The America in which we currently live is not the true America; it is the pseudo-materialization of Euro-culture and imperialism. The true America was originally a paradise inhabited by a people intertwined with nature, ruled by the gods of life. The tribes of original America consisted of the Aleuts, the Cherokee, the Zuni, Sioux, Mohawk, Aztec, and Inca peoples, before the coming of Westerners obsessed with greed.

When the first Europeans arrived in the fifteenth century, the Native American population was in the millions. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, after relentless subjugation and even acts of genocide, the "vanishing Americans" numbered a mere 250,000 (Dobyns, 1966; Tyler, 1973). The land they controlled also shrank drastically.

Euro-discovers found the indigenous people passive and peaceful, in stark contrast to materialistic and competitive Europeans. Yet even as Europeans sized the land of Native Americans, they justified their actions by calling their victims thieves and murderers.

After the Revolutionary War, the U.S. government adopted a pluralistic approach to Native American societies and sought to gain more land through treaties. Payment for land was far from fair, however, and when Native Americans resisted surrender of their homelands, the U.S. government simply used superior military power to evict them. By the early 1800s, few Native Americans remained east of the Mississippi River.

In 1871, the United States declared Native Americans wards of the government and adopted a strategy of forced assimilation. Native Americans continued to lose their land, and they were well on their way to losing their culture as well.

Reservation life fostered dependency, replacing ancestral languages with English and traditional religion with Christianity. Officials took many children from their parents and handed them over to boarding schools, where they were resocialized as "Americans."

Authorities gave local control of reservations to the few Native Americans who supported government policies, and they distributed reservation land, traditionally held collectively, as private property to individual families (Tyler, 1973).

Not until 1924 were Native Americans entitled to U.S. citizenship. After that, many migrated from reservations, adopting mainstream cultural patterns and marrying non-Native Americans. Many large cities now contain sizable Native America population. Overall, however, Native Americans control just a small share of the land they once owned. Current national median income reports that the 2000 family income for Native Americans was far below the U.S. average, and few Native Americans earn a college degree.

Source from: Society, The Basics, Macionis, 2004

© 2004 by AfroStaff