SECTION V
Chapter 16 North American Indians/Protestants in North America

"Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who
crossed over the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion have
always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?"

                            --Robert E. Lee (letter to his wife, Dec 27, 1856)

  "God has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead
in the regeneration of the world."   --Senator Albert J. Beveridge


  "God had a divine purpose in placing this land between two great oceans to
be found by those who had a special love of freedom and courage."

                                   --Ronald Reagan


North American Colonies Settled (Primarily) by Protestants

  England acquired a claim to the lands in Northern America, based on the
voyages of John Cabot in 1497.  Based on this claim, various charters had
been granted to English trading companies for temporary settlements. In 1578,
under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Humphrey Gilbert received the first
charter to form a permanent colony of English citizens in the New World.
Although the first colony was a failure (footnote: Sir Humphrey Gilbert's
colony on the island of Newfoundland was abandoned, after Gilbert was lost
at sea.), his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh assumed the leadership of the
colonization efforts in the America.

   In order to convince the Queen to finance the English colonization of North
American, Scott enlisted the assistance of Richard Hakluyt, a young chaplain
at the English embassy to Paris.  Richard Hakluyt's DISCOURSE, laid down the
theoretical justification for the future colonization of the New World by
the English.  Its primary arguments were religious in nature: "that this
western discovery will be greatly for the enlargement of the gospel of 
Christ..."
(footnote: The original English reads: "that this westerne discoverie will
be greatly for the inlargement of the gospill of Christe...")

  The wealth and cruelties of the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas
(described for example by Las Casa)-- along with the religious atrocities
committed by Catholics in Holland and elsewhere--were well known to Hakluyt.
Hakluyt emphasized to his audience, the importance of entering the colonization
race in the New World--in order to convert over the native Indians into
the "true" (Protestant) religion:

  "what may we hope for in our true and sincere religion, proposing unto
   ourselves in this action not filthy lucre nor vain ostentation, as
   they [the Catholics], but principally the gaining of the souls of
   millions of those wretched people, the reducing of them from darkness
   from light, from falsehood to truth, from dumb idols to the living God,
   from the deep pit of hell to the highest heaven." (Note: The contemporary 
   English has been converted into modern English spellings, for ease of   
   understanding.)

  Hakluyt called on the English crown to expand into North America to
defend the faith:

  "Now the Kings and Queens of England have the name of [Protestant]
   Defenders of the Faith.  By which title I think they are not only
   charged to maintain and patronize the faith of Christ, but also to
   enlarge and advance the same.  Neither ought this to be their last
   work, but rather the principal and chief of all others, according to
   the commandments of our Savior, Christ, Matthew 6 'First seek the
   kingdom of God and the righteousness thereof, and all other things
   shall be ministered unto you." (Ibid)

  This religious battle cry was picked up by later English monarchs to become
the principal justification for colonization in the New World.  For example,
when King James granted charters or companies to operate in Virginia, he
specifically charged them with:

  "propagating the Christian Religion to such people, as yet live in
   darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and ownership of God."

Settlement of the American Colonies--

    New England was first colonized primarily of English Puritans, who
had left England because they believed the Church of England had become
corrupted with vestiges of Catholic ceremonies and ritualism. Largely
Calvinist in doctrine, Puritans believed that every individual was foreordained
to be either an "Elect" or "Damned" of God.  Puritans stressed the power of
God viz-a-viz the helplessness and sinfulness of mankind, and believed in
strictly applying all biblical injunctions and doctrines to every aspect of
their daily living.

  Puritans viewed themselves as God's instrument in carrying out His Plan on
earth. They were the inheritor's of God's covenant--the "Chosen People"
and  America was the "New Israel". The wilderness area of New England was
seen to parallel the hebrew conquest of Canaan over the original inhabitants.

