Native American Cultural Values

Native americans were not able to adapt to western customs and integrate themselves into US societies. Although it is true that American Indians had little influence on modern technology and they have their own history and beliefs, their adaptation in modern US society has not flourished as much. In some cases like shown in Source 4, an American Indian woman is seen smoking from a cigarette. This could be evidence of American Indians adapting to the western world, but it is merely a photograph taken for a photographer's album.

Another rich source of misunderstanding between Native Americans and modern society’s cultural analysis is the different attitude of most Native Americans to such concepts as Nature, the environment, and social values,

In Source 3, it is said that they purposely wanted to get rid of all Native American ways of life and draw them towards the East; the way they accomplished this was by publishing a journal and in detail, describing the economic progress and new and improved way of life to get Native Americans to come to the West. The fact that Native Americans have clung to a distinctive philosophy and cultural identity despite continuous attacks from a federal policy that sought for example to turn the Natives from their culture with its extended family structures into nuclear-family based small farmers suggests that this distinctive identity is not some set of colourful aboriginal survivals but instead, something that runs so deep it can’t be

The usual Western way of coping with some concept or ritual that seems 'other' or strange, is to search for an equivalent that will familiarise and anaesthetise the shock that there are other ways to exist and interact. The myth of the “vanishing Indian” is thoroughly brought out in Source 2 of Morgan’s Ancient Society, where the author’s superior, keen tone to the description of Native Americans and how they were all “savages” and were incapable of adapting the concepts of modern American civilization. As a result, Morgan’s thoughts were that Americans would pervade Native American territories, expecting American Indians to fail to subside to their way of life and thus result in war between the two, eventually leading to the decimation of Native