Native Americans

Native Americans
“In the Navajo reservation of Arizona, the school drop out rate is a staggering 70%. As of 2006, 97% of the population lives below the federal poverty level. Alcoholism affects 8 out of 10 families.” (1) Although this information is related to only one group of Native Americans, the statistics prove that Native American people are currently suffering due to the oppression that they faced throughout history. The 30-year period from 1865-1895 was a time of despair for Native Americans. The Massacre at Wounded Knee, the Dawes General Allotment Act and the relocation of Native American children to boarding schools demonstrated how poorly Native Americans were treated as well as how their culture was torn from them.
“The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre.” (2) Throughout 1890, the U.S government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement. It taught that Native Americans had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning traditional customs. Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the way of the white man, the gods would create the world anew. When police attempted to arrest Sitting Bull, he was killed and tensions arose. The U.S Army’s 7th Calvary surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers and demanded they surrender their weapons. A brutal massacre followed and roughly 200 Native Americans were killed, nearly half of them were women and children. Wounded Knee was a large-scale attempt to resist American settlement in the Great Plains region, but the massacre crushed any hope of resistance.
When the Dawes act of 1887 was adopted by congress, it gave the president of the United States the authority to survey Native American tribal land and divide it into allotments for individuals. Only 160 acres of land was given to each individual or “head of...