Representation of the Encounter between White Settler-Invaders and Indigenous Peoples in Armstrong's History Lesson and Roughing It in the Bush

In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will

Popular culture has shaped our understanding and perception of Native American culture. From Disney to literature has given the picture of the “blood thirsty savage” of the beginning colonialism in the new world to the “Noble Savage,” a trait painted by non-native the West (Landsman and Lewis 184) and this has influenced many non native perceptions. What many outsiders do not see is the struggle Native American have on day to day bases. Each generation of Native American is on a struggle to keep their traditions alive, but to function in school and ultimately graduate.

In Deborah Miranda’s memoir “Bad Indians”, she uses documents, images, and drawings to expose colonial violence and provides evidence of a history of conquest. There are different types of colonial violence that are depicted throughout her memoir, such as: physical, emotional, sexual, and cultural violence. Additionally, Miranda exposes the nature of colonial violence by providing evidence by implementing particular sources to contribute in confirming the history of conquest throughout the lives of California Mission Indians.

The crown depicted the Indians as intractable, only to find that settlers resorted to violence against the Indians precisely because of their supposed intractability. Indigenous peoples, for their part, fought among themselves and against advancing settlers. All groups sought to “territorialize” their societies to secure themselves against competitors. In the final chapters, Langfur extends and qualifies this complicated story. In the later eighteenth century, settler pressures grew, stressing crown policies and threatening indigenous social orders, until all-out war broke out after 1808. For Langfur this was no Manichean battle between European invaders and indigenous victims. To a dominant narrative of violence he juxtaposes a “parallel history of cooperation” among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, and he concludes that war itself must be understood in terms of “the relationship of cooperative enemies.”

The colonisation of North America by the Europeans became one of the most crucial points for the native North Americans. The differing experiences of contact between both cultures had overwhelmingly disastrous impacts on the normal way of life. From such contact arose the issue of land disputes, in turn resulting in massacres and frontier wars which could have otherwise been unnecessary. The factors stated above provide a suitable stimulus for a discussion in regards to the varying encounters of the Indigenous North Americans.

Colonialism has a historical context that has long obscured and distorted the experiences of indigenous people, particularly those who endured the brutalities of the California Missions. Although indigenous people are portrayed in history as docile people, who openly embraced invasion, Deborah Miranda dismantles this depiction in her memoir, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, through two stories called “Dear Vicenta” and “Novena to Bad Indians”. Throughout the stories run various narratives of survival and resistance, which form new understandings of colonization and missionization. Miranda practices decolonization through oral history in order to form new and ongoing indigenous identities. Evidently, through decolonial practice and deconstructing dominant narratives about “colonized” peoples and replacing them with stories that use traditional memory and practice, Miranda disrupts the commonly accepted narrative of indigenous peoples by reconstructing the dichotomy between good and bad Indians through acts of resistance and survival.

Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian tells the story of Indigenous people in Canada and the United States, it challenges the narrative on how Indigenous history is taught and explains why Indigenous people continue to feel frustrated. King’s seeks to educate the reader as he provides a detailed accounts of the horrific massacres Indigenous people endured, yet he simultaneously inserts humorous moments which balances out the depressing content and enhances his story. The books highlights the neglect and assimilation that Indigenous were subjected to and how their survival was seen as an inconvenience to western culture. King directs his message at a Euro-centric audience to offer an accurate explanation of Indigenous culture and

Second Slide: The ways in which Indigenous Women tried to resist, but were ultimately victims of colonization, and how heteropatriarchy has affected them.

The distinction between Indigenous and white fluctuates throughout the novel, exploring the possibilities of playing both roles. Appearances of the men in the middle, the Metis, blurs the lines between the two ethnicities. Language and relationships throughout The Last Crossing also hinder the clear cut oppositions. Appearances of the Metis play a role in the confusion about which “side” they are on.

The film, “After the Mayflower” gives an outside look at the relations between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims. Although it mostly revolves around these two small communities, an explanation of how the British and other native tribes coexisted is also given. The topical overview of the two contrasting entities is one that starts with jubilation but eventually transforms into the indigenous peoples’ downfall. Interdependence personified the groups’ early relations until the Pilgrims grew stronger and much less dependent on the Wampanoag. As they saw less use for the natives with each day’s passing they began to assert their dominance and laws, thus creating a hostile disconnect between the white man and its native opposition.

In Sherman Alexie’s novel The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven shows the struggles of daily Native American life, which is shown through the point of view of male character. All though out the book the following three questions appear: ‘What does it mean to live as an Indian in this time? What does it mean to be an Indian man? and What does it mean to live on an Indian reservation?’ Alexie uses literary devices such as point of view, imagery, characterization to make his point that the conflict of being an Indian in the U.S. in these short stories using the following short stories “An Indian Education” and “Amusement”. “An Indian Education” uses both imagery and characterization to show us what the narrator is

People reading this novel learned of the great culture clash of the white Eurocentric and the native Indian cultures. The natives didn’t understand nor want to conform to the new way of the Europeans. The same applied for the Europeans. Land was their objectives; the Native Americans were trying to maintain it while the

Throughout history there has been encounters where white males have taken a huge amount over Native lands. There has been significant events like Lewis and Clark expedition, Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492, and schools focus on teaching how the whites removed the Indians from their lands. However, they don’t teach the reality on how much damage they did when interacting with the Indians. In “Encounters At The Heart Of The World” by Elizabeth Fenn, she takes a journey to what's now North Dakota to learn about the Madan’s. She took a journey in order to learn what happened to the Mandan Indians, and on her journey she discovers the ways of the Mandan Indians. Fenn writes about Mandan culture, traditions, their environment, food stability and much more, to inform us the perspective of the Mandan Indians.

Thomas Morton was an early American colonist from England who was studying the culture of the Indigenous people. He spent time studying and observing these people as an outsider who was accepted into their life. He wrote of how they built their homes, the clothing they wore, the currency they use, their beliefs they had and details of how they lived. Unfortunately, the view of the indigenous people is that they were uncivilized and were labelled as savages. This document gives us a better understanding of how the First nations lived and the perspective that the Europeans had on them.

In his conclusion George cries “my culture is like a wounded deer that has crawled away into the forest to bleed and die alone” (102). This simile represents what is happening to the Aboriginal culture, in that the culture is slowly dying just like a deer slowly dies when it is hunted. This is a good comparison because just as a deer is a beautiful animal that North Americans admire and kill, the Native culture is also beautiful. However, George is trying to emphasize the importance of preserving the Native culture, because he does not want to see the Native culture die, just like a wounded deer. George causes North Americans to feel a sense of guiltiness for their unloving actions towards the Natives, because if they do not imminently learn to love from the Natives, the Native culture will die. North Americans often kill deer for amusement, but George does not want them to kill the Native culture through their unloving actions, because the Native culture is significant. Therefore, George hopes to encourage his North American readers to raise awareness for this issue, and make individual changes to rejuvenate his culture by expressing love. George continues the conclusion of his essay with another simile: “and we must love you-with a genuine love that forgives and forgets...a love that forgives the terrible sufferings your culture brought ours when it swept over us like