In the nineteenth century, Indian people were stereotyped and treated as people with no rights to land. Indians were viewed as a threat to white people’s progress and humanity. The invasion of the European Americans created the Indian problem which eventually leads to the Indian Wars into Indian natives’ land in which the white Americans had the desire for more resources and land.
In The Vanishing American, Dipple (2007), outlines how the federal government dealt with the Native Americans in the quest of supporting the incoming American settlers acquire enough land for settlement and agricultural activities. The challenge was to deal with Native Americans and convince or force them to give up their land to the Euro-Americans (Tebbel et al. 2001). The federal government used the following attitudes which included Dispossession, Removal of natives from their land by the military and Assimilation to deal with the” Indian problem.” This was a major turning point as the Native Americans were struggling to protect the indigenous land from the invasion of American settlers.
The Indian wars marked a period where native Americans were competing for land ownership and resources in their traditionally owned land with the Europeans and American settlers. The Indian wars had adverse effects on the Native Americans due to the use of brutal measures to eradicate them from their fertile traditional lands in the west (Washburn et al. 1985). In the United States history, the Indian Wars is termed as the turning point for the treatment and perception of the Native Americans. The rights of the native Americans were recognized, and several Acts such as The Indian reorganization act, The Indian appropriation act of 1851 and The Dawes Act passed to cater for the welfare of the Native Indians. Subsequently, as a result of the Indian Wars, several measures have established to settle land disputes, and native Americans are recognized as United States citizens with equal rights.
References
Dippie, Brian W (2007). The Vanishing American: White attitudes and US Indian policy. University Press of Kansas.
Tebbel, John, and Keith Jennison (2001). The American Indian Wars. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
Utley, Robert Marshall, and Wilcomb E. Washburn (1985). Indian Wars. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
