Review Of Elizabeth A. Fenn

Buffalo Bird Woman was a Hidatsa women whose life and stories paint a picture of the of the Mandan people. In her stories, she discusses the cultivation of corn and how they would sing “to make the gardens feel good and grow” (Fenn 64). While singing to corn seems alarming by today’s standards, at the time this ritual was common practice. This ritual, one of many, highlights the significance of corn in the lives of the Mandan peoples. Corn was important to the Mandan people as it was a vital food source, enabled and influenced trade, established gender roles, and influenced ritual life.

The Encounters at the Heart of the World by Elizabeth A. Fenn is a book that includes the history of Mandan people. Most of the people know this place because of Lewis and Clark, but in this book readers can also learn so many important things about Mandan and combination of important new discoveries. In this book, a reader can examine how an author can go far and beyond the expectation, the way she went into the Mandan’s history. The way author have written this book, makes easier for readers to read because she divides each chapter in many topics.

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

The long history between Native American and Europeans are a strained and bloody one. For the time of Columbus’s subsequent visits to the new world, native culture has

In American Indian life, they believe their life is interconnected with the world, nature, and other people. The idea of a peoplehood matrix runs deep in Indian culture, in this essay the Cherokee, which is the holistic view of sacred history, language, ceremony, and homeland together. This holistic model shapes the life of the American Indians and how their sense of being and relationship to their history is strong and extremely valuable to them. This essay will try to explain how each aspect of the peoplehood matrix is important and interconnected to each other and the life of the Native Americans.

Throughout the course of history there have been numerous accounts regarding Native American and European interaction. From first contact to Indian removal, the interaction was somewhat of a roller coaster ride, leading from times of peace to mini wars and rebellions staged by the Native American tribes. The first part of this essay will briefly discuss the pre-Columbian Indian civilizations in North America and provide simple awareness of their cultures, while the second part of this essay will explore all major Native American contact leading up to, and through, the American Revolution while emphasizing the impact of Spanish, French, and English explorers and colonies on Native American culture and vice versa. The third, and final, part of this essay will explore Native American interaction after the American Revolution with emphasis on westward expansion and the Jacksonian Era leading into Indian removal. Furthermore, this essay will attempt to provide insight into aspects of Native American/European interaction that are often ignored such as: gender relations between European men and Native American women, slavery and captivity of native peoples, trade between Native Americans and European colonists, and the effects of religion on Native American tribes.

To expand on the intricacy of the speaker’s life, symbolism is applied to showcase the oppression her ancestors etched on her quilt were facing for their “burnt umber pride” and “ochre gentleness” (39-40). Once again, the theme of absence is introduced as there is a sense of separation among the Native American culture as their innocent souls are forced onto reservations and taken away from their families. This prolonged cruelty and unjust treatment can be advocated when the speaker explains how her Meema “must have dreamed about Mama when the dancing was over: a lanky girl trailing after her father through his Oklahoma

When the first colonists landed in the territories of the new world, they encountered a people and a culture that no European before them had ever seen. As the first of the settlers attempted to survive in a truly foreign part of the world, their written accounts would soon become popular with those curious of this “new” world, and those who already lived and survived in this seemingly inhospitable environment, Native American Indian. Through these personal accounts, the Native Indian soon became cemented in the American narrative, playing an important role in much of the literature of the era. As one would expect though, the representation of the Native Americans and their relationship with European Americans varies in the written works of the people of the time, with the defining difference in these works being the motives behind the writing. These differences and similarities can be seen in two similar works from two rather different authors, John Smith, and Mary Rowlandson.

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.

Fenn uses primary sources when telling her story to help provide background information about Mandan customs, history and lifestyle. Maxi'diwiac (Buffalo Bird Woman’s) story is particularly important because it shows how connected the Mandan and Hidatsa’s were with the land, how they were able to survive, the transformations that happened when the European explorers arrived and how important corn was to the community. This document is a written account of an oral story that Buffalo Bird Woman told Gilbert Wilson and it was intended to provide an oral account of Buffalo Bird Woman’s life, her family and the Hidatsa community. Fenn uses this source to help tell her story but she also provides context around the origin of the source by stating

A book that fundamentally changes our comprehension of North America prior and then afterward the landing of Europeans Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, notable Plains individuals whose overflowing, occupied towns on the upper Missouri River were for quite a long time at the focal point of the North American universe. We are aware of them for the most part since Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, yet why don't we know more? Who were they truly? In this unprecedented book, Elizabeth A. Fenn recovers their history by sorting out imperative new revelations in archaic exploration, human studies, topography, climatology, the study of disease transmission, and dietary science. Her strongly unique

Traditions and old teachings are essential to Native American culture; however growing up in the modern west creates a distance and ignorance about one’s identity. In the beginning, the narrator is in the hospital while as his father lies on his death bed, when he than encounters fellow Native Americans. One of these men talks about an elderly Indian Scholar who paradoxically discussed identity, “She had taken nostalgia as her false idol-her thin blanket-and it was murdering her” (6). The nostalgia represents the old Native American ways. The woman can’t seem to let go of the past, which in turn creates confusion for the man to why she can’t let it go because she was lecturing “…separate indigenous literary identity which was ironic considering that she was speaking English in a room full of white professors”(6). The man’s ignorance with the elderly woman’s message creates a further cultural identity struggle. Once more in the hospital, the narrator talks to another Native American man who similarly feels a divide with his culture. “The Indian world is filled with charlatan, men and women who pretend…”

Fenn’s ‘Encounters at the Heart of the World: A history of the Mandan People’ brings once-almost-extinct Native Americans, Mandan, back on the surface with unique narrative documentation style. Fenn constructed the book carefully so that it draws reader into the time-travel of Mandan’s point of view. The book covers wide and myriad topics including the origination of Mandan people with its two creation story, how Mandan people migrated around different regions under circumstances, spiritual/daily life, encounter with Europeans, and how smallpox decimated Mandan people. Fenn puts heart into Mandan people. She portrays history of Mandan people from Mandan’s perspective rather than usual ‘white man speaks the truth’ style of view. She writes in a way that gives privileges to Native American voices and places. Although this book is about Mandan and Mandan alone, she goes extra mile on providing glance of what was happening on around the world, which brings readers out from the closed world of Mandan and see the forest instead of a tree. By illustrating American history along with Mandan’s, Fenn attempts to broaden American history which used to be confined only within European

The historical literature of First Nations and Peoples’, within North America, have shown inaccuracies and a lack of certain components. This being said, the contents of written history often reflect the points of view of those who have written it; the majority of the historical records composed appear to be homogenized, and

Like a coin dropped between the cushions of a couch, traditional oral storytelling is a custom fading away in current American culture. For Native Americans, however, the practice of oral storytelling is still a tradition that carries culture and rich history over the course of generations. Three examples of traditional oral stories, “How Men and Women Got Together”, “Coyote’s Rabbit Chase”, and “Corn Mother”, demonstrate key differences in perspectives and values among diverse native tribes in America.