Oconaluftee Indian Analysis

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.”

A person’s culture is their way of life. From a young age, we learn to act within the norms of our culture and to be truly ethnocentric. What if one day someone came into your life and told you everything you were doing your entire life was wrong and stupid? Brian Moore’s Black Robe, tells the story of Laforgue, a Jesuit priest from 17th Century Québec who travels to an unfamiliar land called New France. Laforgue’s goal is to convert Algonquin Native Americans into God fearing Christians. Laforgue faces many cultural misunderstandings with the Natives along his journey; he finds the most difficulties understanding the native’s concept of death, why they value dreams, and overcoming ethnocentrism.

Deloria pleads, “Not even Indians can relate themselves to this type of creature who, to the anthropologists, is the ‘real’ Indian […]” (Dennison, 8). It is easy to ignore how much these misconceptions limit the people subject to them. These harmful misconstructions are seen everyday, in settings like sports, particularly the football team the Washington Redskins. Finally we see a major figure, in this case, FedEx, publicly reject the identity. This is a step towards unlocking American Indian potential, which affects the United States in just as many ways. Like the mineral estate at the time, Osage Nation’s casinos are a huge source of revenue for

The usual Western way of coping with some concept or ritual that seems 'other' or strange, is to search for an equivalent that will familiarise and anaesthetise the shock that there are other ways to exist and interact. The myth of the “vanishing Indian” is thoroughly brought out in Source 2 of Morgan’s Ancient Society, where the author’s superior, keen tone to the description of Native Americans and how they were all “savages” and were incapable of adapting the concepts of modern American civilization. As a result, Morgan’s thoughts were that Americans would pervade Native American territories, expecting American Indians to fail to subside to their way of life and thus result in war between the two, eventually leading to the decimation of Native

Throughout history, there have been many literary studies that focused on the culture and traditions of Native Americans. Native writers have worked painstakingly on tribal histories, and their works have made us realize that we have not learned the full story of the Native American tribes. Deborah Miranda has written a collective tribal memoir, “Bad Indians”, drawing on ancestral memory that revealed aspects of an indigenous worldview and contributed to update our understanding of the mission system, settler colonialism and histories of American Indians about how they underwent cruel violence and exploitation. Her memoir successfully addressed past grievances of colonialism and also recognized and honored indigenous knowledge and identity.

The film, Reel Injun reveals a distortion of the way Hollywood sees Native American life through comedy and the real way Native Americans live which changes according to the current times. Neil Diamond sets out on a journey across America to figure out where the incorrect image of Natives arose from, all signs pointing towards Hollywood. Dozens of films recreate the way Americans believe Natives live as savages and wear costumes and decorated headpieces with feathers, but Hollywood does not show the true spiritual side and the meaning of why they live the way they do as true to their own culture and assimilated to the American culture as well. US history negatively affects Native American live which lead to the image of Natives to be clouded by imagination through film, changed the way Natives viewed themselves and expect to live, and misshaped the view we now have for Natives.

What defines a person? Is one of the most basic anthropological questions within the discipline, with the definitions that people have for other people and categories that we have succumb to. This question is loaded and difficult to answer. Unfortunately, indigenous people experience this categorizing plight more than any other racial group in North America and around the world. Furthermore, it has impacted their wellbeing and stripped them of their outward identity. There has always been a romanticized idea of Native Americans, Americans identify Indians as feather wearing, horse riding, buffalo chasing, and spiritual dancing individuals. The truth about who they really are is lost in fiction and westerns, therefore it comes as no surprise

Horace Miner, a American Anthropologist wrote an academic essay titled “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” In this article Miner described some of the bizarre rituals and practices of the “Nacirema” which the reader comes to find out that he is talking about North Americans. The way Miner goes into detail about how these people live makes them seem foreign. Thus making the norm for an American lifestyle seem odd because the certain type of lingo Miner uses to make this “tribe” more exotic then the actually are. His point in doing this is to show the reader how obnoxious anthropologist can be when they are explain a different culture. As a western civilization we are guilty of making other cultures seem strange and unrelatable by describing their culture in an exuberant way. However, Miner does an excellent job at executing the description of the “Nacirema” as foreign individuals with him being a American himself. This essay is told from an

Wilderness as a settler-colonial construct that embodies prejudice--racism and sexism--and that continues to shape and engrave settler-colonial ideologies in our society’s mindset, it should be questioned as to how it has been so powerful a cultural enterprise. Stories are what empower cultural persistence and cultural identity. In particular, the United States has implemented the use of story to shape and construct its cultural ideologies and to marginalize and disempower women and Indigenous people so that white men can assume a position of supremacy. Within these stories, the heroes are often depicted as innocent--similar to anti-conquest in which the colonizer naturalizes his own presence while establishing his power over native peoples

The Iroquois creation story is a renowned Native American myth written by a Tuscarora historian, David Cusick. He is also the author of David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, which is known to be the first Indian-written history printed in the English language (Radus). The Iroquois creation myth exists in twenty-five other versions. It describes how the world was created from the Native American perspective. It begins with a sky woman who falls down into the dark world. She is pregnant with twins. Sky woman lands on a turtles back, which ends up growing and becomes a part of island with time. The sky woman gives birth to twin boys, the good mind, and the bad mind. She dies when the bad mind decides to come out of her

Once European men stepped foot onto what is now known as North America, the lives of the Native Americans were forever changed. The Indians suffered centuries of torment and ridicule from the settlers in America. Despite the reservations made for the Natives, there are still cultural issues occurring within America. In Sherman Alexie’s, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the tragic lives of Native Americans in modern society are depicted in a collection of short stories taking place in the Spokane Reservation in Washington state. Throughout the collection, a prominent and reoccurring melancholic theme of racism against Native Americans and their struggle to cope with such behavior from their counterpart in this modern day and age is shown.

When we think of the American West, we always envision a land of rugged mountains and vast prairie, on which cowboys ride on horseback and chase after the Indians. This is the definition of the American West as presented on big screens in cinema, where most Americans’ perception of the myth of the American West comes from.

The United States of America is a land of freedom, a land of equality, and opportunity. We value independence and should look to exercise this in every form, as a nation. We must stay united and show respect to one another. This means we should not disregard ones ' ethnicity and culture, and use names in which are offensive towards their culture, in order to promote any sort of activity. This is aimed mainly at sports teams that carry racially inappropriate names. Couple teams that carry names that are very offensive to the natives are the Atlanta Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, Cleveland Indians, Kansas City Chiefs, and arguably the most popular of them all, the Washington Redskins. These teams carrying such names bring offense to all the native

The speech that was read by Chief Red Jacket to defend the religious beliefs of his people is a powerful piece of literature that is underrated. The speech describes the feelings that were caused by the religious intolerance from the Americans. Currently, the United States have started to appreciate the impacts of the Native Americans and other minorities in history. However, a piece of history that has been quite hidden is the religious intolerance of Native Americans. Chief Red Jacket utilizes repetition, pathos, and rhetorical questions to convince the Americans to tolerate the religion of the Native Americans.

Science journalist, Charles C. Mann, had successfully achieved his argumentative purpose about the “Coming of Age in the Dawnland.” Mann’s overall purpose of writing this argumentative was to show readers that there’s more to than just being called or being stereotyped as a savage- a cynical being. These beings are stereotyped into being called Indians, or Native Americans (as they are shorthand names), but they would rather be identified by their own tribe name.