Describe what happened to the Native Americans following Columbus’s arrival and history of reservations.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

At the time of the arrival of the first of Columbus’s ships on what later became United States shores, there were reportedly as many as 20 million native peoples residing in North America. Emerging archeological evidence has established that complex cities and agriculture flourished in the Americas, particularly in South and Central America, thousands of years before this wave of Europeans arrived. There are theories and some evidence that Africans, other Europeans, and Asians all made trips to the Americas, and many times, over the millennia and well before this latter foray by the Spaniards and Columbus. Within a few short decades, those populations had been decimated by disease (smallpox mostly), wars, and massacres. Over the course of a few hundred years, only a small percentage of those original peoples survived, and they were overwhelmed by the influx of European immigrants who through wars and treaties relocated American Indians, often forcibly, off their lands and onto reservations. Such reservations, at least initially, were in essence forms of correctional institutions whose purpose it was to incarcerate a whole people on a piece of land, by restricting their movement away from the reservation. Such land was usually less desirable than the land the tribe originally resided on and often inadequate to support the survival of that tribe. As a consequence, American Indian reservations of the 1800s and 1900s were populated by poor, underfed, and undereducated peoples with few prospects for regaining their land, wealth, or status. Federal policy regarding American Indian tribes has shifted over time from efforts to segregate them from White communities, to efforts to integrate tribal members into the larger society, to more current efforts to respect their identity and cultures.