How the Manifest Destiny Affected Native Americans in the U.S - Research Paper Example

?How the Manifest Destiny Affected Native Americans in the U.S. Introduction Almost four decades after the ratification of the Relocation Act, the removal procedure keeps on. Even though the initiative has been seriously and constantly denounced, it has had merely narrow modifications and has never been severely pressured with closure. The hesitance of Congress to financially support it at a point that would have terminated it more quickly may partly reveal the undecided sentiments of several of those who permitted its continuation.1 Opposition from the targets of relocation, under the headship of quite a few religious leaders and aged Navajo women, resulted in a chain of constitutional measures, the most triumphant being the case of Manybeads claiming that relocation infringed their religious rights.2 This struggle of Navajo tribes for land and settlement has been defined and influenced by the doctrine of manifest destiny. This paper depicts how the Navajo fought the United States for its lands and settlements. The Navajo Tribes and its Lands and Settlements Just like in numerous other cases of relocation, the underlying reason of the relocation of the Navajo people had nothing do with their interests or welfare. The case of Navajo is distinctive in the sense that it does not require the ravaging of their territories and does not belong to any development plan. Nevertheless, as in other instances of displacement, Navajos target for relocation were not permitted to choose freely whether to abandon or stay in their lands. Scudder (1985) and Cernea (1993) emphasize in their relocation classifications that triumphant relocation plans should take into account the needed socioeconomic elements for building enduring bonds to the new land.3 Nevertheless, both scholars argue that majority of relocation plans was unsuccessful. The senior consultant on social policy for the World Bank, Michael Cernea (1998), supports positive collaboration between sociological and economic disciplines for the purpose of decreasing relocation and improving the subsistence of relocatees.4 The Navajos’ relocation from the Hopi Partitioned Land (HPL) has been disastrous. It was badly premeditated and executed forcibly. The relocation procedures have been performed in lack of knowledge of the Navajo people’s land possession and dwelling patterns, livelihood, and economic production.5 A number of the most unfavorable outcomes of this relocation could still be alleviated with sufficient subsidy, developmental design, and practical conditions for actual community involvement. However, with no such dedications, aimed at reviving or regaining abandoned economic production prospects, it is not likely that complete economic resurgence will ever happen.6 Examining the responses of the Navajo people to forced relocation from HPL clarifies several common features of the response differences of the displaced people, the vitality of economic production self-rule, and importance of traditional land possessions. Relocation is comparatively triumphant merely when the targets of the relocation revive or broaden their economic production tasks.7 Nonetheless, forced removal harms inhabitants and no measure can quantify the difficulties of these people against the actual reparation they get. The U.S. Government versus the Navajo John O’Sullivan, an American correspondent, introduced the concept of ‘manifest destiny’ in 1845 to characterize American westward expansion. As stated by this principle, white Americans were fated to expand westward by God’s will. American merchants, as early as the 1820s, disseminated encouraging accounts of the Navajo People and frequently conveyed compassion and high regard for their attempts to oppose the Mexicans inhabiting contemporary New Mexico.8 Frontiersman Josiah Gregg, for instance, assumed that the New Mexican people and their chief had “greatly embittered the disposition of the neighboring savages, especially the Navajos, by repeated acts of cruelty and ill-faith well calculated to provoke hostilities.”9 He added that it had been quite uncomplicated for the Americans to aggravate conflicts. It had been effortless for the Americans to support the Navajo people against the Mexican people when they had negligible attachment with the Navajo people, but when they acquired control and authority, their positive accounts immediately became unfavorable, particularly because the Navajo people did not warmly receive any crowd that marched into their country. Even though the Navajo people had valid justification to protect their clan, family, and lands, the Americans held accountable the series of aggressions that often raged in the southwest area directly upon the Apaches and the Navajos.10 White Americans view the Apaches and Navajos as their foes, especially because these natives did not acknowledge any distinction among the groups of conquistadores who had invaded their native soil and tried to conquer them. The U.S. occupation of the northern lands of Mexico started in 1846 with the entrance of the Army of the West of Colonel Stephen Kearny from Kansas.11 Harassed by persistent Navajo hostilities and retributions, Governor Manuel Armijo could merely watch as the armed forces of the United States attacked Santa Fe’s center. Scholar Frank McNitt claimed, “like thunderheads moving before curtains of rain, the sweeping shadow of these forces moved down the Mora Valley in the form of a marching army of fifteen hundred men.”12 This description firmly implies that the land, similar to the people, was deeply in need of assistance. Just as the rain with its revitalizing water can restore all living organisms and the planet, so too did the white people revitalize the southwest, restoring the people and the land. Although the white people have perceived themselves as an emancipator, the Navajo people definitely opposed. They would carry out the needed actions to defend themselves against conquerors and protect their God-given rights to live in a way they want to.13 Upon Colonel Kearny’s entrance to Santa Fe, he declared to the inhabitants that he had arrived as a custodian, not as an invader, “to protect the persons and property of all quiet and peaceable inhabitants… against their enemies, the Eutaws, the Navajos, and others.”14 The white people, even at the onset, knew that they would confront opposition from the Navajo people. Although the Americans might have proclaimed their plans for the southwest, the heads of Navajo did not accept them right away. Instead, according to accounts of constant conflicts between the people of Navajo and New Mexico, in 1846, Colonel Kearny instructed Colonel Doniphan into the lands of the Navajos to make sure whether its people were eager to recognize American domination.15 The meeting of Doniphan with the leaders of Navajo was the first in a string of assemblies that led to an agreement between the two factions. Conclusions In the case of the relocation of vast numbers of Navajos, discrimination and bias were evidently a primary force. It granted those with unknown motives a simple way to manipulate the thinking of the general public, and the judgments of the public stimulated by their scheme permitted them to justify their deeds. Hence they may take for granted the difficulties and misery their deeds caused, since those who became miserable were destined to be worthy of nothing else. This quite upturned principle, one that is embraced by the ‘manifest destiny’, permitted elected officials and the public to support fully a tribal group that espoused absolute peacefulness or diplomacy, so as to serve that group’s aim to harass its neighbors. It permitted the legislators and the people to prioritize property rights over human rights and corporate privileges over individual privileges. The struggle of land rights among the Navajo tribe gives ideas into the intricacies of impetus in people that disregard casual consideration and demands ongoing inquiry if we desire to make sense of who we are as we live in all our differences across the globe. References Brugge, David. The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: An American Tragedy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Denetdale, Jennifer. Reclaiming Dine history: the legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita. University of Arizona Press, 2007. Denetdale, Jennifer & Paul Rosier. The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile. New York: Chelsea House Publications, 2007. Iverson, Peter & Monty Roessel. Dine: A History of the Navajos. USA: New Mexico Press, 2002. Tamir, Orit, “Assessing the Success and Failure of Navajo Relocation,” Human Organization 59, no. 2 (2000): 267+ Read More