Better Off With The White Man's System?

Native Americans were exploited from the beginning; their lands were stolen, their people were killed off in the thousands, and they were enslaved. The Natives had their own society, their own set of rules and laws. In the Natives culture, everyone worked together to make sure no one went hungry or cold. When the Europeans arrived everything changed, they pushed their government system and their religions onto the Natives because they were "savages". John Lame Deer believes they were better off before the white man arrived because they were not greedy and everyone worked together as a community.

John Lame Deer wrote a satiric response to the arrival and the Europeans in his book Seeker of Visions. He says at the end of the quote, "...how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society." This is the part he makes it evident he was being sarcastic. Through out the passage, he says "we" everywhere in the first paragraph but when it get the last sentence, he refers to the Europeans as "they". He doesn’t want to be associated with the white man, in his eyes they ruined their society. He wrote, “We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth.” His is a quote from the part of the quote when he was sarcastically explaining how much better life is with the white people’s system. He realistically believes there was no thieves, no poor people, and no delinquents before; everyone worked together to make the community work. 

To John Lame Deer, the system that was forced upon the Natives has only ruined the society and created bad. Before the system was imposed, there was no bad and no need for prisons. When the white man arrived, they begun to push these new laws onto people who had never experienced written laws. These laws not only messed up their communities and culture, but created the bad that was being attempting to be prevented with the locks and prisons.