Traditions & Culture – Indian Youth

During the 18th and 19th centuries’ “Indian Wars,” relentless aggression by the U.S. Government caused Native peoples to lose their homelands.  Broken treaties and forced relocations displaced American Indians from the land of their ancestors, where they had been living for generations, to reservations. These reservation lands offered a fraction of the size and natural resources of what was taken.  Tribes were split, combined with traditional enemies and/or forced to reservations far from home and sacred spaces.  Laws like the Dawes Act of 1887 reinforced the dependency of reservation system with land reallocation that set forth to destroy the tribe as a social unit.