Northwest Coast Social Structure Analysis

As I struggled to learn to kayak I pushed through the same water the Edisto’s paddles had touched. My experiences mirror those of Joseph Bruchac, in his work “At the End of Ridge Road.” Bruhac has a cabin in the country that is very close to “the homestead where [his] grandfather and his twelve brothers and sisters were born…Even closer to us are the unmarked burial places of Abenakis and Mohawks and Mohicans” (215-216). Bruhac’s modern home’s proximity to places of cultural importance for Native Americans shows that the way the land has been impacted and used by Native Americans should not be overlooked. The Native presence on the land is often overlooked since the Edisto people had all died from disease or war by the early 1700s. The Edisto people are often overlooked because of heavy focus on Civil War history in the area. The land that I’ve been walking for twenty years has an entire culture buried beneath it and I haven’t thought about it once. The Native Presence is not entirely gone. The Island’s infamous Captain Ron, a white man raised by the Cherokee, has had arrangements with my family for decades. Like the Edisto people before Ron uses the land to procure majority of the food his family eats. His children Rain, Tide, Marsh, and Wind learn these same skills and continue to grow up on Edisto Island.

This paper addresses the results of interviews, observations, and research of life in the Ottawa tribe, how they see themselves and others in society and in the tribe. I mainly focused on The Little River Band of Ottawa Indian tribe. I researched their languages, pecking order, and interviewed to discover the rituals, and traditions that they believe in. In this essay I revealed how they see themselves in society. How they see other people, how they see each other, what their values were, what a typical day was etc. I initially suspected that I would have got different responses from these questions but in reality the results in the questions were almost completely the same. I studied this topic because mostly all the people that are

Families assembled in spring to angle, in early winter to chase, and in the mid year they isolated to develop singular planting fields. Young men were educated in the method for the forested areas, where a man's aptitude at chasing and capacity to get by under all conditions were imperative to his family's prosperity. Ladies were prepared from their most punctual years to work perseveringly in the fields and around the family wetu, a round or oval house that was intended to be effortlessly disassembled and moved in only a couple of hours. They likewise figured out how to accumulate and handle normal foods grown from the ground, other create from the living space, and their harvests. The creation of sustenance among the Wampanoag was like that of numerous Native American social orders. Nourishment propensities were partitioned along gendered lines. Men and ladies had particular undertakings. Local ladies assumed a dynamic part in a hefty portion of the phases of nourishment creation. Since the Wampanoag depended fundamentally on products gathered from this sort of work, ladies had vital socio-political, financial, and profound parts in their groups. Wampanoag men were for the most part in charge of chasing and angling, while ladies dealt with cultivating and the social event of wild organic products, nuts, berries, shellfish, and so on. Ladies were in charge of up to seventy-five percent of all sustenance

Since each chapter in this book is based upon a new era or new transformation of the Native culture, he tends to draw mini-conclusions at the end of most sections. For example, in Chapter 1, Richter discusses the Five Nations and its origin and most important principles. At the end of the chapter he states, “For the Five Nations, themes of reciprocity and exchange, war and peace, and alliance and spiritual power entwined to define most relationship among persons, kin groups, and villages” (29). He also illustrates the Indian’s later trials and tribulations with their European colonizers when he discusses when the Europeans began invading the Northeast in the 16th century. When discussing this time in history, he writes, “the Five Nations were being cut off from sources to materials they highly prized by hostile foes” (53).

The possesion of land has proved to greatly amplify and draw out several different stereotypes and conflicts between societies in the world 's history. From Many different accounts all over the world today there has always been a dispute over land. However other disputes shadow in that of the colonial New England settlers and the Native Americans, both virtually revolving their lives around this concept of land distribution. For the settlers it meant wealth and prosperity, for the natives it meant staying alive. William Cronon 's book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, illustrates the differences between these two separate societies and describes what life was like during the period of exploration and settlement in the New World. There are several other facts or opinions that one could take away from this passage, but the three main points are differences in the Colonist and Native conceptions of property, as well as how cultural stereotypes and eventual conflict emerged from mutual understanding of the land and use of property by each group.

The  status of women in Algonquian and Iroquoian society. The Europeans viewed the structure of Native American society lacking the complexity of their own community.  Their drawings and accounts  of the Indian people reveal that the tribe's division of labor and gender roles were actually very advanced, especially where the status of women was concerned. Since  married women in Europe held few rights to their property, family wealth, or even children, women of the tribes had  greater independence and discretion over their produce, conditions of labor, and property.  Native women even served as representatives in the tribal councils, and held  rights over the land they worked.  This  demonstrates that although “women’s work” was belittled in European cultures, Native women’s daily contributions were recognized by Native men and the tribe as a whole as vital to the prosperity of the community and worthy of respect. Analyzing the condition of women in America, a  woman's status in their community was directly related to the social hierarchy, religious culture, and natural environment in which they lived, and that the combination of those ingredients varied vastly  across the continent.