  Determined to establish a "pure" God-fearing society, Puritans spoke of
their newly acquired liberty in setting up a "true" Church of God.  Still,
their newfound liberty applied only to themselves. Other (impure) Christian
sects were NOT to be tolerated in their controlled society. Nathaniel Ward
(1578-2652) who became the pastor of Ipswich in 1634, put it this way:

  "I dare take upon me to be the herald of New England, so far as to proclaim
  to the world, in the name of our colony, that all Antinomians,
  Anabaptists, and other enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keep away from
  us; and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the
  better.... I dare aver that God does nowhere in His word tolerate Christian
  states to give toleration to such adversaries of His truth, if they have
  power in their hands to suppress them... If the devil might have his free
  option, I believe he would ask nothing else but liberty to enfranchise
  all false religions and to embondage the truth." (Nathaniel Ward, "The
  Simple Cobbler of Aggawam", AMERICAN PURITANS, 96-7)

  Thus the "liberty" of their society, consisted in allowing others that
disagreed in doctrine, to "keep away".
   
Reaction of the Indians to the English Settlers

  As noted above, Puritans and other English religious groups rarely
questioned the ethics of taking land away from the Indians.  The charters of
land issued by the kings of Europe were considered in themselves legal and
binding. Indians were considered savages who would be rewarded through
conversion into Christianity.

  When North American Indians began to respond to the white man's "generosity"
by massacring roughly one-fourth of the white settlement in Virginia on a Good
Friday in 1622, the tone changed from concern for the immortal souls of
Indians, to outright hostility--Colonists began openly calling for a "war
of attrition and extermination."  The Indian's response was seen as a willful
refusal to accept the gift of God's grace as imparted by the settlers. They
thus concluded that Indians deserved whatever punishment the white's were
about to inflict. According to Thomas Shepherd, first minister of Cambridge,
Indians were savages who deserved to be "routed by the divine slaughter in
the hands of the English."

  When the smallpox epidemic (footnote: some writers have argued that this
may have been measles) began decimating Indian villages during 1616-18,
the Puritan leader John Winthrop argued that this was simply God's way of
"thinning out" the heathen Indian population to make way for English
migration. When another smallpox epidemic hit in 1633-4, Winthrop again
wrote "the natives are neare all dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lord
hathe cleared out title to what we possess."

  Because Christianized white settlers also experienced terrible losses from
the smallpox epidemic-- it was comforting to them to see that the Indians
were suffering from the diseases far WORSE than they were. The deathtoll
from the smallpox epidemic on the Indian populations was of staggering
proportions. For example, it has been estimated that the Massachusetts
Indian tribal population (which may have been around 144,000 before the
epidemic) fell some 70 to 90 percent.  By 1631, there were only 750
Indians in this tribe left.

  Puritans saw this as part of God's mandate on the new land. As we have
seen,  New England was already called the New "Canaan" or "Israel".  The
stories of the Indian smallpox epidemics, along with recent military
successes (such as the virtual annihilation of the Pequot Indian tribe
in 1637) were interpreted along biblical terms.--That is, just as God had
driven out the peoples in Canaan to make way for the ancient hebrews,
he was now doing the same thing with the Puritans and the Indians--
(Wood, op cit, p 210), thus replacing the inhabitants of the New Land
with a "better stock".

  Early Virginia missionaries perceived Indians as ignorant savages.
Puritans on the other hand typified Indians as agents of the Devil.
Noting that the skin coloring of the Indians was the same as the purported
color of Satan (ie red due to his association with fire), some argued this
"proved" that the Indians were in league with Satan. Thus, Puritans
saw the presence of Indians as a test of faith whereby theirs was a divine
charter to rid the region of God's enemies.  During the war with the
Pequot Indians in Connecticut in 1637, Johnson urged the troops to "execute
vengeance upon the heathen" who were "not only men but Devils".
(Ibid p 36)

   In his MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA (1702) Cotton Mather praised how
God had worked such great miracles for their early American forefathers;

  "We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what work
  thou didst in their days, in the times of old; how thou dravest out the
  heathen with thy hand, and plantedst them; how thou did'st afflict the
  people, and cast them out!"

One Exception where Indians were treated as "Neighbors and Friends"

  Charters of land granted by kings were based on earlier "claims" made by
European explorers.  Rarely were property negotiations ever entered into
with the Indians to legally purchase their lands.  Quakers were one
exception.  For example William Penn wrote on a 1722 Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting:

  "...Friends [Quakers] should not purchase or remove to settle on such
    lands as have not been fairly and openly first purchased of the
    Indians..."

