Colonists v.s. Native Americans
To some Americans, the childhood rhyme "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" summarizes the depths of their knowledge of America's discovery and foundation. While many people both today and in the 19th century acknowledged that a group of people called the Native Americans, not Columbus and his men, were the first ones to set foot on American soil, the Native Americans throughout history have been treated with little respect and tolerance by different groups of people, including the American government. For years, different Native American nations lived peacefully in various regions of western America; although, in the late 1800's, as settlers moved west in search of new land and wealth, the Native American's territory and lives were forever disrupted. While "ethnocentrism and cultural misunderstanding, rather than greed, was the key driving force behind the Native American policy in the late 1800's" the American settlers also acted barbarically towards the Native Americans for the sole purpose of establishing and fostering their personal wealth and success. America's hostility and insincerity towards the Native American groups can be explained by America's general sense of "cultural misunderstanding" and close-mindedness.
During the 1800's, the Native Americans' spiritually based and liberated lifestyle bewildered and frightened the conservative American colonists, who thought this way of life to be savage and unconventional. As many of the settlers believed in the superiority of their culture and "civilized lifestyle," it could be stated that they forced changes on the Native Americans' lives with the intentions of benefiting the Indians. When the Indians "found these crazy white men in their sacred hills, they killed them of chased them out. As a result of the military's misunderstanding of the Ghost Dance, Chief Sitting Bull was blamed for causing chaos and was arrested; this event quickly turned violent, and ended with Sitting Bull and many others massacred. Wovoka once stressed the believed importance of the dance by the inspiring quote, " all Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. The American colonists' invasions in the 19th century on the Native Americans' territory and lives could be debated as being the result of the colonists' misunderstanding of the Native American's culture and also the result of the colonists' selfish desires for wealth and prosperity. Even those who considered themselves to be "friends of the Indian," like Helen Hunt Jackson, thought of the act to be beneficial since it would expose the Native Americans to the "innate superiority of American culture. On the other hand, it could be stated that the white settlers saw tremendous opportunities to benefit financially from the bountiful natural resources and their quest for power and control drove them onward. At the time, from the "white man's" point of view, the land that the Native Americans occupied did not serve a great purpose, and the treaty was approved without much controversy.
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Acceptance Essays
