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Native american history essay
Native american history essay
Native american history essay
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Have you ever had a family and a bright future in one place and were forced to move the place where you have lived for most and or all of your life? Well the Native Americans have or “The First Americans.” North America had people living in it long before the first explorers and settlers arrived. Unfortunately, they were pushed off of their land to make way for white settlers, who felt they had the right to own the land. In my essay I will be explaining how and if the way we treat the Native Americans over time has changed.
Native American culture Between the Five Native American cultures, most definitely the most viable one was the Incas. They engaged in agriculture, bringing water down from the Andes by aqueducts which represented a well developed architecture and math knowledge. The Incas also had the cities connected by good roads; they were organized. Also, they lived peacefully and this is another thing that can make them a more viable society, when you don’t fight the enemy but peacefully absorbed them with promises prosperity and peace you get to know other culture, other ways of architecture and learn a lot more.
Contacts between the Native Americans and the Europeans brought changes to the American Indian societies through three ways. First, since the Spaniards established their settlements by taking over American Indians land, they lived with the Native Americans that survived during the war. As a result, this caused a formation of many different mixed societies. For instance, when the Taino women began to marry Spanish men, they produced a mixed society called the mestizos. After a generation, the Tainos were evolved into another group, and they were no longer distinct as a people or group.
The question is; should cultural treasures should be returned to their countries of origin? The answer is yes. For example; Native American cultural, spiritual sites like the Black hills and Mato Paha (bear butte) was taken by the europeans that travelled here and took their land also. These cultural landmarks had cultural, and religious association for the area from which were taken from the government and settlers. The sites like: Mato Tipila (Devils tower), Hinhan Kaga (Harney Peak), Mato Paha (Bear Butte), and He Sapa (Black Hills) were all once a sacred site for all native tribes for religious reasons, but the europeans came and took their sacred sites, their land, and their animals, commonly the buffalo.
In the history of the formation of the world, human beings walked the planet in search for food, safety and survival. There has always been a history of a group dominantly enforcing their beliefs and cultures on other inferior groups in the effort of “converting” them to their religion and culture. The efforts of the dominant group have always led to the oppression and subjugation of the other group. The European-Indian interaction was no different. Before the arrival of the whites, the Native Americans lived a ritualistic and simple way of life.
As well as knowing the exact events that led to the Native American downfall, it is important to know to what extent the events have damaged how Native Americans lived. Some actions might be more crucial to justifying Native communities than others. The biggest way the United States government has damaged the native way of life is by stealing their land through means of tricking them and unfair treaties. Returning land back to native peoples would bring a great amount of justice back to the Native community. In addition to returning stolen land, repaying tribes with promised money and goods they never received during treaties would help the tribes heal from the unethical ways of the government.
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”.
Differences of Problems Faced by Native American Groups Both northeastern Native Americans and southwest Native Americans have their own problems facing the growing colonist population. Due to less government control in the Southwest, the difficulty to obtain resources, and a greater military opposition, the southwest Native Americans have a harder time facing the new settlers than their counterpart in the north. One problem for the Native Americans in the Southwest, such as the Apache and the O’odham, was less government control over the settlers of the region. This allowed settlers to take advantage of and rule this part of the nation as they wanted to.
The Native American Experience Before the Europeans arrived, Native Americans had 300 different cultures and 200 different spoken languages but all had storytelling in common. Natives having no written language caused the trust of group’s history, legends, and myths by memory from generations known as oral traditions. Native American oral literature is creation stories, legendary histories tracing the migration of people or the deed of great leaders, fairy tales, lyrics, chants, children’s songs, healing songs, and dream visions. European diseases caused some majorities of Native Americans groups to die, but the surviving carried on the oral literature of their diverse cultures.
It is believed that the ancestors of the modern Native Americans came over from Asia to what is now known as Alaska more than 12,000 years ago. The Native Americans were named “Indians” by Christopher Columbus around the year 1492. Columbus was sailing the Atlantic Ocean to India, when he reached an island near Florida he thought he reached the coast of India and named the people he met there Indians.
Sherman Alexie’s Literary Works as Native American Social Realistic Senior Lecturer (Full-time), Department of English, IBAIS University, Bangladesh Research Associate (Part-time), Uttara University, Bangladesh E-mail:amir.hossain.16578@gmail.com/ amir.ju09@yahoo.com This paper aims to look at the social realistic issues in the context of Sherman Alexie’s literary works.
Native Americans, as we all know, where the first to be on the United States when Christopher Columbus had sailed to it but had declared it his land. Through the wave of wars, moving of the whites from England to the States, and unnecessary violence, the Native Americans population had begun to decrease when they first started to move to other parts of the land to find their new home so that the whites would be able to live comfortably without them around.
Native Americans were the first people in North America. They had many tribes on every region. They also had different lifestyles depending on where they settled. The region most fitted for me is the Great Plains. The Great Plains have vast grasslands, abundant herds of buffalo, mountains, rivers, and streams which seems like a great place to live, hence the name.
Culture shock is a feeling insecurity, confusion, and anxiety that a person experience when they are unfamiliarity with a different culture customs, belief, values, language, and norms. When experience culture stock the person we feel culture shock because the new culture has different norms from our own; which these new norms we don’t know how to act appropriately in our new environment and the people in our new environment act differently than what we are used to. Also for people who have fantasy about a country will feel unhappy and confused if those fantasy didn’t turn out as they had thought it would. When cultural shock happening same people might becoming homesick, starting to withdrawal or spending time with people who are the same
The native american religion combined elements of Christianity with Native beliefs. It rejected white-American culture, which made it difficult to control the “tribes” by the United States. Many of these groups had their own beliefs though many of them were similar in the major aspects. At the time of Europe contact, all but the simplest indigenous cultures in North America developed religious systems that included “cosmologies”, which explains how those societies had come into being. The members of most tribes believed in the immortality of the human soul and an afterlife, the main feature of which was the abundance of every good thing that made earthly life secure and pleasant.