During 1876 I feel that Native Americans were considered “less equal” perhaps not in an overall sense but considering that the thirteenth through fifteenth amendments were nearing it seems as though legislation that was aimed at helping Native Americans would have to wait until the 20th century. Just a year after the one hundredth anniversary of the Dawes Severalty Act was instituted offering allotment to Native Americans, this act would take tribes who in many cases had already been relocated to reservations and essentially break up that land to allow individuals and companies to profit off of natural resources that had been overlooked in the past. While the challenges of segregation and voting rights raged during the late nineteenth century for many African Americans, many Native Americans were succumbing to the collective loss of culture and land to survive on. As The Ethnic Dimension points on on page 199, from 1887 to 1924 Native Americans would lose 90 million acres of land. In 1876 it's hard to imagine that any Native Americans would feel optimistic for the future with a federal government who actively had taken away land from the colonial era to the late nineteenth century and even into the twentieth. One of the most oppressive aspects the Native Americans faced during the 1870’s was the various federal laws the Module 5 Course Packet mentions. For example many cultural rituals were flat out banned including funeral rites.
