Oaklee Ohmie

Indians lives had already undergone profound transformations. President Grant even
announced a new peace policy in 1869, but warfare resumed close after. Even Civil War
generals set out to destroy the foundations of the Indian economy. Armys relentlessly attacked
Indians, breaking the power of one tribe after another. Troops commanded by a former
Freedmens Bureau commissioner pursued Indians on a 1,700 mile chase across the Far West.
After that, Indians were forced to surrender and removed to Oklahoma. Farmers and cattlemen
exploited land formerly owned by Indians and the Plains tribes had been concentrated on
reservations where Indians lived in poverty, preyed on by traders and government agents. The
Indian idea of freedom centered on preserving their culture and political autonomy, which
conflicted with most white Americans. In 1871, Congress eliminated the treaty system that
allowed the federal government to negotiate agreements with Indians as if they were
independent nations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs established boarding school where Indian
children were removed from their families and the cultural influences, were dressed in nonIndian clothes, given new names, and educated in white ways.
The Dawes Act broke up the land of nearly all tribes into small areas to be distributed to
Indian families, with the remainder being auctioned off to white purchasers. Indians who
accepted the habits of civilized life became American citizens. The Ghost Dance, a religious
revitalization campaign, where large numbers of Indians gathered together and would have
days full of singing, dancing, and religious observances. But governments feared a general
uprising, so they sent troops to the reservations. Soldiers opened fire on the Indians, killing
mostly women and children. The massacre was known as the Wounded Knee massacre and it
was widely applauded in the press. By 1900, the Indian population had fallen to 250,000, 0.3
percent of the population, the lowest point in American history.
I connected this to my Humanities 1100 class because of the status that American
Indians acquired. They were defined by someone who had no business changing what they had
already built. We talked about freedom and justice in Humanities and the fact that these Indians
were here before Americans were and just because they were different and depended on
different skills, they were unable to defend themselves against the Americans and eventually
lost their rights to what they owned, what was their property. The injustices that were faced by
the American Indians were beyond horrible and the fact that the US could commit such horrors

and hurt people is beyond my belief. Humanities also talked about Pearl Harbor and how we put
people in internment camps and it was okay. But before, when Germany did such a thing, they
were horrible monsters. History and injustice has countless numbers of correlation, but the
American Indians is a very big example, because it affects peoples lives today. People that
have a Native American ancestor or are of Native American descent, they do get less expensive
education and so forth because the US finally realized the horrible things we did to them in turn
for their freedom and rights, just so we could obtain land.