Reason discusses the contributions native Americans made to the liberation of the colonies in rebelling against British forces:
…The contribution of native-style warfare—and natives themselves—to the Revolution should not be exaggerated. Washington was leery of both Indians and their tactics. Throughout the conflict, he sought to fight European-style, with massed armies blasting away at each other in open fields—although he did sometimes look for soldiers who were, as he put it, “accustomed to the irregular kind of wood-fighting practiced by the Indians.” Gradually he warmed to working with such allies as the Iswa (Catawba) and Lënapeyok (Lenape), but he relied on them only for specialized roles—scouting, spying, and safeguarding the frontier—rather than as infantry troops in pitched battles.
If natives’ impact on the battleground was limited, their impact on the war’s origins, political and intellectual, was enormous.
A turning point occurred in 1763. In January, European nations signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France (and their respective allies). Dismaying the war-weary British government, Pontiac’s Rebellion erupted barely four months later. It was a months long, broad-scale assault by a coalition of native nations on British forces in Michigan and the Ohio Valley. (“Pontiac” was the English name for Obwa and i’eyaag, who led the Odawa, or Ottawa, in Michigan.)
NATIVE LANDS ESTABLISHED BY PROCLAMATION OF 1763
In October, seeking to defuse what was becoming a long and costly conflict, King George III banned colonists from moving into land west of the Appalachians. The royal proclamation gave natives permanent title to what had been the eastern half of France’s American holdings—all of the land between the Mississippi River and the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, plus the western half of Georgia, all of Florida, and a big chunk of Canada. It blocked off an area of something like 600,000 square miles.
Leave aside natives’ annoyance at being “given” title to land they had occupied for generations. Colonists reacted with fury. From their point of view, the king was taking back the free land he had promised them—the reason that many had left their homelands, the goal of fighting the Seven Years’ War. Worse, he was giving it to “savages.” Read More