Establishment of Reservations, Battle of the Little Big Horn, Dawes Act (Research Paper Sample)

History
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When the immigrants first came to America, they thought that they were going to meet new virgin lands and develop their settlements in the area. They were however met with Native Americans who settled there. The Indians had their own way of lifestyle, their own established means of life. Thesepeoplehad their own culture, worshipped their own gods and had their own interactions and own medical practices. However, the immigrants deemed these practices and way of life as inferior and tried to impose their own ways of life to these native Indians.
The immigrant settlers embarked on making these lands their own territory and they therefore had to assimilate these Indians into their own culture. However, that was not going to be an easy task since the Indians were reluctant to practice the white man’s traditions and way of life. They therefore embarked on making treaties with these Indians where they violated most the terms of the treaties they agreed and signed upon. The whites were really desperate to get all of the land and was therefore determined to push the Indians to the cliff so as to attain all these acres of land.
The Indians were pushed westwards through signing of treaties which as we have seen, were not honored by the white settlers. They were also pushed westwards through military conquests. The White settlers had superior weapons compared to the Native Americans. They simply had no choice but to push westward to wherever the whites were taking them to. They were taken to reservation settlements whereby they exercised less freedom of self-government CITATION And09 \l 1033 (Boxer, 2009). The reservations were defined as domestic independent nations. This meant that the Natives were unlike any other group of minorities andthat they had self-governance. However, the whites were thinking of ways to assimilate the natives into their own culture. For example, introducing Christianity to these people, clothes and other manners of ‘civilization’ according to the whites (Boxer, 2009).
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought in 1876 near the LittleBighorn River in Montana. The reason for the battle was because the Indians refused to vacate to the reservations and they settled in their rightful lands. The Whites wanted the land because it was rich in gold reserves. The Indians wanted the land because it was rightfully theirs and the white settlers had no right to take it from them. When the deadline finally arrived for the Indians to go to the reservations, the white settlers dispatched the U.S. Army to go deal with the situation. However, the commander, Custer, never had any idea of the number of Indians who were ready to fight for their lands. The United States Army dishonored the treaty that they had with the Indians and went to forcefully evacuate the Indians. This forced the Indians from other reservations to come join forces against the United States army and thus became numerous in numbers. Custer was heavily defeated and had to turn back from the fight. The battle became known as the Custer’s Last Stand. However, the perception that white settlers had regarding the Indians increased as they saw them as blood-thirsty killers(Boxer, 2009).
The Wounded Knee of 1890 was a spiritual movement among the Indians. This was after the war and all the remaining Indians taken to reservations. There was an Indian priest or holy man who got a sign from his creator that the white settlers would one day leave them alone and they would go back to their lands. The holy man, Wovoka, knew that by 1891, all that he had seen would come to pass and they practiced a dance. The American soldiers referred to the dance as the ghost dance and the dance spread. However, the white settlers thought that the movement would spark some form of rebellion among the Indians and therefore lead to a possible fight. This was despite the fact that the holy man, Wovoka promoted non-violent ways of settling disputes. They then demanded that the dance be stopped but the Indians would hear none of it. The United States army was then called to contain the situation and the Indians agreed to go to the reservations and the Wounded Knee creek. However, when the two d=sided met, there was miscommunication amongst the Indians and a shot was fired from the Indians side. Fighting ensued and many Indians died because of freezing and others from the gunshot wounds.
The white settlers attempted to assimilate the Indians into their culture away from their inferior ways of life. After the civil war, the reformists tried to assimilate the Indians to go to school. They argued that with proper education and care, these Indians would be as good as the other citizens. However, so as to achieve that, they had to take the Indian children to schools far away from their families. This was so as to eliminate the traditional mindset of the Indian people. The first boarding school built was the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The school was formed so as to transform these Indians to be proper members of the society as the whites would term it (J., 1998).
The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 was aimed at appreciating the Indians for their gracious acts for taking part in the World War I. the act stated that the United States government shou...