Native American Assimilation Essay

Words: 546
Pages: 3

Many people in today’s society often think that their struggles in their daily lives are detrimental, but they don’t often think about the struggles of the first people who stepped on this land that they are on today. Natives have dealt with many problems in their lifetime, one of them being foreign men on their soil. Europeans brought drastic change which led to the conquering of great sovereign nations. Native Americans adapted to the change in North America over the years that caused them to assimilate with the Europeans. Natives had to change themselves as a sovereign nation to those of a nation that they were not fond of as well as how they coped with their ever changing environment. One of the very first tribes that were affected were the Cherokees. The process of assimilation began when the Cherokee allowed Moravian missionaries onto their land in 1801. The missionaries taught the basics of European agriculture, domestic arts, English, and Christianity. In the 1820s, Sequoyah invented a Cherokee syllabary that translated the sounds of Cherokee language into written symbols. They adopted a constitutional government based on the model of the United States. They even adopted a form of slavery, like their southern neighbors. Another action the Cherokee did to assimilate was to aim to imitate the whites. They disregarded their old clothing …show more content…
The Choctaws were the first Indians to be removed as a nation by the U.S. government to new land in the West. The tribes agreed to abolish tribal governments and communal ownership of land, opening the door to increased white settlement in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. The Chickasaw would be provided a home in the west on the lands of the Choctaw. While the Americans saw little difference between the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, the Chickasaw were opposed to sharing the western domain, particularly when the Choctaw outnumbered them three to