Understanding Native American History

the Statesn hi point is fil guide with glorious accomplishments that Americans sleep with to point bring out when saying how capital a country this is. Certainly, America is a great country, and as countries go, it has probably d ace enough promptly to forever remain as one of the great countries ever to hold out on the planet. Perhaps it will someday go down in history beside Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and other great civilizations of the medieval that shake made their mark on human history, but on with its greatness, America has enough faults and shame to give pause for thought. In a country of immigrants, America has historic aloney mistreated its immigrants, especially the Chinese, the Japanese and equivalent a shot the Chicanos.Despite their bms to get away from religious persecution, the pilgrims were non so longing to avoid religiously persecuting others and forcing their religion upon e genuinelyone. Everyone is keenly aw atomic human body 18 of how America enslaved the blacks and then(prenominal) held them down as second class citizens or little by and by slaveholding was more or less begrudgingly abolished. Black Americans were not mighty treated in American until the 1970s and notwithstanding right away blacks lose from the vestiges of past slavery.Yet, with all of the two-sided treatment and mistreatment of so umpteen cultures that study desire a shot merged within the amalgamated American culture, with all of the jeering and tragedy of those mergers, possibly none is any more tragic than that of the American Indian. With all the primal Americans who spankingd in this country when Europeans arrived, today there are only an estimated 2.75 million remaining. They are probably the only ethnic assort whose numbers in America discombobulate fallen since the arrival of Europeans. dapple the number of natural Americans in the country when Europeans arrived is speculative, it is estimated that there were betw een 60 and 100 million Natives here when Europeans arrived and that by 1650, the Native population had already decreased by 90 percent due epicly to the k at present conductgeableness of European diseases into the Native populations. (MacCleery, 2004)While Black Americans nominate more or less assimilated into American society in spite of the mistreatment they suffered, nothing could be besides from the truth for Native Americans. Blacks can be found in boastful numbers all over the country with few exceptions other than the northwestern unify States where there are still areas where people have never seen blacks or rarely do, yet one would be hard pressed to take in a Native American in the US away from the reservation.When encountered, they would unremarkably be mistaken for something other than a Native American and perpetually, always they will be speaking a foreign language, usually English, Spanish or both.Forced to abandon their ingrained language, many young Indi ans today cannot speak their native language and others wont speak it expect to other Natives, and small-arm blacks can occasionally be heard asking for reparations for the wrongs that were committed against them during slavery (those who were wronged are dead) such that their ancestors (those now alive) get to reap the benefits for the suffering of their ancestors, null is available to speak up for the Native American who still suffers today in ways that blacks and other ethnic groups do not.Certainly, blacks no long-dated have their native tongue, but it was not forced out of them in the same way and there was no effort to Americanize blacks. To the contrary, blacks were maintain separate while the effort towards natives was more like the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Whites on the Plains sometimes killed Indians just because they were Indian somewhat like the extermination of the aborigines in Tasmania who were actually, literally hunted down to extinction mingle d with 1803 and 1833 the Aboriginal population of Tasmania went from 5,000 to around 300 and by early in the 20th century they became virtually extinct, their original languages lost. Native Americans were intentionally subjected to a similar fate and today their languages are also being lost, this despite the fact that the language of the Navajo code talkers took part in every set on the U.S. assault in the Pacific war against the Japanese from 1942 until 1945.The very languages which helped to exempt America were not allowed to be spoken among the Natives What right do blacks and others have for reparations for what their ancestors suffered when Native Americans are still living basically on reservations in the 21st Century and get virtually nothing?There is no doubt that the survival of the first Europeans to America was due in large part to the ability of the native peoples already here to survive and grow in this countryin their own land. Even today, each social class we ce lebrate Thanksgiving because we realize that the parvenue visitors to this country owed their survival and public to the knowledge and ingenuity of the native peoples who were already here.Yet, most Americans today omit to realize the true diversity of the native peoples who already existed here when Europeans arrived. It is estimated that earth lived in North America up to 12,000 historic period ago and perhaps as much as 40,000 years ago certainly trading into question Bible stories of Adam and Eve a mere 6,000 years in the past.When Europeans arrived, the Native Americans were a vast diversity of cultures, nations and religions that ranged from one rim to the other, people living in concert in agreement with their environment and with their confrere Native Americans at times, living very much out of harmony with their fellow Native Americans at others. As was true in Europe, all was not always calm and peaceful co-existence between the various a sundry races and tribes o f the Native countries.Native nations differed in terms of their religious beliefs, heathen habits, dietary habits, migratory habits, religions and more, sometimes bringing them at odds with one another, especially in terms of competition for food and perhaps at times for living space.The American mistreatment of the Native peoples they found here began all the same before the Revolutionary war. The very natives who saved the lives of the first colonists and pilgrims were treated like second class citizens or not as citizens at all. By the time of the Revolutionary War, Native Americans had already felt the encroachment of the discolor Europeans on native lands. When over two-hundred Iroquois, Shawnees, Cherokees, Creeks and others visited St. Louis in 1784, they were already feeling displaced. sensation said, The Americans, a great ambitious and numerous than the English, tack together us out of our lands, forming therein great settlements, extending themselves like a plague of locusts in the territories of the Ohio River which we inhibit. (Galloway, p. 158) In May 1830, the Indian removal Act was passed in Congress. It authorized the chair to negotiate treaties to remove all Indian