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Native American 's Greatest Flaw Throughout History

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Native Americans: 1830s-1930s America’s greatest flaw throughout history is how it treats its minorities, especially the Native Americans. From the beginning of European involvement in America, Native Americans have been cheated and mistreated. Even before the United States became a country, European traders would do whatever they could to make a profit, even use the diseases that they carried to begin an epidemic. As shown in the early Franciscan missions, Native Americans were considered heathens that were, at best, simply objects of conversion and at worst subhuman converts that could be used to till fields until they died of disease or maltreatment. Treaties with Native Americans were rarely honored, and they were used as mere pawns in struggles such as the French and Indian War. In “the land of the free”, Native Americans were systematically denied their “inalienable rights,” and the period that most clearly shows this are the 19th and early 20th century. Government policy regarding Native Americans changed from the 1830s to the 1930s, often reflecting the way Native Americans were viewed in that time period. The most well known injustices that the Native American people suffered under the United States government occurred in the 1830s. Under Jackson’s administration, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee were removed from their lands and resettled in the Indian Territory, which is now known as Oklahoma (Garraty, 248-250). Some smaller groups resisted violently

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