The native Americans, the people we call the 'Indians', had been in America for many thousands of years before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Columbus thought he had arrived in India, so he called the native people 'Indians'.
The Indians were kind to the early settlers. They were not afraid of them and they wanted to help them. They showed the settlers the new world around them; they taught them about the local crops like sweet potatoes, corn and peanuts; they introduced the Europeans to chocolate and to the turkey; and the Europeans did business with the Indians.
But soon the settlers wanted bigger farms and more land for themselves and their families. More and more immigrants were coming from Europe and all these people needed land. So the Europeans started to take the land from the Indians. The Indians had to move back into the centre of the continent because the settlers were taking all their land.
The Indians couldn't understand this. They had a very different idea of land from the Europeans. For the Indians, the land, the earth, was their mother. Everything came from their mother, the land, and everything went back to it. The land was for everyone and it was impossible for one man to own it. How could the White Man divide the earth into parts? How could he put fences round it, buy it and sell it?
Naturally, when the White Man started taking all the Indians' land, the Indians started fighting back. They wanted to keep their land, they wanted to stop the White Man taking it all for himself. But the White Man was stronger and cleverer. Slowly he pushed the Indians into those parts of the continent that he didn't want—the parts where it was too cold or too dry or too mountainous to live comfortably.
By 1875 the Indians had lost the fight: they were living in special places called 'reservations'. But even here the White Man took land from them—perhaps he wanted the wood, or perhaps the land had important minerals in it, or he even wanted to make national parks there. So even on their reservations the Indians were not safe from the White Man.
There are many Hollywood films about the fight between the Indians and the White Man. Usually in these films the Indians are bad and the White Man is good and brave. But was it really like that? What do you think? Do you think the Indians were right or wrong to fight the White Man?