“By 1871, the federal government stopped signing treaties with Native Americans and replaced the treaty system with a law giving individual Indians ownership of land that had been tribal property. This "Indian Homestead Act," official known as the Dawes Act, was a way for some Indians to become U.S. citizens. This created complex problems for Native Americans. What did you learn from watching the documentary, "In the White Man's Image?"
18 comments:
This documentary was pretty informative. I pretty much knew the whites viewpoints towards Indians, but I didn't know it was to an extent to where the Indians would try and turn into a white man. The whites treated the Indians as if they were inferior and were savages when in all reality, it was quite the opposite. The Indians had a connection with their land because they had that strong spirituality with their culture. It was an overall interesting documentary.
I think the whole documentary in general was pretty informative. I thought I had a pretty good idea on how the whites treated the Native Americans but had no idea that they tried to turn them into white people. The whites viewed the Natives as less than human, basically just as property. The white men and women tried to forcefully move the Native Americans out of their land and in turn they were behaving how they viewed Indians, they were acting like the savages. The documentary did a good job of showing how the white people mistreated the Native Americans, and the extent they went through in the effort to change them.
I thought that this documentary provided a really interesting insight to this topic. We talked a lot about it in history class this year, but I don't think I fully grasped the idea of how poorly the Native Americans were treated until now. The fact that the whites were so focused and spent so much time trying to force the Native Americans to assimilate is a really interesting and sad concept. Their idea of "saving" them was taking away everything that made them who they were. Because the Native American culture was so different from a white man's culture, they saw it as a threat and just wanted anything that had to do with them to be gone.
I found this documentary to be very informative. I was unaware that Native American men underwent transformation to pass off as white males. The documentary highlighted the extremities of the mistreatment of the Native Americans and the savagery of the whites. Overall, I learned many new facts about this subject.
I find this certain period in history very interesting because we did study it in history this very already. The film focused on the characteristics of native American life and also viewed the mistreatment of them by the whites. I couldn't even imagine someone coming into my homeland, labeling me as inferior savages, and trying to change many years of distinct culture. Not to mention they killed most of the buffalo needed to survive (the staple of life on the Great Plains). The fact that the thought of assimilating native americans into the white culture was a little insulting, I could imagine to the Native American people. Now the force of moving Natives off of their land was just down right wrong. But, it was definitely necessary in order for the United States to be what it is today.
Julia Zawadzki
I think this documentary showed a better understanding how the whites treated the Natives. I learned about this briefly in history but not to this degree. This shows that the whites cant force there culture on the natives its unfair. This documentary did a great job on showing how the whites treated the Natives so poorly.
The documentary we watched in class on Friday was skilled at illustrating the dramatic change in most of those Native Americans's lives. Before watching the film I had known that the Native Americans were forced into assimilation by the whites, however I didn't know to what extent. The personal letters and anecdotes from the converted Native Americans before and after their change put the history into perspective to me. I was more able to relate to that point in history due to the film.
I felt that the documentary to me was able to shed more light upon the Indian Homestead Act and all the other unfair systems and laws that the Native Americans were placed under by the federal government. We’ve spent a lot of our years as students studying and learning about the harsh treatments that the Native Americans had to endure and I felt that this documentary was able to go into more detail about the subject. I learned more about the assimilation of the Native Americans being forced into the life style of the current U.S. citizens and how horrible the situation was for them. They were torn from their homes and families because they were not a part of the dominant status quo, because they were different and in the way to the government and the people. I also learned that the federal government has the power to not only create laws that people must follow, but they have the power to take away these laws when they are no longer in their favor. They can lie and steal and not face any consequences as seen with the Indian Homestead Act.
While watching this i had learned the places and times of these events but i had already known much about how the natives were treated. I grew up in walking distance of a Cashata Indian reservation so i've had grown people angry at me because my race, "ruthlessly took the land and all her inhabitants from the beautiful Indian." I usually stayed away from that guy. And I agree with him, but thanks to some angry man by the post office, I learned about what this film was teaching.