  Another important exception was Roger Williams (c 1603-1683), who was the
first president of the colony of Rhode Island.  A Calvinist and then a
Baptist, and finally a Seeker--Williams believed that only a few "selected"
individuals would make it to heaven.  However, whereas Calvinists believed
that a utopian society (run by Church Fathers) was required in order to
control a "corrupt" populace--Williams believed that humans were indeed SO
corrupt, that even a utopian society created by and for humans on earth,
would in turn ALSO become corrupt.  For this reason, Williams wanted
Church authorities to stay out of politics--as this would interfere with a
pious individual's personal relationship with God.

  This led Williams to interpret differently from his fellow Puritans, the
"covenant" between God and Israel. Williams viewed the "covenant" as
applying NOT between God and State--but instead between God and the INDIVIDUAL
(closer to the Quaker concept). Not that Williams was any friend to the
Quakers--He believed them to be damned by God. Still, because he viewed
virtually all Christian sects as corrupt and sinful, this lead him to
maintain a tolerant POLITICAL view for allowing the freedom of choice of
religion.

  In the new colony of Rhode Island, Williams established the precedent of
religious toleration and "separation of Church and State", which would over a
century later, become the model for the new American Revolutionary government.
His religious arguments for the separation of Church and State would also be
repeated roughly a hundred years later by the such individuals as Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison in arguing for religious freedoms to be embodied
within the American constitution.

  In a document adopted in 1647 written by Williams, it was asserted that
in the Colony of Rhode Island, no one should be persecuted for their
religious beliefs-- even including Quakers and Unitarians--both of whom were
facing whippings, torture, and hangings during this time (See Section IX,
Chapter 4.):

  "These are the laws that concern all men, and these are the penalties
  for the transgressions thereof, which, by common consent, are ratified
  and established through the whole Colony.  And otherwise than this,
  what is herein forbidden, all men may walk as their consciences persuade
  them, every one in the name of his God."

  Williams had envisioned himself to be an apostle to the Indians, and had
learned the language of the local Delaware Indian tribe for this purpose.
Angered, that most of the white men's religions were not "pure" enough to
receive the Indians, this led him to become tolerant and even sympathetic
towards the Indians. In 1683, Williams entered into a treaty of peace and
friendship with the Delaware Indian Tribe. During his speech, Penn spoke of
his desire to live with the Indians as "neighbors and friends":

  "There is one great God and power that hath made the world and all
  things therein, to whom you and I and all people owe their being and well-
  being, and to whom you and I must one day give an account, for all that
  we do in this word; this great God has written His law in our hearts,
  by which we are taught and commanded to love and help, and do good to one
  another, and not to do harm and mischief one unto another.

  "Now this great God hath been pleased to make me concerned in your
  parts of the world, and the King of the country where I live hath given
  unto me a great province therein; but I desire to enjoy it with your love and  
  consent,that we may always live together as neighbors and friends, else what
  would the great God say to us, who hath made us not to devour and destroy
  one another, but live soberly and kindly together in the world?"

  As part of the treaty, whites were given an area of land, estimated to
have been roughly thirty miles. Voltaire would write that Williams' treaty
was the only one "between those nations and the Christians which was never
sworn to and never broken."

  However, Williams' treaty was not to last following his death. By the late
1730's, the increased immigration of whites led to a desire for more of the
Indians' preserved lands. At first, the whites looked for loopholes in the
peace treaty, to LEGALLY expand their territorial rights.  Because measurements
were unknown to the Indians, the exact wording of the treaty describing
Williams' parcel of land, was said to extend "as far as a man can walk in a
day and a half." In common Indian terms, this would have amounted to about
30 miles.

  In 1737, whites determined to "re-measure" the area by sending runners
out to mark the new boundaries (which effectively doubled the area to 60
miles).  Fraudulent surveyors doubled this again, so that whites now
claimed the agreement applied to 120 miles. (As one historian would later
comment on this: "It was almost as if a man had bought a farm in Pennsylvania
and surveyed it to include the state of Maryland.")

   One Indian later summed up their experience of the white man, from their
point of view:

  "I admit that there are good white men, but they bear no proportion to
  the bad; the bad must be the strongest, for they rule.  They do what they
  please.  They enslave those who are not their color, although created by
  the same Great Spirit who created them.  They would make slaves of us
  if they could; but as they cannot do it, they kill us.  There is no faith '
  to be placed in their words."

