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Effects of European colonization on natives
Impact of colonization on native people
Effects of colonialism in indigenous
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The word possession is be defined by Merriam online dictionary as “control or occupancy of property without regard to ownership” (Merriam Online Dictionary). When Professor Andrea Smith refers to the term dispossession, she is speaking about the mass relinquishment of identity by Native American peoples through a structural enforcement of subservience. The learning of “ones proper place” for Native Americans was instilled in boarding schools which served to eradicate the former matriarchic roles women played in Tribal hierarchies (Lomawaima quoted by Smith pg. 37). Essentially, United States policy regarding Native American education sought to assimilate young Natives into American society, but this assimilation was not one based upon equality. “Instead, the consequence of this policy was to situate them at the bottom of the U.S. socioeconomic ladder. For the most part, schools prepared Native boys for manual labor or farming and Native girls for domestic work” (Smith pg. 37). The dispossession of minority culture when influenced by United States education is often simultaneously paired with the inclusion of the nation’s dominant Caucasian culture. In the case of Native American educational policy, “Carl Schurz, a former commissioner of Indian affairs, concluded that Native peoples had “this stern alternative: extermination or civilization” (Smith pg. 36). A direct instance of the rejection of Native American heritage followed by the gain of Western influence can be found in the text of Smith written about Pratt, who “developed a plan to separate children from their parents, inculcate Christianity and white cultural values, and encourage/force them to assimilate into the dominant society through off-reservation schools” (Smith p... ... middle of paper ... ...h instead calls for a “re-possession” policy of reparations, one that empowers Natives instead of simply asking them to forget the wrongs of the past and present with the help of monetary assistance. The re-possession of Native American culture begins with the re-possession of Native American land (Smith pg. 54). Legislation such as “English only laws” serve to undermine Native American sovereignty, and help to perpetuate imbalanced racial hierarchies. Smith wants to “use a reparations framework to demonstrate that “services” provided by the U.S. government (healthcare, public assistance, education, etc..) are reparations owed to communities of color for human rights violations of the part of the U.S. (Smith pg. 54). An empowerment of native culture and identity paired with the power of U.S. guaranteed social service, can help to end colonial education for Natives.
People know about the conflict between the Indian's cultures and the settler's cultures during the westward expansion. Many people know the fierce battles and melees between the Indians and the settlers that were born from this cultural conflict. In spite of this, many people may not know about the systematic and deliberate means employed by the U.S. government to permanently rid their new land of the Indians who had lived their own lives peacefully for many years. There are many strong and chilling reasons and causes as to why the settlers started all of this perplexity in the first place. There was also a very strong and threatening impact on the Native Americans through the schooling that stained the past and futures of Native Americans not only with blood but also with emotion. It was all a slow and painful plan of the "white man" to hopefully get rid of the Indian culture, forever. The Native American schools were created in an attempt to destroy the Native American way of life, their culture, beliefs and tradi...
American Indians shaped their critique of modern America through their exposure to and experience with “civilized,” non-Indian American people. Because these Euro-Americans considered traditional Indian lifestyle savage, they sought to assimilate the Indians into their civilized culture. With the increase in industrialization, transportation systems, and the desire for valuable resources (such as coal, gold, etc.) on Indian-occupied land, modern Americans had an excuse for “the advancement of the human race” (9). Euro-Americans moved Indians onto reservations, controlled their education and practice of religion, depleted their land, and erased many of their freedoms. The national result of this “conquest of Indian communities” was a steady decrease of Indian populations and drastic increase in non-Indian populations during the nineteenth century (9). It is natural that many American Indians felt fearful that their culture and people were slowly vanishing. Modern America to American Indians meant the destruction of their cultural pride and demise of their way of life.
