Before the white man took over dominion of what became known as the United States of America, there was said to have been, about sixty million American Indians on this land. Yet, somehow, centuries later, the Census Bureau tells us that, as of 2020, there are about only 6.79 million American Indians, in this a land of 329.5 million peoples. What happened to the American Indian, could be best described, as systematic annihilation, and a litany of broken promises -- in addition to American Indians suffering from virulent and often deadly viruses, typically brought to them through the white man, that they had no natural immunity to -- all thus serving to decimate their population.
The present status of American Indians demonstrates that a significant portion of them, are confined to, or live within American Indian reservations – which to the uninitiated might even sound like a pretty compassionate idea, in the sense that these reservations, are nominally self-governing as well as providing to these American Indians land that they either individually own or our held in the hands of the Federal government, for the expressed or implied benefit of those American Indians. The problem, though, with reservations, for those that have surveyed or visited such, is that the conditions within those reservations, are often that which represents poverty, dilapidation, neglect, and an overall despondency. That is to say, one of the reasons why American Indians are placed onto reservations, is something akin to the attitude of “out of sight, out of mind."
When it comes to African-Americans, there never has been, nor is there anticipated to be, reservations so set aside for those African-Americans. While there were indeed, discussions held at the highest echelons of government, of what to do with African-Americans, before, during and after the Civil War --in which the hope from some of those of influence, was to repatriate them back to Africa or similar, is the inconvenient fact, that most African-Americans that were already in America, saw America as their homeland, and therefore did not desire to leave; but rather what they wished for instead from that government, of, for, and by the people was a fair opportunity to achieve gainful employment, home ownership, as well as to receive a good education for themselves and progeny.
The decision by African-Americans to basically be assimilated into American society, as opposed to some sort of reservation system being set aside for them, has for the most part, been the correct one; of which, in recent decades we so find, that African-Americans have more commonly been judged upon the content of their character, as opposed to the color of their skin. Whereas, we find that American Indians that live upon reservation lands, have been provided with an inferior shadow American experience, which has placed them into a world in which they are treated primarily with “benign neglect,” which thus does not provide them with enough material aid or the wherewithal to ever advance themselves, from a rather precarious situation, in which, though the white man no longer directly harasses them, that same white man doesn’t do much constructively to aid them, either – thus leaving American Indians in a perpetuity of poverty, without any realistic hope of ever advancing from such.