What does it mean to be an American? Without any doubts, throughout centuries, since the foundation of this country, people have asked themselves what it means to be an American. As of today, it is a known fact that immigrants have helped with the development of this nation and discrepancies of what it means to be an American were born throughout the years. Certainly, more than one person has tried to give an exact answer to this question. An example of one of these people, is Jean de Crevecoeur, who wrote an essay on his definition of “what is an American?” If we take a look to his essay, the French farmer describes poetically the lives of people living during his lifetime. He explains how people are able to come to this new country and start their lives all over again. People are able to buy land and sell land without the need of …show more content…
De Crevecoeur devotes his composition mentioning how the new world is the product of all the men working hard for a new life, but he fails to mention that Native people are part of this equation. Native people had lived in these lands for thousands of years and they called this land “home”. They had been hunting, cultivating, raising their children and working hard, to be part of their society and be called an “American” as well, before any European arrived. It is also fair to say that European settlers learned to survive in these lands thanks to the help of native people. When Europeans arrived, they had no clue of what to do in the new world up to a point where they died of starvation and sickness. Europeans settlers learned to survive by observing where to find the food they need. They survived by observing the precautions needed to take and the medicine they had to ingest in order to survive the deathly plagues they had never seen in their