The U.S. intentionally starved numerous Native Americans

In addition to faster methods, food deprivation was another tactic that the colonists used against the Natives. Quoting Carroll P. Kakel’s The American West and the Nazi East, pages 190–1:

In Early America, the policy of ‘concentrating’ [the] survivors of genocidal war and forced ‘removal’ on ‘reservations’ was an unplanned policy of attrition and slow death, aimed at breaking the[ir] will to resist continued settler expansion and to further the dispossession of Native Americans. On these barren reservations, [they] were subject to repeated cycles of mass epidemics and starvation.

Early in the nineteenth century, isolated attempts were made to vaccinate certain tribes against smallpox, but these early efforts failed, due mostly to lack of interest on the part of U.S. officials. Vaccination had some effects in reducing mortality during the late 1800s and was used to induce [Native] to stay on the reservations.^32^ While ‘treaties’ often promised that [Native Americans] would be provided with the minimum necessities of life, [the] tribes frequently did not receive what was promised, and became unable to feed their populations.

Wretched living conditions on these reservations meant only ‘slow death’ for Native Americans. As instanced above, in the Annual Report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, in 1853, U.S. Indian [sic] Agent Thomas Fitzpatrick described the reservation system as ‘the legalized murder of a whole nation’.^33^ Almost 40 years later, The New York Times would accuse the U.S. government of ‘starv[ing] those whom we pretend to feed’.^34^

Between 1870 and 1883, commercial hunters, aided at times by soldiers, slaughtered millions of American bison (commonly known as the American buffalo) in an extermination effort, supported by the federal government, to force the starving Plains Indians to submit to the reservation system. Aided by drought, blizzards, and other environmental factors, the hunters brought the [Natives’] primary resource — a source of food, clothing, and shelter — to the point of destruction and near‐extinction.

Like the bison, the Plains Indian [sic] was brought to the point of near extinction. White settlers took the droughts, blizzards, and grass fires of the 1870s and 1880s that aided the bisons’ demise, as evidence of the ‘providential extinction of the herds’; just as their ‘superior’ domestic livestock were ‘destined’ to replace the ‘inferior’ bison, the ‘superior’ ‘white’ settlers were ‘destined’ to replace the ‘inferior’ Indians [sic]. As one of the buffalo hunters expressed it, ‘kill every buffalo you can ... [for] every buffalo dead is an Indian gone’.

In the end, this strategy spared the army from having to fight the large‐scale ‘exterminationist’ ‘Indian war’ that many had predicted (and some had wanted).^35^

Dorothy Lippert’s and Stephen J. Spignesi’s Native American History For Dummies, page 305, puts it more informally:

Forcing Indians [sic] onto reservations and away from their hunting grounds and proven growing lands resulted in a great many deaths by starvation.

Also, the deliberate extermination by Europeans of the life‐giving buffalo caused [the] tribes to starve and disintegrate. By 1895, the buffalo was essentailyl extinct. The Plains Indians [sic] suffered most from loss of the buffalo. And, again, if we follow the money, we’ll see why the animal was exploited to the point of “almost” extinction:

✓ Their hides were worth a lot of money.
✓ They were in the way.

How did the tribes of the Plains Indians [sic] replace the meat [that] they got from the buffalo?

They didn’t.

You may be wondering how many Natives perished as a consequence of this food deprivation. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any calculations. The number could be in the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands. I don’t know.