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Analysis Of The Alabama-Coushatta Indian By Jonathan B. Hook

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Recommended: The impact of the europeans on Native Americans

Colton Wood
History 4983 Southern Plains Indians
Jonathan B. Hook
The Alabama-Coushatta Indians Hook, Jonathan B. The Alabama-Coushatta Indians. College Station: Texas A & M UP, 1997. Print. What Jonathan Hook’s purpose for writing this book “was to illustrate the dynamic and contextual based nature of personal and communal ethnic identity.”1 The case study is done to show how the Alabama-Coushatta Indians of East Texas have responded to external forces to stay true to their people. Jonathan Hook is of Cherokee heritage and tribal membership, which would provide some of the insight he has into Indian identity. Hook lives in Houston, Texas which is ninety miles southwest of the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation. This provided Hook with …show more content…

Just like any tribe first contact with europeans that changed the Alabama-Coushatta forever. Hook goes into how the mindset of the two different type of people are. Native American perception of time was, and for some still is, cyclical rather than linear, and the Indian world view is holistic rather than compartmentalized. The circle is extremely significant in Native American thinking and culture.7 There are two medicine men who have respectively have an explanation for the Indian mindset and the other for the white man mindset. Black Elk, a Lakota medicine man said, “You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars…The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”8 Another Lakota medicine man John Lame Deer said, “The white man’s symbol is the square. Square is his house, his office buildings with walls that separate people from one another. Square is the door which keeps strangers out, the dollar bill, the jail. Square are the white man’s gadgets—boxes, boxes, boxes and more boxes—TV sets, radios washing machines, computers, cars. …show more content…

He goes into detail from the move homeland to where the Alabama-Coushatta currently reside in Texas. Shows how the different interactions with non-Indian people and the effects that followed those interactions. The influence of Christianity and the Federal government how that shaped their community today. Hook an enrolled Cherokee member goes through traditional means, research and interview to make study. Overall Hook displays a people who are survivors. (Johnson 1999) Hook brings a cultural study of the Alabama-Coushatta Indians of Texas. He brings the importance of personal and communal ethic identity in the American Indian world. He also show how contact with non-Indians has affected the Alabama-Coushatta ethnicity by examining four different historical periods. He covers real issue that the Alabama-Coushatta had to endure through and still are pushing through today. (Lancaster 1999)

Bibliography
Hook, Jonathan B. The Alabama-Coushatta Indians. College Station: Texas A & M UP, 1997. Print.
Johnson, Bobby H. "Book Reviews." Journal Of American History 86.2 (1999): 773-774. America: History and Life with Full Text. Web. 29 Apr. 2015.

Reviewed Work: The Alabama-Coushatta Indians by Jonathan B. Hook
Review by: Jane Fairchild Lancaster The Journal of Southern History
Vol. 65, No. 2 (May, 1999), pp.

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