Dominant and minority groups

Even after the North American tribes gained the use of horses and guns, they were, ultimately, no match for the superior forces of the United States military and armed mercenaries who hunted to near extinction the primary source of protein—the American bison or buffalo—and who also closed off through various (unkept) treaties many of the hunting and gathering grounds. The ideology called “Manifest Destiny” pushed white traders, treasure hunters, thrill seekers, and settlers further and further across North America until they had encroached on every part of the land, “we heard that creeks of [white people] were flowing into the [Black]Hills and becoming rivers”( Black Elk Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, As Told through John G. Neihardt . John G. Neihardt. Bison Books, U. of Nebraska Press, [1932] 1995. Speaks, John Neihardt, Bison Books, U of Nebraska Press, [1932] 1995), p.82).

Ethnocentrism

The ethnocentrism of the Europeans led to an ideology, based primarily on the low-technology hunter-gatherer lifestyle and animistic religion of the Native Americans, that the Native Americans were, as Marger Marger, op. cit . states, inferior, savage humans. This ideology eventually led to “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” philosophy which began with such events as the “Trail of Tears” in the early 1800s and culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The “butchering” at Wounded Knee as Black Elk Black Elk, op. cit. describes it, marked the last battle between Native Americans and the military forces of the United States. However, there were still skirmishes between farmers and ranchers and Native Americans as late as the 1920s. In fact, the term “Redskin” comes from a bounty set aside by the United States government for any Indian found outside a reservation without papers. The policy was for Indians “dead or alive” and the bloody, red, skins of the Indians brought as much bounty as a body.

Competition

Competition for land and natural resources and conflict over ownership of land exacerbated the conditions imposed by armed conflict and ethnocentrism. Economic competition always ends in conflict whether armed or peacefully resolved, and when the competing group is a minority—and a despised minority at that—the competition often becomes bloody concluding with the complete subjugation or annihilation of the minority group.

Differential power

Differential power is always a concomitant of stratification of any kind, as stated previously, the greater force of arms and the increasing white population linked to the susceptibility of the American Indians to disease, the collapse of their social structure, the loss of their hunting and gathering grounds created a state of affairs in which the indigenous peoples were virtually doomed. As Black Elk Black Elk, op. cit. says:

and now when I look about me upon my people in despair, I feel like crying and I wish and wish my vision could have been given to a man more worthy. I wonder why it came to me, a pitiful old man who can do nothing. Men and women and children I have cured of sickness with the power [my] vision gave me; but my nation I could not help. If a man or woman or child dies, it does not matter long, for the nation lives on. It was the nation that was dying, and the vision was for the nation . . . the nation’s hoop [social structure/social solidarity/integrity as a people]is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree [the tree of life that nourishes the nation] is dead. (Black Elk Speaks, p. 180 and 270; italics added for emphasis)