Native Americans and the Manifest Destiny

...

fact support

the Removal Act of 1830 which gave him, the President, certain rights enabling him to "exchange" by forcing the removal of the selected five tribes from the ancestral lands against the will of the Natives. Due to this removal act, the next oncoming decades, over 40 different tribes were removed to “Indian Country”. The numbers have amounted to between 70,000 and 100,000 Natives that were removed by the use of force by the American Army. The ones who were not killed in that times were the ones who were killed before given the opportunity to leave or simply rejected the idea of removal. When leaving to the present area known as Oklahoma by force, the Native Americans called the passage journey there the “Trail of Tears”, because of all of the devastating affects it had caused to the tribes. The “Trail of Tears” started the summer of 1838 because General Winfield Scott, took orders from President Martin Van Buren, to lead tens of thousands of Native Americans from Mississippi. When they were ejected, it was quick and brutal, they were not able to take any of their belongings with them on the journey, but soon after being pushed out, there homes were searched for valuables. On the trip, around 4,000 people of Cherokee decent died due to hunger, disease, and of cold. This was a very common way to die because of how much terrain they had to travel; in present day land, it was equivalent to Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and finally, Oklahoma. They were taken into governments hands at reservations.

To get the land of the Native Americans the Americans justified it as okay because, the Indians had fought with the French during the French and Indian War lost the war, and as a consequence, also lost their land. The Native Americans were made to leave the land that they had occupied and move to federal reservations, which to this they, they still reside in. The mentality of those people who made the reservation system thought that Natives would be much more “civil”, and would have more American standards like religion, and customs if confined to only themselves. It would make a sort of camp to turn them into the standard white man or all American worker, teaching English, sewing, and as well as farming. It was a challenge because the Natives fought to keep their customs and culture. Around the end of the 19th century much of the reservations were already completed, but the Natives were still not wanting to adapt to the reservations, bringing on, allotment.

Completely contrary to their first belief, that bringing them together would Americanize them; Americans now thought the only way to Americanize the Natives was through Allotment. They wanted now to extract them from the same reservations that they had already moved them to. This was so they could interact with the Americans and not run their customs in the comfort of their reservations. At this point it seemed as if they, the Americans, were trying to strip the Native Americans of their culture by any means that they could. The land of the reservations was given to heads of the Native American people under the Dawes Act, so they still had land, but now it was integrated amongst the other Americans. Under the Dawes Act, the Native Americas were also treated as their individual person, as oppose to how they had been treated, and referred to as a whole by tribes. The Dawes Acts eventually failed because of how much the Native Americans opposed of the Act.



The Native Americans were not treated as equals in the Manifest Destiny. At the time, there seemed to be no real pros to the westward expansion. All that happed to the Native Americans was that they were removed, taken to reservations, then taken out of their reservation all to adapt to the American way of living. The Americans had no remorse for the Native Americans because of their belief that expansion was inevitable and their divine right,