Oppresion In America Essay, Research Paper
Who s country does this really belong to? Since the beginning of the colonization ofAmerica it has been known as the“ melting pot combining different races and cultures. Only one has always been in power and dominated this country. One of the main ideasthat comes across to other nations is the diversity of races and cultures within thiscountry. Even though that is this the idea that our government is trying to portray itseems that the constitution has only included one of these races, the white American. Wehave to keep in mind that when our fore fathers wrote the constitution their intentionswere to protect all people living within the United States and grant them their God givenrights. This is the image that America wanted the rest of the world to see. As historytells us we have seen that many different races have been suppressed by this hypercriticalgovernment. Even as we are taught history today we are only focusing on the whiteman s point of view and how he is the one to thank for our great country today. Threeexamples of this unjust government can be shown by the suppressing of NativeAmericans, African Americans, Mexican Americans. The United States Government has been trying unsuccessfully to register Native American Indians for over a hundred years. The Dawes Act of 1887 was the first sucheffort on a large-scale. The main purpose of the Act was to protect Indian property rightsduring the Oklahoma Land Rush. By registering, Indians were told, they would begranted 160 acres of land per family. The purpose of the Dawes Act, supposedly toprotect Indian welfare, was viewed with suspicion by many Indians hurt by government’sclumsy relocation efforts of the past. Indians who had refused to submit to previousrelocations refused to register on the Dawes Rolls for fear that they would be caught andpunished.To get on the Dawes Rolls, Native Americans had to “anglicize” their names. RollingThunder thus became Ron Thomas and so forth. This bit of “melting pot” chicaneryallowed agents of the government, sent to the frontier to administer the Act, to slip thenames of their relatives and friends onto the Dawes Rolls and thus took millions of acresof land for their friends and relatives. This act was a failure because it abused, the landwas never going to be owned by the Indians because its purpose was to make the landproductive and at the same time help Americanize Indians. The Native Americans wereto farm the land for twenty-five years inorder to actually become citizens of this country. As we can clearly see this was just one way of making sure that Native Americans wouldnever succeed in this country which was stolen from them. African Americans were another group of people being suppressed here in theUnited States. Ever since they were forced into slavery, the white people never changed
their attitudes towards
Brinkley, Alan. American History. New York: McGraw Hil, Inc. 1995.