Different Approaches Of The Federal Government Toward Plains Indians

1.Discuss the different approaches of the federal government toward the Plains Indians.

The different Approaches the Federal Government wanted to use in dealing with the plains Indians in the late 1800's and early 1900's came down to either assimilate them into American Culture, or to completely eradicate Native American way of life by killing them off and destroying their economy.

Many people such as Philip H. Sheridan wanted to destroy The Native American way of Life by setting out to destroy the foundations of the Indian economy like their villages, horses, and especially the buffalo. Methods were implicated against the Plains Indians that were once used against the Confederacy. The Massacre of Wounded Knee is a fitting example of such

Most officials believed that the federal government should persuade or force the Plains Indians to surrender most of their land and to exchange their religion, communal property, nomadic way of life, and gender relations for Christian worship, private ownership, and small farming on reservations. in 1887the Dawes Act broke up the land of nearly all tribes into small parcels to be distributed to Indian families, with the remainder auctioned off to American buyers. Indians who accepted the farms and adopted the habits of civilized life would become full-fledged American citizens. The policy proved to be a disaster, leading to the loss of much tribal land and the erosion of Indian cultural traditions. Americans, however, benefited greatly. Other laws and treaties in the nineteenth century offered Indians the right to become an American citizen if they left the tribal setting and become a part of American society. But tribal identity was the one thing nearly every Indian wished to maintain, and very few took advantage of these offers. Thus, few Indians were recognized as American citizens. After WWI congress made all Native Americans US