TOEFL - Reading Comprehension Passage 5
From the first days of European settlement in North America, Native Americans have retreated as white civilization advanced. In
the early nineteenth century, the federal government began removing Indians living in the eastern part of the United States to the region west of the Mississippi River in order to open up Indian land for
settlement, to protect the Natives from the corrupting influence of white society, and to promote assimilation. By the 1850’s whites were pouring into the trans-Mississippi West, and the federal government
adopted a policy of concentrating tribesmen on reservations away from the paths of white migration.
In the late nineteenth century, Americans found that concentrating Indians on
reservations had not solved the “Indian problem,” the problem of an impoverished, dependent people living in a separate society, and they became increasingly concerned with assimilating the Indians into white
society. Reflecting these sentiments, government officials developed policies rooted in two fundamental but erroneous assumptions: that the Indians should give up their tribal existence and become “civilized”
and that they should become independent, productive members of white society. Tribal organization was recognized as a defining feature of Native identity, and private ownership of land was seen as a means of
civilizing the Indians. By allotting reservation land in severalty policy makers hoped to replace tribal civilization with a white one, protect the Indians from unscrupulous whites, promote progress, and save
the federal government money. Native Americans, however, did not view land in the same way as their white neighbors. They did not regard land as real estate to be bought, sold, and developed. Rather, they valued
it for the things it produced that sustained life. To Native Americans the land represented existence, identity, and a place of belonging.
Although the roots of allotment
extend back to the Colonial period, the Dawes Allot- ment Act of 1887 was the first comprehensive proposal to replace tribal consciousness with an understanding of the
value of private property. The idea was not only to discourage native habits but to encourage Indians to accept the social and economic standards of white society. Americans considered
this acceptance essential if the Indians were to survive. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Leupp expressed this Social Darwinist philosophy very well. All primitive peoples, he wrote, were
wasteful of their natural resources. As the population of the “civilized” world increased, it was inevitable that the “uncivilized” world would be encroached upon. “Hence the most we can ask of the advanced race
is to deal justly with the backward races and give always a fair equivalent for the land it invades.”
|
