Question

Compare and contrast the similarities and differences between Native American and African slavery. Explain how these contributed to the various lives led by enslaved Native Americans and Africans.

Answer 1

Since the dawn of the Nation, both the African American and Native American communities in the United States have undergone considerable difficulties. As selfish American settlers took the Indians' ground, Southern plantation owners kept the black population in enslavement. However, conditions for both changed drastically after the Civil War: the captives were eventually liberated, and the remaining free tribes were herded into reservations. Thanks to a heavy Republican presence in the federal and state governments, blacks were considerably better off economically, politically, and socially than their Native American counterparts in the years immediately after the war. While the Indians lost their land due to the ever-moving push westward, under the constitution, blacks gained suffrage and freedom. However, as time went by, owing to an alliance of white nationalists happy to hold freed blacks at the bottom of society and Democrats anxious to achieve a Southe, the African American community was stripped of its freedom.

Blacks continued to suffer the same hardships suffered by their Indian cousins. But after World War I, because of pity for their wretched reservation life, the plight of the Native Americans was somewhat relieved and attempts were made to provide them with both reparations for lost lands and representation in American politics. Conversely, racial forces in both the North and South were also discriminating against the African American community; blacks had to wait until the mid-1950s before their plight was alleviated and they were elevated to the stage inhabited by Native Americans.

While the bottom of the American social ladder was shared by both African American and Native American people and they suffered from racism and bigotry, their lives were very different. Both suffered at the hands of whites, but with the almost complete collapse of their culture, Native Americans suffered more. It took much longer, on the other hand, to begin changing the African American condition than it did for the Native American one. One thing is clear, but America must still note the struggles that caused these communities to suffer for no other reason than the greed, hate, bigotry, and racism that made it possible for segregation to thrive.