Returning to Zitkala-Sa, we can see how her work strongly contests Turner’s ideas about what it means to be “evolved.” At home in the west, Zitkala-Sa and her family and friends had well-established, respected customs for everything: food collection, meal preparation, hairstyles, fashion, crafting, storytelling, religion, and more. Without recognizing this point we risk falling into the same mindset as Turner, in believing that Indian culture was primitive at best and nonexistent at worst. Conversely, at boarding school, Zitkala-Sa and her fellow Native American peers are forced to learn a new language, cut their hair short, wear “immodest” clothes, and indoctrinate themselves into Christianity, among other things. In Turner’s eyes, this may seem like the natural course of action in the “procession of civilization” (32), but to Zitkala-Sa, these experiences left her feeling like a “mummy,” chained up prior to her “burial” (Zitkala-Sa 97.) She states that it was “inbred in [her] to suffer in silence” at the hands of the “civilizing machine” (96), and remarks that she often “wept in secret, wishing [she] had gone West, to be nourished by [her] mother’s love, instead of remaining …show more content…
Early in his essay, he calls the United States “the land which had no history” before colonists arrived (Turner 31). He even goes as far as to say “Long before the pioneer farmer arrived on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away” (32). Meanwhile, every single line of Zitkala-Sa’s piece refutes the idea that Indian culture did not exist or had “passed away” by the time the colonists arrived. Scenes where Zitkala-Sa is depicted listening to Ikomi stories from her elders, learning how to do beadwork, preparing a meal for an older gentleman, or praying to the Great Spirit all depict customs of a long-standing, thriving Native American
The Lakota, an Indian group of the Great Plains, established their community in the Black Hills in the late eighteenth century (9). This group is an example of an Indian community that got severely oppressed through imperialistic American actions and policy, as the Americans failed to recognize the Lakota’s sovereignty and ownership of the Black Hills. Jeffrey Ostler, author of The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground, shows that the Lakota exemplified the trends and subsequent challenges that Indians faced in America. These challenges included the plurality of groups, a shared colonial experience, dynamic change, external structural forces, and historical agency.
“The Indian presence precipitated the formation of an American identity” (Axtell 992). Ostracized by numerous citizens of the United States today, this quote epitomizes Axtell’s beliefs of the Indians contributing to our society. Unfortunately, Native Americans’ roles in history are often categorized as insignificant or trivial, when in actuality the Indians contributed greatly to Colonial America, in ways the ordinary person would have never deliberated. James Axtell discusses these ways, as well as what Colonial America may have looked like without the Indians’ presence. Throughout his article, his thesis stands clear by his persistence of alteration the Native Americans had on our nation. James Axtell’s bias delightfully enhances his thesis, he provides a copious amount of evidence establishing how Native Americans contributed critically to the Colonial culture, and he considers America as exceptional – largely due to the Native Americans.
In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will
Throughout the course of history there have been numerous accounts regarding Native American and European interaction. From first contact to Indian removal, the interaction was somewhat of a roller coaster ride, leading from times of peace to mini wars and rebellions staged by the Native American tribes. The first part of this essay will briefly discuss the pre-Columbian Indian civilizations in North America and provide simple awareness of their cultures, while the second part of this essay will explore all major Native American contact leading up to, and through, the American Revolution while emphasizing the impact of Spanish, French, and English explorers and colonies on Native American culture and vice versa. The third, and final, part of this essay will explore Native American interaction after the American Revolution with emphasis on westward expansion and the Jacksonian Era leading into Indian removal. Furthermore, this essay will attempt to provide insight into aspects of Native American/European interaction that are often ignored such as: gender relations between European men and Native American women, slavery and captivity of native peoples, trade between Native Americans and European colonists, and the effects of religion on Native American tribes.
In American Indian life, they believe their life is interconnected with the world, nature, and other people. The idea of a peoplehood matrix runs deep in Indian culture, in this essay the Cherokee, which is the holistic view of sacred history, language, ceremony, and homeland together. This holistic model shapes the life of the American Indians and how their sense of being and relationship to their history is strong and extremely valuable to them. This essay will try to explain how each aspect of the peoplehood matrix is important and interconnected to each other and the life of the Native Americans.
The American desire to culturally assimilate Native American people into establishing American customs went down in history during the 1700s. Famous author Zitkala-Sa, tells her brave experience of Americanization as a child through a series of stories in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” Zitkala-Sa, described her journey into an American missionary where they cleansed her of her identity. In “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-Sa uses imagery in order to convey the cruel nature of early American cultural transformation among Indian individuals.
