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Week 4 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 4 — Reading a Treaty, Placing a Removal: Native Nations on the Record — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 4 of the term — place the week's laws in time, read a treaty as an agreement between nations, and explain it to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship as a political status, treaties as agreements between nations through the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868), removal under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, allotment under the Dawes Act of 1887, the federal Indian boarding schools, and settler colonialism as a framework. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Community History Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3, where you drew the line between immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples and met Blauner's internal colonialism.

The task

This week's record is real and documented. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized removal treaties with tribes living east of the Mississippi River, and the Cherokee removal under the Treaty of New Echota, ratified in 1836, is known as the Trail of Tears. The Fort Laramie Treaty (1868), between the United States and the Sioux Nation, set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills, which are sacred to the Sioux people; after gold was found following an 1874 expedition, the government confiscated the land in 1877. The Dawes Act of 1887 divided reservation land into individual allotments and opened the land not allotted for sale. Settler colonialism, from Wolfe (2006), says settlers come to stay and take the land, so colonialism is an ongoing structure rather than a single past event.

A cousin hears you are studying this and says, "Tribes are a racial group that got special deals from the government, and all of that is ancient history anyway." Your job is to answer the way ethnic studies would, starting from a few plain subtractions that place the week's laws and frameworks in time.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. The Indian Removal Act came in 1830, and the Fort Laramie Treaty came in 1868. How many years after the removal law did the treaty come?
  2. The Fort Laramie Treaty came in 1868, and the government confiscated the Black Hills in 1877. How many years after the treaty was the land confiscated?
  3. The Fort Laramie Treaty came in 1868, and the Dawes Act came in 1887. How many years after the treaty did the Dawes Act come?
  4. Blauner's internal colonialism appeared in 1969, and Wolfe's settler colonialism appeared in 2006. How many years after Blauner's article did Wolfe's article appear?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: state what the Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized, and explain why the Cherokee removal on the Trail of Tears is called a forced removal rather than a voluntary move.
  • Problem 2: read the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) in the field's order (what it says, who made it, whom it affected, and what happened next), and explain why it is an agreement between two nations rather than a gift; describe the present-day Black Hills dispute without taking a side.
  • Problem 3: state what the Dawes Act of 1887 did with reservation land and with the land not allotted, and name what allotment took as well as what it gave, using Week 3's question of what a law expected the people it affected to become.
  • Problem 4: explain settler colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than a single past event, and set it beside Blauner's internal colonialism in two or three sentences.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin thinks tribes are a racial group with special deals and that the history is over. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains why tribal citizenship is a political status rather than a racial category, why a treaty is an agreement between nations rather than a deal handed out, and why Native nations are governments that exist and govern now, and that names one limit, such as that sources give different figures for the deaths on the Trail of Tears, or that a framework is a tool rather than a verdict on every case. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor who says a union's contract with an employer is "a favor the company did for the workers." Model answer: "A contract is an agreement between two parties, and each side gives something and is promised something: the workers agree to do the work, and the company agrees to pay and to follow the terms. Calling it a favor hides the promises the company made. One caveat is fair: a contract records what was promised, not whether each side kept its word, so you would still check what happened afterward."

Use that pattern for your cousin, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the years in the problems without guessing which years or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the four results, each with the subtraction shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to the cousin, explaining why tribal citizenship is a political status rather than a racial category, why a treaty is an agreement between nations, and why Native nations govern now, with one limit; and
  • a one-line restatement of the years you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled hand-drawn timeline of the four problems with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the subtractions, the interpretations, and the writing yourself. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the week's laws and treaty only as the course and the issuing bodies describe them, check any outside claim about a real nation, law, or date against an issuing-body source such as the National Archives, and do not borrow a detail about any real nation from another source without citing it. Submitting work you did not write as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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