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Essays on native american culture
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Essays on native american culture
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Theda Perdue`s Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835, is a book that greatly depicts what life had been like for many Native Americans as they were under European Conquering. This book was published in 1998, Perdue was influenced by a Cherokee Stomp Dance in northeastern Oklahoma. She had admired the Cherokee society construction of gender which she used as the subject of this book. Though the title Cherokee Women infers that the book focuses on the lives of only Cherokee women, Perdue actually shines light upon the way women 's roles affected the Native cultures and Cherokee-American relations. In the book, there is a focus on the way that gender roles affected the way different tribes were run in the 1700 and 1800`s.
Similarly to what Brown does for our understanding of gender and power in colonial Virginia, Daniel Richter attempts to do by calling for a new perspective of Native American history with regards to westward expansion. In Facing East from Indian Country, he acknowledges how the difficulties presented by a lack of historical sources and distances of time make it impossible to see the world through the eyes of Native Americans. The best historians can do is to “capture something of how the past might have looked if we could observe it from Indian country.” Richter calls for researchers to break with tradition and examine colonization looking from the west to the east. In doing so, the author forces Native Americans to the front, and views Europeans
Before the 1860’s the native americans were living in peace until the Colonists attacked. The Western Expansion of 1860-90 greatly affected the lives of Native Americans, due to the powerful role
Throughout history, there have been many literary studies that focused on the culture and traditions of Native Americans. Native writers have worked painstakingly on tribal histories, and their works have made us realize that we have not learned the full story of the Native American tribes. Deborah Miranda has written a collective tribal memoir, “Bad Indians”, drawing on ancestral memory that revealed aspects of an indigenous worldview and contributed to update our understanding of the mission system, settler colonialism and histories of American Indians about how they underwent cruel violence and exploitation. Her memoir successfully addressed past grievances of colonialism and also recognized and honored indigenous knowledge and identity.
From the seventh to the nineteenth century, the Cherokee people underwent an important time of gender and cultural change. In Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700-1835, the author Theda Perdue reconstructs the history of the Cherokee people by placing women as the focus and by examining their gender roles. Throughout the novel, Perdue successfully argues previous narratives made about the Cherokee’s history and offers an alternative to the reading of their history. In order to support such an alternative, the author has created a detailed timeline of the events that lead to such a shift in the gender roles of the Cherokee from 1700 to 1835.
In the Iceni tribe’s society, “women held positions of prestige and power .
The Indian removal was a staggering example posed as the commercial injustice with those profiting for personal gain at the expense of the less fortunate. The millions of acres that were forcibly taken by the Indians were utilized for the slave labor as there was an increase in the demand. Women in the new republic had developed interests that diverge from the male electorate and recognized women’s role in promoting public virtue. Women had obligations to act as moral guardians of the nation’s virtue so they had established organizations and societies that improved social life. During the 1820s, women recurrently sponsored Indian youth and community leaders for school and agricultural progresses in their community.
The narrative offers an account which can be used to describe the particularly puritan society based on the ideals of Christianity and the European culture. It offers a female perspective of the Native Americans who showed no respect to the other religious groups. The narrator makes serious observation about her captors noting the cultural differences as well as expectations from one another in the society. However, prejudice is evident throughout the text which makes the narratives unreliable in their details besides being written after the event had already happened which means that the narrator had was free to alter the events to create an account that favored her. Nonetheless, the narrative remains factually and historically useful in providing the insights into the tactics used by the Native Americans
Merrell’s article proves the point that the lives of the Native Americans drastically changed just as the Europeans had. In order to survive, the Native Americans and Europeans had to work for the greater good. Throughout the article, these ideas are explained in more detail and uncover that the Indians were put into a new world just as the Europeans were, whether they wanted change or
The men were “...tall of stature, and strength...and the women have handsome limbs, slender arms, and pretty hands…” (Strachey 20). All the way from the individual men who were masculine with “tall [] stature, and strength” to the women who were beautiful, shows the individuals in the society were elite. The society as a whole was very elite and intricate society with “a Monarchial government” gaining land through “inheritance” and “several conquests,” with a type of justice system, where those who “offend [the Powhatan]” are punished (Smith 22 & 23). The Natives were already an intricate society, but when foreigners arrived, they proved to be a dynamic society by adapting to further their civilization.
Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives offers two compelling stories that challenge the notion of cultural identity. Mary Rowlandson’s narrative equated the English family and English culture with a utopian society, while Mary Jemison’s story portrays the English civilization as a dystopian community. Rowlandson and Jemison were taken as captives by the Indians, and their families were killed in the process. Although Jemison was capture by the Indians when she was fifteen years old, she overlooked their brutality and chose not to return to her English home. Unlike Jemison who was captured by the Indians as a child, Rowlandson was taken from her family when she was an adult with three children and a husband.
Political, social, and economical structures were everywhere (Olson & Beal p.194). Being forced from their lands and coerced onto reservations where the Native Americans were under the constant control of whites had to play a huge role in the loss of their cultural identity. They almost had to accept the lesser roles in order to survive. However, in doing so they lost their independence, as well as their sense of personal
Although Native Americans are characterized as both civilized and uncivilized in module one readings, their lifestyles and culture are observed to be civilized more often than not. The separate and distinct duties of men and women (Sigard, 1632) reveal a society that has defined roles and expectations based on gender. There are customs related to courtship (Le Clercq, 1691) that are similar to European cultures. Marriage was a recognized union amongst Native Americans, although not necessarily viewed as a serious, lifelong commitment like the Europeans (Heckewelder, 1819). Related to gender roles in Native American culture, Sigard writes of the Huron people that “Just as the men have their special occupation and understand wherein a man’s duty consists, so also the women and girls keep their place and perform quietly their little tasks and functions of service”.
In all the different tribes, none of the women are seen as less than the men, however in European culture at the time, the women were seen as weak and lesser beings. Gunn Allen tackles this issue using ethos logos and pathos by appealing to the readers through logic, emotion and her personal experiences. With Ethos Gunn Allen makes herself a credible source by mentioning that she is a “half breed American Indian woman. ”(83) making her story worth paying attention to rather than if it were a story by an outsider who truly has nothing to do with the American Indian women.
Science journalist, Charles C. Mann, had successfully achieved his argumentative purpose about the “Coming of Age in the Dawnland.” Mann’s overall purpose of writing this argumentative was to show readers that there’s more to than just being called or being stereotyped as a savage- a cynical being. These beings are stereotyped into being called Indians, or Native Americans (as they are shorthand names), but they would rather be identified by their own tribe name. Charles Mann had talked about only one person in general but others as well without naming them. Mann had talked about an Indian named Tisquantum, but he, himself, does not want to be recognized as one; to be more recognized as the “first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet,”(Mann 24).
