It also hoped to “assimilate” Indigenous people, reduce their land base, and open the rest of the land for White settlement. The government’s goal was to break up tribes by encouraging individual family farming. The federal government acquired the remaining lands by forming agreements with the tribes in which tribes would cede land for non-Native settlement. Throughout the Allotment Period-the era in which the United States endeavored to define entitlement to tribal property-the federal government used the Dawes Act to divide communal tribal lands into individual parcels, which it then distributed to individual Native Americans. Using blood quantum allowed the government to turn independent nations into racialized groups, which thus enabled the government to subordinate them. Federal officials used blood quantum to decide who was entitled to specific property or benefits. The government hoped that using blood quantum would eventually eliminate Native peoples-that intermarriage would “dilute” the amount of “Indian blood” in the population, causing descendants of Native peoples to become indistinguishable from the rest of the population.ĭuring the Treaty Period-the time from 1817–1871 when the United States had a policy of negotiating treaties with tribes as sovereign political entities-federal officials used the language of blood to describe Native American ancestry, specifically those who were mixed with non-Native ancestry. Throughout history, blood quantum was used to define a point at which responsibilities to tribes, entitlement programs, treaty rights, and reservations would end. Other laws did not provide any definition of “Indian” identity, leaving it up to the courts to decide. Others required reservation residency, ownership of land kept in a government trust, or tribal citizenship for federal recognition. Most of these definitions specified a particular level of blood quantum, which is the amount of “Indian blood” a person has. In 1978, a congressional survey found thirty-three separate definitions of “Indians” in various pieces of federal legislation. The definitions of “Indian” are inconsistent because the government is constantly reshaping those definitions in order to fit its aims. One means of control was defining what it meant to be an “Indian.” The dominant White society in the United States has changed and manipulated legal and sociological constructions of race to further its goals: to acquire more land, preserve the institution of slavery, prevent certain groups of people from becoming citizens, maintain the White race, and more. For an atom, we have four quantum numbers.From the time that European colonists set foot on American shores and made contact with Native peoples, they have sought to control the land and resources that first belonged to the tribes. We will dwell on this last detail later.Įach combination of quantum numbers defines the energy of the electron in the orbital. Each orbital can contain two electrons: at that point, a split happens thanks to the fermionic nature of electrons, and two particles with opposite spin fill the shell. We specify the orbital using a collection of numbers, each indicating a peculiar characteristic of the orbital itself. According to the latest atomic model, electrons move around the atom as a delocalized cloud where the double nature of wave and particle allows them to exist without dissipating energy (we talked about this duplicity in our De Broglie wavelength calculator) the inaccuracies that still flawed Bohr's atomic model - we found them in our Bohr model calculator - are finally gone.Įlectrons are fermionic particles: other than obeying the Fermi-Dirac statistics (we outlined it in the Fermi level calculator), they follow what's known as Pauli exclusion principle: every electron occupies alone a specific orbital.
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