You have to go back

Think mirror

From an article in the Anchorage Daily News, Dec. 17, 2016 about the town of Barrow, AK and controversy over changing the name. It's very apparent this is about way more than the town name.

"I'm backing up the young people that are wanting to reclaim our culture, reclaim our language," said Etta Fournier, 63, who grew up in Barrow. "This is for our seventh generation."

https://www.adn.com/features/alaska-news/2016/12/17/utqiagvik-barrow-north-slope-name-change-brings-tension-division/

7th generation? These people have supposedly been here since about 500 A.D.

A generation is generally regarded as 20 to 30 years, probably on the shorter side with natives who start families early.

So we're looking at somewhere between 140 and 210 years ago, 1810 to 1860.

In 1832, the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek ceded the 6,283,804 million acres of the remaining Chickasaw homeland in Mississippi in return for Chickasaw relocation on an equal amount of land west of the Mississippi River

https://www.chickasaw.net/our-nation/history.aspx

The U.S. gov had already tried to kill them off, as had the Brits and the French, but the Chickasaw won every battle.

They tried offering them land on OK with other tribes, but the Chickasaw were shrewd negotiators. They controlled all trade and travel in the south, and it was lucrative. It wasn't that the white man wanted passage, he wanted FREE passage.

What did the U.S. gov offer up to finally get them to leave?

The czarist government of Russia, which had established a presence in Alaska in the mid-18th century, first approached the United States about selling the territory during the administration of President James Buchanan, but negotiations were stalled by the outbreak of the Civil War. After 1865, Seward, a supporter of territorial expansion, was eager to acquire the tremendous landmass of Alaska, an area roughly one-fifth the size of the rest of the United States. He had some difficulty, however, making the case for the purchase of Alaska before the Senate, which ratified the treaty on April 9, 1867.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sewards-folly

On a side note- missionaries took children from parents and whipped kids who spoke their native language. Polio wiped out the elders. Culture nearly lost in two generations.