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.
According to Kraut, “The elderly who carried in their heads ancient histories, cures and crafts were often wiped out quickly, taking with them generations of a tribe’s collective understanding of the world and itself” (Kraut 17). It made them lose their expertise: hunting and gathering. Few Native Americans who survived the genocidal disaster had to naturally assimilate into the European culture to survive or fight to the death against the white invaders. Besides, their society fell into ruin. Shamans, conjurers, medicine men, or anyone who had claimed special power lost respect and authority because their traditional therapies were not effective in curing the infectious diseases.
The white people decided that they wanted to take the land away from the Indians and formed a government against the Indians. The children were taken to these reservations for education but they were not allowed to know about their heritage, they had to learn the American way. This was hard for the elders to understand, they wanted their
As a nation, America should be proud of the first people that lived there, and should embrace Native Americans as a part of our history. However, this has not always been the way that America looks at Native Americans, as this country went through a time in the late 19th century when we wanted to eradicate their entire population, and take all their land for ourselves and our westward expansion. Because of these selfish, inhumane ideas, terrible things like The Trail of Tears happened, and if Indian tribes were not being killed, they were being converted by force. One of the things that suffered along with the Native American cultures and tribes, was their languages. These beautiful, sophisticated
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). 5. Why did A Century of Dishonor strike so positive a chord among readers, including U.S
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 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
The Indians’ New World By: James H. Merrell The Indians’ New World, by James Merrell, is an article that was meant to describe how the lives of the Native Americans were greatly impacted when European settlers invaded their land. This article shows how the natives were excluded from the New World because, unlike the settlers and slaves brought to the New World, they had already been there. The natives were experiencing most of what the new settlers and slavers were, they were forces to adapt to the changes in the New World because it was slowly becoming less familiar to them with all the changes the Europeans made. The Indians’ New World shows that, although the natives had already lived in America for quite some time, the world they were living in once the Europeans arrived was not just as new to them as it was to the settlers but it was also more harmful for their ways of life. One of the main ideas of this article was to open the read’s eyes to how many hardships the natives had to face starting with the rapid destruction of their population.
This infers that for the aborigines, having another culture coming in and trying to get rid of their way of life “cuts like a knife”, meaning it starts hurting more and more the deeper it goes, and the wound will heal but the scars (memories) will always remain. In the past, and in some tribes today, it is believed that the Aboriginal people would live day by day around the belief that every object had a spirit. However, since the European invasion, Moncrieff states that, “the spirits (have begun) to disperse”. This infers that, when this culture was defaced, the spirits began to disband. This poem is relevant to us all, as greed and racism is still very much present in today’s society, and we are still being affected by other’s
* Large amount of Aboriginal people were imprisoned, because they were often in conflict with the law. In addition, countless of their children were taken away and were positioned in the child welfare organization. * Potlatches or big gatherings, in 1884, were forbidden, since the government viewed them as unsafe and as opportunities for native peoples to manage their protests. Website: Racism against Native Americans * Throughout the imposing and self-governing periods, an extended sequence of Indian Wars was fought with the major goal of obtaining much of North America as land of the U.S. * During wars, slaughter, required displacement, the limit of food rights, and the imposition of treaties. The land was taken, several hardships forced.