Treatment of Native Americans by Europeans

3098 Words7 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Native american history and european settlers

Native Americans have faced increasing encroachment by European and Euro-American settlers since the discovery of the Americas by Europeans in 1492. Beginning with the Caribs, mistakenly labeled as Indians by Christopher Columbus, continuing with the ‘Indian Wars’ waged by the U.S. government against such tribes as the Lakota and Apache, and lasting until today, native peoples have had to adjust and adapt constantly to survive. Native peoples have had to use and balance their ‘historical agency,’ or the ability of a people to affect the world around them throughout history, against the ‘structural forces’ set up by outsiders and foreign governments, which seek to limit their impact on the world. Both Andrew Fisher and Jeffrey Ostler have written about native groups, the Columbia River Indians and the Lakota, respectively, which have balanced historical agency against external structural forces over time. According to Fisher and Ostler, both the Lakota and the Columbia River Indians have used legal and illegal means to promote their historical agency. Both have a central cultural issue at the heart of their struggle against external structural forces. Ultimately, however, both groups have used the struggle between their historical agency and external structural forces to forge an identity that allowed them to adapt and survive into the twenty-first century. In Ostler’s The Lakota and the Black Hills, Jeffrey Ostler details the history of the Lakota tribe, beginning with the earliest records we have about them, detailing their origin story of humanity. The Lakota believe that the earliest humans came about within the earth and came to the surface through a narrow cave opening, called the Wind Cave, in the Black Hills, a beautiful h... ... middle of paper ... ...roups such as the Lakota and the Columbia River Indians have regained their sense of identity through the conflict between their historical agency and structural forces. This new sense of identity, forged in a struggle to regain what has been lost, has allowed these tribes to survive and find new ways to thrive into the twenty-first century, despite the belief that assimilation would have eliminated Native American tribes by this point in time. The fight for historical agency continues for many Native groups, and it may continue for many more decades unless a respectful result can be achieved in the near future. Works Cited Fisher, Andrew H. Shadow Tribe: The Making of the Columbia River Indian Identity. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Viking Press, 2010.

Show More
Related

  • Shepard Krech's The Ecological Indian

    782 Words  | 2 Pages

    Modern day Native American are widely known as stewards of the environment who fight for conservation and environmental issues. The position of the many Native American as environmentalists and conservationists is justified based on the perception that before European colonists arrived in the Americas, Native Americans had little to no effect on their environment as they lived in harmony with nature. This idea is challenged by Shepard Krech III in his work, The Ecological Indian. In The Ecological Indian, Krech argues that this image of the noble savage was an invented tradition that began in the early 1970’s, and that attempts to humanize Native Americans by attempting to portray them as they really were. Krech’s arguments are criticized by Darren J Ranco who in his response, claims that Krech fails to analyze the current state of Native American affairs, falls into the ‘trap’ of invented tradition, and accuses Krech of diminishing the power and influence of Native Americans in politics. This essay examines both arguments, but ultimately finds Krech to be more convincing as Krech’s

    Read More

  • Indian From The Inside Native American Culture Summary

    529 Words  | 2 Pages

    Pages one to sixty- nine in Indian From The Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal by Dennis McPherson and J. Douglas Rabb, provides the beginning of an in-depth analysis of Native American cultural philosophy. It also states the ways in which western perspective has played a role in our understanding of Native American culture and similarities between Western culture and Native American culture. The section of reading can be divided into three lenses. The first section focus is on the theoretical understanding of self in respect to the space around us. The second section provides a historical background into the relationship between Native Americans and British colonial power. The last section focus is on the affiliation of otherworldliness that exist between

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Peace Came In The Form Of A Women

    1385 Words  | 3 Pages

    Native American’s place in United States history is not as simple as the story of innocent peace loving people forced off their lands by racist white Americans in a never-ending quest to quench their thirst for more land. Accordingly, attempts to simplify the indigenous experience to nothing more than victims of white aggression during the colonial period, and beyond, does an injustice to Native American history. As a result, historians hoping to shed light on the true history of native people during this period have brought new perceptive to the role Indians played in their own history. Consequently, the theme of power and whom controlled it over the course of Native American/European contact is being presented in new ways. Examining the evolving

    Read More

  • Black Elk Speaks

    1275 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sioux as told through John G. Neihardt, an Indian boy then a warrior, and Holy Man

    Read More

  • Cruel and Inhuman Treatment of Native Americans by the Colonists

    1498 Words  | 3 Pages

    The process of assimilation, as it regards to the Native Americans, into European American society took a dreaded and long nearly 300 years. Initially, when the European’s came to the hopeful and promising land of the “New World”, they had no desire or reason anything but minimal contact with the Indians. However, starting in the 1700s the European colonists population skyrocketed. The need for more resources became evident and the colonists knew they could attain these necessities by creating a relationship of mutual benefit with the Native tribes. The Indians, at first skeptical, however became growingly open to the colonists and the relationship they were looking to attain. Indian furs were traded for colonial goods and military alliances were formed.

