Native American history and cultural development

¶ … Kevin Gover, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior, made at the Ceremony Acknowledging the 175th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on September 8, 2000 were long since overdue. In his statements, Gover admitted to the BIA's harsh mistreatment of Native Americans over the past one hundred seventy-five years. This public apology was one that had been necessary long since it was made. However, the fact that it was made gives hope that reparations can be made to the injustices committed to the Native American people throughout the years. It may not erase all that has happened, but the BIA's acknowledgement of the problems is a starting point in making sure history doesn't repeat itself.

In his speech, Gover made note of the Dawes Severalty Act, passed in 1887. This act was just one in a long line of examples of the early settlers' inability to understand the ways of the Native Americans. The act was created by whites who believed they were helping weak Native Americans by turning them into farmers and land owners. While this act uprooted the Native Americans from their homes and placed them in reservations, the American government alleged that they were helping, rather than hurting the Native Americans simply because of their belief in the superiority of America and of its culture.

This law would ultimately distort Indian thought, culture, and community by dismantling traditional Indian government, traditional Indian customs and family structure. The literal interpretation of the Dawes Severalty Act was to provide for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the various reservations, and to extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for other purposes. Other intentions of the Act were to break the communal pattern of Indian landholding by encouraging small, freehold farming. Since Indian people lacked the training and equipment for isolated farming, many sold their allotted lands to white settlers.

Indian people not only lost approximately 90 million acres of land from the allotment process, but also lost their ancient communal way of existing together. This modern way of living encouraged Indian people to forget about their social structure of the past and become individualistic like the lifestyle of the dominant society (Hurtado and Iverson, 2001).

Another topic that Gover touched on was the boarding schools that Native Americans were forced into. The Reservation Boarding School System was created by whites to educate the Native Americans in the ways of the new white Americans. This was mainly due to the fact that white European settlers believed themselves to possess a divine right to take over the land and force those who already occupied it into their own way of thinking (Child, 1998). What boarding schools did, in fact was destroy any type of cultural history the Native American people held and replaced it with white Europeans' history and beliefs.

The Reservation Boarding School System was rationalized by the belief that the Native Americans were savages. Whites were moving westward and colonizing the land. In doing so, they attempted to bring culture to the Native Americans who were viewed as animals. It was the whites way of taming the Indian, restructuring their way of thinking, and destroying their culture through systematic brainwashing.

Probably the biggest injustice that Gover made reference to was the Native Americans by the government was the Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears, forced the Cherokee in 1838 and 1839 from their southeastern homeland to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. About 4000 died from starvation, disease, and exposure while on the journey westward or in stockades awaiting removal. The Trail of Tears refers to the route followed by fifteen thousand Cherokee during their 1838 removal and forced to march from Georgia to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. In 1791, an U.S. treaty had recognized Cherokee territory in Georgia as independent and the Cherokee people had created a thriving republic with a written constitution. For decades, the state of Georgia sought to enforce its authority over the Cherokee Nation, but its efforts had little effect until the election of President Andrew Jackson, a longtime supporter of Indian removal. Although the Supreme Court declared Congress's 1830 Indian removal bill unconstitutional in Worcester vs. Georgia.

The idea of moving Native Americans to a different part of the country was not new. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson had suggested that tracts of land in this vast new territory could be given to native peoples if they agreed to cede their lands in the eastern part of the country. Transfers occurred in a piecemeal way, but no consistent removal program developed until after the War of 1812.