There’s a saying that questions “do the ends justify the means”? This means does the outcome outweigh everything sacrificed to get there. In the early to mid nineteenth century, America was hurt socially, technologically, economically, and politically due to the Trail of Tears, President Andrew Jackson, and Industrialization. Beginning in the late 1700’s and advancing into the 1800’s, the Native Americans that had lived in America for the past 12,000 years gradually lost the majority of their land.…
How did the American government shift from an “expansion with honor” policy to a policy of the expulsion of the Cherokee people? The Cherokee people were once a great nation whose population spanned all across the South Eastern corners of the North American continent. The Cherokee people once called states such as North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and Virginia home. The Cherokee people once governed their own nation, a nation where men hunted and women farmed. A nation where both men and women worked together in harmony as a balance for each other, an equilibrium.…
Native American response paper This response paper will be on the articles A Tour of Indian Peoples and Indian Lands by David E. Wilkins and Winnebagos, Cherokees, Apaches, and Dakotas by Debra Merskin. The first article discusses what the Indian tribes were and where they resided. There are many common terms to refer to the native people including American Indians, Tribal nations, indigenous nations, first peoples, and Native Americans. Alaskan natives are called by their territories like the Inuits or the Aleuts.…
Native Americans have had an estimated 1.5 billion acres of land taken from them by the United States (The Invasion of America). Nearly every tribe’s land has been greatly reduced by white settlers, whether by forceful removal or sneaky laws and enactments. Losing so much land can be devastating to a nation. The location of a nation can determine the natural resources that can be used, the size and population, and the territorial jurisdiction. Land not only provides economic opportunity, but is also a “hallmark of identity”, a “barometer of community integrity”, and “a repository for […] the remains of ancestors and their artifacts, the cornerstones of worldviews, and moral lessons from the past” (d).…
Issue and Controversies in American History Dawes Act Americans believed in 1840, that they had to move westward; although the land was taken by the Native Americans. The Dawes Act, was a way to end the conflict between white settlers and the Indians; by giving the Indians and settlers their own plots of land. After the American Revolution white settlers continued to come to the New World, taking more from the natives for ranches, railroads, mining interest, as well as their own needs, causing the natives to have to move farther west. The government sought out to resolve the issue by giving the Indians large pieces of lands called reservations. Whites weren’t allowed to trespass on the land.…
Native Americans and Americans always have had a very tumultuous relationship. Starting from the first discovery and then colonization of the Native American's land; Americans pillaged and plundered villages, which purposefully depleted the Native American population. The tumultuous relationship boiled over when Andrew Jackson, known for his hatred of the British and Native Americans, signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 (Tindall and Shi 342). The Indian Removal Act authorized Jackson to give the Native Americans land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the land in the south and in the east (Tindall and Shi 342). The removal of the Native American's was primarily for land and urbanization of that land, which were held by the Native Americans at that point.…
Discussion 1 The turn of the century in 1900’s, most remaining Native Americans had been forced, to leave their ancestral lands; it was truly a time of cultural assimilation (Assimilation through Education). Some chose to live on the reservations that were created by the U.S. government starting in the 1890s, while others spent their lives hiding from whites whom they feared would kill or capture them. Native Americans world as they new it naturally died out, from progression (Assimilation through Education), they needed to become a part of white society. There Indian language, religion, and art, would become something from the past to be studied or viewed in a museum, but would not be the products of living cultures.…
White Americans desperately wanted Native American land. George Washington called this an “Indian Problem” and tried to “civilize” the Native Americans by forcing them to convert to Christianity and follow European practices. This did not deter White Americans from forcing the Native Americans out of the land they thought was rightfully theirs. In order to get them to leave, the abuse of Native Americans increased drastically. From stealing livestock and burning houses to the government passing laws that made them leave, White Americans were doing everything they could to steal their land (History.com “Trail of Tears”).…
Question 3: Boarding schools have affected Native Americans in many ways. Boarding schools have given a lot of Native Americans depression. Depression has made many students in the boarding schools suicide or has suicide attempts. This is shown in the book Lakota Woman " I know an eleven-year-old who hanged herself and in our school"( Crow Dog, 29). She hanged herself because of the boarding school that was an unbearable situation.…
The long process of American territorial expansion was both facilitated and justified by a mid-nineteenth-century ideology (or national vision) known as Manifest Destiny.i Manifest Destiny was infeasible to majority of the people who were willing to get on board with the expansion of America, except for the Indian people. The Indian people felt as though their land, in which they owned, was a good source for hunting, while the settlers thought it was a good idea to expand the nation 's territory. Reaching no concluded agreement, the white settlers came up with an alleged theory, that, in so many words, the whites were the superior and the non-whites were the inferior; and the inferior had no rights to own any land, and therefore the whites…
The natives have been in America for nearly 12,000 years.6 They have grown up where their ancestors lived, where the ground was special to them and had a deeper meaning to them than to anyone else. Not only was this their land in a spiritual sense, tribes like the Cherokee, where legal owners of their land that the cherished.7 The white settlers only had one reason for their need to take the Indian land: greed. They wanted the gold, that was recently found in Georgia, for themselves and also wanted to set up plantations to grow crops to ship up north to become rich. These settlers hated the Indians simply because they had legitimate claims on their land.…
Americans dehumanized the Indians piece by piece. The natives became unworthy to live wherever they pleased, even if they did have their land stolen from them. Maybe Woody Guthrie songs should have went more like this: “You thought this was your land, but now it’s my land, from California to the New York Island, from the redwood forests to the gulf-stream waters, this land was taken from you and given to…
The goals of settler colonialism led to the mistreatment of Native Americans, Mexicans, Africans, and African Americans, and because of the history of the country as well as the nature of U.S. government, these groups of people are still discriminated against today. The persistence of such a structure, in regards to Native Americans, is due to the fact that indigenous people who originally resided on the land that white Americans claim as their own have not left, the white colonizers are still present, and the two groups still do not necessarily see eye to eye. The fact that the effects of settler colonialism, along with settler colonialism itself, have persevered over time have led to distorted concepts of what it means to belong in U.S. society. One effect of settler colonialism is the existence of Indian Reservations.…
As Europeans expanded across the nation the status of Native Americans “changed from a majority culture of peoples living in sovereign nations to a disadvantaged minority living apart from mainstream U.S culture and subordinate to U.S law” (Shaw et.al.2015:31). The model of economic/political disempowerment applies to the Native Americans as seen through the Indian nations loss of land, power, and independence, all of which has had lasting consequences. An example of such model is the decline of sovereignty, in the beginning period of Sovereignty (1700s-1830s) native nations and the British/U. S government entered treaties as co-equals when exchanging demands, doing such over 400 treaties were signed between the groups which suggest that there was a respect for the native communities as being independent nations (Wk:3, Lecture 2). The period of sovereignty declined steadily as Europeans expanded westward which put white settlers into frequent contact with the native population. The white settlers greedily craved the natives land and resources which created conflict that they thought they could resolve with treaties but the growing U.S population proved to be too much to peacefully resolve with treaties.…
By the late seventeenth century, much of Native American land was considered to be controlled and owned by the English crown. The only way an Indian could own property was to get a land grant from the King (Cronon 70). Once a European settler owned land, they were encouraged to “…transform the soil by a property system that taught them to treat land as capital” (Cronon 77). Cronon states a very important aspect to European land ownership in that the owner of an area of land must improve it and tend to their property for the land remain in their custody. Since Native American homes were easily…