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Summary Of Double Victory By Ronald Takaki

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Chapter four of Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II written by Ronald Takaki describes the struggles of Native Americans before World War II and during the war. On the homefront Native Americans were treated poorly, but gradually white Americans began to tolerate them more as time went on. When they first arrived on the reservations after the Long Walk, they felt ashamed and were treated as if they were scum. They were losing their land to foreigners. Yet as time went on, the living situation on the reservation began to improve. For example, schools were improving, white people were training to be traders and farmers, and their rights were respected by the government. As the war, went on, Native Americans started …show more content…

The first V in victory was obvious because they defeated the Germans and the Japanese and helped the United States win the war. But the reason they were successful with the second V in victory was because “Whites believed that World War II had completed the process of Indian integration into mainstream American society” (Morgan). Before the war, Native Americans were not treated very equally and they were not treated wonderfully after the war either. For example, “In yet another of the rude and arbitrary reversals that long have afflicted the government’s relations with Native Americans, Eisenhower also sought to cancel the tribal preservation policies of the “Indian New Deal,” in place since 1934. He proposed to ‘terminate’ the tribes as legal entities and to revert to the assimilationist goals of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887” (Kennedy 896). This shows that there were still attempts to discriminate Native Americans, but the bill was eventually shut down in 1961. The reason they achieved “Double Victory” was because they help the white Americans win the war and because “the war caused the greatest change in Indian life since the beginning of the reservation era and taught Native Americans they could aspire to walk successfully in two worlds” (Morgan). Of the Four Freedoms, the one Native Americans accomplished was the Freedom from Want because they were given a stronger economic base. Before the war, money was a hard product to find for Native Americans because “The federal government's stock reduction program had made the Navajos dependent on wage income: nearly 40 percent of their annual per capita income of $128 came from wages, mostly from temporary government employment” (Takaki 66-67). This shows that Native Americans had a tough time

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