Critique: Tribal Wisdom Essay

One might not understand what makes one keep moving forward day after day. Nobody gets it unless they have lived in the footsteps of another. Ask any Native American. They have lived a life of others judging and misunderstanding and if they haven't their ancestors have. The Native Americans pass stories down generation by generation so surely they have heard what it was like to be misunderstood. They believe differently than other cultures, yet not one is alike. They have a very complicated and hard to understand system when it comes to their views. The way they view, believe and run their system is never fully understood unless one has grown up with the Native American culture. The religious culture of these people is what holds their

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.

“Will my tribe forget the tradition?” This is a line from the poem Tribal Land by Dale Backo. This poem is about an Aboriginal man worrying for the future of his tribe, all his worries are from the fact that the “white man” is taking over their land and everything they own. Towns are being built, shops and new technology is being introduced which is changing everything they once knew.

The Choctaw Indians were an important tribe, and the largest of the Muskogean tribes. The Choctaws have two stories about their origins in their traditional homeland in central Mississippi. One is that their ancestors came from west of the Mississippi River and settled in what is now the homeland. The other is that the tribe is descended from ancestors who were formed by a spirit from the damp earth of Nanih Waiyah, a large mound in northeastern Mississippi. Either way, the Choctaws resided in places, holding most of Southern Alabama and Mississippi with adjoining parts of Louisiana.

The Yurok tribe of California is very interesting. The Yurok tribe was located in Northwestern California. In 1770, their estimated population was 2,500 indians. The language they spoke was in the Algonquian family. This report will tell you about the Yurok’s settlement, food, houses, clothing, tools, trade, and last but not least different ceremonies.

Do peace, unity, and equality still exist this day in time among groups of people? Are we influenced by our environment to associate our way of seeing things and create language based on that fact? How we view the environment around us helps shape our understanding by creating language to give it meaning. Based on the linguistic data of the recently discovered tribe, we can draw conclusions about the tribe’s climate and terrain, diet, views on family and children, system of government and attitude towards war. This data shows that the lost tribe was an isolated group that lived in a valley, coexisted in unison, valued life, had high regards for

He believes that ‘Nature hath made men so equal' that ‘one man can claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he.' This, taken from Chapter 11, leads us to a conclusion that three things in the Nature of man bring out complexities that cannot be resolved and lead to tyranny and war. These are competition, diffidence and glory. Mankind's self-instincts for

"...but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly." (p.64) This statement shows that he does not believe in treating people this way in their own land.

He believed if people’s social arrangements could be perfected, people could be better. Which basically meant, people were shaped by their

Culture, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is stated as “The integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behavior that dpends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. The customary beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious or social group. The set shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes an institution or organization. The set of values, conventions or social practices associated with a particular field, activity or societal characteristic.” Of these four definitions, I shall be focusing on the second one to discuss what makes up the culture of American Indians.The culture of the various tribes that made up the Native Americans is one of close knit families, highlyspiritual peoples and living together as one with the land they lived on. They believed in spirits, worshiping and honoring them. Some settled into single locations while others were nomadic, but all had a focus on working with the land around them. Because there are so many varying tribes that make up Native

J.R. Miller’s article entitled “Victoria’s “Red Children”: The “Great White Queen Mother” and Native-Newcomer Relations in Canada” was published in July 2008 in the Native Studies Review, Vol. 17 Issue 1, p1 -23. The article examines how even though First Nations people suffered tremendously during Queen Victoria’s reign, they maintained their strong allegiance to the Crown mostly due to their kinship mentality. Miller notes that slowly but noticeably, by the end of Victoria’s reign the Great White Queen’s Red Children were beginning to adjust their rhetoric to use the Crown and imperial government at Westminster as counterweights against national and provincial governments within Canada that were oppressing them.

Every day, people are reprimanded for their family’s history. No one truly knows what an individual is going through. I never understood the reasoning behind the criticism until I attended my first Lumbee Homecoming.

He explains that black people were civilized and influenced by American civilization due to which they could speak English and be civilized so why not the Indians. Indians were called the savage as they were uncivilized and uneducated. He has written that Indians can even be civilized and made industrious and self supporting by the help of Americans civilization." We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians to our civilization( Reading American past)". This demonstrates the condition of pathetic Indians in the west. Indians are deprived of preliminary facilities and even many died because of starvation. This was not only the condition of Indians, other minor group also

In the early years, George Washington believed that the best way to solve the “Indian Problem” was to simply “civilize” the Native Americans. The Goal was to convert them to Christianity, learn to speak and read English and adopt European-style economic practices like Individual ownership of land and other property. Some of the Tribes embraced these customs and become known as the “Five Civilized Tribes”. (www.history.com)

Equality, however, was the universal theme, because he emphasized that anybody’s opinion deserved the same amount of respect as his. He also stated that everyone’s death is inevitable, thus everyone is the same. It can also be said that he wanted to preserve the Earth as well, because technically the whole planet is a sacred burial ground where generations of people and other living entities have passed away.