diseases that the Indians didn’t have before. They imposed new religions onto the Indian people. They forbade the Indians from speaking their own languages. They tried to do away with the Indians’ culture. What were Arizona Indian reservations? When the American Civil War ended, citizens of the United States once again turned their attention to the American West. Thousands of Americans decided to pack their wagons and seek a new life and new riches in the lands west of the Mississippi River. With so many Americans moving into the western lands, conflict soon arose. The Native American Indians did not believe that their land now belonged to the newly arriving Americans. Raiding and fighting became a way of life between the two groups of people. In 1868 President Ulysses S. Grant suggested a new “Peace Policy” to stop the conflict between the Native Americans and the American settlers. The goal of this policy was to place all the Arizona tribes onto reservations and avoid more fighting with the American settlers. A reservation was land set aside for the Indian people to live upon. An Indian reservation was a specific piece of land given to the tribe by the United States government. The tribe was given the power to manage the reservation but the U.S. government kept the final control over the actions of the tribe. The tribes could no longer hunt and live in their traditional ways. Most tribes survived by hunting, yet they were forced to learn the skills of farming in order to stay alive. They could not leave the reservation; thus they were not a free people. The reservation system began to have problems almost immediately. Federal Indian agents were too often corrupt. American settlers did not like the Native American people being given so much land, even though most of the reservation lands were not ideal for farming. The Native Americans wanted to return to their homelands. They were not free to live their lives as they chose. In 1868 President Ulysses S. Grant expanded the reservations for the Indian nations of the Arizona Territory. Those reservations are still a part of Arizona today. 140  Chapter 14 • Indian Nations of Arizona in the 21st Century