American Manifest Destiny and the Genocide of the American Indian

United States Manifest Destiny and the Genocide of the American Indian

Manifest Destiny is a phrase used to express the belief that the United States had a mission to expand its borders, thereby spreading its form of democracy and freedom. Originally a political catchphrase of the nineteenth-century, Manifest Destiny eventually became a standard historical term, often used as a synonym for the territorial expansion of the United States across North America towards the Pacific Ocean. The United States government believed that the Native Americans were a problem that was hindering Manifest Destiny from being fulfilled (or at the very least, used the idea of Manifest Destiny to gain land and resources the Indians possessed), and would do everything in their power to exterminate the “Indian Problem.” The U.S. government, along with the majority of the U.S. population, eradicated this problem through lies, forced removal, and murder. This eradication nearly wiped out a race of people, whose only crime was mere existence in a land they had lived on, respected, and cherished for hundreds of years. The U.S. government had three main ways of solving the “Indian Problem”. They would remove them, kill them, or segregate them from the “civilized” white man by placing the Indian on reservations. The Indians soon learned that the U.S. government could not be trusted, and fought fiercely against the harsh injustices that were being administered. Tragically, the Indians would eventually have their spirits broken, living out their meager existence in the terrible homes called reservations.

The U.S. Government sponsored solution to the “Indian Problem” started in the early nineteenth century among the southern s...

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...sea.” The extermination of the Indians is a dark, bloody mark on America’s past. Today, a new “Terrorist Problem” has emerged which finds America once again spreading its form of democracy and freedom to the “savages” in the Middle East. Meanwhile, in our own borders that we obtained through the genocide of the native inhabitants of America, a real and devastating “Illegal Immigrant Problem” is being solved by handing over our country to a nation of people who trample on the flag of the United States of America. Will we ever learn to live in harmony with our “brotherhood” throughout the world of borders, instead of killing each other for the right to fly a piece of cloth high in the sky, signifying a government’s dominance?