The essential question for this week was, Was the discrimination that the Buffalo soldiers and Native Americans faced intentional or did the White settlers and federal government actually believe that what they were doing was just? The Buffalo Soldiers were black soldiers for U.S.A., African American, cavalry officer, and United States colored troops. The buffalo soldiers thought that becoming soldiers would be more interesting than going home and sharecropping. The first thing we did to learn about the Buffalo Soldiers and the Native Americans was to watch ABC Cleo videos just like we did last week to learn about Rockefeller and Carnegie. During the videos we assigned each group a topic to take notes on while watching the videos. After we each took notes on each of the documents according to our groups topics.
These videos give some background information on both Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans on what the rest of this post will be talking about
Buffalo Soldiers were very frequently put into the Indian wars and mostly helped with the battles of Spain and Cuba. As said before Buffalo Soldiers are black soldiers who thought it would be more interesting to be a soldier than go back to sharecropping. After the Civil war, the Americans expanded westward and took their land. They used total war strategies against the Native Americans and attacked the Buffalo Soldiers. They took their food, supply and clothing. They also destroyed their horses’ food source and their homes. People started to think that Native Americans should be understood and taken into society. The Americans started to split up the land owned by the Native Americans though, they believed that they were their friends. The Land that the Americans split up was not good for farming so instead they started schools for the children to try to remove Native American Culture. Shamans who were the chiefs of the tribes began to introduce the concept of Total War and the government used it to wipe out the Indians starting with the Buffalo Soldiers. They went after the camps and the horses of the people. Many Indians were forced to move farther west and move to land for reservations. The Native Americans lived on the reservations and the land was understood as a sovereign nation, until they were put under government protection. The main goal was to encourage the Native Americans to fit into the society of America, but reformers thought that what was needed was assimilation, 90% of land went to American settlers. Reformers thought that they were the “Friends of the Native Americans”. The Dawes Act was the federal legislation related to land rights of Native Americans which tried to promote assimilation with Native American culture and U.S. culture.
The discrimination of Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans faced was not intentional, the white settlers and federal government believed what they were doing was just. The government and settlers thought that they were actually helping the Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans by taking away their land and building schools to teach the children American culture and to forget about their culture making them fit in with the Americans thinking that that was a good idea. Also reformers thought they were “Friends of Native Americans” by helping them. The White settlers and federal government were not discriminating the Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans intentionally but they thought they were doing the right thing by helping the Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans fit in with American Society.
