Racism Against Native Americans Essay Research Paper

Racism Against Native Americans Essay, Research Paper

Native Americans

The issue is whether different ethnic groups can preserve their culture in a pluralistic society, and the answer depends on what amount of culture is taken into effect and which ethnic group is being considered. The Native American population remains one of the most invisible of all American minority groups for the country, for much of the population has been relegated to reservations on land far from the majority of urban society. On these reservations, the native people have been able to maintain certain traditions, but long before the prevalent reservation system came into effect, the intrudance of white society devastatingly reduced the Native American population, removed the natives from their former lands, cut them off from many of the things which constituted their culture, as well as morally and spiritually damage them.

The modern Native Americans tend to be either reservation Indians or urban Indians, and since World War II the urban Indian population has increased greatly, in turn reducing the size of the reservation population. This has been one of the reasons for the destruction of the Indians’ own culture:

For better or worse, urban Indians are more intimately involved in the dominant culture than their reservation brethren, though even the latter have become “urbanized”–more sophisticated–through travel, school, movies, television, and their own production of news and entertainment (Jennings 399).

The reservation of the Chippewa is used as an example as part of a long-term fraud committed on this tribe, as well as others by the government.

The White Earth Reservation has become a dubious measure of rapacious federal policies that dominated the land and dislocated communal cultures at the same time (Vizenor 31).

Another of the major forces that has been destructive to Native American culture is government interference, and even when they intrude with meaningful intentions, this has often resulted in destructive outcomes causing great harm to the Native American community. Since the nineteenth century, the Indians moving to reservations have been faced with the reality of lies told to the Native Americans over the years by the government, and Native Americans today think of the government in a certain way based on how pervasive the government is in their lives :

The bureau [of Indian Affairs] grows and grows, poking tendrils into every aspect of Indian life. . . “Nothing, or next to nothing, happens on an Indian reservation without it being a result of, a reaction to, an attempt to get around, or a violation of an action or policy of the federal government” (White 274).

Shkilnyk points to the case of the Ojibwa tribe from Grassy Narrows in northwestern Ontario, Canada, who had been moved from a different reservation in 1963 by what the author says was a well-intentioned bureaucracy . The result was a complete destruction of the social bonds and unity of the tribe. The effect was a community in which suicide, alcoholism, and violent deaths were widespread. This was obviously due to recent phenomenon related to the move from one location to another, because prior to relocation, all of the deaths in the community were due to natural causes. Social problems caused by alcoholism are normal to many Indian communities, but Grassy Narrows is known as the place where sudden death from violence is most likely:

In this community, people have turned their anger inward, lashing out against those closest to them or against themselves. Their self-destructive response to intolerable conditions is clearly evident in the statistics on suicide (Shkilnyk 16).

The same types of forces have been let loose in Native American communities in the United States because of the social problems brought about by government control and bureaucratic actions intended to help but are rather more likely to harm:

Finding an American Indian community anywhere in the United States today where a perceptive visitor will not be confronted by overwhelming evidence of excessive drunkenness and other forms of social pathology is almost impossible (Graves 275).

Consider the size of the Native population today and the way it has been effectively relocated to various areas. The Native American land base today is approximately 54 million acres, and these lands take many forms, including reservations; rancherias; colonies; native villages; historic Indian areas; Indian trust land and joint use areas of reservations. According to the 1990 census, about 685,000 Indians or 35 percent of Native Americans in the United States live on Indian land, while in 1980 37 percent lived on this type of land (Hirschfelder and de Monta o 40).

The Indians even on the reservations have difficulty preserving tribal ways, and what has happened to their government shows this. Tribal governments at one time exercised full self-governing powers as independent nations, though much of what was known about tribal governments before European contact has been lost. Decisions for the tribe focused on the well-being of the group, and daily rituals for the tribe included childrens education, care for the elderly, food supply, and safety. Internal disputes and controversies were usually centered on issues of personal pride or greed, and tribal governments d