Pretty much the Native Americans were thought of as non-people. The Americas were a great empty wilderness ripe for the taking. A land without a people for a people without a land.

is there any point in the history of the U.S. in which Native Americans were treated honorably?

Hmm. I would say there are moments when Congress or the courts or some other entity tried to do right by the Tribes, but was stymied by the inexorability of oppression.

There is The Marshall Trilogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Trilogy#The_Marshall_Trilogy.2C_1823-1832), which affirmed tribal sovereignty on their own land, but the rulings were generally ignored by the locals. The end result of Cherokee v. Georgia, which was decided in favor of the Cherokee, was The Trail of Tears.

The General Allotment Act, aka the Dawes Act, attempted to provide Indians the werewithal to be self-supporting and independent--by ignoring their culture and history, and turning them into farmers in the European mode. The end result of this well-intentioned condescension was the loss of hundreds of millions of acres of Indian land to fraudsters and thieves.

In the 1950s, Congress decided that the best thing for Indians would be to just assimilate into "American" society--so they just revoked the official status of a number of tribes, sold the land, and paid out all their trust assets. As a result, many of the tribal members ended up broke and unemployed and homeless, since they didn't have any experience in managing the lump-sum payments they received.

Indian law in the US is ridiculously complex and generally tragic--it's a litany of malice interspersed with good intentions gone badly awry.

Pretty much the Native Americans were thought of as non-people. The Americas were a great empty wilderness ripe for the taking. A land without a people for a people without a land.

That was explicit for Australia. The British colonisers didn't recognise within the Aboriginal people's societies any notion of land ownership or leaders with the authority to sign treaties, so the land was declared to be terra nullius - without an owner. This was overturned by the High Court in 1992, which oerturned the terra nullius assumption and recognised native title under particular conditions.

The British colonisers didn't recognise within the Aboriginal people's societies any notion of land ownership or leaders with the authority to sign treaties, so the land was declared to be terra nullius - without an owner. This was overturned by the High Court in 1992, which oerturned the terra nullius assumption and recognised native title under particular conditions.

Wow, such a difference from New Zealand, where there were formal treaties signed between the Crown and the Maori. I mean, sure, the Maori still got shafted, but they retained a lot more sovereignty than the Australian natives, and culturally have a great deal of influence on New Zealand.

Has anyone written an alternative history novel where the newcomers to America didn't wrest land/rights from the Indians? That would be interesting.

I was just reading about the treaty to get safe passage for settlers using the Oregon Trail in exchange for recognition of sovereignty for a bunch of tribes [link] Sounds like more of a good faith negotiation than I expected, given the general historical trend, although that is a pretty low bar.

Eta: I've read a few, Amy, but they all had other elements of fantasy or scifi taht were more of the focus, not just straight up alternate history.

Wow, such a difference from New Zealand, where there were formal treaties signed between the Crown and the Maori. I mean, sure, the Maori still got shafted, but they retained a lot more sovereignty than the Australian natives, and culturally have a great deal of influence on New Zealand.

Very much so. It was also significant, I think, that when the British and the locals went to war in NZ, the British would like as not get their arses handed to them. It helps to be bargaining from a position of strength.

How long did early settler cooperation with the native peoples last? A lot of the colonies would have starved if it weren't for the generosity of their neighbors--irony abounds on that--but did the population pressure of new settlers end that quickly? And my general impression is that Canada wasn't quite as brutal, though I have no real information to back that up.

I got a crash course in the history of the treatment of the Aboriginals in Australia, and the whole in-your-faceness of terra nullius took me aback. I mean, I knew it wasn't shiny happy, as colonizers rarely bring the shiny happy to the natives, but I had not really delved into the details, really.

If you're interested in that question in Massachusetts, Connie, I recommend Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, largely about King Philip's War. In sum: Plymouth Colony started as one new polity in a mosaic of independent groups in the region, and was only able to get started in the first place because of a recent devastating illness (maybe measles) killed off a big chunk of the native population, and Massasoit helped them to benefit himself in inter-group rivalry (new ally! with guns!). Two things eventually caused problems - HUGE waves of immigration after 1640 to the neighboring Mass Bay colony, and more modest growth in Plymouth, caused land pressure. And the first generation of leaders on both sides died off, and the second wave didn't have the longstanding personal relationships that had enabled them to avoid violence after the very early period (in which Myles Standish had been a little bloodthirsty, in part to establish that he was someone to be reckoned with.) So by 1674 things fell apart and you got King Philip's War. And things went to shit for the native peoples of New England at that point.