Consider the US government's policies toward the

Plains Indians in the 1800s.

Do you think the government was justified in using

these policies?

Write a two-to three-sentence response to this

question.

At the start of the twentieth century there were approximately 250,000 Native Americans in the USA - just 0.3 per cent of the population - most living on reservations where they exercised a limited degree of self-government. During the course of the nineteenth century they had been deprived of much of their land by forced removal westwards, by a succession of treaties (which were often not honoured by the white authorities) and by military defeat by the USA as it expanded its control over the American West.