ABSTRACT
Native Americans, continued to insist on their rights in the nineteenth century, inspired by both Enlightenment ideals and their lived experience as colonized peoples. In some cases, Indians fought wars against the extension of colonial powers, by the nineteenth century, this primarily meant the expanding United States and Mexico. At the same time, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh united a large confederation of Native American tribes in the hope of establishing an autonomous native territory with British support. Meanwhile, in the decades after the American Civil War, there were a number of armed conflicts between the expanding American state and western Indian nations. During the late nineteenth century, the Ghost Dance movement in the west arose as a new spiritual belief system that emphasized a return to traditional Native American cultural values and predicted an end to settler encroachment. Women's rights, though controversial in the nineteenth century, were a cause supported by many progressives.
