Indian Land example essay topic

Imagine this; you and your tribe live a peaceful life, living off the land, only taking what you need. You work hard for your food, clothes, tools, where you live and the quality of the life you live. Your tribe occasionally fights over land with other tribes but there is never any lasting damage done. White ghost-like figures appear one day, people you thought were ancestors come back to life, talking a different language that you didn't understand. You were friendly to them because it is in your nature to be so. People suddenly start developing diseases that you have never seen before and you can't find a cure for them, and lost of people die because of these new diseases.

Then more of these ghost-like people arrive and start killing off you main source of food, skin, and materials for tools. Your life is being destroyed right in front of your eyes. If you still haven't worked out who you are, you " re an American Indian. The Buffalo, this single beast provided their main source of meat. The bones were used to make most of their tools, hoes and axes were made from the shoulder blades, sledge runners for the dog-drawn sleds were made from the rib bones, there were many other tools that were made from the bones. The hooves were boiled and then used as glue to stick the feathers on to the arrows and also for cementing the arrow heads.

The thick hide of the buffalo was used to make heavy robes, bedding for winter. In summer the hides were used as a sheet, or light blanket, men's and women's attire and moccasins. They were also used as coverings for their tepees and were stretched over light frames to make boats. Trunks and boxes were also made with raw hide. The Indians were very religious people, they believed in good and evil spirits. There were many ceremonies held to encourage the good spirits to stay with them and to banish the evil spirits.

They had special people who were called Shamans who were able to make contact with spirits through vision and dreams. When you saw decorated tepees they were either decorated with traditional stories or with things to banish evil spirits. The Indians would kill the buffalo in a few different ways, but when they did kill them they only killed as many as the needed and could use so that they were there when the Indians needed them later. The first way that they would kill them was to herd them off a cliff, the impact either killing them or making them easy prey because they are injured. Another way the Indians killed the buffalo was to surround them and to kill them with arrows and spears; this way makes sure that all the bones needed for tools are all still intact and whole. The final way that they were killed was that they were trapped in a valley.

There was a lot of resentment towards the white people after a little while because they had started to move across Indian land. This to the Indians was a sign of dishonour, to walk, uninvited and without asking, across the land belonging to someone else was like trespassing is today. The settlers started to build homes on the grass lands where the Indians hunted and lived. They made railways that brought more people and the destruction of their lives because they had to move when the railway lines were put in and the lines went up all over the place.

Also in the process of making the railway lines the settlers massacred hundreds of buffalo, making the Indian's life almost impossible to live because the buffalo was their main source of everything. The intertribal warfare kept happening even after the white people arrived. If anything the fighting was increased because there wasn't as much to go around because the buffalo were almost extinct, and the white people had taken up a lot of the land that was usually belonging to one tribe or another. The war where the Sioux and the Cheyenne were against the Cluster's seventh cavalry was really what brought around the end of their chances of going back to their old life. All of the seventh cavalry were killed, but in return the Sioux were massacred at Wounded Knee, and that was the end of their old life. In 1924 Congress passed and act that said that American Indians were actually to be recognised as citizens of America, meaning that they had the right to vote.

The name of this act was the Indian Citizenship Act. The Indians were finally recognised for actually being there, and living in America long before the Europeans even knew the world was round and a very long time before America was even founded by the Europeans.