Being of Native American/Hispanic decent and not being familiar with both of my cultures and only really taught the basics of Native and Mexican  history it’s hard growing up not feeling like you belong with in your culture, and even harder when it feels like the U.S. government doesn’t even care for those peoples. Assimilation created this drift and seclusion from one’s own culture, and was used exactly for that purpose by white Americans in the early 1800s. The borderlands created by assimilation left many people within those cultures stuck in a in between, not feeling like they belong with Native/Hispanics but neither feel fully Americanized. The feeling of what the “American” is has taken a new form from that era there’s a new acceptance for the many cultures and ethnicities so why do we still feel these borderlands in our society?

       “Kill the Indian and save the man”, a phrase to highlight the true objective of the assimilation of Natives in the United States actually was. The destruction of the Indian culture and displacement of their people wasn’t for the benefit of them but for the benefit of the white people, who were able to accede Native lands and the cultural genocide that Native children went through due to the forced boarding schools created for them. Native boarding schools stripped away important aspects to their culture such as; language, clothing, and even cut their hair which has a cultural significance to Natives.

       Zitkala-sa’s ‘Impressions of an Indian Childhood” I feel show the full effects of how these boarding schools  were trying to turn the Native children to the mainstream society and religion. Zitkala-sa’s describes herself feeling homeless and feeling lost in the world due to how she doesn’t fit in just one cultural identity, “Thus homeless and heavy-hearted, I began anew my life among strangers.”(pg25) This line in the passage reaffirms the idea that assimilation was really trying to strip the Native culture from the Native American people placing them in a borderland where they don’t feel apart of either culture.

        If the connotation of what the “American” has evolved and changed to represent the many cultures and ethnicities in the U.S. why can the government not keep up and respect the many peoples within its country. In relation to the North Dakota access pipeline and the Standing Rock peoples, the government is explicitly telling the Native American people placed in those reservations that they aren’t as important, as U.S. citizens Native Americans are of less value than white people. This conclusion comes from the fact that the government like times before has broken yet again another treaty they made with the Sioux people, in the 1851 Treaty of Fort. Laraime, and the fact that the pipeline was originally going to be put through Bismark, whose population is 94% white. Why did they move the location of the pipeline from this white city to go through sacred Native lands if the pipeline should not break? Because Native people aren’t treated of thought of as the same class of citizen as white people. Assimilation was to erase Native culture and identity, and since that didn’t wipeout every Native oppression and disregarding what sacred things they have left will have to do.