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Native american culture and spirituality
Native american culture and spirituality
Native american culture and spirituality
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Running Head: THE BEAN TREES Abstract This book report deal with the Native American culture and how a girl named Taylor got away from what was expected of her as a part of her rural town in Pittman, Kentucky. She struggles along the way with her old beat up car and gets as far west as she can. Along the way she take care of an abandoned child which she found in the backseat of her car and decides to take care of her. She end up in a town outside Tucson and soon makes friends which she will consider family in the end. Historical Context From as early as the time of the early European settlers, Native Americans have suffered tremendously. Native Americans during the time of the early settlers where discriminated against and still are today. At the arrival of the Europeans there was an estimated one million to eighteen million Native Americans (meaning living above Mexico) in population. There is also said there was about three hundred languages spoken at the time. Anthropologists have tried to summarize “the cultural practices and reduce the cultural complexity and they have come with twelve major cultural areas. But, material artifacts and mode of subsistence give a geographical area rather than on social organization or a people’s way of life, including their family relationship.” ( Mindel, 1998, p.382) The similar family structures can be traced in almost every Native American family from their basic family structure to marriage rituals. Europeans introduce disease to the Native Americans. The introduction nearly killed the total population. Diseases like the small pox, measles, chickenpox, influenza, and many other help to the extinction of almost half of the languages known today. When Europeans settle in the Native American land the quickly tried to acculturate them by taking their land, fighting them for land, and later using reservations to almost incarcerate them for the outside world because the did not want to live like the white man. Native Americans did not like the way they were being treated. Every generation that passes, there would be fewer and fewer Native Americans around the Americas. The Native Americans saw what the Europeans were doing to their land, they wanted their old way of life, and they wanted the Europeans to leave. The Europeans were relentless in their attempts to get rid of the Native Americas the attitude of the Europeans was felt among the Native Americans.
In the novel, The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver, we watch as Taylor grows a great deal. This young woman takes on a huge commitment of caring for a child that doesn't even belong to her. The friends that she acquired along the way help teach her about love and responsibility, and those friends become family to her and Turtle. Having no experience in motherhood, she muddles through the best she can, as all mothers do.
It has often been suggested that some southwestern literature is based on the experiences of others. With this suggestion, it has been demonstrated that these experiences are incorporated with the intention of portraying the experiences of others as a learning tool; for both the reader and the writer. Some may also imply that literature, therefore, may impose a learning opportunity in itself. In correspondence with this belief, it must be suggested that the classic novel, The Bean Trees, could be considered a learning experience for the audience as well as Barbara Kingsolver in relation to the catalyzing character Marietta "Missy"/Taylor Greer along with additional inspirational characters that effect her and are likewise effected along the way.
The European influences to the Native Americans were Europeans carried the new diseases to the Indians. “Europeans were used to these diseases, but Indian people had no resistance to them. Sometimes the illnesses spread through direct contact with colonists. Other times, they were transmitted as Indians traded with one another. The result of this contact with European germs was horrible. Sometimes whole villages perished in a short time” (Kincheloe). Slave trade was another influence to American Indians. Europeans soon realized that they could provide commercial goods such as tools and weapons to some American Indian tribes that would bring them other Indians captured in tribal wars, and these captured Indians were bought and sold as slaves. Therefore, “slavery led to warfare among tribes and too much hardship. Many tribes had to move to escape the slave trade, which destroyed some tribes completely. In time, the practice of enslaving Native peoples ended. However, it had greatly affected American Indians of the South and the Southwest” (Kinchloe). Lastly, Europeans change Native America and African’ roots. Native Americans
In The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, a young naive boy, Bruno, tells from his perspective how the occurrences in the Holocaust took place. In 1943, the beginning of the story, Bruno’s father, a commandant in Hitler’s army, is promoted and moves to Oswiecim with his family. Oswiecim is home to the hideous Auschwitz Concentration Camp. While Bruno is out playing near a fence at the edge of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, against his father’s orders, he becomes friends with a young Jewis...
Hitler’s rise to power can be attributed to a series of events occurring both in Germany and the rest of the world in the mid 20th century. In the year 1929, due to the collapse of the American Stock Exchange the economic situation in Germany terribly worsened. “’I see myself as Chancellor and I will be Chancellor,’ Hitler told Hans Frank, who by then had become his lawyer.” (P.64) Hitler believed in himself and eventually received the power he aimed for. Unemployment was at around 6 million and people were desperate for a quick ...
"Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them." -Oscar Wilde. This quote embodies the fight over gender roles and the views of women in society. Taming of the Shrew deals with Kate and Bianca, two sisters who are at the time to he married off. However, suitors who seek Bianca as a wife have to wait for her sister to be married first. Kate is seen as a shrew because she is strong willed and unlike most women of the time. In his 1603 play The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare enforces traditional gender roles and demonstrates how little say women had in society. He accomplishes this through the strong personality of Kate, Baptista 's attitude towards his daughters as transactions, and
Consequently, in the play The taming of the Shrew and the sources of author Elizabeth Hutcheon, Marion Perrett and Dale Priest they have ideas amongst those sources and my three other sources have the common theme of women being objectifified and therefore the idea between those sources is that women’s roles become reversed when they let themselves be shrewed like the character Katherine did when it came to Petruchio. Amongst the first source the moral of it is one that Linda Boose argues that “Shrew and similar terms were transposed from their origin as contemptuous expressions for lower-class males into terms that gendered such hostility, displacing it away from the threat of male class revolt which remained real throughout the era and redirecting
Through Manifest Destiny and the land from the Louisiana Purchase Americans were able to travel further than they had ever before. However, most of the land was already inhabited either by other countries or Native Americans. By expanding and continuing to push American society across the country there were huge losses to the native tribes. As more and more Americans began to move westward native people were killed and/or removed from their land and placed in reservations. As of 2010 22% of the US’s 5.2 million Native Americans live in reservations in which poverty levels are exponentially higher than the rest of the country. In many of the reservations adequate health care may not be available directly and as result health issues are much more prevalent. (Native American Aid) It is because of the rise of Manifest Destiny that Native Americans still live in reservations possible hundreds of miles from where their original tribe may have once existed. Even though a lot of pain arose from the expansion of Americans and Manifest Destiny a lot of great did as
Fight to end censorship treaded on steadily, until 1971, when it was found out that even the government couldn’t be fully trusted. In 1971, the Pentagon Affair arose. It revealed many abuses in security during the Vietnam War. It thus fell upon them to prove that classified information is essential military, domestic...
The Taming of the shrew is play penned by William Shakespeare. The setting of the play is set to be in a 16th century Italy mainly in the cities of Padua and Verona. Even though the play has many characters, there are two main character, Petruchio and Katharine. The Play has 5 acts and many scenes in between those acts and also includes a framing device i.e. an induction in the beginning. The ending of the play and objectification and treatment of the female character has drawn the ire and harsh criticism from various critics and commentators. Shakespeare has brought up societal issues like Materialism, Patriarchy, Gender relations and Female submissiveness. The play has been performed and adapted in many version, most relatable one for a common
The Native Americans suffered depression and intoxication and this was all due to a collection of horrible things done to their ancestors, starting with colonial domination, genocide, de-culturalization, and pure hatred towards these Native American Indians from the people that came and took their land from them. Starting with the Spanish who first came to the land that is now the United States, they burned and mutilated these Indians, and even fed them to their animals. The Dominican Priest, Bartolome de Las Casas, believed that burning Indians was “in honor of Christ”. When Columbus arrived to the land that is now the United States, there were approximately 15 million Indians, that number soon decreased to just under 250,000 by the 1890s.
In all three of the plays that we have read so far there have been characters that seem either out of place compared to the other characters, as with Othello or Shylock, or looked down upon because they belong to a group that are placed very low on the social structure in Elizabethan society, as with all of the women in the plays. Shakespeare shows the overall role in society of women as one that is only subservient to men. In The Taming of the Shrew there is the brash but ultimately subservient Katharina, in Othello the docile and eternally optimistic Desdemona, and in The Merchant of Venice the powerful but still second class citizen Portia. Shakespeare does not portray these women from our modern perspective of women as independent and
One of the most wildly debated monologues in Shakespeare’s work is Katherine’s’ ending one from The Taming of the Shrew. Many have understood the final speech to be one of genuine submission while others read it as Katherine having control over the women in the room. It’s my belief, however, that this final speech is just Katherine getting in her two-cents in a way that won’t cause her to be tortured by her husband. Katherine hasn’t been wooed or changed into submission and in my opinion isn’t trying to get the upper-hand with the women in the room. She has been broken and is tired but not changed. Thus, she masks her true intentions with wit and subtext. This theory is supposed by many direct examples from the monologue itself.
Lies and deception that consume William Shakespeare’s play are made out to be a joke in The Taming of the Shrew, yet the center of the comedy revolves around the most honest character on set. Katherine Minola, the first daughter of Baptista Minola, was only portrayed as “shrewd,” through other characters’ assuming perception of her persona (Shakespeare 1.2.91). Those characters openly criticize her throughout the play and treat her like an animal by not giving her any sort of acknowledgment. Furthermore, Katherine has no voice at the beginning because she was silenced by the stubborn patriarchal sovereignty that degrades the idea of a woman’s opinion, thus their society perceives Katherine’s outspoken nature to be shrewish. She understood that
Throughout Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare portrayed women as objects or shrews that needed to be tamed. Kate was the daughter of a wealthy man named Baptista Minolta from Padua. She was the oldest sister and, under tradition of the time, had to be married first. Bianca, on the other hand, was the younger daughter and was courted by many. Due to Kate’s wild behavior, the suitors were afraid of her. Along came a man named Petruccio, who was determined to marry her and get the money that would be given to the man who marries her. Through Petruccio, Shakespeare exploited women.