Unjust Treatment to Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans

Recently in History class we have been talking about the Buffalo soldiers and Native Americans. To learn about these topics we used the same process as the week before, we watched various videos on ABC-Clio and PBS, we took notes on separate topics and eventually created our own essential question and exam questions. In this lesson we were trying to determine whether the discrimination towards the buffalo soldiers and Native Americans was intentional or if the white settlers and government believed what they were doing was just. While the federal government may have thought the things were doing were just, they were acting completely barbarous towards these two groups of people.

Buffalo soldiers at this time were black Americans who had just come off the civil war, they became soldiers because frankly they had to pick their poison; buffalo soldier or sharecropper. When being a sharecropper was much like being a slave, and not having any say, buffalo soldiers did not have it much better. They were forced to fight Indians in many instances, and did hard labor, such as laying out electrical lines and cutting paths for other soldiers. The government may have thought that compensating them with clothing, food, and shelter was fair, but it really was not. These men were faced with a large amount of controversy when carrying out orders simply because they were black, they also were put into battles that were highly unsafe obviously compromising many lives. Seeing as though the buffalo soldiers were put into many dangerous situations the resources that they were provided did not make the treatment just.

This is a timeline of the Indian removal and the tension that
grew between the westward expanding Americans and these
two groups of people.

After the Civil War there was gold found westward, and for this reason they expanded to the West taking over native american land. When this happened they were faced with conflict because of the people that they were exterminating on their way. To get rid of the native american tribes the american troops destroyed the natives food supply, homes, and even took lives in an effort to get them to move. At this point the government put into action The Dawes Act. This allotted a certain amount of land to each person, but these amounts of land were not what the native Americans had previously had, and most of the land was of no use to the people. After all of the total war, in effort to try to get natives to move; the native Americans became protected by the government, so they were enrolled in schools and encouraged to leave their native roots and traditions. All this was brought about by reformers who thought of themselves as “Friends of the Native Americans” so it is believed that they did want to give these people more education and in turn a better life, but on their way to this they destroyed a lifestyle and many lives for that matter, thus making what the government did unjust.