Although the violent conflict between the continent’s native population and the European settlers and their descendants has persisted since the very beginning of European colonization of the New World, it exacerbated in the mid-nineteenth century when the European settlers moved ever further west across the American continent. Most white Americans thought the American Indians were primitive and barbaric so they could never live in peace and harmony with them. As a result of this belief, the federal government created the reservation system in 1851 to provide land to Native Americans and alienated them from the European- Americans settlement. Even though many Native Americans tribes resisted their confinements in the reservation system, they…show more content… Some of them started to think the Native American traditions as barbaric and intolerable. Others, especially the evangelicals, who dedicated themselves to both the religious and the cultural conversion of the Native Americans, viewed themselves as benevolent teachers and they had a duty to acculturate the Native Americans to the better American culture (Learning Activities, The Dawes Severalty Act.) These ideas gave rise to the 1887 passage of the Dawes Act. This Act mainly aimed at acculturating the Native Americans to American values and practices by breaking the land of the remaining reservations into parcels and redistributed them to individual American Indian. By partitioning the Indian land in this manner, Congress hoped to force the Native Americans to give up communal livings, like hunting for buffalos, and to adopt American farming practices, which was thought to be better way to earn living than hunting. Through this Act, the policy makers reasoned that American Indians would embrace all American cultural norms and become integrated into the US society as well as freeing up some lands for the European- American settlers in the…show more content… First, under this Act, the American Indians lost immense amount of their lands. “In the half century after the passage of the Dawes Act, Indians lost 86 million of the 138 million acres of land in their possession in 1887” (Foner, p.g. 625). As a result, they could no longer practice their rituals and culture. Although the policy makers blindly believed the American culture was superior and better than the tribal culture, and assimilation was the only way for the Native Americans to improve their quality of life, this was not the case at all. As shown in the practice of Ghost dance, the American Indians suffered a lot from the assimilation, Ghost dance was a religious revitalization campaign reminiscent of the pan-Indian movements led by earlier prophets like Neolin and Tenskwatawa. Those leaders foretold a day that they could return to practicing their ancestral hunting and different customs, and be free from misery, death and disease (Foner, p.g. 627). Frequently practicing the Ghost dance showed that the American Indians felt nostalgic about their culture and were not happy with the assimilation. Furthermore, secretly practicing Ghost dance also leads to the Wounded Knee massacre, in which between 150 and 200 Indians, mostly women and children were killed due to their secretly
