Editing American Indian Wars (section)

==Background==
The various wars resulted from a wide variety of factors. The European powers and their colonies also enlisted allied Amerindian tribes to help them conduct warfare against each other's colonial settlements. After the American Revolution, many conflicts were local to specific states or regions and frequently involved disputes over land use; some entailed cycles of violent reprisal. Under the doctrine of ''vacuum domicilium'' first employed by John Locke in 1690, the settlers believed that the natives lacked any concept of property rights, which gave them the justification to annex their lands.

As settlers spread westward across North America after 1780, armed conflicts increased in size, duration, and intensity between settlers and various Amerindian tribes. The climax came in the War of 1812, when major Amerindian coalitions in the Midwest and the South fought against the United States and lost. Conflict with settlers became much less common and was usually resolved by treaty, often through sale or exchange of territory between the federal government and specific tribes. The [[Indian Removal Act]] of 1830 authorized the American government to enforce Native American removal from east of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory west on the American frontier, especially what became Oklahoma. The federal policy of removal was eventually refined in the West, as American settlers kept expanding their territories, to relocate Amerindian tribes to [[Indian reservations|reservations]].