Influenced by Land and Man: Willa Cather and Catherine Porter, Writers of the Southwest

      Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia dramatizes the effect the frontier has on both native-born people and immigrants that come to the West in search of new beginnings. The story centers around two families living in a remote area of Nebraska from completely diverse backgrounds. This tale suggests that regardless of where a person comes from, the trials and tribulations of living under such tough conditions will ultimately impact his/her future existence. Cather's characters, no matter the age or heritage, are continuously re-defined, as if reborn, into a new life by surviving the harsh realities of the frontier. Much of the creation of these characters takes place in the very

The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of emergence, change, and uncertainty in the American Southwest. Randolph B. Campbell celebrates this historical time period in his novel, Sam Houston and the American Southwest, as well as the life and times of the southwest’s hero himself, Sam Houston.

Native American literature from the Southeastern United States is deeply rooted in the oral traditions of the various tribes that have historically called that region home. While the tribes most integrally associated with the Southeastern U.S. in the American popular mind--the FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole)--were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) from their ancestral territories in the American South, descendents of those tribes have created compelling literary works that have kept alive their tribal identities and histories by incorporating traditional themes and narrative elements. While reflecting profound awareness of

Just as the Greeks, the Romans and any other great civilization, Native Americans had their own gods with certain values. These values are a sharp contrast to the current european expansionist mindset and give great insight into understanding Native American’s actions and behavior. These documents are about Native American culture and are written around the arrival of European settlers. These documents show the conflicts that many Native Americans had were due to many miscommunications and conflicts in values. The two Native American values that the Europeans most tread on were their very philosophy and honor, which leads to some of the most brutal acts of war and massacres.

When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away gives an in-depth history of the Pueblo Indians before and after the Spanish conquest. It describes the forced changes the Spanish brought to the Indians, and also the changes brought to the Spaniards who came to “civilize” the Indians. The author's thesis is that the Pueblo Indians and other Indians were treated cruelly by the Spanish, who justified their crime by claiming they were civilizing an

When Spaniards colonized California, they invaded the native Indians with foreign worldviews, weapons, and diseases. The distinct regional culture that resulted from this union in turn found itself invaded by Anglo-Americans with their peculiar social, legal, and economic ideals. Claiming that differences among these cultures could not be reconciled, Douglas Monroy traces the historical interaction among them in Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Beginning with the missions and ending in the late 1800s, he employs relations of production and labor demands as a framework to explain the

6. In two or three sentences, explain how the difficult existence described in “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread” (see the Connection on page 269) corresponds to your previous notion of life in the late 1500s. In light of this information, what is surprising—or, perhaps, not surprising—about the visions of life presented in the pastoral poems you have just read?

John Grady Cole, the last in a long line of west Texas ranchers, is, at sixteen, poised on the sorrowful, painful edge of manhood. When he realizes the only life he has ever known is disappearing into the past and that cowboys are as doomed as the Comanche who came before them, he leaves on a dangerous and harrowing journey into the beautiful and utterly foreign world that is Mexico. In the guise of a classic Western, All the Pretty Horses is at its heart a lyrical and elegiac coming-of-age story about love, friendship, and loyalty that will leave John Grady, and the reader, changed forever. When his mother decides to sell the cattle ranch he has grown up working, John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins

14: Though the landscape is one of rare beauty, to a European or English eye it seems desolate, and even after more than forty years my father could not become reconciled to it. He longed for the generous and

The lands of Crohin were abundant with life, farmers grew crops to feed villages, and hunters took home enough food to feed even the largest of families. Life across the lands was bliss, nothing ever went wrong, no natural disasters, no crime was committed. The people of Crohin felt blessed that the Heavens had provided them with such a beautiful place to exist.

“The French refused to refused to follow native custom and promised to punish the boy by whipping. This idea horrified the natives, who sought mercy for the boy… One native threw his blanket over the boy, saying “strike me, if thou wilt, but thou shalt not strike him.” (Dickinson 22, JR 6: 219-21) This passage resonated with me as it also shows the opposite of what the indigenous people at the time were written to be like.

  'For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of the geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning'

Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 (2009) by Nicola Whyte captures the character of ordinary people’s experience of landscape and offers an understanding of the landscape as a lived environment imbued with diverse meanings and associations particular to time and place. It also shows how the landscape could be used to express beliefs on matters such as land use rights, local customs, and traditions. Whyte weaves in discussions of parish perambulations throughout the work, placing the practice within the broader context of interactions with the landscape.

The contribution of the metaphor is provided most likely to connect to a more relatable entity that exhibits what the people feel about the desert, as it is like sand in the eye, very

1. Three arguments’ that Juan Gines de Sepulveda used to justify enslaving the Native Americans were for gold, ore deposits, and for God’s sake and man’s faith in him. 2. Three arguments that Bartolome de las Casas gave in attacking Spanish clonial policies in the New World were the Indians eating human flesh, worshiping false gods, and also, he believed that the Indians were cowardly and timid. 3. For comparisons that Sepulveda used, in lines 1-7, to express the inferiority of the Indians was their prudence, skill virtues, and humanity were inferior to the Spanish as children to adults, or even apes to men. Comparisons he used to dismiss the significance of the Indians