In Chapter 8 of Major Problems in American Immigration History, the topic of focus shifts from the United States proper to the expansion and creation of the so called American Empire of the late Nineteenth Century. Unlike other contemporary colonial powers, such as Britain and France, expansion beyond the coast to foreign lands was met with mixed responses. While some argued it to be a mere continuation of Manifest Destiny, others saw it as hypocritical of the democratic spirit which had come to the United States. Whatever their reasons, as United States foreign policy shifted in the direction of direct control and acquisition, it brought forth the issue of the native inhabitants of the lands which they owned and their place in American society. Despite its long history of creating states from acquired territory, the United States had no such plans for its colonies, effectively barring its native subjects from citizenship. Chapter 8’s discussion of Colonialism and Migration reveals that this new class of American, the native, was never to be the equal of its ruler, nor would they, in neither physical nor ideological terms, join in the union of states.
The governmental leaders of the United States of America began implementing Indian policies from its inception. As Euro-Americans they expected all non-whites in the U.S. to assimilate into a Euro-American (Christian) lifestyle, without reciprocation or sympathy to the traditions and history of our native people. Our founding fathers and subsequent leaders of the United States at varying times have used suppression, segregation, aggression, and assimilation to manage what they perceived as an Indian problem, and civilize them. The native peoples of North America have responded to these actions by, at times, complying with the U.S. government and allowing themselves to be relocated to other areas of the country leaving behind their ancestral
Pratt in the late 1800’s. Americans felt it was important to influence on Native Americans traditional white, Christian values. This was also important in Arizona, and it led to the opening of The Phoenix Indian School. Americans felt Native Americans were “a cruel lot of savages...for horrible butcheries of white settlers and unspeakable barbarities upon their enemies.” This was the image Native Americans were given in the 19th and in part of the 20th century, and it was a big part of the reason why assimilation was put into practice in Arizona. Americans wanted Indians to live as they did, and the only way to do this was through forced assimilation. To do this, Americans took many Native American children forcibly from their families and villages on their reservations and took them to off reservation boarding schools located in the midst of big white cities. In Arizona, this was especially enforced by the military and by the police. The first round of students taken by the Arizona police were largely from different tribes, as the white Americans felt that this was necessary to further the process of assimilation and to help the Native Americans live successfully in modern American society. The tribes had been confined to their reservations for decades and lived by separate traditions, ways, and beliefs and that would therefore make being
There are consistent patterns or themes regarding Native American world views and the differentiation of cultural elements and society. Native Americans retained control of institutional and cultural orders against the assimilation effort because all aspects of Native American societies are interrelated, guided by the broader cultural world views. Each cultural or institutional element is, in fact, overlapped with other elements, so change in one element inevitably affects the broader cultural and social complex. While adopting to a new environment and small changes was possible in the West, where social and cultural elements are separate from each other, Native Americans were faced with conflicts and a potential, large disruption of the existing social orders.
In our day and age where our youth are becoming more aware of the history of the country and the people who inhabit it, the culture of Native Americans has become more accessible and sparks an interest in many people young and old. Recent events, like the Dakota Access Pipeline, grab the attention of people, both protesters and supporters, as the Sioux tribe and their allies refuse to stay quiet and fight to protect their land and their water. Many Native people are unashamed of their heritage, proud of their culture and their ancestors. There is pride in being Native, and their connection with their culture may be just as important today as it was in the 1800’s and before, proving that the boarding school’s ultimate goal of complete Native assimilation to western culture has
Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era edited by Frederick E. Hoxie is a book which begins with an introduction into the life of Charles Eastman and a brief overview of the history of Native Americans and their fight for justice and equal rights, it then continues by describing the different ways and avenues of speaking for Indian rights and what the activists did. This leads logically into the primary sources which “talk back” to the society which had overrun their own. The primary sources immerse the reader into another way of thinking and cause them to realize what our societal growth and even foundation has caused to those who were the true natives. The primary sources also expand on the main themes of the book which are outlines in the introduction. They are first and most importantly talking back to the “pale faces”, Indian education, religion, American Indian policy, the image of the Indians presented in America. The other chapters in the book further expanded on these ideas. These themes will be further discussed in the following chapters along with a review of this
Imagine you’re young, and alone. If your family was taken from you and suffered horribly for your freedom, would you want to be repaid in some form? In the article “The Case for Reparations” Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses a great deal of information about reparations, and if they should be given. Reparations are when a person or people make amends for the wrong they have done. Ta-Nehisi believes that from two hundred years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow laws, sixty years of separate but equal, and thirty five years of racist housing policy, that America is shackled.
