Reservations were a way for Americans to give some of the land back to the Indians without having to lose much on their own end. Reservation life was not nearly as well off as the lives Americans lived. There was poor schooling, not enough food, and disease running rampant. The living conditions were horrible and there were usually too many people forced into an area that couldn't hold that kind of capacity.
While reservations did have some sort of community set up in them, they were still just a place the whites pushed all the Indians off to. Americans, at that time, were extremely racist when it came to people who weren't of the same skin color as they were. So to make sure they were still supreme, they made their own areas and neighborhoods to segregate themselves from anyone who wasn't white. Even if it meant those people had to live in conditions no person could or should ever live in.
I don't think anyone would ever want to have lived on a reservation, but we still forced people to live like that. Why is it that Americans could never see past skin color to truly understand who a person was? We always manage to judge a book by its cover and never actually read it for ourselves. We've missed out on a lot of great books in the course of generations of living here in America.
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