Christopher Columbus, Letter to Luis de Sant’ Angel (1493)
In this letter to one of his leading supporters in the Spanish court, Christopher Columbus describes his reaction to the sights of the New World. He is describing the island of Hispaniola, present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, "Indians of the Rio Grande" (1528-1536)
In 1528, half of the crew of the Spanish explorer Panfilo de Navarez was stranded in Florida. After sailing in makeshift vessels across the Gulf of Mexico, the crew was shipwrecked and enslaved by coastal peoples. After six years, Cabeza de Vaca, a black slave, Estevancio the Moor (referred to as "the negro" in this excerpt), and two others escaped and made the overland journey from Texas through the Southwest and south to Mexico City. In this selection from his journal, Cabeza de Vaca describes the native peoples and environment of what is now Texas and northern Mexico.

Bartolomé de Las Casas, "Of the Island of Hispaniola" (1542)
This extract from Las Casas’s Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies describes the island of Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti), the island Columbus described in his letter to Luis de Sant’ Angel. Las Casas wrote this gory and explosive account in 1542 to be read at a forum on Spanish colonization called by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Widely translated, this account gave rise to a flood of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda throughout Europe deriding the Spanish settlement of the Americas.

Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message to Congress (1829)
In the early nineteenth century, the lands occupied by southeastern and northwestern Native American groups, including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Fox, and Creek, were closed in upon by an expanding frontier of white settlement. In this address, President Jackson, a former frontiersman and Indian fighter, cloaked his argument for the relocation of Native Americans in the language of concern and honor. Indian removal helped bring about economic expansion for the new republic, but at tremendous cost to both the Native Americans who fought displacement and who moved west.

"Memorial of the Cherokee Nation" (1830)
The Washington administration had established a policy designed to "civilize" the Indians, and the Cherokee, more than any other Native American group, had done so-by codifying their own legal system, printing their own newspapers, and even owning slaves. However, no amount of assimilation helped the Cherokee when the state of Georgia demanded their land. During the "trail of tears," when the Cherokee were forced to march to Oklahoma, more than 4,000 Cherokee died. The "Memorial of the Cherokee Nation" appeared in Nile’s Weekly Register in 1830.

Black Hawk, “Life of Black Hawk” (1833)
In 1832, Black Hawk (1767–1838), whose Native American name was Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, led a band of Sauk and Fox Indians in a fight to reclaim lands in Illinois and Wisconsin that the Indians believed Americans had stolen in 1804. Desperate and hungry, they were no match for the U. S. Army, which hunted down and killed most of Black Hawk’s group at The Battle of Bad Axe in western Wisconsin. In this document, Black Hawk, dictating his autobiography through a federal interpreter, remembers the coming of the “American father” to the midwestern prairie and the land swindle that Black Hawk called “the origin of all our difficulties.”

Chief Seattle, Oration (1854)
Native Americans were devastated by the effects of American expansion: 70,000 Indians died in California alone between 1849 and 1859; the Paiute were shot for sport by trappers. Between 1853 and 1857, the United States forced the secession of 147 million acres of Native American land. This land included those of Chief Seattle, who chose to capitulate to the government rather than risk conflict with an army that had been singularly effective in crushing other Indian groups.

Helen Hunt Jackson, from A Century of Dishonor (1881)
Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor brought national attention to the plight of Native Americans when it was published in 1881. Jackson, a Massachusetts native who had traveled to California, describes in particular the plight of the California Indians, who had seen 90 percent of their population die from war and disease in the years after the gold rush.

Congressional Report on Indian Affairs (1887)
The federal government sought to force Indians into a sedentary way of life on limited parcels of land known as reservations. The stated goal of such a policy was to compel the Indians to assimilate to the culture and politics of the United States. As the secretary of the interior’s 1887 report to Congress made clear, requiring the Indians to forsake tribal languages for English was a key ingredient in the government’s strategy.

Tragedy at Wounded Knee (1890)
Some Indian leaders resisted the federal government’s policies attempting to transform their peoples into self-sufficient farmers. Spurred by desperate hopes of reversing their prospects, a group of Sioux left their reservation. When federal soldiers attempted to take away the weapons of an Indian group at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, bloody tragedy ensued. M. I. McCreight published a speech by Red Cloud and recollections of Flying Hawk in 1936, describing the events surrounding the massacre.

Benjamin Harrison, Report on Wounded Knee Massacre and the Decrease in Indian Land Acreage (1891)
The following is an excerpt from President Benjamin Harrison’s annual message, delivered December 9, 1891, in which he describes the Wounded Knee Massacre and the progress of the program to decrease Native American land acreage.*