The Enlightenment Influence On American Culture

Fee and Gunew describe in their interview, From Discomfort to Enlightenment: An Interview with Lee Maracle, “there’s very few of us left [...] that have any kind of a foundation in the culture, [...] you have only one knowledge system [...] the Western knowledge system” (211). What this means is that since colonization began, there has been a disconnection between indigenous people and their own culture; the cause of this is because of the takeover of Western thought during the colonization of North America. It was considered the “right” and only way that a culture could act. Although the Enlightenment is portrayed as a necessity to the colonization and formation of the Americas, it has been discovered that this action had a cost: the cost of individuality between indigenous cultures. As a result of the Enlightenment, European imperialism ran rampant, beginning the processes of colonization, which inevitably led to the destruction of individual cultures. This includes things such as language, education, and the way that interactions occur between different nations today. Therefore, the Enlightenment had a positive effect on Europe but had increasingly negative effects on the indigenous peoples of North America.

As a result of the technologies that were created, many Europeans made the decision to lead expeditions to find new places to colonize and inhabit. This is especially important in the context of colonization of North America because the drive that the Europeans had would (as eventually proven by the idea of Manifest Destiny) seemingly never end. The idea of imperialism changed during the Enlightenment from discoveries of new cultures to the eventual takeover of those same cultures. The Europeans saw themselves as more civilized than the indigenous people that they had met, portraying them as