American and Indian Conflicts of the American Frontier
...ns would combine and cooperate to hunt and farm and all decisions would be made by a consensus. Next, the Indians were also very religious people. They had several different religious celebrations to call upon the gods. One of these celebrations was the Sun Dance. In some Indian cultures polygyny would spread as men needed to take additional wives to help with tanning the buffalo skins. This was also something very different from American culture. As well as those differences, Indian culture was obviously less advanced than that of the Americans. Indians did not rely on large buildings and factories. The Indians created their homes, tools, and weapons using the environment and their resources and did not have any factories or manufacturing taking place in their culture. There are many differences between Indian cultures and American cultures. Even though the Indians were surviving just fine with their own cultures and lifestyles, Americans made several attempts to change the ways of the Indians. Originally the federal government had began a policy of treating much of the West as a vast Indian reserve, but they slowly abandoned that idea and began to set up a system of smaller tribal reservations for the Indians to live on. This would change Indian lifestyles because they would be forced to move their homes and belongings, and for the Indians who followed the buffalo herds, they were now limited to space and were not necessarily given good land to live on. Also, Americans attempted to reform the Indians and convert them all to Christianity. In 1869, Congress established the Board of Indian Commissioners to change reservation life to what Christian reformers wanted. Their goal was to break the Indians’ nomadic traditional lifestyles and force them to stay on their reservations where they would be Christianized, taught to farm on individual plots of land, and given government assistance. They would constantly be under the supervision of an agent of the board. Many of the Indian tribes rejected to these ideas and plans and it often resulted in bloody massacres like ones at Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. Another way of trying to change the Indian way of life was in special schools. Army officer Richard H. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The school’s goals were to help individual Indians learn the skills and culture of American lifestyles to help them succeed in the American society. As Pratt put it, to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Indians who cam...