Native Americans and the Oppression They Dealt With

Native Americans and the Oppression They Dealt With

Although the United States has tried to make up for the horrible conditions they’ve inflicted on the Native Americans, they have failed in fulfilling the promise of equality for the Native Americans through reservations, destruction of the Black Hills, and unrecognizable citizenship during the early 1900’s and some states didn’t even allow their Native American citizens to vote until 1957.

Reservations were full of inequality. This is due to the insufficient funds given to the Native American reservations by the government. This lack of funds lead to poverty and suffering by the Native American’s as seen in the top picture of Document C. The young children are frowning, wearing tattered clothes and no shoes. This not only leads the viewer to believe that the children are in a scene of poverty, but to also take into consideration that the Native American’s are being treated worse than the black community at this time in the United States. Many native Americans are now living on one of 65 Native American reservations. This is a smashed area for so many people; the equivalent of 566 tribes. The inequality of white communities and Native American reservations comes up again in Document D. Also according to Document D, there was no running water or necessary sanitation statutes that white buildings had. The Native American’s are basically saying, “The white man says he wants equality, but he doesn’t act on this.” This leads to hostility between white and Native American.

Larger amounts of hostility are actually brought out due to the Sioux’s loss of the Black Hills. The United States government promised multiple times, with flimsy treaties, to give the Native American’s the Black Hills, but never actually followed through. Today the government is trying to return the Black Hills to the Sioux nation but is unable to due to innocent people living on the Black Hills have built a home and family there. The government would say one thing and then it would say another. In Worchester v. Georgia, the government decided that since the Cherokee was stationed in the United States, the government could move them wherever they felt necessary. As stated in Document E, the native americans lived on American soil, therefore the government had the power to move them wherever they felt appropriate. The government was being completely dishonest throughout the entire treaty-signing progress.

Lastly, the issue of assimilation