Well of course it is. These indigenous people stood in the way of the accomplishments of the white people who came here to make progress. They were not like the whites, they did not feel the need to own the land nor did they posses the same culture, and so they had to go. As Robert Jensen puts it, the leaders of our country justified this decision “by asserting that the non-white people being murdered were not fully human, or at least had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (Jensen p. 33). Mary Crow Dog also writes about the intentional killing of her people this in her book, Lakota Woman.
Red Cloud: another Indian chief who only wanted peace with the white men. Red Cloud made Sitting Bull mad by signing the government papers, and in the end he was seeing that signing with the United States Government did nothing for his tribe. Senator Daws:
I believe that he felt that the native women did not play a significant role in the signing of the treaty. This is opposite of Howling Wolf’s rendering. I believe that John Taylor’s decision was based on cultural bias because he did include one woman, Mrs. Margaret Adams the
Miller showed in his writing how bias he was with seeing the truth about the Indians. In the preface of his book Errand into the Wilderness he bluntly not acknowledge the Indians by using the word vacant, “the massive narrative of the movement of European culture onto the vacant wilderness of
They believed that "the white people have no right to take the land from the Indian, because they had it first; it is theirs"(D). The U. S. portrayed the Native Americans as savages and in a 1785 treaty, white Americans were not allowed to "attempt to settle on any of the lands westward or southward of the said boundary"(B). The United States promised them land that no American citizen was permitted to enter. However, the U.S. government treated these agreements as something of little importance and continuously violated them. They began to remove the Indians on the accusation that the Native Americans did not respect "the power of the United States of America” (E) President Andrew Jackson stated, "We bleed our enemies in such cases to give them their senses" (E).
One of the major reasons the Native Americans were affected by the European exploration was because the Europeans spread small pox and many other diseases to the Native Americans. Since the Natives have never been exposed to diseases they had no resistance and most of them died out. Also the Europeans threat was very direct to the natives. To the Natives, Europeans were becoming a threat deeper and deeper by seizing their lands, clearing forests, driving away many of there wild game (which tribes depended on food) and letting their livestock run loose to destroy the natives crops. The Native Americans started becoming less and less powerful towards the Europeans, there population was small to begin with and with the epidemics diseases and the land and food shortages, they were almost wiped out of there population.
Alexie, on the other hand, feels that the blame falls more on the actual people of the new Native American generations becoming more like the white men on their own accord. Throughout the entirety of “War Dances” it is not mentioned in any section other than “Blankets” that the main character is Indian. In fact, if “Blankets” was to be taken out of the short story, it is doubtful that the main character's heritage would be defined at all. Even in the section “Drugstore Indian” the closest Alexie comes to describing any of the people in the drugstore is calling one a “nosy hag,” despite the title of the section suggesting there would be mentions of race (Alexie 72). The main character, despite
He, unfortunately, cannot do anything about it, so he is forced to listen and do as the white men tell him to. This unfortunate type of manner was common back in the early to mid-1900s. Laws, which were known as the Jim Crow laws, were put into place by white men to substitute for the end of slavery, to keep the black men “in their place”. This type of behavior is pitiful. It shows how inconsiderate and cruel humans can be.
The settlers came in with the belief that they were settling a "new land," and failed to recognize or accept the Native Americans rights to their land, culture, and way of life. The white man believed that the Native Americans were not a part of the larger American society. The settlers viewed it as their right to settle on the land and push forward with development. The white man put a demand on the Federal government to push the Native Americans aside to make room for progress
Journey As glamorous as PBS and our grade school teachers embedded the history of the United States into us as young children, we soon discovered that the United States hardly practiced equality. Race today is defined as a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology and/ or ancestry (Lopez, 193). The definition of race was all but a blur in the court system during a time when immigrants were trying to naturalize. Those that saw a reason why he or she should be naturalized challenged and fought for the right to establish a permanent home in the United States legally. But, the Statue of Liberty’s famous remarks about “Land of Opportunity” was all but a myth and not seen as reality.