I think that after watching “The White Man’s Image” I believe that I have a better understanding of the treatment of Native Americans than I did before having learned about them in history class throughout my years in high school. I think because of how evolved the U.S. is and how accepting they are of things nowadays, we forget that our country had many flaws namely in how the white man treated and dealt with the black man and the native man. I feel as though after watching the documentary and hearing from descendants of the natives that were involved in the assimilation of natives to white culture, really struck me as important to furthering our understanding of our mistakes and mistreatment of people. This film really sheds light on the fact that all countries and people are flawed and have done things that they regret and that the United States is no exception, although we have made much progress since then.
The documentary was informative, but slightly dry at times. As I had already heard of the Carlisle school, I already knew the basics of American reform of Native Americans and understood what was going on. I feel like the documentary was quite vague and disconnected, which is understandable since they couldn't exactly get video footage of the school. Although, at the end of the section we watched, I definitely enjoyed the drawings from the students and thought that those could have taken a more important role in the documentary. The idea of getting an inside look of what the students thought added a new aspect to the concepts and showed how some of the Natives actually wanted to assimilate into the White man's culture and world. True, Americans were incredibly cruel to Native Americans, lied on many occasions with treaties, and killed the buffalo that numerous tribes needed to survive, but even still, some Natives realized that resistance had failed time and time again and let themselves be converted. This documentary showed me more about individual opinions of Native Americans that normal History Textbooks didn't delve deep into.
The documentary was very informative. I learned many things from it. I have always known that whites viewed Native Americans as less than human but I never knew that it was to the extent of having them change themselves into white men. Also, I never knew that the whites would force Native Americans to give up their kids so that they could be raised as whites.
"In the White Man's Image?" was a very eye-opening movie. I remember learning about the Dawes act and assimilation last year in US History 2, but learning these vocab words in a text book did not begin to explain what I witnessed in the movie. The Native Americans' lives were destroyed by the whites; the Native Americans were forced to choose between being someone that they were not or being killed/removed from their land.
I learned a lot after watching “The White Man’s Image” in class on Friday. The documentary was so important because the crimes committed against the Native Americans are so easy to forget and turn a blind eye to because we never really talk about them or study them. The documentary was eye opening and really showed the awful trickery that the Native American’s became victims of. We took their land, their homes, their culture and their traditions and destroyed them and tried to turn them into Whites. And the worst part was, that the whites didn’t even think they were treating the Natives wrongly and believed they were helping them. This documentary gave me a lot of food for thought and I would really enjoy learning more about the Dawes Act and the awful crimes committed against the Native Americans.
The movie "In the white mans image?" Was a very good view on the different thoughts that native Americans an Americans had toured each other. The definition that we learned from Darwin also was very revolutionary on how people viewed each other and it was eye opening to relieze how scared the natives were when they were captured . Someone can't begin to imagine what it must d felt like to be put into foreign territory that is completely out of this world to you. I also can't imagine how it must of felt to be striped of your identity and taught sometimes that goes against what you have learned and grown up with.
I found the documentary to be very eye opening. It shed light on a dark side of American history. The Dawes act really shows the white's feelings towards Native Americans during this time period. The superiority complex of the white Americans was so great that they actually believed it was beneficial to the Indians to completely strip them of their heritage and try to integrate them into white culture. Just because of their vastly different cultures, Whites felt that the "savage" Indians could not life amongst them if they retained their culture. This shows the great racism of Americans at the time and also gave insight into the justification of racist acts that happened around the world later. This video not only showed the the racist views of Americans at the time, but also displayed the idea of superiority amongst races, which was a common theme that would lead to events such as the Holocaust.
Zinah Alnaal said...
I thought this documentary was really interesting. Before watching it I never knew how much the native Americans were mistreated. They were viewed as savages and inferior to the white people. I found it really eye opening that the whites thought it would be better if the native Americans were white just because they thought they were superior. This shows how much racism the native Americans faced by the whites at the time. This video was good for showing the superiority between several races and the racism certain races faced amongst others.
This document was very interesting to watch and learn about it. I found it very intriguing and the Americans wanted the Indians to be like them. They didn't like each other and would call each other names.
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