Ongoing Injustice: The American Indians Essay

The American Indian Movement is an organization in the United States that attempts to bring attention to the injustice and unfair treatment of American Indians. Aside from that, the AIM works for better protection and care for the American Indians and their families. They have been changing the American perception of Indians since the late 1960’s, as well as aiding our awareness of their existence.

Before, during, and after the Civil War, American settlers irreversibly changed Indian ways of life. These settlers brought different ideologies and convictions, such as property rights, parliamentary style government, and Christianity, to the Indians. Clashes between the settlers and Indians were common over land rights and usage, religious and cultural differences, and broken treaties. Some Indian tribes liked the new ideas and began to incorporate them into their culture by establishing written laws, judicial courts and practicing Christianity, while other tribes rejected them (“Treatment”). Once the United States purchased Louisiana from the French in 1803, Americans began to encroach into the Indian lands of the south and west

In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will

Army and the forceful action used to confine the natives, the construction on Indian land, and the massive slaughter of the buffalo which the Indians relied on in every aspect of life. The mistreatment of the Native Americans has been going on for hundreds of years, way before the Gold Rush began. The American government has taken land that they are unable to return to this day. They have deprived the plains Indians of their culture and freedom. Immigration from other countries was at its peak, but America still wasn’t able to call people, that had resided in the United States for many years, citizens. Even the Native American’s, that had lived on the continent before it was even discovered, were denied citizenship unless they were Anglo-Saxon Protestant. To this day, many look at the Indians as a joke; The Seminoles as “The Tribe that Purchased A Billion Dollar Business.” Children are being taught about friendship between the American Settlers and the Natives, they are being lied to. The upcoming generations won’t understand the horrors of unnecessary warfare against innocent people, and they will only know to take what they want, even if it isn’t rightfully theirs. America as a nation has to be stopped from draping curtains over the defeat of the plains Indians: their wiping out of an entire people, just as they did to the

In 1886 during a speech in New York future President Teddy Roosevelt said; “I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Though this was over 250 years after Jamestown and almost four decades after the Trail of Tears Teddy Roosevelt’s attitude toward Native Americans in the late 19th Century seems to have changed little from many of those men and women who first colonized America. After hundreds of years of violence, discrimination and forced assimilation the Native American culture remains endangered and continues to suffer from higher rates of poverty and social distress than any other minority

In her book American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa's central role as both an activist and writer surfaces, which uniquely combines autobiography and fiction and represents an attempt to merge cultural critique with aesthetic form, especially surrounding such fundamental matters as religion. In the tradition of sentimental, autobiographical fiction, this work addresses keen issues for American Indians' dilemmas with assimilation. In Parts IV and V of "School Days," for example, she vividly describes a little girl's nightmares of paleface devils and delineates her bitterness when her classmate died with an open Bible on her bed. In this groundbreaking scene, she inverts the allegation of Indian religion as superstition by labeling

What if everyday in America there was not an action someone could take because someone of an opposite race sexually assaulted or domestically abused that person? Often news outlets only focus on major even in cities or towns, but never the reservations. With the lack of awareness of the number of rapes and domestic abuse victims on reservations, at large society is saying America doesn’t care due to reservations having sovereignty. Even with new laws signed into place by President Obama to deal with the rape and abuse problems to Native American women, that come from non Native Americans, the problem with this is it’s a pilot only on three tribes (Culp-Ressler,1).It is said it will expand soon, but how soon? America is not known for being

Post-bellum America began in 1865 after the Civil War and slavery. Slavery continued in a different form; the African Americans were bound by law to their employer. The Native Americans were forced out of their land and into a different culture. The truth is one ethnic group was not more oppressed over the other. In order to examine the corresponding oppression of the African Americans and Native Americans in post-bellum America it is important to compare their transition into society.

In the seventeenth century, European people begin to settle in the North America. They started to invest in the natural resources in the eastern America using the best resource they found in the land, captured Native Indians. Many poor European people migrated to North America for opportunity to earn money and rise of their social status. They came to the America as indentured or contracted servants because the passage aboard was too expensive for them. By the time many Native Indians and indentured servants die from the hard labor and low morality rate, masters of the plantation purchased more slaves from Africa to profit themselves. The “Virginia Servant and Slave Laws” reveal the dominant efforts of masters to profit from their servants and slaves by passing laws to treat slaves as their properties and to control servants and slaves by suppressing the rebellion using brutal force. Masters and rich planters sought to earn more profit from mercantilism, or trade, economic system by violating the civil rights of Native Indian, African, and poor European people and this thought and practice still exist today as a form of racism and segregation in America.

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The lecture covered the basis on Indians’ treaties, the government, and how both (the treaties and government) clashed with the Native’s culture. The guest speaker was Gillian Allen, a lawyer, who worked on First Nations treaty-related affairs in Canada and an Aboriginal. She presented a lecture on Indian Treaty Rights in Canada and the U.S. During the lecture, I learned interesting information about the Natives and recognized some aspects of cognitive psychology. The aspects of cognitive psychology that were present were priming, categories of knowledge, and surface features/deep structure.

Throughout history, Native Americans have been victimized by Americans and the American Government. Native Americans were here long before the English settlers found and migrated to America. They tried to buy the land from Native Americans, and money was not important to them so they refused. Over time this costed a lot of Native American lives and most of their land was taken from them. Native Americans were immensely mistreated in the 1900’s by white Americans and are still being wronged by deceiving history in textbooks and other learning aid.

Native Americans have felt distress from societal and governmental interactions for hundreds of years. American Indian protests against these pressures date back to the colonial period. Broken treaties, removal policies, acculturation, and assimilation have scarred the indigenous societies of the United States. These policies and the continued oppression of the native communities produced an atmosphere of heightened tension. Governmental pressure for assimilation and their apparent aim to destroy cultures, communities, and identities through policies gave the native people a reason to fight. The unanticipated consequence was the subsequent creation of a pan-American Indian identity

What were the significant treaties, policies, and events that defined US Government and Native American Relations? How did the Native American respond to these treaties, polices, and events historically? How did these treaties, policies, and events affect the subsistence, religion, political, and social structures of the Native American people? I will answer these questions through the examination of two centuries of US history in six time periods that define clear changes in the relationship between the Native American and the US Government.

America is, and was, never as equal as we like to think. Most of that comes from us, as humans, thinking that we are superior to other races, genders, or groups of people in general. First we had issues with how we treated the Native Americans when the colonists arrived. Yes the colonists tried to have as little conflict as possible, when they came over to settle this new land, they saw the Natives as “savages”. From then on, we used them as slaves, which progressed into slavery of other races, Hispanics, Africa-Americans, and even our own race, simply because they were not as rich or as high on the social ladder. Eventually they broke free of those reins, but we still had issues. Starting in the early to mid-1800s, people began to try and take the land, which they thought was theirs because they were ignorant, that the Native Americans had owned for who knows how long. The same land that they had grown up on. The same land that their ancestors had lived on for so long, and where they buried their dead. When Andrew Jackson came to office, the poor Cherokee’s, among other tribes, world came crashing down on top of them, as they were removed from their land, and taken on a trip, which became known as the trail of tears, or “The Trail that we cried on.” The trail itself led them to the Indian Containment Zone, or the “ICZ”, in present day Arizona. In that time frame, Andrew Jackson; a long supporter of the Indian removal act, among the many citizens of the United States,