The Legacy of 19th-Century Native American Reforms – Respect and Whiteness Theory
America’s leadership, under the stewardship of President Hayes Rutherford, assumed a relatively sincere and aggressive approach to trying to acculturate Native Americans as a means of attempting to help bring them into the country’s mainstream life. The administration was more than ever focused on making them self-sufficient and productive members of society. Part of this process – which was commissioned by the so-called “friends of the Indians” – was entangled or enmeshed in a three-step reform action: introducing boarding schools to educate Indians, implementing the Dawes Act as a way of separating the tribes and Christianizing all the remaining Native Americans. The subsequent goal of the entire ‘Americanization’ process was to detribalize Indians and create equality by treating everyone as an American citizen.
According to Townsend (2019), this pro-active and ambitious reform program was both a success and a failure. For example, the Dawes Act, which was signed into law by President Cleveland Grover in 1887, played an important role in the reform process. Each Native Indian household was allocated approximately 160 acres, while every single male over 18 years received 80 acres, and those below 18 years obtained around 40 acres. Just a year into the passage of the Act, approximately 3,349 allotments were issued by the Office of Indian Affairs. About 8000 of these allotments annually were issued throughout the 1890s. On the flip side, Townsend (2019) argues that despite allowing Natives to own land and be part of the American system, the program had its loopholes as “white settlers” descended on these lands, persuading Native Indians to lease them cheaply (less than $2 per acre). Most of the unallotted Indian lands were opened by the government for white settlement, pushing a large proportion of the Natives to reside in Reserve lands.
Similarly, even though the Christianization and education efforts led to the introduction of schools and colleges for Native Americans as well as the cultivation of core values in Native cultures, such as the St. Leo core value of ‘Respect,’ authors like Hosner & O’Neill (2004) argue that there was still a bigger problem of ‘whiteness.’ This means that whites still enjoyed better access to certain privileges and opportunities in a society that Natives could only dream of – an aspect that created a further gap between whites and Natives. As Townsend (2019, p. 362) puts it, “Most adult Indians still dislike intensely the end result, a young adult no longer truly considered Indian among his family and friends, yet not considered white off the reservation.” Most of these schools were brutal against Native Indians and forced kids to attend school.
References
Hosner, B., & O’Neill, C. (2004). Native Pathways: American Indian culture and economic development in the Twentieth Century. University Press of Colorado.
Townsend, K. W. (2019). First Americans: A history of native peoples (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
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Question 
The Legacy of 19th-Century Native American Reforms
By 1890, the armed rebellion of the Native American tribes was at an end. Well-intentioned white reformers, many of whom organized themselves collectively as “the friends of the Indians,” worked to institute a three-step reform program designed “to kill the Indian to save the man.” You are familiar from this week’s readings with that three-step process: The Dawes Act, designed to split apart the tribes; the Indian Boarding Schools, designed to remove Native American children from their parents and educate them to become “productive Americans,” and conversion to Christianity, designed to strip the remnants of Native American spirituality from the remnant tribes. In a thoughtful, well-researched response, explain the results obtained from this reform program. Consider in your response Saint Leo’s core value of Respect, and research the “whiteness” theory in order to put this reform movement in proper perspective. Depending on the quality of your original post and two response posts, you can score up to 25 additional credit points on this discussion, so be serious about your discussion posts.