Backround Analytical

Ever since the colonists came to America, Native Americans have been an oppressed people. As the whites came to colonize in America, they slowly took over everything the Native Americans had. Native Americans were deprived of their land, their culture, and their traditions. As the American colony got bigger, the American colonists moved out westward to expand their land to make a new country. However, the Native Americans were living in America all along and did not want to move. As a way of compromise, the U.S. government offered peace treaties with the Native Americans in order to keep peace. The U.S. government was much more powerful than any individual tribe, so they controlled most of what the treaties said. America was a fast growing nation and needed more land and more resources. Tension between the growing nation of the U.S. and the Native Americans grew. After the discovery of gold and other resources, the whites would break the treaties in order to expand. Sitting Bull, a significant leader and war chief of the Native Americans, was angered by the way the whites broke their own treaties while the Indians accepted the rules. "What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the whites ever made with us red men have they kept? Not one." The Native Americans always wanted peace so they never broke the specifications of any treaty proposed by the whites. The whites on the other hand, were a growing nation and needed more land and felt justified to take it from the tribes by "manifest destiny; the drive to spread American culture and values across the continent." The whites believed they were a dominant race and their culture is better than any others. Manifest Destiny was their justification of running the Native Americans out of their land and eliminating their culture by assimilation. After many breaking of treaties and westward expansion the Native Americans began to come together and resist against the U.S. government to protect their land and rightful hunting grounds creating conflicts. Sitting Bull was responsible for most of the resistance because he was able to unify different tribes against the whites' westward expansion. Normally these tribes would have individually defended their own land, but Sitting Bull was able to unify them to defend all the land. "Although these conflicts often slowed white settlement, they could not stop it, particularly as the whites usually had the backing of the federal government." Native American resistance did very little the young expanding country and its ambitious government. Acts such as the Dawes Act and the Homestead Act, which granted 160 acres free to anyone who agreed to build a house on the land, live there, and farm it for five years, encouraged even more westward movement along with the California gold rush. A general, William T. Sherman believed in the concept of “total war” and used it against the Native Americans to wipe them out of the area. “The first step was to attack the Indians' supply base: the buffalo. Sherman encouraged the New England tanning industry to start using buffalo hides in their manufacturing process.” Sherman would ultimately be responsible for the extermination of 19 million buffalo. Doing this destroyed an essential aspect to Native American culture and way of life. The president, Andrew Jackson, oversaw the removal of tribes from their native grounds, which encouraged westward expansion. He then forced Native Americans in restricting reservations giving the Americans the rest of the land. The removal of native tribes from their original grounds depleted them of their traditional land and long time culture. The reservations were far away and the long journey killed many people and devastated the Native American population.