    Read More

  • Beyond 1492-Native Reactions to Invasion

    963 Words  | 2 Pages

    ... “ the majority of [Native Americans] turned to the invaders’ cultures and religious for empowerment, knowledge and skills with which to sustain native identities and values in other guises” , many of them stilled called themselves “true people” by keeping their native names (116-117).

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Indians Old World By Neal Salisbury

    696 Words  | 2 Pages

    In his essay, “The Indians’ Old World,” Neal Salisbury examined a recent shift in the telling of Native American history in North America. Until recently, much of American history, as it pertains to Native Americans; either focused on the decimation of their societies or excluded them completely from the discussion (Salisbury 25). Salisbury also contends that American history did not simply begin with the arrival of Europeans. This event was an episode of a long path towards America’s development (Salisbury 25). In pre-colonial America, Native Americans were not primitive savages, rather a developing people that possessed extraordinary skill in agriculture, hunting, and building and exhibited elaborate cultural and religious structures.

    Read More

  • Native American Sovereignty Research Paper

    694 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout history the attacks on Native American sovereignty proved to be too much and eventually tribes had to submit. The problems Native American tribes faced when fighting for and dealing with sovereignty in the 18th century are identical to the problems they are facing today. These

    Read More

  • Dennis Banks

    1413 Words  | 3 Pages

    Banks, D., Erodes, R. (2004). Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement. Ojibwa Warrior. Retrieved January 20, 2005, from http://www.oupress.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=0-8061-3580-8

    Read More

  • Lakota Woman

    1161 Words  | 3 Pages

    Lakota Woman Essay In Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog argues that in the 1970’s, the American Indian Movement used protests and militancy to improve their visibility in mainstream Anglo American society in an effort to secure sovereignty for all "full blood" American Indians in spite of generational gender, power, and financial conflicts on the reservations. When reading this book, one can see that this is indeed the case. The struggles these people underwent in their daily lives on the reservation eventually became too much, and the American Indian Movement was born. AIM, as we will see through several examples, made their case known to the people of the United States, and militancy ultimately became necessary in order to do so.

    Read More

  • THE TRAIL OF TEARS

    1787 Words  | 4 Pages

    “Quantie’s weak body shuddered from a blast of cold wind. Still, the proud wife of the Cherokee chief John Ross wrapped a woolen blanket around her shoulders and grabbed the reins.” Leading the final group of Cherokee Indians from their home lands, Chief John Ross thought of an old story that was told by the chiefs before him, of a place where the earth and sky met in the west, this was the place where death awaits. He could not help but fear that this place of death was where his beloved people were being taken after years of persecution and injustice at the hands of white Americans, the proud Indian people were being forced to vacate their lands, leaving behind their homes, businesses and almost everything they owned while traveling to an unknown place and an uncertain future. The Cherokee Indians suffered terrible indignities, sickness and death while being removed to the Indian territories west of the Mississippi, even though they maintained their culture and traditions, rebuilt their numbers and improved their living conditions by developing their own government, economy and social structure, they were never able to return to their previous greatness or escape the injustices of the American people.

    Read More

  • Racial Inequality in America

    872 Words  | 2 Pages

    Black Elk, F (2000). Observations on Marxism and Lakota Tradition. In Brunk, T., Diamond, S.,

    Read More

  • Native American Ritual Dancing

    3050 Words  | 7 Pages

    Irwin, Lee, ed. Native American Spirituality. Nebraska: The University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Kehoe, Alice Beck.

    Read More

  • The Treaty Party

    1889 Words  | 4 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Southeastern Native American Literature

    1226 Words  | 3 Pages

    Dorothea M. Susag, Roots and Branches: A Resource of Native American Literatures--Themes, Lessons, and Bibliographies (1998).

    Read More

More about Treatment of Native Americans by Europeans

Open Document