Transition

My author focuses his chapter on the assimilation and the Indians during the turn of the century. Dawes Act was passed in 1887, when private land property was allocated to individual Native American. However, the government was also authorized to sell any surplus and eventually break up the Indian tribes and assimilate them into the mainstream US culture. It was surprising for me that one of the reason they are pushing this act to pass was that some government officials like Dawes himself was to grant Indians the right and possibility to become US citizens. So citizenship = private land ownership? The process of accessing private property and be able to sell the lands off was the starting point of capitalism and was in the US culture of becoming a US citizen with full rights, which is not true in the Indian cultures where people advocate group cooperation, public property, and tribal union. A lot of them were not able to produce anything from their own land and was force to sell the land, having nothing at the end and no one to turn to. The natives are not technically immigrants since they were the native people on this land. It is interesting to see that they were treated as immigrants when it comes to issues like this. Yet the attitudes towards them were somewhat different from the rest of the immigrant groups such as the Chinese and Italians. Even though an act like the Dawes Act did not really benefit the Indians, at least the Americans passed an act to grant possible rights to them, whereas for the other groups, acts like the Chinese exclusion act was passed.