.S. only to be assassinated by bounty hunters a year later.

After three years of fighting against relentless Union forces, eight thousand Navajo people were forced to march three hundred miles to a military concentration camp at Fort Sumner in the southeastern New Mexico desert. During the "Long Walk," many died on the journey with over a quarter dying of starvation once reaching the camp. The U.S. Congress would not release the Navajo people until 1868, not because of the camp's dire conditions, but because of the expense to maintain it.

Buffalo Soldiers, as pictured here in Frederic Remington’s "The Pursuit," were formerly enslaved African American men enlisted in the U.S. cavalry regiments, including the Army of the West. Many black men opted for army service for survival reasons, as it gave them food and shelter, pay and a pension, and a chance at glory. They received lower pay, were in segregated units under white officers, and had key missions of protecting advancing settlers, railroad crews, and wagon trains travelling through Indian territory.

Sent West to also appease white Southerners who did not want armed black communities, the Buffalo Soldiers along with the remaining Army of the West systematically eradicated Native populations on the Plains. In destroying the basic economic base of the Plains Nations - the buffalo - the Army of the West was able to create Indigenous economic dependency, enforce compliance of land transfers, and debilitate Indigenous communities. By the 1880s, the buffalo were near extinction.

The signing of the Second Fort Laramie Treaty granted land west of the Missouri River to the Lakota, Dakota (Yankton), and Arapaho peoples. The sacred lands of the Black Hills, in particular, were reserved for the Western Sioux tribes. However, once a military expedition led by George A. Custer discovered gold in the area in 1874, white settlers broke the treaty clauses of Indigenous-sanctioned lands in order to mine the areas.

Western Expansion continues through the 1870s. U.S. occupation and settlement caused the extermination of more than one hundred thousand Californian Native people in 25 years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870. Californian gold rushers, without the assistance of the U.S. Army, had precipitated one of the most extreme demographic disasters of all time against unarmed Indigenous communities.

U.S. halts all formal treaty making through the Indian Appropriation Act. This act would allow Congress and the President to make laws affecting an Indigenous nation with or without negotiations or consent. Approximately two million square miles of land passed from Indigenous nations to the United States, some through negotiations, others through breach of treaties.

Consider the following quotes by U.S. General William T. Sherman in relation to the featured painting by Asher B. Durand, "Progress: The Advance of Civilization" (1873).

"We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop the progress of [the railroads]" - taken from a letter by Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant in 1867, specifically in response to the U.S. loss against the Sioux during the 1866 Fetterman Massacre.

Sherman was also responsible for the genocidal wars in the West, and has been quoted for saying: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children … during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age."

The Battle of Little Bighorn (also known as Battle of Greasy Grass) in Montana Territory took place in 1876 against Colonel Custer to stop gold rushes and land settler invasion. The battle took place on Crow land, who were allies of Custer at that time, against the alliances of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples. This was a prime example of the United States military exploiting existing tensions between various Plains groups to their benefit.

Key Native figures involved in the resistance to Euro-American invasions include Crazy Horse (Oglala Lakota, 1842-1877) and Black Elk (Oglala Lakota, 1863-1950).

Due to Captain Richard Henry Pratt's "successful experiment" in transforming incarcerated, captive Cheyenne and other Plains Indians into drill soldiers, he founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879 which would serve as a prototype for militaristic boarding schools for Indigenous assimilation and yielded to loss of cultural traditions.

Fritz Scholder's "Bicentennial Indian" presented here, is based on historic photos of 19th-century imprisoned Native peoples who were given surplus flags to wear after their tribal clothing was confiscated. Similar to these prisoners, the students in the Carlisle School had to shed their heritage for an American national identity.

Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad reaches Santa Fe. This results in a flood of tourists and collectors to the Southwest. Pueblo people, among them the Cochiti, Zuni, Hopi, and San Ildefonso, respond to this influx by creating art for new markets.

Presented here is a cornmeal bowl by contemporary Zuni artist, Eileen Yatsattie, who elaborates on the Pueblo traditions of pottery making.

Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull) returns the Sioux people from exile in Canada to Native lands in Wyoming and Montana. By 1890, he would be killed for his role as an instigator of Ghost Dancing, a spiritual-based ritual practice that sought to bring about the expulsion of the Euro-Americans and the return of the buffalo.

In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1887, the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act, would reallocate Indigenous lands to Euro-American settlers, giving heads of household 160 acres and diminishing Indian landholdings to approximately 50 million acres (the size of Idaho and Washington). By 1889, the federal government opened the remaining “Unassigned Lands” originating in the Indian Territory to settler homesteading, triggering such land grabs as the “Oklahoma Run.” Later, after the discovery of oil in Indian Territory, the Curtis Act of 1898 was enacted, prompting an era of settler land-grabbing of formerly sanctioned Indigenous lands that continued well into the 1930s.

In Trust and Loss, Dyani White Hawk incorporates a 1929 newspaper advertisement peddling lands from her own reservation as a direct result of the Dawes Act.

Big Foot (Lakota leader, also known as Spotted Elk) led his people to the designated Pine Ridge Reservation in now-identified South Dakota to avoid military attack. At Wounded Knee Creek, the Lakota people encountered armed soldiers led by Colonel James Forsyth, who had not forgotten Little Bighorn. After confiscating all tools and weapons, there was a misfire from a young Indigenous boy, which led the troops to fire upon the entire group of over 500 people. The Massacre at Wounded Knee marked the last armed resistance of Indigenous people against the U.S.

Popular and visual culture would continue to promote the mythic idea of the "Vanishing Race." Ishi, the California Yani who was held captive for study by anthropologists, died and was proclaimed to be the last Indian.

Presented here is one of Wendy Red Star's contemporary photographs from her "Four Seasons" series. Titled "Fall," this image embodies the mythicization and exoticism of Native culture caused by ethnographic museums, popular culture, and other industries.

Crazy Snake of the Muskogee Creeks (also known as Chitto Harjo), who founded an alternate government and pled for the Creeks' cause, passes in 1912 from an earlier war-related wound. He had been jailed and freed during his life, yet continued to fight through a decade long resistance in eastern Oklahoma, leading and leaving a lasting legacy of Muskogee resistance.

The Indian Citizenship Act (also known as the Snyder Act), granted full citizenship to all Indigenous peoples born in the United States. This, however, would not secure Indigenous voting rights, as they were determined by each state. It would not be until 1957 that all states would recognize and permit Indigenous voters.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, also known as the Wheeler-Howler Act, was put into effect due to the financial burdens of the Great Depression upon the American government. Wanting to alleviate Native American dependence on federal funding and support, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted this Act to decrease federal control of American Indian affairs and increase Indian self-government and responsibility.

This work by Lucy Ganje (b. 1949) is one of a series of prints on which she collaborated with Daniel Heyman titled "In Our Own Words: Native Impressions, 2015-2016." Excerpts of interviews from Native people living on North Dakota reservations today are formatted in a way reminiscent of 19th century public proclamations of land sales, when the ancestors of these individuals were being displaced through government-sanctioned actions.