Opressed into a Corner

The Native Americans were forced by the whites to the West, until the whites realized that they wanted this land and they then forced the Native Americans into even smaller areas. The whites were continutously greedy as they wanted land as land represented power. This idea was completely foreign to the Native Americans as they believed that no one could own land. This could be a reason that they were initially forced so far West with little struggle, as the idea of losing land did not make sense to them. They never had to fight over land previously so this foreign concept of owning land could have been a great weakness for the Native Americans. However, Native Americans did begin to fight back because they had inhabited that land for hundreds of years and they did not want to move. The U.S. government's idea was "to confine the Native Americans to reservations in areas deemed unsuitable for white settlement" ("American Indians and Buffalo Soldiers"). It was not enough for the new Americans to force them all the way to the west and off of their homes, they had to further confine the Native Americans to reservations that had bad land. The Native Americans had enough and I believe that they should have began organized efforts to fight back sooner. They had shown some resistance, but they needed to come together to fight because the new Americans had experience with organized wars. When they did fight back, soldiers were put on the frontier of the Native Americans' land in order to keep them in place. They were treating these people like animals putting them in a cage. Granted the cage was a large area it was still nothing compared to the thousands of miles they had previously roamed over. They had roamed over great and fertile land, but they were then forced off of this land to small reservations of bad land. As soon as the whites found positive aspects in the land that the Native Americans occupied they used force to take away this land. The Native Americans had no rights and their only option was to fight back. Some organizations preached peace, but others realized that they were going to lose everything if they did not fight back. I believe in peace in most situations, but when someone is clearly dehumanizing you and taking everything that you own, you have to fight fire with fire. This idea was embraced by the Sioux leaders, and they chose to fight back but they failed as over 150 Sioux people were killed in the Wounded Knee Massacre. This brought about an unhappy ending for the Native Americans as this event "marked the end of Indian resistance to the white culture that had arrived in the New World hundreds of years before" ("American Indians and Buffalo Soldiers"). This is a truly sad result as the Native Americans basically had to accept that they had lost and there was nothing they could do in order to return to the style of life that they loved for so many years. I understand that this is a brief overview of what happened and there are many more specific details that I have yet to find out about, but it confirmed some of my conclusions that the whites used force against the Native Americans in order to get what they wanted. It seemed to me as thought they were gating off the Native Americans from all that was good in the world and all that they loved, which in a sense must have been torture to them. When you never have something in life you are not as upset about not having it because you do not know what you are missing; the Native Americans knew exactly what they were missing out on because they had previously roamed North America as free as could be. They probably would have been willing to share this land, but the whites didn't want to compromise and rather took anything that they wanted. Until next time, enjoy the gadgets.

Sincerely,

Matt Magill

"American Indians and Buffalo Soldiers, 1850-1900 (Overview)." American History. ABC-CLIO, 2010. Web. 28 Jan. 2010. .