The Rez, How bad could it be?, How bad have we been?

Jailing the rightful landlords

The aim of this blog entry is to show a little bit deeper how the Indian reservations worked and how the natives were trapped and isolated in their own homeland.
As we have read The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian and also learned in classes with Mr. Villa,

we can easily imagine how things in the reservations worked, the residents didn't only have a small amount of money to survive but they were also given a really bad education in order to keep them "under control",
but we do not know yet the history behind this problem.

It was 1851 when the United States Congress authorized to create reservations to "relocate" the Indians due to the conflicts that emerged because of the invasion of their lands.

Who would like to be forced to move out of your house? I guess nobody would.

 But that was just the beginning, even though they were forced to leave, they were promised decent homes and "a good life", but they only received a nightmare. The promises were no more than lies and everything turned into more conflicts, so now we had two sides of the natives:

• The unhappy inhabitants of the reservations
• The Indians who did not want to live in the reservations because they were too restricted

Unfortunately the government of the United States was not willing to give budge and so they sent the army to make them accept their terms, this was a bad idea and several natives were slaughtered and there were also wars between the two sides, the most known was the Sioux War.

So on has the government cheated Indians to take away their lands, as another cruel example of their lack of mercy there was an act called the Dawes Act, which consisted of two parts, a great one and an awful one.
First they promised to give small parcels to tribe members, quite a kind thing. But it was just to hide an awful truth, the parcels were to be placed very closed one from each other, and all the excess land after the placement was then sold to white settlers.

This is part of the sad history that the native Americans have suffered, and the main reason why I chose this topic was to make everyone think about how have we affected our own natives, our roots. In the news we just see bad things about the Mapuches and nothing about how their homes and lands have been taken is ever shown, the discrimination against these kind of tribes is omnipresent and is their unfair truth we should all try to fix.