Crooked Paths to Allotment:
A Travesty to Learn From Most average Americans of the modern generation do not know much about the American Indians, let alone the travesties that occurred after the Civil War because of westward expansion. American Indians were present in America long before America was “discovered”, yet the colonists and settlers believed that America was theirs for the taking regardless of the opinions of the American Indians. The book, Crooked Paths to Allotment, by C. Joseph Genetin - Pilawa, makes the main point of exposing the crooked ways in which the American Indians’ land was taken from them. It highlights a few of the main Indian rights activists and explains the timeline of land grabbing and allotment from after the…show more content… In fact, the proposals were often in the best interest of westward expansion rather than in the interest of preserving the American Indians’ land and sovereignty. In the Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh, John Marshall ruled that, “the Native people held a ‘right of occupancy’ but not the ultimate title to their homelands” and that, “European nations assumed a free title to the land”, in an attempt to justify taking the lands of the American Indian people (18). In my opinion, I believe that the American Indians held the rights to the land long before we arrived and forced them to give it up. A few different viewpoints were brought up by various leaders of American Indians’ rights. Ely Parker, for example, proposed “[using] the military to enforce treaty stipulations and to help implement social policy”, but he also made it known that he “did not want the military to engage Native people violently unless it was absolutely necessary” (52). His belief was that, given time, the American Indians would eventually
