Poverty levels were high and remain so at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
By 1890 the United States was a country that stretched from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast. The government’s goal had been reached—white Americans had settled the West. But what did that mean for the American Indians? For most it meant life changed drastically for the worse.
After the West was settled, most American Indians had been moved from their native lands to reservations, often in other parts of the country. They didn’t want to leave their homes, but had little say in what happened to them.
The Indians faced a difficult adjustment on the reservations. Poverty levels were high and living conditions were poor. It was easy for many Indians to become depressed in their new homes. Some turned to alcohol as a way to cope with their unhappiness. Many Indians also lost confidence in the power of their traditional belief systems.
CHILDREN’S HARDSHIP
The U.S. government wanted American Indians to live the same way that white Americans did. One way was to require all American Indian children to go to school.
Some American Indians students went to schools on their reservations. Others were sent to boarding schools, sometimes hundreds of miles away from their homes. The students were required to speak only English at their new schools instead of their native language. They also had to change their names to ones that sounded “American” and wear the same kind of clothes that American students did. Student Luther Standing Bear observed: “It did not occur to me at the time that I was going away to learn the ways of the white man. My idea was that I was leaving the reservation and going to stay away long enough to do some brave deed, and then come home again alive.”4
Most American Indian students didn’t like the new ways that were forced upon them. It was hard to be away from their parents in a new and strange environment. Punishment could be severe at the schools, and teachers and other people in authority sometimes physically or sexually abused the students.
Adult Indians were also expected to make changes in how they lived their lives. The government wanted Indians to become more like the settlers, farming the land and attending Christian churches. It didn’t seem to matter what the Indians wanted. In addition to losing the land they had lived on, American Indians were losing their culture and traditional ways too. The West had been settled the way the U.S. government had wanted, but American Indians’ lives were unsettled—and often lost—in the process.
AMERICAN INDIAN SPIRITUALITY
There are many religious beliefs among the various tribes of American Indians. But a common belief shared by most was that American Indians were chosen to exist by their creator. Most American Indians respected other peoples’ religious beliefs. Most also believed that all forms of life depended on each other.
White settlers hoped to introduce Indians to Christianity and brought missionaries with them. But Indians sometimes had difficulty separating how Christians preached and how they behaved, since the two could be very different. Sauk leader Black Hawk said: “The whites may do bad all their lives, and then, if they are sorry for it when about to die, all is well? But with us it is different: we must continue throughout our lives to do what we conceive to be good.”5
