Superiority

            It’s amazing to me how an entire culture could be moved to the brink of extinction by another. Native Americans were tormented and hunted down simply because they were so different and because they didn’t “belong” in the American dream. I can’t imagine trying to survive in a world where everything I owned and all my history and beliefs were taken from me.  Takaki explains, “In 1902, Congress accelerated the transfer of lands from Indians to whites: a new law required that all allotted lands, upon the death of the owners, be sold at public auctions by the heirs. Unless they were able to purchase their own family lands, Indians would lose what had been their property.” The passage completely caught me off guard. The Native Americans had to purchase their own land otherwise they were forced to leave it behind. Imagine living your entire life in a home that your parents built and being told it was no longer yours after your parents passed away. If Native Americans were forced off their lands and given only a miniscule portion of what they used to own that they couldn’t even inherit, what land was supposed to be theirs? Where were they expected to go? White settlers treated Native Americans like they were some pest that they were waiting to die out.

The most obvious connection I made while reading this was the treatment of Jews in Nazi occupied Germany. Just as Native Americans were treated, Jews were seen as a pest and the best way to control them was to move them into a designated land or simply kill them. A book by Yitzhak Arad, titled the Plunder of Jewish Property in the Nazi-Occupied Areas of the Soviet Union, shares this similarity, “Soviet Jews were murdered at killing pits near their homes, and not in distant extermination camps. Consequently, all their money, valuables and other property were left on the spot at the disposal of the local authorities”. This quote seemed like it came directly out of A Different Mirror. The Native Americans were treated so much similar. They were killed, taken from their homes, and their property was then the property of the government. My question is: what makes someone believe that they are superior to another and who gets to decide?