Louise Erdrich Influence On Native American Culture

Junípero Serra has been decapitated, defaced, and became a saint all within a month’s time. He is surrounded by controversy. Many celebrated for he was the first Latino to become canonized. Rubén Mendoza of California State University of Monterey Bay explains, “Father Serra was not only a man of his time, he was a man ahead of his time in his advocacy for native people on the frontier.” However, Valentin Lopez who is the chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band explains that “Serra’s and the Church’s failure to learn form the teaching of Christ or from the life of St. Francis resulted in the complete extinction of many, many California tribes and great devastation for many others.”

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

In her book Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies, Aleiss discusses the history of the portrayal Native Americans in American films. Aleiss shows that Native Americans have not always been portrayed negatively or stereotypically in films, but instead they have been displayed in more complicated ways that have changed over the years. By explaining how the portrayal of Native Americans in film has changed over time, Aleiss provides a way to think about how Native Americans are being represented in films today.

First, because my research was focused on understanding the portrayal of Native Americans, it was important to get the perspective from Native Americans themselves. The opinions of a sample of Native students were collected as a way to begin answering these questions and to provide a basis for further research. The population for this research was ten native students recruited from the Speel-Ya program and by email invitation at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande. I introduced myself to them at one of the Speel-Ya meetings. To protect their identities, I decided to give them pseudonyms. Although I aimed to get the perspectives of ten students, only four were willing to participate or respond to my questions. Persons consulted are as follows:

Respect is a big part of our lives still. Although the presence of many of the virtuous Native American values is very meager today, this one still exists as a miniscule glimmer across our lives. One must have respect for others to first have respect for themselves. You make a choice of how people will see you: as a incorrigible person, or as a respectful person. People will usually treat you accordingly.

Native Americans have many values, and to choose just one that is the most important is hard to do. The one that stands out as the most important is family, this played a huge role in the culture of the Native Americans. Discrimination has affected many kinds for many years, we have to learn from the history and the stories of Native Americans. We build common ground to connect with people through life, learning from Native American’s values.

At this time, the Indian Termination policy had just ended, ceasing the forced assimilation of Indians into American society and customs. In addition to this, during the Termination period, two-million five hundred-thousand acres of trust land was removed from protected status, and sold to non-natives, leaving Native Americans without land and connections to their tribes. Due to this, the issue of Native American land became prevalent in America, but an authentic voice was still missing for the Native American community. In this, Momaday became that voice, and became a teacher to a society ignorant of other’s customs and traditions. With this, the audience of the work became the people of America who knew little about the people assimilated into their society. Because of this work, Momaday spread the important aspects of the Native American culture, and worked to preserve the Kiowa history by sharing the importance of protecting culture plus commemorating

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).

“....I believe in immersing the Indian in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”, said Richard Henry Pratt. Richard Pratt founded the United States’ first indian boarding school. Carlisle Indian Industrial School was established in the year of 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Indian Boarding Schools were created to decimate traditional indian culture, and replace it with white, american culture. There were a plethora of indian boarding schools established in the United States. For instance, Concho Indian Boarding School in Concho,Oklahoma , Sante Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or or Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada. These schools spanned all over the United States. In these schools, Native American children, taken from their homes and families, were taught mathematics and english, as well as trivial subjects such as farming and sewing. These schools served as a way to eliminate the culture of Native Americans.

Ever since the widespread colonization of the Americas in the 16th century, popular perception of the diverse Native American culture by the ‘civilized’ world has changed dramatically, from one of mutual understanding between tribes and a begrudging respect from the first settlers of the New World, to a modern culture where finding a ceremonial headdress in a halloween store is not so rare an occurrence.

“Are you Spanish? Are you Mexican?” Not-so-close friends ask me. “…No,” I reply. Thinking in my head, “Really? Are people this clueless about the first people in America?” I am not one of these other brown-skinned peoples living in New Mexico. I am not a part of the majority-minority of this state. Rather, my culture, my relatives, my people are the minority of the country. I am Navajo.

Interviews with a selected group of Native American women who are members of the federally recognized tribe of the Crow Tribe of Montana, will ask what it means for them to grow up on the reservation as well as their experiences there that led them to choose to raise their own children off the reservations. My study will look at what challenges they are facing as women and as mothers now that they live apart from their tribal community. If their accounts are consistent with what the literature reports of not having enough opportunities to better themselves and that their children suffer from dilemmas regarding their cultural identity, then this study submits itself to the consideration of government and non-government organizations to help them achieve a better quality of

“Native American food - North America - pemmican and succotash – Quatr.Us Study Guides.” Quatr.us Study Guides, 27 Dec. 2017, quatr.us/nativeamerican/native-american-food-north-america.htm.

Native Americans have suffered a lot because of something that the human being should have learnt after all this past experience. They have been robbed of their own land which they truly loved and which they learnt so much from.

One of the most fundamental needs a person must obtain is a sense of identity. In an American Indian context, many factors are relevant when considering their identity. For them, identity can exist in many forms and varies from small traits to powerful ethnic behaviors and practices. However, Native Americans are not merely defined by self-determination but by federal, state, and tribal laws. The dignity of Native Americans’ identity has long been subjected to controversy because of how it is socially and politically constructed.