When the Dawes Act, a Native American policy, was implemented in 1887, it focused on dissolving reservations by granting parcels of land to individual Native Americans. At that time, people believed that if a person adopted the white man's clothes, ways, and was responsible for his own farm, he would eventually abandon his, as Oxford University Press stated, "Indian" and become assimilated into American society. . The basic idea of this act was the elimination of Native American culture because they were considered savage and primitive to the incoming settlers. Many historians now agree that the treatment of Native people during the Dawes Act was completely unjust, illegal, and unethical. American society has classified them as savages solely due to their differences in morals, religion, appearance and general culture. First, the American government made reservations to separate the American settlers from the Native Americans in an effort to acquire more land from the Indians and hopefully try to stop the conflict. Unfortunately for the Native Americans, by the late 1800s the settlers had become a corporation. The government's goal was to Americanize them into society. America is based on immigrants from all over the world. Each of them brought their own customs, culture and values and integrated them into society. Native Americans, however, were known as savages because the government considered them uncivilized and uncontrollable. Although the United States claims to be a free country and states in the first amendment that you can believe in any religion you want without persecution, but it did not give this right to the natives. Instead, the government was trying to convert the Native American religion to Catholic or Christian, completely forgetting that many people came to America to escape religious persecution. The government was trying to assimilate the natives by taking away their religion and
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