Diversity in American Protestant Sects
Negative Indian Views Towards Converting to Christianity

  Maryland was established as a Catholic colony, although Protestants
were allowed to settle too. (Quakers and Unitarians were however excluded).
Anglican church members immigrated to the southern colonies, such as
Virginia and the Carolinas.  After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in
1685, French Huegenots immigrated to South Carolina.  Southern colonists,
for the most part, also believed they had a mandate from God to live in
the new land, and to convert the heathen Indians over to Christianity.

   American history books typically portray the colonial period as being
primarily comprised of Puritans in New England, with Anglicans in the south.
However, the fact is that, even in the late 1600's, religious plurality
had generally become the rule.  In 1750, one commentator complained how
Pennsylvania "was simply a chaos of religious sects." In North Carolina,
an Anglican missionary decried the "great number of dissenters of all
denominations... particularly Anabaptists, Methodists, Quakers, and
Presbyterians."

   In the 1800s revivalist group called the Disciples of Christ set as a goal
the unification of all Protestant denominations.  However this effort
literally resulted in only adding ONE more fractured Christian sect to
the already large list of denominations. Indeed, the trend was for groups
to keep splintering, as opposed to consolidating. --For example, the Quakers
broke off into Orthodox, Hicksite, and Wilburite factions.  According to
Forest Wood:

  "In short, from the late seventeenth century, Christianity in America
  embodied countless denominations congregations, sects, cults, synods,
  episcopates, and splinter groups; and these "churches" were just as
  diverse in their theologies as in their physical and organizational
  structures.  The only obvious thing they had in common was a professed
  allegiance to a Christian God; but it was here that they often disagreed
  vehemently on the nature and message of that God; as a perceptive Seneca
  chief observed,

   'If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much
   about it?' Likewise, another Indian chief,] Red Jacket asked ...
   'These black coats talk to the Great Spirit, and ask for light that we
    may see as they do, when they are blind themselves and quarrel about
    the light that guides them.'

  "To someone from a culture where there was virtually no fighting
  over religious doctrines (which described almost every African and
  American Indian kinship group), the often rancorous diversity among
  Christians must have seemed strange indeed." (Wood, op. cit, p13)

  American Indians were also puzzled as to why, if there was only one true
God, that he had NEVER revealed himself to the Indians.  As one Indian
replied to the preacher John Eliot in 1646:  "if we are all the children
of one father", why do "white men know about the ten commandments and
Indians do not?"   The Seneca Indian Red Jacket posed the same question
slightly differently to another missionary:

  "You say that you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great
  Spirit agreeably to his mind; and, if we do not take hold of the religion
  which you white people teach us, we shall be unhappy hereafter.  You say
  you are right and we are lost.  How do we know this to be true? We understand
  that your religion is written in a book.  If it was intended for us as well
  as you, why has not the Great Spirit given to us, and not only to us, but
  why did he not give to our forefathers the knowledge of that book, with
  the means of understanding it rightly?  We only know what you tell us about
  it.  How shall we know when to believe, being so often deceived by the
  white people?"

  After the meeting with Red Jacket, the missionary refused to shake hands
with him, stating "[t]here was no fellowship between the religion of God
and the Devil."(Berkhofer, SALVATION AND THE SAVAGE,P 108, as described
in Forrest C. Wood's ARROGANCE OF FAITH PP23 -4)

  Indians had a hard time understanding some of the more fundamental tenets
of Christian faith--for example regarding the crucifixion and resurrection.
It was not the miraculous, supernatural aspects of these stories that the
Indians had difficulty comprehending--for their own legends contained plenty
of these.  Instead, many Indians said they simply could NOT understand how
an all-powerful God could allow his own son to be killed.  If this were true,
they argued, then how could this God truly be ALL-powerful? Indians also
could not understand why any group of people should demand that their religion
be followed by everyone else. After all, when Indian tribes conquered or merged
with other tribes, there was typically no organized action to enforce their
religious beliefs upon others. (Ibid, p 24-5)

   Both Protestant and Catholic were shocked at the casualness towards
nudity held by many Indians.  Although generally monogamous, Indians (either
husband or wife) could easily dismiss their partner and remarry another--
which contradicted the Christian belief in the divine insolubility of
marriage still held today by Catholics. Indians also had a difficult time
accepting the doctrine of Original Sin.  Some of the old proofs for the
doctrine of Original Sin, such as the mother's great pain at childbirth,
appeared foreign to them--as many Indian women apparently gave birth without
too much discomfort.

