American Indian Experience in the U.S.

Efforts to help American Indians were often effectively damaging. White Americans often brought their western ways of looking at the world to their efforts, misunderstanding the ways that American Indians existed in the world and condescendingly offering solutions that neglected the wisdom and desires of the tribes they were controlling. While efforts to move American Indians to reservations came with an effort to assimilate Native Americans by educating them and teaching them to work wage jobs, it robbed communities of their lands and moved them to less desirable plots. Additionally, it assumed that Western culture and society was ideal and that Native Americans should participate in it. Similarly, efforts to move land to private Native ownership also robbed American Indians of more land that they were not “utilizing” (by Western standards of productivity and ownership) and denied future generations opportunities to maintain such land by creating a system in which Native Americans did not inherit the lands of their parents, but were required to pay market rate for it upon their passing, which most were unable to do because of the continuing disenfranchisement and impoverishment of American Indian communities. More land passed into the hands of white Americans. While these laws and policies had terrible results, they were instituted with a mix of good and bad intentions by white Americans who both sought to “help” American Indian communities and take additional lands from their tribes.

Collier’s plan, in similar ways, worked both as an effort to improve conditions for American Indians and white Americans. While he sought autonomy and self-government for tribes, he also sought to alter their ways of using their animals and land, privileging Western “knowledge” about how they were over-grazing the land over American Indian knowledge that understood the tendencies and seasons of the land through generations of living on it. Through efforts to both protect a government project and maintain the integrity of the land that American Indians were living on, more animals were coercively bought from them, making more and more members of the community dependent on government wage labor projects that were temporary and depriving the community of its resources which could help sustain it in the future.

Today’s churches continue to, with good intentions, oppress and marginalize native populations. Many assimilationist mentalities continue to dominate white American treatment of minority groups, with an expectation that Native Americans adopt Western ideals of dress, educational models, employment, and land use. White Americans also continue to “take” property from American Indians, although today it is more likely to be in the form of intellectual property and cultural appropriation. Religious practices are often incorporated into our ways of worship in ways that attempt to be “inclusive,” but are often seen as another form of theft from Native communities who are accustomed to white oppression and to white folks taking from their abundance and scarcity. Furthermore, such use of American Indian cultural material is often done in a superficial way that does not offer respect nor choice to American Indian communities, but instead operates “over” their communities as white churches and white people make the choices of what to include and how to include American Indian cultural elements without understanding the Native perspective well or thoroughly and without consulting American Indian communities, who often do not wish to share their practices and beliefs, feeling that it is yet another thing that will be stolen from them.