4. Which of the agencies involved with the Indians- the Interior and the army- seemed to Jackson to be the most understanding of the circumstances of the Cheyenne? Jackson believed that both the Department of the Interior and the U.S army did not do much to help the Cheyenne. The U.S army massacred the Cheyenne tribe in 1864. After the massacre the Commissioner of Indian affairs tried to prove they were not put in situations that forced them to rebel/ run away (refused food; starved, not provided with warm proper clothing they were promised in the treaty, driven off their lands and forced to stay confined on a reservation that wasn’t theirs).
Indians depicted it as becoming denationalized as document H explains. The Cherokees repeatedly protested. Document I clearly states that the Cherokees believed that had the right to their land. To move beyond the Mississippi, to unknown territory, was a great burden to them. The treaties created were not fulfilled even though they guaranteed Indian privileges and protection from intruders, thus driving the Natives to exile.
If they did choose to stay the Indians will have to obey the states laws anyways. Why not move to the west of the Mississippi River and try to claim their own independent state there. Lastly, is the race and color card. The Indians are clearly not white men; therefore they would probably be thrown into slavery and be treated like the African American. Even worse, if the Indians bear their grounds many will be killed by the white men for trying to hold the land and the Indian race can be even extinct.
Book Review – Lakota Woman By Mary Crow Dog Since the American government passed laws to push for progress and to help ‘civilise’ the Native American peoples, Indians have suffered as they can no longer practice their cultural customs or speak their native languages and yet are considered to be less than human in the eyes of the White Americans. In the book “Lakota Woman” by Mary Crow Dog these White American ethnocentric views are highlighted from experiences in Crow Dog’s life and are compared to the degree of ethnocentrism displayed by the Indians to keep their culture in defiance of the White Americans plans for them. Growing up on an Indian reservation Mary Crow Dog experienced the ethnocentrism
The problem is, to achieve this newfound opportunity Jackson wants to remove thousands of Indians from their settlements and move them to Oklahoma (Roark, 260). If you disregard the lives of all the Indians who were massacred for not leaving when Jackson ordered them to, I guess obtaining new land was a good thing. But it’s a bit hard for me to just ignore that harsh racism. Overall, I believe Jackson was a good President and certainly the most influential Democrat. However, in some instances I think he went too far, such as forcefully making Native Americans leave and some of the comments he made about the issue.
Spain on the other hand felt that the native people were not using the land to it's full potential. It was their obligation to put the land to better use. Through the generations of colonization and invasion, both the Spanish Empire and the native people met several ups and downs. Spain initially conquered many of the Natives such as the Aztecs and the Pueblos. Eventually the Pueblos blamed the Spanish for their hardships and misfortunes because of the fact that the Spanish had, in a sense, outlawed their ancient rituals and ceremonies.
As I said this is how they gained respect and by doing this they could also gain a wife. Indians didn’t belief in dying in warfare because they thought dying in a battle was stupid as a dead brave couldn’t feed his family. However for the Americans stealing was a crime, and murders were killed or imprisoned. They thought that to be killed in a battle was an honour but to run away was cowardly. In conclusion you can see why white Americans society thought differently from the Indians society.
Many of these acts proved to be failures, and left conflicts unresolved. The Allotment Act of 1887 was passed to provide each family of tribal members 160 acres of land in hopes for assimilation with the non-Native Americans. This act ended in failure with poor planning, and no effort with teaching Natives how to cultivate land like White homesteaders in order to survive. Later, this resulted in many White landowners taking possession of these lands. The few Native Americans that managed to keep their land, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a federal government committee, served as trustee and held the legal titles over these lands.
The reservations were not set on the best land; those were given to white Americans. These grounds could not be harvested and due to corruption settlers driving them even further away into smaller reservations constantly invaded them. Continuous struggles continue to cause the Indian’s numbers to dwindle and their culture to almost vanish. The main standard of living as a tribe that has greatly helped them to survive was now being replaced by the individualism of new American ideals. In accordance with the Native Nations website, one example of the terrible conditions the Indians had to live under the U.S government and the reservations took place in May of 1868 when at the Bosque Redondo Reservation two-thousand Indians perished and
1. The demise of the Plains Indians cannot be considered a result of good intentions. In the words of one army officer in 1850 the goal was “Kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Not only did this attack on the buffalo ruin the subsistence system that Plains Indians relied on, it led them to attack one another more and not have a food source to turn to if their villages were raided for crops. Also, it was not in good intentions that following the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 that made officials consider tribes to be different countries, treaties with these “countries would