  A story recounted by Benjamin Franklin showed how easily misunderstandings
could arise between the two cultures.--After a missionary had finished
relaying the Genesis account of Adam and Even to a group of Susquehanna
Indians, they summed up their understanding of the moral of the story back
to the missionary as follows:

"It is indeed bad to eat apples".

  It turned out they were just being polite, because their "rules of
common civility" obliged them to treat seriously any story they were told.
After the Indians, in turn, related their own legend about a beautiful
maiden who had descended from the sky and helped them discover maize,
and kidney beans, the missionary ridiculed their story as "mere fable,
fiction, and falsehood". Offended that the missionary had not shown them
the same courtesy as they had shown him, the Indians felt the missionary
was rude and had exhibited bad manners.  Franklin noted how the missionary,
who had condemned the Indian's myths as "nonsense and rank superstition",
never saw any similarity between the supernatural events of the Indian's
religion--and that of his own biblical miracles. (Nancy B. Black and
Bette S. Weidmn, eds, WHITE ON RED: IMAGES OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN (Port
Washington, NY, 1976), p 104.  See also Robert T. Handy, A CHRISTIAN
AMERICA: PROTESTANT HOPES AND HISTORICAL REALITIES (New York, 1971),
p viii, taken from Forest Wood, op. cited.)

North American Indians Are Forced Off Their Lands

  The desire of Whites to occupy Indian lands, and the rivalry between
French and English for control of the fur trade conducted through Indians,
led to the French and Indian War of 1763.  Lord Jeffery Amherst (who
commanded the British military forces stationed in North American during
this time), discussed with his troops the advantages of hunting down
Indians with dogs, versus infecting them with smallpox.  Since dogs were
not available, officers passed out blankets and handkerchiefs to Indians
that had been purposely infected with smallpox from a hospital at Fort Pitt.
This is believed to have been possibly the first use of biological warfare in
history! (Peter Farb, MAN'S RISE TO CIVILIZATION:THE CULTURAL ASCENT
OF THE INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA, E.P. Dutton (New York), 1968,1978, p 236)

  Following the War of 1812, Americans felt it no longer necessary to
form alliances with certain Indian tribes to protect them from British
interests. From this point on, all efforts were focused towards pushing Indians
off their lands--to make room for expanding white settlements. By 1848,
two major wars had been fought with the Indians (along with numerous
minor ones) as Indians were pushed further and further westward.  According
to Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri, the justification for these actions
was due to the fact that Whites deserved the land "according to
the intentions of the Creator." (Ibid, p 237).

  There was some whites who rose in defense of the Indians--Some
philosophers and liberal theologians decried the action.  For example,
after Georgia had extirpated its Indian population, Ralph Waldo Emerson
wrote: "The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart's heart
in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business."  Emerson,
was considered a radical liberal. The common American frontiersmen regarded
the Indians as nothing better than savages. (Ibid)

  President Andrew Jackson (who had been raised on the frontier) denounced
as an "absurdity" and a "farce", the proposition that the United States
government should even go through the motions of negotiating treaties with
Indians, as if they legally owned their lands. As President, he exerted his
influence to have Congress pass the Removal Act of 1830, which gave him
legal right to remove the eastern Indians. When the U.S. Supreme Court
under Justice John Marshall ruled in favor of the Cherokee Indians, Jackson
is reported to have responded, "John Marshall has made his decision, now
let him enforce it!" (Ibid)

  Over the next ten years, most of the Indian tribes were removed from the
eastern states. Some tribes left peacefully, but others had to be evicted
at gunpoint, or fighting.  According to Peter Farb in his book MAN'S RISE
TO CIVILIZATION--THE CULTURAL ASCENT OF THE INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA:

  "All in all, an estimated seventy thousand Indians are believed to have
  been resettled west of the Mississippi, but the number may have been closer
  to one hundred thousand.  No figures exist, though, on the numbers massacred
  before they could be persuaded to leave or on the tremendous losses suffered
  from disease, exposure, and starvation during the trip westward, in some
  cases a thousand miles, across a largely unsettled and inhospitable land."
  (Ibid, p 239)

  Especially inhumane and brutal was the removal of the Cherokee tribe,
which had in the previous half century adopted the White Man's civilization--
constructing churches, schools, farms, even a newspaper printing press and a
library.  Most of the population refused to leave voluntarily, and soldiers
under Gerneral Winfield Scott forcibly evicted them and marched them off in
what today would be called a concentration camp.

