The Indians With Federal Supervision

Forty-eight years ago to date, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was organized. On that same year, Congress enacted the Indian Civil Rights Act. The purpose of the Indian Civil Rights Act was to accomplish two majorly significant points. First, it would ensure Reservation Indians many of the safeguards granted to other citizens by the Bill of Rights. Secondly, it would acknowledge the legitimateness of tribal laws within the reservations. Unfortunately, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and other supporting groups were not content or satisfied with the outcome and as a result created a disagreement and conflict between the two.

The Returning Soldiers by W.E.B Du Bois, is about the thousands of African American soldiers that helped France against Germany. They then returned home.The main idea that Du Bois wanted to express was that the soldiers returned home only to a country that does not treat them equally. Du Bois says “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy!”. He wanted the soldiers to continue to fight, not for France but for themselves. He wanted to show the returning African Americans how America as a shameful place full of discrimination. Du Bois states, “it steals from us”. He wanted to reveal how America robbed them out of their land, labor, savings and wages. He’s explains that the government keeps them universally

“. . . In the face of heavy odds, black troops had proved once again their courage, determination, and willingness to die for the freedom of their race”

W.E.B. DuBois’ “Returning Soldiers,” an editorial piece written in May of 1919 for the NAACP’s publication The Crisis lays out for not just returning soldiers, but for African-Americans as a whole that the war is not over. While the Great War of 1914-1918 may have ended, there is still a greater war to continue to fight on the American homefront. “Returning Soldiers” calls out the United States government on the charges against its people as seen by DuBois and reiterates and rejuvenates the reader for the fight it still needs to take on. The black man soldier may have escaped the battlefields of France and now be able to shed the uniform that symbolizes the systematic injustices he faced, but upon returning, in his “civil garb” he is still a soldier, only in a different military.

Martin Luther King Jr. best addresses the discrimination and oppression of Native Americans (NAs) in his book, Why We Can’t Wait (1964):

Not knowing how to cultivate the land or domesticate animals, the Cherokee at a standstill. The Whites, who knew how to cultivate the land and domesticate animals, would have been able to utilize the land to its fullest potential instead of withering away precious resources. The Whites tried various methods to persuade the Cherokee to part with their land, but they refused and were frequently abused. “… we have come to the conclusion that this nation cannot be reinstated in its present location, and that the question left to us and to every Cherokee, is, whether it is more desirable to remain here, with all the embarrassments with which we must be surrounded, or to seek a country where we may enjoy our own laws, and live under our own vine and fig-tree.” If the Cherokee had agreed to relocate further west, they would not have had to go through adversity. The Whites would have left them alone, free to create their own laws and free to do what they wanted. The Cherokee pushed their source of food westward leaving a shortage of deer and buffalo and they did not have the knowledge or resources to cultivate the land. Due to these facts, they were not self-sufficient and would not have been able to survive using their outdated methods of living. Compared to the Whites, the Cherokee population was miniscule, spread across a vast amount of land. “The

John Collier's two aims under the Indian New Deal, on the other hand, were (1) to preserve the Indian people as a "race" and as distinct cultures, which Collier termed "grouphood," and (2) to preserve and develop resources, including land. The means to achieve these goals for Collier were "tribal" organization and economic incorporation under the IRA. For traditional Indians, however, the means to their goals is for the United States to return to the treaty relationship (treaty federalism) and to recognize the Indian peoples as sovereign with the right to self-determination (Talbot, 2011).

As established in the Marshall Trilogy (Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832)), Indian tribes are “domestic dependent nations” possessing an inherent sovereign right that is only subject to Congressional plenary power due to the doctrine of discovery. The degree to which sovereignty applies varies on a tribal-specific basis, especially in the scope of tribal-state gaming compacting. In the previous section concerning historical considerations of Indian gaming, it should be noted that the sovereignty of tribes to regulate their gaming was greatly influenced by the fact that tribes did not wager in a way that threatened non-tribal parties at

By 1940, Native Americans had experienced many changes and counter-changes in their legal status in the United States. Over the course of the nineteenth century, most tribes lost part or all of their ancestral lands and were forced to live on reservations. Following the American Civil War, the federal government abrogated most of the tribes’ remaining sovereignty and required communal lands to be allotted to individuals. The twentieth century also saw great changes for Native Americans, such as the Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal. Alison R. Bernstein examines how the Second World War affected the status and lives of Native Americans in American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs. Bernstein argues

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.

People reading this novel learned of the great culture clash of the white Eurocentric and the native Indian cultures. The natives didn’t understand nor want to conform to the new way of the Europeans. The same applied for the Europeans. Land was their objectives; the Native Americans were trying to maintain it while the

In the early years, George Washington believed that the best way to solve the “Indian Problem” was to simply “civilize” the Native Americans. The Goal was to convert them to Christianity, learn to speak and read English and adopt European-style economic practices like Individual ownership of land and other property. Some of the Tribes embraced these customs and become known as the “Five Civilized Tribes”. (www.history.com)

One of the defining moments of President Andrew Jackson’s career, if not the most significant, was the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This was a controversial bill at the time and the impact from it is still felt today. The Indian Removal Act directly led to the displacement of thousands of Native Americans; including four thousand deaths during the Trail of Tears, the forced march from Georgia to Oklahoma. While overt racism played a clear role in relocating Native Americans past the Mississippi, it is possible that other factors were at play. The living conditions in many of the states were poor for Natives and Jackson hoped that giving them a new location to live could remedy these problems while opening the land up for white settlers.

Between 1790 and 1920 it was a tough time for the Indians. During that period Native Americans were forced to convert to the European-American Culture. Their whole life changed, the way of living, religion, and especially their children’s future. It was wrong of Americans to convert natives into a different society that they saw fit and not letting them express their own culture and treating them as an unworthy society.

The Indian race was not supposed to own land in America but in regard they were concentrated in slums adjacent to the cities. Here they were exposed to poor housing, lack of clean water and poor man related work that ranged from fishing and hunting thus they were regarded as second class American citizens. In response to these social status inequalities, the Indians staged demonstrations against the vices and afterwards grated accessibility to land and its resources. The land given to them was of low quality the low quality that they were classified as marginal land s that could not support farming. This shows that the American government was in support of the discrimination against these Indians. In support of the racial discrimination strategy, the state even ensured that no white citizen became poor or bankruptcy by buying their land parcels. These lands were then subdivided to the Indians who were later to be killed by the Americans in their efforts to get the land for their mining activities. The sequence of events showed how discrimination was the main agenda of the