Native American Identity Essay

American identity is unique, there is no other country in the world that can claim the same identity that Americans’ possess. An Identity that developed from the early colonization of America through until the middle of the eighteenth century. Since I was born and raised in Canada, it is easy for me to recognize American unique identity that exist even today. To answer the question, how did the process of colonization create an American identity in the middle of the eighteenth century? The answer is in the American unique cultural, religious, and social identity, their military fighting styles, and their commerce or economy. To start, American identity is linked to the term often cited, America is a “melting pot” a blending of cultures

Native Americans culture became the first experience that influenced the early settlers. Native Americans introduced new food sources, maze and tomatoes, and the soon to be the cash-crop of tobacco to the early settlers, and their making of Wampum’s, and the trade of furs. In addition, the tradition of thanksgiving came from the early Pilgrims and Native American sharing of food at the end of the harvest or how the Native Americans showed the Pilgrims could survive the harsh winters on North American by storing food and seeds for the following year’s harvest. The African slaves’ music and dance helped to identify their African culture. “In 1774 Nicholas Cresswell, a British visitor, described slave celebration in Charles county, Maryland. On Sundays, he wrote, the blacks “generally meet together and amuse themselves with Dancing to the Banjo. This musical instrument … is made of a Guard something in the imitation of a Guitar, with only four strings.” “Their Poetry,” Cresswell reported, “is like the music – Rude and uncultivated. Their Dancing is most violent exercise, but so irregular and grotesque. I am not able to describe it.” Cresswell’s reaction to the dancing suggest that it contained African rhythms unknown in European dance. If the form was African, it was placed in and American context: the slave songs

In order to understand how societies identify with American identity, we have to understand how two societies developed up to the mid-eighteenth century. To start, we have to discuss Native Americans’ who were considered “warrior nations or tribes,” but when you look at how women of the tribe were treated as compared to European women, you can see a significant difference. Indian women “lived in matriarchal societies (their husbands came to live with their wives and their wives ' extended family), they had the right to divorce their husbands, and they controlled the source of most of the food (corn and other garden-grown produce) eaten by the family. For Indian women, their tribal status, both age and relational, played a large part in the level of oppression with which they were bound. Older Indian women usually served as clan mothers, advisors to the sachems or chiefs, and very few Indian leaders would take action without considering the advice of the tribal matriarchs.” In contrast, “European women were moderately oppressed for their time, in that they were expected to be reliant on a male in their life (father for maidens and husbands for married women) for shelter and security, they spent the majority of their time in domestic or farm chores with limited work outside the home, and their financial affairs were tied to the same men that provided them their shelter. Like Indian women, they were also able to