  Separated from their homes and belongings, there was no time for the
Cherokees to sell their property--and local Whites descended upon the area
to take everything for themselves.  Those Cherokees who tried to escape were
rounded up by the soldiers and killed. Survivors were forced to march a
thousand miles to their new home--a march which to this day is referred to
as "the trail of tears" by the Cherokee.

  Among one of the cruelest marches in history, the Cherokees were
forced along the trail by soldiers wielding bayonets in the freezing
temperatures of the Smoky Mountains.  Many Cherokees died as a result
of the march--they were Ill-clothed, poorly fed, and lacking in medical
attention.

   Alexis de Tocqueville, who happened to be in Memphis Tennessee, caught
a glimpse of some of the ragged party of the Choctaw Indians who were
moved to Arkansas.  He reported the following:

  "It was then the middle of winner, and the cold was unusually severe; the
  snow had frozen hard upon the ground and the river was drifting huge masses
  of ice.  The Indians had their families with them, and they brought in their
  train the wounded and the sick, with children newly born and old men upon
  the verge of death.  They possessed neither tent nor wagons, but only their
  arms and some provision.  I saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and
  never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance.  No cry, no sob,
  was heard among the assembled crowd; all was silent.  Their calamities were
  of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable."
  (Farb, op cit., p 240-1)

   The white demand for land became so great, that the common feeling arose
that there was not enough land anywhere to give to the Indians, except possibly
in the most desolate places.  Western settlers and miners, wanted the Indians
out of their way as they expanded westwards.  The writings from around this
time, show the disparaging views white settlers had of Indians.  In one
Kansas newspaper, for example, Indians were described as "[a] set of
miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaking, murdering,
graceless, faithless, gut-eating skunks as the Lord ever permitted to infect
the earth, and whose immediate and final extermination all men, except
Indian agents and traders, should pray for." (Ibid).

  The newspaper ignored the lying and thieving done on the part of whites
to the Indians.  By 1868, nearly four hundred treaties signed by the United
States government with various Indian groups had been broken! Suddenly
realizing that the whites were after their very existence, Indians rushed up
in a final rebellion against the whites--leading to Indian wars that lasted
through much of the 1870's and 1880's. General Philip Sheridan (who had once
quipped "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead") urged during this time
that the bison herds be exterminated, so that the Indians would starve.  By
1885, this had been largely accomplished and many Indians, as he predicted,
did indeed starve to death.

  A humanitarian concern for the plight of the Indians developed in the
eastern U.S. following the Civil War--largely by the same abolitionists that
had fought for the repeal of slavery. Senator Dawes of Massachusetts
successfully gained passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, in the hopes of
salvaging some land for the Indians.  When President Grover Cleveland signed
the bill, he sympathized for the harm done to the Indians by whites, saying:
"hunger and thirst of the white man for the Indian's land is almost equal
to his hunger and thirst after righteousness." The Dawes Act, although
well-intentioned, did not prevent the Indians from being cheated from the
small remnant of land allotted to them from the Dawes Act.

  The final abuse came in the attempt to Americanize the Indians that now
largely lived on federal government reservations.  All male Indians were
ordered to cut their hair short, this despite the fact that many Indians
believed that long hair had special spiritual significance. Children were
taken away from their parents and sent to boarding homes, during which time
they were not allowed to see their friends or family. Anything Indian--dress
code, language, religion, even philosophy on life--was prohibited.  After
becoming Americanized in the boarding schools, young Indians returning home
were now caught between two cultures.-- Either they could turn their back on
their heritage and settle in the white world, or return to the reservation
whose ways now seemed foreign to them.