After 1871, the United states made Native Americans wards of the government and tried to resolve “ the Indian problem” through forced assimilation. Native Americans continued to lose their land, and were well on their way to losing their culture as well. Reservation life fostered dependency, teaching English in place of ancestral languages and eroding traditional religion in favor of Christianity. Many children were taken from their parents and placed in boarding schools, operated by the Bureau of Indian affairs, to be resocialized as “Americans.” Local control of reservations was placed in the hands of the few Native Americans who supported government policies, and reservation land-traditionally held collectively-was distributed as the private property of individual families (Tyler, 1973). In the process, some whites managed to grab still more land for themselves