American Progress: The Oppression Of Native Americans

While many different cultures were and are oppressed around the world, many people tend to forget about the genocide of the Native Americans on the land we call home. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus first sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, he came into contact with the indigenous people of the New World. After returning to Hispaniola, he quickly implemented policies of slavery and mass extermination of the Taino population in the Caribbean. This became the first major impact on Native Americans and eventually led to further oppression of American Indians. The implication of the population as savages helped in the displacement and genocide of the indigenous peoples. The Native Americans faced a lot of discrimination in North America during
The term propaganda is derived from the Latin propagare, to propagate, to reproduce, to spread, with the meaning, to transmit, to spread from person to person. One form of early propaganda against Native Americans is the painting American Progress by John Gast in 1872. The painting depicts the iconographic image of Columbia, the American angel floating above the land, leading her pioneers westward. The angel image, intended as a personification of the United States, floats ethereally over the plains, stringing telegraph wire with one hand as she travels, and holding a schoolbook under her other arm. Ahead of her in the West is a great darkness populated by wild animals: bears, wolves, buffalo and Indian people. All are considered wild and savage, and fleeing away from her light. In her bright-light wake, as the figure progresses across the land, come farms, villages and homesteads and in the back are cities and railroads. The light of “civilization” dispels the darkness of “ignorance and barbarity”. American Indian people are portrayed along with the wild animals as the darkness, all of which have to be removed before Columbia can bring the prosperity promised to the United States. United States covert agencies working with the mainstream media often used “grey and black propaganda” to distort or fabricate information concerning the groups they had targeted. Grey propaganda efforts often
Many Native Americans were depicted as marauding, murdering, hellish savages who scalped women and children. They were seen as thieves, drunkards, and beggars, unwilling to work but willing to accept government handouts. The American Indian was often used as the antagonist in old country western films and portrayed in a negative, barbaric manner. Today a majority of the Native American population still resides on reservations. Despite helping shape America in their own way, the oppression of the American Indians is often overlooked in comparison to that of Jews during World War II and African Americans in the U.S. from slavery to the