The U. S. government had two purposes when making land agreements with Native Americans: to open it up more land for white settlement,[31] and to ease tensions between whites and Native Americans by forcing Natives to use the land in the same way as did the whites - for subsistence farms.[31] The government used a variety of strategies to achieve these goals; many treaties required Native Americans to become farmers in order to keep their land.[31] Government officials often did not translate the documents which Native Americans were forced to sign, and native chiefs often had little or no idea what they were signing.[31]