This report called for control by First Nations of education in the system with procurements for possible complete independence over education and toward that end, it called for First Nations representation on local school boards serving First Nation understudies. The Federal government did not implement policies that would have empowered First Nation communities to produce and gain the knowledge needed to accept full control of their education frameworks and it was prepared to delegate fractional control over education to First Nations communities. The implementation of the policy of Indian Control of Education has not been without its challenges. Among the key criticisms has been that Indian control has often meant little more that First Nations administration of federal education programs and policies. Pre-1980 policies showed a few several classic characteristics of a colonial relationship. They forced a non-First-Nation orientation of education, debased First Nation dialects, histories, culture, and indicated results that were assimilative in nature. Post-1980 approaches advanced First Nations control of instruction in the connection of a model of mix of First Nations understudies inside existing common conveyance system of educational administrations and projects. First
Towards the development of the United States of America there has always been a question of the placement of the Native Americans in society. Throughout time, the Natives have been treated differently like an individual nation granted free by the U.S. as equal U.S. citizens, yet not treated as equal. In 1783 when the U.S. gained their independence from Great Britain not only did they gain land from the Appalachian Mountains but conflict over the Indian policy and what their choice was to do with them and their land was in effect. All the way from the first presidents of the U.S. to later in the late 19th century the treatment of the Natives has always been changing. The Native Americans have always been treated like different beings, or savages, and have always been tricked to signing false treaties accompanying the loss of their homes and even death happened amongst tribes. In the period of the late 19th century, The U.S. government was becoming more and more unbeatable making the Natives move by force and sign false treaties. This did not account for the seizing of land the government imposed at any given time (Boxer 2009).
The history of the relationship between Indigenous Peoples of the North America and European settlers represents a doubtlessly tragic succession of events, which resulted in a drastic decline in Indigenous population leading to the complete annihilation of some Native groups, and bringing others to the brink of extinction. This disastrous development left the Indigenous community devastated, shaking their society to its very pillars. From the 1492 Incident and up to the 19th century the European invasion to the North America heavily impacted the social development of the Indigenous civilization: apart from contributing to their physical extermination by waging incessant war on the Indian tribes, Anglo-Americans irreversibly changed the Native lifestyle discrediting their entire set of moral guidelines. Using the most disreputable inventions of the European diplomacy, the colonizers and later the United States’ government not only turned separate Indigenous tribes against each other but have also sown discord among the members of the same tribe. One of the most vivid examples of the Anglo-American detrimental influence on the Native groups is the history of the Cherokee Nation and the U.S. Indian Removal Policy. The Cherokee removal from Georgia (along with many other Indian nations) was definitely an on-going conflict that did not start at any moment in time, but developed in layers of history between the Native Americans, settlers of various cultures, and the early U.S. government. This rich and intricate history does not allow for easy and quick judgments as to who was responsible for the near demise of the Cherokee Nation. In 1838, eight thousand Cherokees perished on a forced march out of Georgia, which came to be called the T...
In 1887 the federal government launched boarding schools designed to remove young Indians from their homes and families in reservations and Richard Pratt –the leader of Carlisle Indian School –declared, “citizenize” them. Richard Pratt’s “Kill the Indian… and save the man” was a speech to a group of reformers in 1892 describing the vices of reservations and the virtues of schooling that would bring young Native Americans into the mainstream of American society.
The Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 brought about the policy of Cultural Assimilation for the Native American peoples. Headed by Richard Henry Pratt, it founded several Residential Schools for the re-education and civilization of Native Americans. Children from various tribes and several reservations were removed from their families with the goal of being taught how to be c...
This land which the had been reserved for the Indians was now being distributed by the government. There were thousands of landless and hungry Indians due to the white taking over their land. The federal government never removed the illegal settlers, instead, they forced the Natives to sign a new treaty that surrendered more of the Native American’s land. Treaty after treaty the Americans pushed aside the Natives and did not fulfil their promise. The eagerness to enlarge the horizon of the United States and the invasion of white people due to the gold rush, troubled the Indians and sent them into a disastrous downward spiral (Garraty 405, Lecture-21