2. 11 Native Americans : text and questions

 Read the text and answer the following questions:

Native Americans : A lost cause

against white expansionism

 

Indian tribes were scattered all over the American continent. Pioneers moving west invaded the Indians' territories.

 

At first the Native Americans helped the Pilgrim Fathers (the colonists) survive their first winter by sharing corn and wild turkey with them and showing them where to fish. Indian generosity is still celebrated on Thanksgiving Day.

 

But the quest for land had only begun. In 1787 and 1830 Congress issued acts* allowing immigrants to go west and driving Indians west of the Mississippi River. Indians were dispossessed of their lands and considered "domestic dependent nations".

Thousands of Indians were deported or killed. One example illustrates how things happened: when gold was discovered in Cherokee country, settlers and the army invaded their territory and removed them to Oklahoma in the winter 1838-39. Four thousand Cherokee Indians died of cold and exhaustion* on the Trail of Tears*.The Indians fought back but the white conquerors benefited from a numerical and technological superiority.

 

After 1840, three factors speeded up the extermination of the Indians:

__ the Gold Rush to California in 1848. It attracted gold hunters and settlers looking for land to farm.

__ the transcontinental railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific was completed in 1869. Settlers could move west in six days.

__ the buffalo was systematically slaughtered*. In the 17^th century there were over 50 million buffalo. In 1883, 200 buffalo were left. It meant starvation* and the end of the Indian traditional ecosystem since they depended on its meat, its skin and fur to make clothing or tepees.

 

American expansionism was justified at the time by politicians who proclaimed that it was America's Manifest Destiny to spread over the continent, its divine mission was to serve as model of democracy to the world and the Indian savages.

 some vocabulary to help you

an act : une loi

exhaustion = tiredness

the Trail of Tears : la Piste des Larmes

slaughter =  massacre

starvation =  famine

Questions:

 

Questions (Use your own knowledge to answer)

 

1.     Why did so many Europeans go to America in the centuries after Christopher Columbus discovered the new land? What was happening at the time in Europe?

 

2.     What did they expect to find / to become?

 

 

Questions about the text.

 

3.     Guess the meaning of:

 

- scattered (§ 1):  

- gold hunters ( § 4) :

 

4.     Use your own words to sum up all the reasons why Indian tribes slowly disappeared.

 

 

5. What was the Americans’ justification for their behaviour towards the Native Americans? Do you remember the meaning of that expression?