Native American Displacement

"[M]y people have lived within a one-hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington,. For at least ten thousand years," Jackson notes in. "What You Pawn I will Redeem." This Estimation is corroborated by David Wynecoop in his book Children of the Sun which offers a detailed history of the Spokane Indian tribe from precolonial times. Shortly after white settlers entered the Spokane country in 1807, Wynecoop notes that initially "little else changed" beyond profitable fur trading and intermarriage between whites and Indians. However, he notes, the arrival of the Christian missionaries "had a more lasting influence than even the white man's guns," as the Native Americans were forced to convert and were made subject to church laws and governance. With the acceptance of the white man's religion, Native Americans largely abandoned their traditional beliefs, which permanently altered their communities, traditions, and unique identities.

In 1850, Congress passed the...