Ethical Dilemmas Of Native Americans

Great Essays
Starting with the invasion of Europeans, Native Americans have been actively destroyed as a people. Remarkable levels of discrimination towards minorities such as Native Americans, in the United States, after the invasion are displayed through media outlets like the internet and television networks. Commonly, those who tune in to watch the daily news and the newest post on the internet are intruded with one sided bias, sometimes unknowingly. My goal throughout this informative essay is to give reason to question how Native Americans are portrayed in Western society and give knowledge of what was not taught through the Eurocentric biased perspective with a Native perspective on a people’s right to law, life, and land and the ethical implications of the destruction of those human rights. It is believed that the beginning of the hardships Native Americans face today began with Columbus’s discovery of ‘The New World’. …show more content…
As Howard Zinn informed his readers of a quote from Columbus in his book A People’s History of the United States, “The Arawak men and women traded everything they owned for beads and bells. They would make fine servants.” The Arawak welcomed the strangers, then were stripped of their freedoms. They were raped, their bodies were mutilated, they were murdered, punished for their beliefs, sold like property, families were split up, and they were forced to live on small reservations, which are still actively binding Native American lives between inequality and disregarded freedoms as citizens in the United States. Several books have been published from the journey written by Las Casas, a priest who pursued the new world with Columbus in the 1500s. In Las Casas’s book History of the Indies, he says “As two Christians saw two Indian boys, each carrying a parrot, they grabbed the parrots from them and for fun, beheaded the young boys.” He describes the peaceful nature of Arawak and how the men of Columbus quickly began taking their lives until the Natives as a people were diminished until there were not anymore Arawak in the Indies. A peaceful people was destroyed for European game. The destruction caused by Europeans began to crack the delicate boarders that held the Natives as a People together. Following the colonization of Westerners on the Natives’ land, laws affecting Natives were set by the United States government to give themselves lawful power over the Native Americans. According to Maureen E. Smith in the book American Indian Thought, policies were set for “limiting the freedom of traditional Native Religions” (Smith 2004). After the power hungry European takeover of Native American rights to spirituality began, Europeans displaced them from their homes and diminished their culture into almost nonexistence, stripping Native Americans from their place, territory, and language. Before the Europeans invaded Native American lands, Natives lived under moral law. For example, to name a few, it was “law” for Native Americans to respect their elders and do as they were told by their mothers, all while respecting Mother Earth. Once Europeans invaded, Native Americans were forced to live under their sense of law which indefinitely was set in place to destroy them as a people because they were different or “dirty”, as described by Europeans. The United States government began negotiating treaties with the Natives in the 19th century. They worked together in an attempt to create what should have been an even playing field between each other, in hopes of creating peace through their differences. However, the philosophy that Native Americans were somehow inferior to white people led to a mindset that the treaties need not be respected. The United States had the power of military force to get their way around these treaties. Anything that gave Native Americans any kind of freedom was a block to Euro-American manifest destiny. Columbus and the colonization is taught as a form of American success in the United States. Europeans found a land with possibility of growth and success and could prosper through trials such as starvation and intense weathers. The United States educational system chooses to shine light on European hardships but the United States fails to educate

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    Article Analysis: Troubling the Path of Decolonization Indian Residential School Case Law, Genocide, and Settler Legitimacy In the article Troubling the Path of Decolonization: Indian Residential School Case Law, Genocide, and Settler Legitimacy the author, Leslie Thielen-Wilson, attempts to prove that the European settlers asserted their power over the Native people by treating them as subhuman and regarding them as settler property that had no control over their memories, thoughts, desires, and/or emotions. Through the analysis of some IRS civil cases, Thielen-Wilson argues that the treatment of the Native population at the hands of European settlers served to create a multi-generational legacy of colonialism as well as a system of Native…

    • 1424 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Sand Creek The Morning After In Annette Jaimes, “Sand Creek The Morning After” she first starts by giving a background to the atrocities done to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho in late 1864 after stating they were at peace. This group of people, after being having countless lives taken, were driven out of their Colorado. She moves forward two decades where the American Indian community celebrate the renaming of Nichols Hall and honoring those who were slaughtered at Sand Creek.…

    • 918 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Winona Laduke Sparknotes

    • 1121 Words
    • 5 Pages

    government has continuously ignored treaties, taking land without regard for cultural sites. This, along with hundreds of other violations of boundaries, illustrate injustices throughout Native American tribes. The U.S. government’s failure to abide by these treaties has impacted Native Americans, leading to continuous struggles. On top of this, settlers ignored these treaties and took land, which spans millions of acres across the U.S. These ongoing violations of treaties not only by the U.S. government but by residents pose significant challenges throughout the daily lives of Native Americans.…

    • 1121 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Hyeon Chung 10/24/17 SSCI 350 Personal Analysis of “In the White Man’s Image” The film “In the White Man’s Image” illustrates how white Americans wanted to civilize Native Americans. Anglo Americans, settlers who colonized United States, encroached on the land and culture of Native Americans. At that time, any hostile or violent behavior toward Whites’ intention was punished severely. Moreover, Whites believed that Native Americans needed to conform to the white way of civilization in order to live in America and thought that the way of life of Native Americans as immoral.…