I think the purpose of Zitkala-Ša’s writing is to show how she felt experiencing a new place away from her family and experiencing a new culture. Zitkala-Ša’s village seems that it has its own traditions and culture. Zitkala-Ša’s did not know any of the white pale face cultures and it shocked her and surprised her. For example, when she first arrived and a rosy-cheeked paleface women caught her (carried her), Zitkala-Ša’s was “frightened and insulted by such trifling.” She wanted to be put down and to stand on her feet. Other children in today culture always like to be held and carried. However, the way she explained how her mother never made a playing of her wee daughter, shows us how her culture doesn't like to get close or physical with
The Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida, they inherited all of these lands from their ancestors who cultivated for generations. According to Elias Boudinot the natives considered themselves to be just as equal as the Whites, he states, “What is an Indian? Is he not formed of the same materials with yourself?” (Boudinot, 1826) The natives saw themselves to be no different from the Whites, in fact they cared for one another as a whole, they lived in kinships, where there was never an Indian left alone without a family. They followed a society based off of the concept of interdependence, they had in their mind that everything is dependent of something. The Indians were very advanced, and were able to prosper in their society, although the Whites believed otherwise, and believed that the natives were uncivilized.
When the first colonists landed in the territories of the new world, they encountered a people and a culture that no European before them had ever seen. As the first of the settlers attempted to survive in a truly foreign part of the world, their written accounts would soon become popular with those curious of this “new” world, and those who already lived and survived in this seemingly inhospitable environment, Native American Indian. Through these personal accounts, the Native Indian soon became cemented in the American narrative, playing an important role in much of the literature of the era. As one would expect though, the representation of the Native Americans and their relationship with European Americans varies in the written works of the people of the time, with the defining difference in these works being the motives behind the writing. These differences and similarities can be seen in two similar works from two rather different authors, John Smith, and Mary Rowlandson.
In our society, it is inferred that conforming to the masses is the American way. Whereas, in a Native American culture, where everything is connected, one would think that conformity would be encouraged and individuality would be frowned upon. Yet, we see in the stories of Zitkala-Sa the importance of individuality being taught to her growing up, and her attempts as a child, as well as an adult, to rebel against anything that would oppose it. We see her fight and struggle to hold on to her individuality, despite, as a child being forced to become Americanized. Through her stories, Zitkala Sa demonstrates to us that freedom, culture, and Faith are fundamentally interwoven into our identity, each one speaks to the intrinsic design of a
Freedoms taken away from her in the hope for education and opportunities. Is it worth it? Is it worth it to give up freedoms, maybe a little bit of ourselves? Do we endure these difficulties now to then better ourselves in the future? I’m sure that’s something Zitkala-Sa thought about. She wanted to be educated like the “paleface” Maybe she thought to be like the “paleface” was to be American. For Zitkala-Sa the ending is a bitter-sweet moment. “There were two prizes given, that night, and one of them was mine! The little taste of victory did not satisfy a hunger in my heart. In my mind I saw my mother far away on the Western plains, and she was holding a charge against me.”
Zitkala-Sa’s The School Days of an Indian Girl is an autobiography that was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1901. The autobiography in detail describes her experience in her community, the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota as a child and later her journey ravelling with European-American missionaries to attend a Quaker Missionary School that teaches speaking, reading and writing in English. Upon her arrival at the missionary led school, Sa felt ostracized, fearful, and terrified of every little adjustment or ordeal that appeared to be foreign or unknown to her based upon her cultural identity and heritage. Her trauma often led to many nights where she would sob and cry herself to sleep. Her daunting experiences of having her heritage ripped away ensued when Sa caught word that her “long and heavy” hair was to be cut (314). From the teachings from her Mother, Sa understood that “only the unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy” (314). She cried and shook her head with anguish but as her thick braids were cut she then “lost her spirit” (315).
“My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.,” Chief Seattle Speech of 1854. The culture of the Native American people has been deteriorating ever since the Europeans arrived in the Americas. The impactful and immense loss of lifestyle that they faced is one that can never be recovered, what the United States has given them are generations of trauma and blatant suffering. However, the U.S. did not stop there, a multitude of cultures have been broken to help keep America pure. For instance, one of the most significant cultures that have been dismantled by the U.S. other than the Natives and their music were the languages and music of the African slaves. The apparent likeness of these two cultures in the ways in which their deconstruction impacted them is in more of an abundance, such as the dominating influence of the Christian religion and the gravely vital role of maintaining what little heritage they could through language. In contrast to this, the two groups had an opposing difference pertaining to how the Natives and slaves tried to compensate the immense loss of their culture through the generations.
Popular culture has shaped our understanding and perception of Native American culture. From Disney to literature has given the picture of the “blood thirsty savage” of the beginning colonialism in the new world to the “Noble Savage,” a trait painted by non-native the West (Landsman and Lewis 184) and this has influenced many non native perceptions. What many outsiders do not see is the struggle Native American have on day to day bases. Each generation of Native American is on a struggle to keep their traditions alive, but to function in school and ultimately graduate.
In Jeannette Armstrong’s poem, History Lesson, she writes in perspective of Indigenous people reacting to the first encounters with European settlers. Historically, Indigenous people did not have a positive encounter with the first settlers due to their clash of beliefs and values of how communities and structures should run. Instead, they had many disagreements which caused the partial destruction of their whole culture. It is clear that Armstrong uses the theme of history to portray the destruction that the first European settlers had on the Indigenous way of life through various points in history. Armstrong imbeds the theme of history throughout her poem to further emphasize her stance on the assimilation of the Indigenous people with the restricting and destructive effects the early settlers had on them throughout history.