For one of our final units in Honors History 10, our essential question was: During westward expansion, did the impact of federal policy towards buffalo soldiers and native americans match the intent?
To answer the essential question, we first watched a PBS Learning-Media video on the topic. We also looked at this chart that gives a general overview of the situation:
Despite being after the Civil War, blacks were still being discriminated against, and so were Native Americans. So the natives of the nearly untouched western land, and its protectors, the Buffalo Soldiers, were being treated unfairly, and pushed out of their homeland. The ‘Dawes Act’ was basically a selling off of all Native American land to whites looking to move farther out into the territory, which certainly didn’t help the Native Americans. It also took land from the Buffalo Soldiers living in the area at the time, too. Here’s an ad from around that time:
In the end, I would say that the impact of newly enforced federal policy on both Natives and the Buffalo Soldiers didn’t match up with the supposed intent of these policies. The government just didn’t care enough about the Native Americans and the Buffalo Soldiers enough to keep their best interests in mind.
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