Personal History Essay I had a hard time trying find a person who is different than me, and then I finally had the “ding” ringing about in my head. I thought about how interesting it would be to find out more about a friend of my fathers. I have known him for many years, every time I have seen him I wanted to know what nationality he was. I have never taken the time to find out, until now. Once I began to talk to him, I gained a much better understanding of why he does the things he does, and why he acts the way he acts. I began to learn about his ethnic background and I was excited to know that he is Sioux Indian, since I am a Native American myself. Although I am Cherokee and Blackfoot, I do not know much about the Sioux Indians except that they exist. He told me that the …show more content…
This brought hordes of miners along with the U.S. Army, and the Treaty of Fort Laramie that was established in 1851 was violated. To the Sioux in the second half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. government was duplicitous, greedy, corrupt, and without conscience. They watched buffalo herds be deliberately exterminated by U.S. Army policy; and within a generation they found themselves a poor nation of people in their native land. There was no alternative but to accept reservation life. They found it impossible to maintain decent, peaceful relations with the United States. Attempts were made to acculturate the Sioux, trying to force them out of existence as separate people. In the mid-twentieth century, the government attempted to legislate them out of existence through an official policy of "termination" of Indian nations. Only within recent decades have there been attempts on behalf of the U.S. government to redress past wrongs. All of this started with the discovery of gold, and that is what caused the Sioux Indians to become the way they are in today’s