How did the Native Americans views or beliefs influence their response to these reforms?
Land in severalty, on which to make a home for his family. This land the Government should, where necessary, for a few years hold in trust for him or his heirs, inalienable and unchargeable. But it shall be his. It shall be pat- ented to him as an individual. He shall hold it by what the Indians who have been hunted from reservation to reservation pathetically call, in their requests for justice, “a paper-talk from Washington, which tells the Indian what land is his so that a white man cannot get it away from him.” “There is no way of reaching the Indian so good as to show him that he is working for a home. Experience shows that there is no incentive so strong as the con- fidence that by long, untiring labor, a man may secure a home for himself and his family.” The Indians are no exception to this rule. There is in this consciousness of a family-hearth, of land and a home in prospect as perma- nently their own, an educating force which at once begins to lift these sav- ages out of barbarism and sends them up the steep toward civilization, as rapidly as easy divorce laws are sending some sections of our country down the slope toward barbaric heathenism. . . .
We must as rapidly as possible break up the tribal organization and give them law, with the family and land in severalty as its central idea. We must not only give them law, we must force law upon them. We must not only offer them education, we must force education upon them. Education will come to them by complying with the forms and the requirements of the law.