Native Americans: An Open Mind

Being open minded is the key to not ending up betraying the knowledge in coming to know about American Indian peoples in Minnesota. It is because only through open minded that we can explore the new knowledge without a preconceived idea or prejudice and not being offended. Being open minded consists of two main components in this setting: acknowledge and accept with respect. These are our obligations and responsibilities for the knowledge exposed to us.

First of all, we have to acknowledge, instead of ignoring, American Indians’ histories and the injustice that they faced and are facing. We should stop allowing ourselves to repeat the same mistakes again. Thinking about the genocides, defined by Merriam-Webster as the “deliberate and systematic

Yet, for years and years that the Federal Government was trying to absorb the American Indian into the mainstream culture of society. In assimilating Indians into the white culture, adults were forced to become farmer and boarding schools were formed. The schools killed the culture and language by removing the children from parental contacts (Treur 31). Anton Treuer describes that “culture loss goes hand in hand with language loss and language is a critical attribute of sovereignty” (75). Some of the traditions are slowly disappearing nowadays because ceremonies such as powwow need language to be performed. Accepting a culture means to allow oneself to be exposed to the culture and to understand the reasons behind seemingly weird practices of others. For example, Oona from the Night Flying Woman became a dreamer after picking up the charcoal, went into a forest and dreamed many dreams (Broker 51). It may sound absurd for one to be claimed to be a Dreamer for those that do not accept the culture, but the Indians believe that some people are gifted, like Oona. Oneroad and Skinner also mentions that “The Grass Dance and Omaha Dance are being treated by the Euro-American as an unreasonably lavish exchange of gifts, encouraged the neglect of individual crops and farms, and was detrimental to accumulation of individual capital and thereby subversive of self-sufficiency” (21). In addition to accepting, we are obligated to

For instance, nearly a year after the Dakota uprising, a bill named the Dakota Expulsion act was legislated (http://www.usdakotawar.org/timeline). The intention of the bill was to make being Dakota in Minnesota illegal and to this day it has not been removed. Even though the bill is not enforced today, it displays a lack of remorse on the part of the government for not removing what destructed the Dakota way in Minnesota and that should have never happened. Additionally, the state and federal government should minimize their jurisdiction in indian reservations due to the confusion and injustices that occur. In an analysis of The Road House by Louise Erdrich, a novel about a case of sexual assault that occurs on a reservation, doctoral student in American Studies(https://apps.cla.umn.edu/directory/profiles/corne212), Akikwe Cornell, state's “[native peoples are inherent sovereign nations and as political entities each possesses the right to self-government”( moodle).However, laws like the major crime act , that gave federal jurisdiction for crimes like arson, murder, rape, burglary, and three other crimes of that nature, and public law 280, that shifted power from the federal to the state level, reduce the capacity for Natives to self govern themselves. This effects of the reduction results in confusion can be seen with the staggering statistic of 67% of sexual assault