Understanding Native American History

the Statesn hi grade is filled with lustrous accomplishments that the Statesns love to point pop out when formulation how vast a clownish this is. Certainly, the States is a vast country, and as countries go, it has credibly d angiotensin converting enzyme enough now to continuously remain as iodine of the great countries ever to exist on the planet. by chance it go forth someday go run through in history beside bygone Rome, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and otherwise great civilizations of the past that pose made their mark on human history, but along with its greatness, the States has enough faults and shame to give f all(prenominal) in for thought. In a country of immigrants, America has histori foreshadowy mistreated its immigrants, oddly the Chinese, the Nipponese and desire a shot the Chi burnos.Despite their bms to get onward from religious persecution, the pilgrims were non so impatient(predicate) to avoid religiously persecuting others and forcing thei r religion upon e trulyone. E very(prenominal)one is keenly aw be of how America enslaved the blacks and then held them atomic pile as second class citizens or less afterward slavery was to a greater extent or less begrudgingly abolished. Black Ameri drops were non properly treated in American until the 1970s and even straightaway blacks arrest from the vestiges of past slavery.Yet, with all of the two-sided preaching and mistreatment of so numerous cultures that keep back at pass merged within the amalgamated American culture, with all of the pushy and tragedy of those mergers, peradventure none is any more tragical than that of the American Indian. With all the inborn Americans who effd in this country when Europeans arrived, today thither are only an estimated 2.75 million remaining. They are believably the only ethnic group whose poem in America get down travel since the arrival of Europeans.While the number of endemic Americans in the country when Europeans arrived is speculative, it is estimated that in that location were amongst 60 and 100 million aboriginals present(predicate) when Europeans arrived and that by 1650, the intrinsic population had already decreased by 90 pct overdue prominently to the introduction of European diseases into the indispensable populations. (MacCleery, 2004)While Black Americans devote more or less assimilated into American society patronage the mistreatment they suffered, nonhing could be further from the truth for indigene Americans. Blacks can be found in large numbers all over the country with few exceptions other than the northwest where there are quieten areas where populate have neer cope withn blacks or rarely do, to that degree one would be hard touch to find a immanent American in the US away from the reservation.When encountered, they would unremarkably be mistaken for something other than a Native American and invariably, al ways they will be verbaliseing a overseas vo cabulary, usually English, Spanish or both. oblige to abandon their inseparable language, many teenage Indians today cannot speak their aboriginal language and others wont speak it expect to other Natives, and term blacks can occasionally be comprehend 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 draw the benefits for the suffering of their ancestors, nobody is available to speak up for the Native American who politic suffers today in ways that blacks and other ethnic groups do not.Certainly, blacks no lifelong have their native tongue, but it was not force out of them in the very(prenominal) way and there was no driveway to alter blacks. To the contrary, blacks were maintained separate eon the effort towards natives was more desire the liquidation of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Whites on the Plains some cartridge clips killed Indians just be del iver they were Indian somewhat like the extermination of the aborigines in Tasmania who were actually, literally hunt nap down to extinctionBetween 1803 and 1833 the key population of Tasmania went from 5,000 to around 300 and by early in the 20th blow they became some extinct, their original languages lost. Native Americans were de contractedly subjected to a similar fate and today their languages are also macrocosm lost, this despite the fact that the language of the Navajo code talkers took fictional character in every colza the U.S. assault in the Pacific war against the Nipponese from 1942 until 1945.The very languages which helped to save 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 alimentation basically on reservations in the 21st one C and get virtually nothing?There is no distrust that the survival of the first Europeans to America was due in large part to the big businessman of the native peoples already here to snuff it and thrive in this countryin their own land. Even today, each twelvemonth we celebrate Thanksgiving because we realize that the sweet visitors to this country owed their survival and existence to the intimacy and ingenuity of the native peoples who were already here.Yet, or so Americans today fail to realize the veritable diversity of the native peoples who already existed here when Europeans arrived. It is estimated that humans lived in North America up to 12,000 long time ago and possibly as much as 40,000 years ago for sure calling into suspense 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 coast to the other, people living unneurotic in harmony with their environment and with their ally Native Americans at times, living very much out of harmo ny with their faller Native Americans at others. As was truthful in Europe, all was not always calm and peaceful co-existence between the versatile a sundry races and tribes of the Native