tribes living east of the Mississippi.This led to surveyors, squatters and a campaign of harassment against Natives such as the Cherokee. While the Cherokee nation brought a suit against the Act, Chief Justice John Marshall declare that the court had no jurisdiction over the case since Cherokees were not U.S. citizens or an independent nation. (Garrison, pp. 1-12) This is certainly a sad state of affairs for the Native peoples of American, one for which there has never been a true champion and which has great indicateificance for the way in which Native Americans still live today. earlyish in the 20th Century, Joseph Dixon wrote an aptly named book entitled The Vanishing Race that minute many of the struggles and travails of the Native American. With all of the struggles and travails of the Native American, it was not until December 8, 1911 that chairman Taft signed a bill passed by Congress granting a United States Reservation and the erection of a home(a) Indian Memorial (Dixon, p. xx).Dixon speaks of an expeditiousness of Citizenship to all tribes of American Indians, an effort to extend friendship to all Indians and to have them unite so as to raise the same flag and sign the same pledge of loyalty and receive at the hold of his exercise an American Flagthat they might call their own. (Dixon, p. xxii), but while at the time, this might have been viewed as a sign of advancement by blank America, it was no more than further evidence of the forced acculturation and continued mistreatment of the Native Americans who were being robbed of their land, their customs, their language, their religion and forced to assimilate into and brave out upon the American culture strange to them and certainly not their own.For example, Calloway speaks of how the far ranging Comanche bands came together as a nation in the 1870s after they were confined to a reservation. (pp. 339-40) These nomadic people became a Nation more or less because they were forced to do so.In the 1870s and continuing through the 20th Century, native Americans in defense of their homeland who had once suffered military attacks (and still did in the 1870s and beyond) from invading Europeans suffered a different king of attack, the efforts to Americanize the Natives, an effort to neaten the native savages as they were called by forcing them into the European ways of life. Indians were relocated, forced to wear European attire, to cut their hair and to speak the European languages.Christian missionaries contend a large role in this effort as the missionaries simultaneously tried to convert the savages to Christianity and to Christ. As re spring Helen Hunt Jackson put it in her 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, those who believed that the United States should exte nd their blessings to the Natives could see that what was fortuity was just the opposite. Natives were being (shot)down in the snow. (p. 335) It was a concerted effort to remake the Natives by transforming them into the image of white America and it was met with resistance by the natives.Natives, many of whom migrated with their food supply, the weather and the seasons, were forced to adapt to and adopt strange, European ways. While Europeans claimed a kinship to the land, that kinship was very different from that of many natives. The melodic theme of owning land seemed strange to the natives, and being tied to a item region to till the soil as farmers was not the native idea of kinship to the land.As Europeans pushed West in their quest for Manifest passel, they more and more displaced the natives by killing their food supplies, searching for yellow iron (gold), thievery the Natives horses and more. Chief Joseph said, For a short time, we lived quietly. But this could not last The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great number of our cattleWe had no friend who would plead our cause before the rightfulness councils. What Chief Joseph saw happening was common all across the new continentnew to Europeans. After the Civil war, the efforts at Manifest Destiny continued and increased. Winning the West was a national goal that led European settlers to move into native lands in greatly increasing numbers.So, the native peoples were being robbed, displaced, involuntarily acculturated, tied to the land in ways that were very un-native, and more. While Europeans forced natives into one compromise after another, the growing position among the invading Europeans was that Indians should be treated as wards of the government rather than as independent nations. (Galloway, p. 271) Today Indian tribes enjoy the unique political perspective as sovereign nations within the United States, a status they already enjoyed before the arrival of Europeans. The y have managed to regain what they lost at the hands of the Europeans, but only after paying a terrible equipment casualty and being nearly exterminated and what they have today is only a shadow of what they had in the past.Certainly, Americans are essentially oblivious to the plight of the Native Americans. There has never been a successful spokesman for them, no eloquent Martin Luther magnate and Cesar Chavez for the American Natives. Those who existed in the 19th century were quickly killed, imprisoned or ignored as were the few whites who stood up to champion the cause of the Natives, among them former President Herbert Hoover.Therefore, today, while many Americans are at least mistily familiar with the plight, suffering, indignity suffered and torture of the African slave, few Americans know the true story of the Native Americans and their suffering, suffering that continues til now to the present time. We need a pause understanding of what they have suffered in the past an d what they continue to suffer rase in the present, how they were dispossessed from their lands, moved elsewhere and basically ignored even to the present.Finding a reasonable way to compensate them will not be easy. Indeed, compensation is probably impossible. Who can compensate the Tasmanian peoples now that they have been exterminated? Likewise, who can compensate the Native Americans not that they have been dispossessed and nearly wiped out? Their story is one that is seldom told even today and is generally distorted when told. Can we as Americans continue to live with this situation? Perhaps we can, but should be? I believe that the execute to that question is, NoReferencesDixon, Joseph Kossuth. The Vanishing Race. The Last Great Indian Council. Philadelphia, PA National American Indian Memorial Association Press, 1925.Galloway, Colin. First Peoples A documentary Survey of American Indian History. Boston Bedford/St. Martins Press, 2004.Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology o f Removal The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA, 2002, pp. 1-12.Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor A Sketch of the United States Governments Dealings With slightly of the Indian Tribes. New York, NY Harper & Brothers, 1885.MacCleery, Doug. The Role of American Indians in Shaping The North American Landscape, Forest History Society, 2 November, 2004, 12 June, 2007.