Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

             Since Lewis and Clark ventured to the Pacific Ocean at the beginning of the nineteenth century the white man has believed that it was his "manifest destiny" to control all of the new land between the Atlantic and the Pacific. This caused conflicts with the Indians that already inhabited this land. The U.S. Government decided they had three choices: they could assimilate, segregate, or eliminate the American Plains Indians. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown chronicles the events that took place between 1860 and 1890. The American society soon realized that there culture was too different from the Indians. Therefore, they could not assimilate with the Indians. The only options left were segregation or elimination. The Indians did not want to give up their land or their way of life it is because of this that the wars began. Unfortunately because the U.S. Army had so many advantages technologically and systematically the Indians were continually defeated.
             It was impossible for the Indians to obtain the quantity and quality of weapons that the U.S. Army possessed. They were fighting with primitive weapons that had not been modified in hundreds of years. Previous to this time period the Indians' culture did not demand advances in technology and for this reason no improvements had ever been made in regards to their weapons or artillery.
             The Indians also suffered because of inferior strategic tactics. Role specialization did not exist in Indian culture as it did in the white population's culture. Each male within the tribe was a hunter, a farmer, a father and a warrior. There was no special training in one area or another and no commanding officers as were seen in the U.S. Army. The only way the Indian's gained any advantage was by attacking small groups of soldiers. Even then there were still large numbers of Indian casualties that could not be replaced.
             Since they were fighting defensively ...

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 03:14, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/84628.html