Civilization Program

Thousands of years ago before Columbus set foot in the Americas, a group of Indians living in the Great Lakes region of what is now the present day United States, broke off from the other Iroquois tribes living in that area and migrated south. They eventually settled in the American southeast in what are now the states of Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia and West Virginia. They called themselves Aniyun-Wiya which in Cherokee means "principle people." The Cherokee way of life was one of balance and harmony, the men were responsible for hunting and fishing while the women were left to raise and tend to their crops. They, along with many other Indian nations lived and prospered on the North American continent for hundreds of years. Then in the early 1500s Europeans began landing on the eastern coast and surveying the so called "new world." For the Indians this was not a new world, it was their world the only one they had ever known, but unbeknown to them their world was about to become a much different place. Over the next three centuries the two culture's attitudes toward each other would evolve and change as more and more Europeans made the trip across the Atlantic. As the population grew settlers began to move farther inland and deeper into Indian Territory leading to increased interaction between both sides. The United States established two seperate policies that dictated relations with the natives; although each took different approaches they both had the same goal, land.

After the French and Indian War (1754 – 1763) the British controlled a large majority of the North American continent. They acquired a large amount of land from France in the Treaty of Paris and now had the task of maintaining peace with the Native Americans who inhabited their newly acquired territory. The Proclamation of 1763 was signed into law and prohibited whites to settle on Indian lands. Under the British policy the Indians had a right to their land and were recognized as land owners. At the start of the American Revolution most Native Americans took the side of the British seeing the colonists as a threat to their lands, although some tribes did fight alongside the Americans. As a result of the British defeat and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Great Britain ceded all its land between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian mountains to the newly formed United States of America.

After the war the United States was very much in debt and they needed a way to pay it off. They figured since the Native Americans were allied with the British and they had just defeated the British they had inherited the Indian's land by "right of conquest". This provided the government a lot of land to sell to help pay off their debt and also to give to soldiers as compensation for serving during the war. In the South the Cherokee signed the Treaty