Pine Ridge Reservation Thesis

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation: Where Despair Meets Hope The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (P.R.I.R.), established in 1889 and set in the southeastern corner of South Dakota, is the home of the Oglala Sioux Nation. The Sioux are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government in North America. The Nation is on 2,000,000 acres, and the population is about 40,000 people. As a large area, the needs of the residents are immense, commensurate with grinding poverty. The Native Americans face challenging economic, health, and social conditions.

This story of the Seminoles’ struggles for identity and sovereignty is a microcosm of the true horrors inflicted on Indian nations by the federal government. The Seminoles remarkably defied federal, state, and local government pressures of removal in the early nineteenth century. They also disputed Creek insistence on tribal consolidation, and other Indian nation claims to their property. Among the federal tactics were the illegal removals, and treaties that meant little to the federal government when land, as part of Manifest Destiny, and wealth the federal government sought entered the equation. The Seminoles also endured the paternalism, coercion tactics, and pressures from Bureau of Indian Affairs agents who made promises to them that were frequently broken.

Many Native Americans live on reservations that were established in 1851 under President Andrew Jackson. Life on a reservation is not glamorous. A majority of the stories are filled with alcohol, suffering, death, and sadness. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie details some of the experiences that that Native American culture faces. Arnold reflects on the treatment of Native Americans when he states “We Indians have lost everything… We only know how to lose and be lost”(Alexie 173).

Mr. P 's second statement further emphasizes the understanding that because of the consequences that arose due to the attempt to control the Indian community made by the US mainstream population, Indians are now left with miserable, hopeless lives and their only way of finding hope is by leaving everything they know behind and seeking a new life outside their reservations. Moreover, a quote by a Native American teacher from the Rosebud Reservation states, “...there is a feeling that you have to leave the reservation to strive…” (Siegler). Not only do teachers think Indians need to leave the reservation to strive, even Indians

During the “Gilded Age” period of American history, development of the Trans-Mississippi west was crucial to fulfilling the American dream of manifest destiny and creating an identity which was distinctly American. Since the west is often associated with rugged pioneers and frontiersmen, there is an overarching idea of hardy American individualism. However, although these settlers were brave and helped to make America into what it is today, they heavily relied on federal support. It would not have been possible for white Americans to settle the Trans-Mississippi west without the US government removing Native Americans from their lands and placing them on reservations, offering land grants and incentives for people to move out west, and the

Many Native Americans still do not receive the same opportunities as other citizens, even though we have struggled with these issues for centuries. One of the very first examples

During one of his powerful speeches, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.” Scholars talk of what happened to the Indians as a great tragedy, but never anything further. We deny what happened to the Indians, particularly the Cherokees. During the 1830’s, the United States government set out to remove all Cherokee individuals from their homes and relocate them west. Relocation meant ending up on a land foreign to them, and presented with environmental conditions that posed difficulties for human living.

Since Europeans first set foot onto the Western Hemisphere, the Indigenous people of the United States have been subjected to incredibly poor standards of living, right in the heart of what is supposed to be the best country in the world to live in. Despite thousands of years of living in this very nation, The Native people of this land have been forced to take a backseat to pave the way for an industrialized world, all leading up to present day United States, in which Native Americans are hardly better off. Because of this, many Native American Reservations all over the United States have some of the highest poverty rates in the nation, while at the same time being one of the least talked about issues our nation faces. The source of which

When analyzing the book Waterlily, by Ella Cara Deloria, it is important to recognize the vital relationship she illustrates between the Dakota Sioux tribe and their values of kinship. The book both incorporates the complex nature of kinship, but also constructs a comprehensive timeline of the traditional lives of the Dakota Sioux and how the interact within their society. Deloria strives at epitomizing how important kinship is in everyday life for the Dakota Sioux; and how it keeps them organized into one exhaustive, organized society, thus allowing them to stand together in solidarity. The entire idea of how vital kinship is for the Dakota Sioux tribe is exemplified in the beginning of Waterlily, when Blue Bird and her grandmother leave the camp in order to gather food for the merciless winter which was ahead of them. After returning to their camp they were shocked to find that the camp had been ravaged, with the inhabitants of it either missing or slain.

The Sioux described how depressed the man came, and how many white men ridiculed him for it. Some Native Americans tried to escape allotment. One Cheyenne man and his family decide to leave the reservation and its new allotment for the mountains to stay away from white people, who could not be trusted. Most however were forced to allow their lands to be cut smaller and smaller, like the Northern Ute, until there was almost nothing left to live on. These particularly tragic tales continue into today, as Native Americans live in overcrowded reservations that have high rates of poverty, alcoholism and drug abuse, and even suicide, as tribes in Canada have recently

The Ponca tribe has gone through so much, and suffered many losses, but they also gained many new things. Today the Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma continues to pursue many new things for its people in education, history, business, and government, expanding their sights and setting new goals for themselves. There have been a lot of controversial issues over sovereignty to the United States government and many problems within the their own government, and continuous conflict, but the nation has not fallen. The

government on the Native society was boarding schools that began in the late 19th century. Native children, as young as five years old, were taken from their families off the reservations thousands of miles away to boarding schools. One of those boarding schools was the Carlisle Industrial School, which opened in 1880, founded by Captain Richard Harry Pratt. The sole purpose of these schools was to assimilate the next generation of Native’s into the Anglo society. The boys were taught mechanical and agriculture skills, while the girls were taught domestic lessons such as sewing and cleaning.

These issues can still improve through cooperation and understanding, however, and reaching a satisfactory decision about the Dakota Access Pipeline provides a perfect gateway to uplifting improvement of the reservations’ lifestyle. If the government agrees to give a little, a great opportunity arises for them to get a little as well. In the last decades, lack of funding has led to blatantly subpar education for the majority of Native American students, even when the government made an attempt to intervene due to an understandable inherent distrust of Government interference. Through a monumental compromise via the Dakota Access Pipeline, the government could prove its decency, transparency, and trustworthiness, which would advance the relationship of Native Americans and the United States Government brilliantly. The newfound trust could easily apply to areas such as financial welfare, educational support, and government-run health clinics.

Once European men stepped foot onto what is now known as North America, the lives of the Native Americans were forever changed. The Indians suffered centuries of torment and ridicule from the settlers in America. Despite the reservations made for the Natives, there are still cultural issues occurring within America. In Sherman Alexie’s, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the tragic lives of Native Americans in modern society are depicted in a collection of short stories taking place in the Spokane Reservation in Washington state. Throughout the collection, a prominent and reoccurring melancholic theme of racism against Native Americans and their struggle to cope with such behavior from their counterpart in this modern day and age is shown.

Losing one’s cultural knowledge, and therefore the reality of their culture, allows others to have control over their collective and individual consciousness as well as their destiny. In this case, it is clear that the United States government has had the dominant relationship over the Native