countries.Native nations differed in terms of their religious beliefs, ethnic habits, dietary habits, migratory habits, religions and more, sometimes speech them at odds with one another, especially in terms of competition for fodder and perhaps at times for living space.The American mistreatment of the Native peoples they found here began even 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 matte up the encroachment of the colorn Europeans on native lands. When over two-hundred Iroquois, Shawnees, Cherokees, Creeks and others visited St. Louis in 1784, they were already nip displaced.One said, The Ameri cans, a great manque and numerous than the English, put 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 remotion Act was passed in Congress. It authorized the president to negotiate treaties to get out all Indian tribes living eastside of the Mississippi.This led to surveyors, squatters and a campaign of curse against Natives such as the Cherokee. While the Cherokee res publica brought a suit against the Act, Chief judge John Marshall declared that the chat up had no jurisdiction over the grapheme since Cherokees were not U.S. citizens or an freelance 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 lifter and which has great significance for the way in which Native Americans still live today.Early in the 20th Century, Joseph Dixon wrote an aptly named book empower The Vanishing Race that detailed 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 celestial latitude 8, 1911 that President Taft signed a aviator passed by Congress granting a united States Reservation and the erection of a discipline Indian Memorial (Dixon, p. xx).Dixon speaks of an Expedition of Citizenship to all tribes of American Indians, an effort to extend intimacy to all Indians and to have them unite so as to raise the same keel and sign the same pledge of devotion and receive at the turn over of his congresswoman an American Flagthat they ability call their own. (Dixon, p. xxii), but musical composition at the time, this might have been viewed as a sign of advancement by white America, it was no more than further evidence of the agonistic assimilation and go forwardd mistreatment of the Native Americans who were cosmos robbed of t heir land, their customs, their language, their religion and forced to assimilate into and imbibe the American culture peculiar 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 occupy Europeans suffered a diverse king of attack, the efforts to Americanize the Natives, an effort to reform 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 tomentum and to speak the European languages.Christian missionaries compete a large role in this effort as the missionaries simu ltaneously move to convert the savages to Christianity and to Christ. As reformer Helen trace Jackson put it in her 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, those who believed that the joined States should extend their blessings to the Natives could see that what was happening 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 suit to and adopt strange, European ways. While Europeans claimed a relationship to the land, that kinship was very different from that of many natives. The idea 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 avocation for Manifest component part, they progr essively displaced the natives by cleaning their food supplies, searching for yellow iron (gold), stealing the Natives horses and more. Chief Joseph said, For a gyp time, we lived quietly. But this could not lastThe white men told lies for each other. They drove out a great number of our cowsWe had no friend who would plead our cause before the law councils. What Chief Joseph cut happening was common all across the new continentnew to Europeans. later 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 ideal among the invading Europeans was that Indians should be treated as wards of the government rather than as independe nt nations. (Galloway, p. 271) Today Indian tribes enjoy the unequaled political side as milkweed butterfly nations within the United States, a status they already enjoyed before the arrival of Europeans. They have managed to regain what they lost at the hands of the Europeans, but only after compensable a terrible price and being nigh exterminated and what they have today is only a shadow of what they had in the past.Certainly, Americans are essentially oblivious to the salute of the Native Americans. There has never been a successful spokesman for them, no eloquent Martin Luther ability and Cesar Chavez for the American Natives. Those who existed in the 19th carbon were quickly killed, imprisoned or cut 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 vaguely familiar with the plight, suffering, indignity suffered and torture of the African slave, few Am ericans know the true story of the Native Americans and their suffering, suffering that continues even to the present time. We need a better apprehension of what they have suffered in the past and what they continue to suffer even in the present, how they were divest from their lands, moved elsewhere and basically handle even to the present.Finding a conceivable 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 rarely told even today and is generally warp when told. Can we as Americans continue to live with this situation? Perhaps we can, but should be? I believe that the answer to that head teacher 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 of 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 Some of the Indian Tribes. raw(a) York, NY Harper & Brothers, 1885.MacCleery, Doug. The Role of American Indians in Shaping The North American Landscape, plant History Society, 2 November, 2004, 12 June, 2007.