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Essays on Indian culture
Indian culture and western culture
Indian culture and western culture
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Over the past week we have seen how Native Americans face the never-ending barrage of racial stereotypes and misconceptions. As well we have seen their cultures and traditions used and misinterpreted by people outside of their culture in an attempt to make a profit from these unique practices. Native Americans have been persecuted ever since White men stepped on to their land. As we will see in this paper Native Americans have been misconstrued as a savage group of feather wearing and horse riding Indians. In the end this paper will look into how Native American culture and identity have been taken advantage of by whites and transformed the many different tribes and their uniqueness into one large group full of many different stereotypes. It is through the false replication of art and artifacts as well as how Indians have been portrayed in …show more content…
Museums are the most common place where these images can be seen, but sometimes they do not reflect the truth behind the events being displayed. Once again non-native people are exploiting the history and traditions of Native Americans in the hopes of making a profit off of their trials and tribulations. “Native American art has long been mined as a resource by non-native artists and for commercial enterprises, just as Native American land was mined as the first act of dispossession and appropriation” (Berman 392). Again these non-native artists don’t fully understand the history of how an event took place and instead are creating the art in a way that will help better sell their piece. This damages the traditions and cultures of Native Americans as these events and people are being portrayed in a manner that is false and deceiving. This artwork is then sold on a global scale and artists who have no understanding of the truth behind and event being recreated are falsely portraying
In the text “Seeing Red: American Indian Women Speaking about their Religious and Cultural Perspectives” by Inés Talamantez, the author discusses the role of ceremonies and ancestral spirituality in various Native American cultures, and elaborates on the injustices native women face because of their oppressors.
Lliu, K., and H. Zhang. "Self- and Counter-Representations of Native Americans: Stereotypical Images of and New Images by Native Americans in Popular Media." Ebscohost. University of Arkansas, n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2014
The stereotype of Native Americans has been concocted by long history. As any stereotype constructed by physical appearance, the early Europeans settlers were no different and utilized this method. Strangers to the New World, they realized the land was not uninhabited. The Native Americans were a strange people that didn't dress like them, didn't speak like them, and didn't believe like them. So they scribed what they observed. They observed a primitive people with an unorthodox religion and way of life. These observations made the transatlantic waves. Not knowingly, the early settlers had transmitted the earliest cases of stereotyped Native Americans to the masses. This perpetuated t...
For Americans moving west in the 1820's and 30's there was little firsthand knowledge of what the frontier would be like when they arrived. There was a lot of presumption about the Indians. Many felt, through the stories they heard and read, that they had sufficient information to know what the Indians would truly be like and how to respond to them. Unfortunately, as is described in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, white settlers stereotyped the Native Americans as savage, heartless beasts.
There were many stereotypes that were shown in this book but the two that stuck out to me the most was the way they tried to show that almost every native American except Juniors grandmother was an alcoholic on the reservation. He saw that his friend and his mother were always walking around with bruises and knew that they were from his dad because he drank a lot and beat them. This can be seen as harmful in the fact that after reading this book you can just take this view into the reservation life as all there is and assume that all the Native Americans are raging alcoholics and wife beats and lazy drunks. Most people won’t see it that way because we as a species are smarter than that hopefully. The positive take on this that if you read this you might see that drinking is a problem on some reservations and maybe try to help in some way by giving a donation to a tribe that sticks out to you and to their recovery programs because for this to get done you need time, money and participation.
Native Americans, sometimes referred to as American Indians, have continually faced hardships. Native Americans history is Often overlooked and misunderstood which can lead to stereotyping or discrimination They have fought for many years to be accepted and given their rights to continuities practicing the beliefs that were practiced long before the Europeans came upon the Americas long ago. Throughout history, Native Americans have been presented with many obstacles and even now they continue to fight to over these hardships. hey still are continuing to fight to overcome their hardships.
When most people think of "Indians," they think of the common stereotyped of the wild, yelling, half-naked "savages" seen on the television movies. With more modern movies like Dances with Wolves and some of the documentaries like How the West was Lost, some of these attitudes have changed. But the American public as a whole is still very ignorant of what it means to be a Native American-today, or historically.
For many years, Native Americans have faced horrible social and political mistreatment and discrimination from white Americans. Many Native Americans still deal with discrimination in the United States today. This section of the paper will describe and explain the general history involving the Native American reservations.
In The White Man’s Indian, Robert Berkhoffer analyzes how Native Americans have maintained a negative stereotype because of Whites. As a matter of fact, this book examines the evolution of Native Americans throughout American history by explaining the origin of the Indian stereotype, the change from religious justification to scientific racism to a modern anthropological viewpoint of Native Americans, the White portrayal of Native Americans through art, and the policies enacted to keep Native Americans as Whites perceive them to be. In the hope that Native Americans will be able to overcome how Whites have portrayed them, Berkhoffer is presenting
The encounter of early explorers with the people of the Americas would ultimately set in motion the destruction of long existing Native American life and culture. Engrained into the minds of the Europeans were prejudiced images and stereotypes of the Native Americans, which we struggle still today to eradica...
For example, in the local school, stereotypes such as the image of the ‘wild man’ are consolidated by claiming that there was cannibalism among the indigenous people of the northwest coast (Soper-Jones 2009, 20; Robinson 2010, 68f.). Moreover, native people are still considered to be second-class citizens, which is pointed out by Lisamarie’s aunt Trudy, when she has been harassed by some white guys in a car: “[Y]ou’re a mouthy Indian, and everyone thinks we’re born sluts. Those guys would have said you were asking for it and got off scot-free”
“ "It’s easier to pathologize people than it is to think critically," says Elm, now a PhD student at the University of Washington who studies how the health of Native Americans is affected by stress and generations of traumatic experience” (Szalavitz, M.). This specific information is exactly why people refer to Native Americans by being raging alcohols, because it’s much easier to judge by the action they are doing rather than by who that person is. Sure there will always be that one group of people who will criticize no matter what you do, but in today’s day, every living Native in the United States has been put into a category known has alcohols, so when someone does speak of a native they automatically think of their stereotype image of
Contemporary artists of Native American descent do not recoil from these stereotypes. In contrast, they draw upon these characterizations and combine it with their first hand experience to convey a truly significant piece of historical and artistic perspective. The contemporary artist’s versions are not as theatrical in appearance as the mainstream depiction.
The stereotyping of Native Americans has cemented them in the historical context disabling their political power within the 20th and 21st century. Stereotypes such as the vicious savage or noble savage perpetuated the ideas that Native Americans were not civilized based on their religious practices, habitual practices, and language, thus effectively harming their fight for civil liberties regarding such court cases as Porter v. Hall and Opsahl v. Johnson. In regards to modern colonial discourse, the current stereotyping of Native Americans through textbooks, mascotting, media, and news outlets is hurting the awareness of reservation conditions, in particular Pine Ridge Reservation. Through the constant stereotyping of Native Americans as either the degenerate welfare-earning loser or wealthy casino owner that pervade through news outlets, along with
Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.