Native Americans--

In 35,000 B.C., the ancestors of the Native Americans came to North America using a land bridge formed from massive glaciers exposed when the sea level dropped near the present-day Bering Sea between Siberia and Alaska. In 1492 A.D., Christopher Columbus "discovered" North America.

Columbus, who had actually been searching for a new water route leading to the Indies, mistook the Native Americans in the Bahamas for Indians. The Native Americans were thus known as the Indians by a simple geographical misnomer. After observing the noble relationship the Indians had with nature, the Europeans took it upon themselves to colonize the "noble savages." At first, there was cooperation. But as the English took to raiding Indian food supplies and spreading their diseases everywhere, the Indians gradually discovered they would have to fight back against these unfriendly colonizers. The English were discovering something, as well: they no longer needed the Native Americans now that they had figured out how to grow their own crops. The Indians were in the way of the European colonists achieving their most precious desire: land.

In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson stated, "The story of one tribe is the story of all... Colorado is as greedy and unjust in 1880 as was Georgia in 1830 and Ohio in 1795; and the United States government breaks promises now as deftly as then, and with added ingenuity from long practice." In 1795, the Indians were abandoned by the British after having been used so long as a hopeful buffer state to contain the newly independent colonists. Created soon after, the Treaty of Greenville ceded the Indians' claims to a vast tract in Ohio country. The Indian Removal Act, passed by Congress in 1830, called for transplanting of all Indian tribes east of the Mississippi to the recently established Indian territory in Oklahoma, resulting in the sad journey as the "Trail of Tears." The Act went against earlier Washington government policy of recognizing the tribes as separate nations and thus acquiring land from them only through formal treaties. Unfortunately, the Native Americans were cheated even then; they were repeatedly pressured or tricked into ceding large territories to the Americans. John Marshall of the Supreme Court had thrice defended the rights of the Indians earlier in 1828, but current president Andrew Jackson had repeatedly refused the Court's decisions. Before the 1880s, the Indians were continuously herded into smaller areas, notably the "Great Sioux reservation" in the Dakota territory, and, of course, Oklahoma. The Indians surrendered their ancestral lands when promises of food and clothing came from Washington. Tragically, the federal Indian agents in charge of giving such goods to the tribes were usually corrupt. White men mistreated the Native Americans who thought they had been given immunity. Gold was conveniently discovered in the Sioux and Nez Perce territories of Dakota and Idaho, and the Indians continued to lose the territories that had been promised to them by the government. What the United States government promised the Indians, it repeatedly took away from them.

Morgan noted that "the most perplexing element in the problem is not the Indian but the white man... the end at which we aim is that the American Indians shall become as speedily as possible Indian-Americans; that the savage shall become a citizen; that the nomad shall cease to wander." From the very beginning, Americans saw fit to civilize the Native Americans. In early times of colonization, Puritans made feeble attempts at converting the "savage natives" to Christianity. Tiny groups of Indians were gathered into Puritan "praying towns" to learn the ways of the English culture and become associated with the English God. Before the Indian Removal Act in 1830, whites created the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among Indians, and sent missionaries into various Indian villages. The Cherokees in Georgia were one of the few tribes to abandon their nomadic lifestyle in favor of the system of settled agriculture and the idea of private property. A new Cherokee alphabet was devised, a written legal code was made, and a constitution was even created. Sadly, the Cherokees were removed from Georgia only a year later. Christian reformers who administered educational facilities on Indian reservations were cruel to tribes, withholding food to force them to give up their tribal religion and become civilized members of white society. The leftover reservation land of the Dawes Act, which broke up tribes and gave 160 free acres to the Indian family heads, was sold to railroads and white settlers with proceeds used by the government to educate the Native Americans. In the school created by these funds, Native American children were separated from their tribe and taught white values and customs. The motto of these schools was "Kill the Indian and save the man." Nobody seemed to realize that the Indians were a separate people with their own way of life. Native Americans were completely ignored, and the Indians were encouraged--even forced--to drop their old ways of life.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the Native Americans were repeatedly mistreated by the United States government. As illustrated by Helen Hunt Jackson's quote, promises were made and broken. The Indians were lied to, abused, brutally murdered for no apparent reason, and continually forced to move wherever the government desired them to go. Though the whites attempted to civilize the Native Americans, Morgan's statements still show the fact that the Americans had no regard whatsoever for the Indian way of life. A seemingly endless age of neglect and brutality toward the Native Americans has caused them to become empty human beings, devoid of hope for the future. Is it any wonder that they should feel like that, after observing the horrible way they have been treated in the past?

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