Stereotypes In The Earth Shall Weep By James Wilson

History is what we learn in school about the past, about people’s culture, their way of life, their beliefs, their fight and their dreams. However, history is not an absolute truth. In fact, every story has more than one version. The History of the native American in the United States still one of the most controversial subjects in history, not only because of all the ambiguity filled in the story, but also and more importantly because the it was written by only one side. Indeed, it was written by the winners, the invaders, and the dominants. In the prologue of his book, The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson tries to inspect and explain the reality of Native American today by analyzing the stereotypes and the prejudice they faced through since the beginning in the United States.

Even though it has a more sympathetic connotation, it feeds the same image of the uncivilized native American, but in a soft way. The native man is represented as the “noble savage”, a wild man who is related to nature, and animals. He is not portrayed as a bad man, but he is just not good enough and not compatible to the American advanced and civilized world. He doesn’t belong to this modern life. He is from the past, and he must stay there. To sustain this idea of the wild man who doesn’t belong to this modern time, an image of a “vanishing” native American image starts to appear in the media. He is vanished because he has no place in this modern American word and he is uncappable to coexist with his advanced civilized peer, the white American. He disappears for no reason, and no clue, and if he didn’t vanish, he melts to become an American, in the white man way. These romanticized portrayals of Native Americans have consolidated stereotypes, what have created prejudice and social