The Taking, Giving Back, Taking Again and Finally Returning What Doesn’t Belong to Us.

Learning about American Indians in high school and primary school taught me many things about their cultures, beliefs, history and interactions with the colonists and settlers. Ever since we landed near Plymouth rock, in my opinion, we have been taking away the Native Americans’ rights and land. They lived in this country for hundreds of years before we arrived and took away everything they had. We took their hunting and fishing grounds by the BILLIONS of acres and placed all the different tribes on a total of 56,200,000 acres which is only about 2.5% of the total land mass in the United States. What was done to the Tohono O’odham Nation was wrong. We initially gave them 22,000 acres by the executive order of President Chester A. Arthur in the 1880s. Within a few decades, problems arose as a conflict of interests between Indians and American Farmers to gain access over water and land around and President Taft removed almost half of the land and returned it to the state for Euro-Americans to use. Toward the end of the century, a dam was completed and flooded 9, 000 acres of land which was later returned as private land to the Reservation. Although we gave The Tohono O’odham Indians land to freely live their lives, we repeatedly took away from them and broke promises to them just because we wanted their land for water rights. Again, in my opinion, these Indians and the other 120+ Indian populations around the United States should be given more than enough land, water, and other natural resources for two reasons; they were here first, and we took away their livelihoods and made them endure many hardships by kicking them out of their territories (think about the Trail of Tears).