    • 850 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Zinn Chapter 1 Analysis

    • 1033 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The oppression of smaller communities and individuals by the larger states leads to an inherent support of nationalism in the narrative of history; as a result, the assumption of the viewpoint of smaller communities allows for an unexplored historical perspective. By attempting to understand the perspective of smaller communities during the efforts to colonize and explore the Americas, Zinn introduces the importance of historical interpretation to his approach to narrating history. Despite his typical treatment as a hero and pioneer for his discovery of America, Christopher Columbus established a precedent of brutality towards the Arawak communities by commanding “all persons… to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months,” upon…

    • 1033 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Zinn does a very good job about attacking the reader from a Native American’s perspective. Zinn uses quotes from Columbus’ own journal and describes to the reader what it was like back then. He quotes, “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.” It is obvious that Columbus must have treated them very badly in order to get what he wanted which we all know was gold. “..…

    • 535 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian provides a harrowing and sarcastic but ultimately very real, look at the history of Indigenous peoples in North America from the time of first contact to the present. King details the relationship between non-Indigenous peoples and Indigneous peoples, establishing a subversion of history in which this relationship has continuously exploited and dominated over Indigneous people. At times a deeply personal account on his own conflicted activism, and at other times a revised edition of truths that show the identity of Indigenous peoples and how these identities have been affected by popular culture. In fact herein lies King's main theme of The Inconvenient Indian, how the stories and narratives by which legal…

    • 1694 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Native Americans Imagine aliens from another planet landing on earth. Imagine if the people of the land accepted them and taught them how to survive on earth, only for the aliens to take away the land. In “Native Americans: Contact and Conflict,” Native Americans wrote down their experiences, letting the reader get a different perspective on events and occurrences that the reader would not get from reading white colonist papers. The writings provide the viewer with understanding and knowledge of Indian beliefs, culture, and feelings towards the white immigrants. At the beginning Indians welcomed the English with hospitality.…

    • 806 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Native Americans were the first to settle in America and were defined by the English as indigenous people. The English labeled the indigenous people as “savages” and viewed them as an uncivilized culture, while they viewed themselves as a civilized culture. In Robert Warrior’s “Indian,” he argues the idea of the present absence of indigenous culture meaning their culture is what made up American culture and no one realizes it. In the “Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” Mary Rowlandson explains her feelings and experience while Native Americans held her captive. In the beginning, her perception of the world was defined as either savage or civilized.…

    • 545 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In today’s society, it still remains a heavily debated topic of discussion amongst people. However, the lives of the Native Americans would never prove to be the same as they were before Columbus and the European people arrived. They accidently…

    • 2480 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many Native Americans were stripped of their rights, freedom and equality. Chief John Ross wrote a letter that protested the treaty of New Echota, that stated “we are denationalized; we are disfranchised. We are deprived of membership in the human family!” (Ross) Chief wrote…

    • 768 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the 1820’s and 30’s after the death of Tecumseh, Native Americans in the Ohio River Valley faced what amounted to an ethnic cleansing. After the war of 1812, “settlers” outnumbered Native Americans 7 to 1. Throughout history, Native Americans have been referred to as “savages” or “primitive”. America is the one who seems savage like for their removal and elimination of the Native Americans. The way the Native American were disregarded and treated by the Americans is horrific.…

    • 1082 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The article explains the various mistreat that Indians received from the Americans, at first Indians were considered to be “white” because they had a similar appearance to the Europeans. With time that idea had changed and instead reflected that they were defined as “children’’ or “savages”. The main fear that the country has always had is the fear of the unknown, “in 1892 ceremonial behavior was misunderstood and suppressed” (Rothenberg, 2014: 503). Indians were forcibly stripped from their origins and were being left with no land, no identity, and no respect. The documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion: The Story we Tell,…

    • 733 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This essay argues that North American governments passed laws in an attempt to strip Indigenous peoples of their culture in what can be considered Cultural Genocide by forced relocation, the outlawing of traditional ceremonies and the use of re-education in the form of residential schools. Genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic act of destruction to whole or part of a racial, religious or ethical group1. In 1933 Raphael Lemkin spoke at an International conference for Unification of Criminal law in Madrid where he proposed that genocide consisted of the destruction of a cultural group in two ways the first being the annihilation of members of the group and the second being the undermining of their way of life what is now considered cultural genocide2. The Canadian and United States of America have both enforced laws that can be considered acts of Cultural genocide to the indigenous peoples of North America. The United States government forced the Native Americans to relocate west of the Mississippi in what is now Oklahoma, know now as the Trail of Tears resulted in thousands of death, they set up residential schools in an attempt to destroy Native American culture and they also were at war with different tribes from about 1644 till Wounded Knee in 1890.…

    • 875 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Regardless of your political stance, healthcare is a service that all people should have access to, privately, or publicly. In the United States, millions of Native Americans on reservations are stifled from receiving the much needed dental care they deserve, and the consequences are damaging to their health and prosperity. Tribal sovereignty is the right of an independent authority to govern tribal members. In regards to dental care, this is the right to train, license, and employ professionals.…

    • 918 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays