WI: No American Indian Treaties?

These are the capstone of the United States and Canada's relations with Native Americans, which are still considered "independent" nations within the territory. This affects things like law enforcement on the reservations these countries have set aside for Native Americans, which is why a certain Mohawk Indian drug trafficker on the border between the US and Canada was able to build his notoriety and become one of the major drug traffickers in North America--corruption of local law enforcement and a certain legal interpretation of treaties signed with the Mohawk Nation.

So what if both Britain and its successor the United States decided to dispense with the idea of American Indians as sovereign nations? Australia and its Aboriginals might be a good example, since very, very few treaties were ever signed and Australia treated their natives far different than the US treated ours.

Essentially, treating the natives as anyone else, which in pre-20th terms, means subjecting them to discrimination and other junk if the US tries to incorporate them. The "Five Civilised Tribes" being important landowners in the US South might be something to look up to, even if for the non-wealthy Cherokee, Creek, etc. it certainly wasn't good as the aristocracy of the tribe had become. No Indian Removal might be a result, as anyone in the South who wanted cheap labour but didn't have slaves available could use poor Cherokee or otherwise.

This would extend into other American Indian groups, but in more difficult ways. It's hard to incorporate steppe nomads like the Sioux and Comanche. The US might hit them even harder than OTL. But without a precedence for a treaty, might these groups surrender earlier once they realise the US will keep murdering all their women and children and never stop at trying to destroy them? Not that their isn't a potential for peace as early as the American Civil War, if the US wants to keep what their vision was for 19th century Indian affairs (pretty solid if a bit misguided, ruined by lack of funding and plenty of idiots on the American side, but ultimately not malignant?).
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
You are going to need to drastically reduce the amount of people deciding to stake a claim westwards for this to work. That means no Lincoln's Homestead Act and possibly things to be better in Europe to stop the migration to America.

The basic idea that the Indians could be more or less incorporated into the US fell apart as the demand for land skyrocketed and the amount of people going west did as well.
 
You are going to need to drastically reduce the amount of people deciding to stake a claim westwards for this to work. That means no Lincoln's Homestead Act and possibly things to be better in Europe to stop the migration to America.

The basic idea that the Indians could be more or less incorporated into the US fell apart as the demand for land skyrocketed and the amount of people going west did as well.

The US Indian agents signed treaties with them, though, didn't they? Exploitative as they were, lack of desire to follow up on as happened, the US was still signing treaties with tons of Indian nations. They certainly broke those treaties often. But I'm most curious of what if they dispensed even with the whole concept of a treaty, as the British for most part did in Australia. It would certainly affect a ton of things, both in the 19th century and into the current day, where the modern American Indians use the treaties as basis of their claims and often recruit scholars to help them in legal issues. No treaties fundamentally alters the paradigm of American Indian relations with the United States, even if we still respect them as "noble savages" and superior to Australian Aboriginals or whatever race-based nonsense.
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
The US Indian agents signed treaties with them, though, didn't they? Exploitative as they were, lack of desire to follow up on as happened, the US was still signing treaties with tons of Indian nations. They certainly broke those treaties often. But I'm most curious of what if they dispensed even with the whole concept of a treaty, as the British for most part did in Australia. It would certainly affect a ton of things, both in the 19th century and into the current day, where the modern American Indians use the treaties as basis of their claims and often recruit scholars to help them in legal issues. No treaties fundamentally alters the paradigm of American Indian relations with the United States, even if we still respect them as "noble savages" and superior to Australian Aboriginals or whatever race-based nonsense.
The concept of the treaties was from day 1 ridiculous and unenforceable. They were enacted by different administrations with different priorities and different levels of commitment, all of which was to be enforced by an army smaller than Belgium's for most of its history until the World Wars spread out over an entire continental plain, amongst the backdrop of millions of immigrants pouring into the US and thousands of land hungry heavily armed people moving all over the west.

The treaties were done in an effort to avoid open warfare because the US Army was small and underfunded, and people in the era who held political power in the east generally disapproved of open warfare with the Indians. The farther west a state government was, the more aggressive their policy was. Massachussetts and Maine largely provided for their native populations, most of which assimilated well into 19th century society, while California and Texas were putting out scalp bounties.

If you want no treaties, that means you probably are going to need the US government to decide they want to pacify the west solely by force and therefore invest heavily into the army and make what got John Chivington court martialed as regular policy. This might require cultural changes, like no Victorian "Burden" concept and a more militant United States. Or, if you want no treaties without harsh measures, you probably need the population pressures that drove westward expansion to be dealt with, and the concept of a largely Indian west that slowly assimilates into the US, much like the British in New Zealand rather than Australia, could develop. Or rather, have westward expansion have almost no government involvement, and rather have settlers in the West sort of make their own rules. OTL, this is largely what happened, but this way you could have official avoidance of treaties.
 
The concept of the treaties was from day 1 ridiculous and unenforceable. They were enacted by different administrations with different priorities and different levels of commitment, all of which was to be enforced by an army smaller than Belgium's for most of its history until the World Wars spread out over an entire continental plain, amongst the backdrop of millions of immigrants pouring into the US and thousands of land hungry heavily armed people moving all over the west.

The treaties were done in an effort to avoid open warfare because the US Army was small and underfunded, and people in the era who held political power in the east generally disapproved of open warfare with the Indians. The farther west a state government was, the more aggressive their policy was. Massachussetts and Maine largely provided for their native populations, most of which assimilated well into 19th century society, while California and Texas were putting out scalp bounties.

If you want no treaties, that means you probably are going to need the US government to decide they want to pacify the west solely by force and therefore invest heavily into the army and make what got John Chivington court martialed as regular policy. This might require cultural changes, like no Victorian "Burden" concept and a more militant United States. Or, if you want no treaties without harsh measures, you probably need the population pressures that drove westward expansion to be dealt with, and the concept of a largely Indian west that slowly assimilates into the US, much like the British in New Zealand rather than Australia, could develop. Or rather, have westward expansion have almost no government involvement, and rather have settlers in the West sort of make their own rules. OTL, this is largely what happened, but this way you could have official avoidance of treaties.

Correct. But Massachussetts had a scalp bounty multiple times as well. I think I mean what if the US had dispensed with the formalities of dealing with a foreign nation (which many tribes were), thanks to a situation of "this is the new order, you do as we say, or bad things will happen thanks to the US Dragoons or other US Army units (on Indian patrol most of the 19th century)." Treaties wouldn't matter, you are thus thrust into the capitalist system. Note the final decimation of the buffalo herds had capitalist hunting demands as an inspiration behind it. The American Indians should thus adapt to this capitalist economy--if white farmer X can do better on your lands, you sell. Likewise, white farmer X might sell to you (probably an American Indian chief as in the US South) if his lands have failed and he has no real option but to sell to you.

Yeah, Westerners make their own rules, that sort of things. A lot of people were screaming for vengeance against the Plains Indians, and if you were in Col. Chivington's unit, you certainly got it, with your massacre of one of the most friendly bands of Plains Indians versus people who would fight until the bitter end.

I might be holding an ideal instead of reality, but certainly a lot of Western Indians might've assimilated. They would be landowners on the High Plains and in that area. Nothing less, nothing more. They would be discriminated against, as people with known American Indian ancestry were in the Texas Panhandle as late as the Great Depression era. But that isn't too far out of how the Cherokee and such were in the US South prior to Jackson's Indian Removal, where the leaders of that community were at least as equal to the white man in wealth.
 
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