Stereotypes Native Americans

“ "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

Stereotype means, “A widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing”, as given by defining terms at Google.com. So then what does a Native American Stereotype look like? This term was given to Native Americans by directly saying that each and every one of them were raging alcoholics, or were prone to become one. Well certainly this is all false, because not all of one race can be prone to one specific doing just because of the cause of another. But certainly this is how the world works, once someone does something, the world assumes that all people of that specific identity are all the same. How absurd

“Indian people learned to drink European alcohol such as rum from people who were not “normal” drinkers. That is, the early frontier Europeans – the traders, the trappers, the explorers – were often social rejects in their own society. Many were alcoholics. The drinking pattern which they taught Indians was not the polite social drinking of upper class European society, but rather it was the alcoholic model of the lower classes. Indians learned from these people that the purpose of drinking was to get drunk and drunkenness was to be expressed in violence and anti-social behavior” (Ojibwa). So first of all, our European ancestors did teach natives to drink to get drunk, so we did that one to ourselves if anything. Secondly, after all the rough and tough wars and treaties our European ancestors put native Americans through, with all the loss and grief, they certainly chose to drink alcohol to numb the pain, they didn’t know anything different. So being that said and having every story passed down for generations, I believe our Europeans ancestors drove natives to drink because of the first message we gave to them, and that was to drink alcohol till your