The excepted social theory of civilization’s social process was made by the scientists Adam Smith, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and lastly Lord Kames. This social theory was that there were many levels of civility in a society. These levels were hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. One example of the first level which is hunting is the the Native Americans. The excepted social process is that a country was to go through all of these levels by starting out on hunting and eventually the society would mature and work its way up to the point of being a commercially based society. Now this process helped shaped the colonies culture of “civility” because the colonists were never hunters. When the colonists got to the North America

It is also this depressing lost of Native Americans’ culture that has motivated them to never stop trying to return home. However, in the memory of the speaker’s dad, these Native Americans were just “swollen bellies of salmon coming back to a river that wasn’t there” (CR 123). Salmon have the nature of returning back to the place, where they were born in, to reproduce. Comparing the Native Americans to salmon, the author identifies the importance of their land to their nature. That is, losing the land is the same as losing their reproduction. Therefore, taking the land away for the modern developments, the western culture has ultimately become the nightmare for the Native Americans.

However, with the remains of their pieces of tools and other goods across the lands in different villages it can be speculated that some groups of Native Americans had social relations with others, or had mobile groups spread across the lands. For example, the clovis was an instrument used for hunting by the Paleo-Indian groups. The Clovis and Folsom peoples, and has been found in animal and village remains across the land. Judging that their groups traveled a lot this means that they built social connections with other groups. Leaving behind many small villages of fewer people for archaeologists to excavate. Additionally, social constrictions are seen in the people who follow after the Paleo-Indian peoples who focused more on hunting and gathering, but relied heavily more on natural foods such as fruits and nuts. As a result of this gathering technique for food supply, more villages were formed beginning with the archaic peoples. I believe this had led to the evolution of larger populations in native villages as I had read throughout Plog’s book that the villages got bigger with the increased use farming agricultural goods such as maize and beans. Rather than small campsites, villages rose as a result such as the Shabik’eschee peoples in Chaco Canyon. The development of village life led to new cultural customs such as cremation of the dead and preserved

The concluding points the author is trying to making in the hunters and Gatherers of New Guinea is to distinguish between other methods of finding food. Another difference is what is being cultivated, one of which is the Sago or the root vegetables on what is classified as being part of hunting and gathering. How much time and labor is goes into these activates if they are worth accounting those cultivating activities as part of Hunting and Gathering. Basically trying to determine what tribes in New Guinea could be classified as hunters and gatherers in the.

The migration of European settlers and culture to North America is an often examined area. One aspect of this, however, is worthy of deeper analysis. The conquest of North America by Europeans and American settlers from the 16th to 19th centuries had a profound effect on the indigenous political landscape by defining a new relationship dynamic between natives and settlers, by upsetting existing native political, economic and military structures, and by establishing a paradigm where the indigenous peoples felt they had to resist the European and American incursions. The engaging and brilliant works of Andres Rensendez and Steve Inskeep, entitled respectively “A Land So Strange” and “Jacksonland”, provide excellent insights and aide to this analysis.

Native Americans hold a type of esoteric concept that comes from their philosophy of preserving their environment as well as their kinship that ties them together (Access Genealogy, 2009). They not only have social ties, they are politically and religiously organized through their rituals, government, and other institutions (Access Genealogy, 2009). They work together to reside in a territorial area, and speak a common language (Access Genealogy, 2009). They are not characterized by any one certain structure (Access Genealogy, 2009). However, the society agrees on fundamental principles that bond together a certain social fabric (Access Genealogy, 2009). Different Native American tribes throughout the years have had different ideas, opinions, philosophies, which are not always predetermined by their past ancestors.

Indians and Colonists saw the wilderness from different environmental history perspectives which changed how each treated nature. In the essay “Interpreting Environmental History,” Carolyn Merchant describes three lenses to look through when thinking about environmental history; gender, race, and class. From the gender lens in the Native American lifestyle,

The idea that First Nations (here on referred to as FN) in North America always lived in harmony with the environment has been a very controversial and touchy subject when under debate by historians. The language barrier and lack of written information leaves a lot to speculation and the chance of oral history being slightly changed over time leaves biases in the works of historians. This paper, however will argue the concept that FN indeed lived in harmony with nature as they were able to learn from their mistakes and treated the environment and nature with respect to ensure that the coming years would guarantee a plentiful harvest and would protect the lakes, river and nature around them. The FN had been able to realize the effects of

The social structure theory deliberates delinquency as a gathering of the person’s dealings with numerous groups, organizations, and process in the society. Any person irrespective of their prominence in life is likely to become delinquents if they continue with negative social affiliations. Every aspect of the society, social and economic must be viewed using the social structure theories to find the cause of crime and deviance. The social structure theories consist of four types which include social disorganization theory, anomie theory, differential association theory, and labeling theory. Several theories offer different answers to this delinquent of influential the key features of a social group.