Comment by insane_dreamer

I think it was the forced relocation of Native Americans to the worst possible land with no natural resources that destroyed them over generations, not the little free government money they received. If they had no opportunity to extract wealth from the land, and they were outside population centers (who were also highly discriminatory against them), then they had very few options.

(These days wealth is not necessarily created by extracting value from physical resources, but that is a very recent development.)