The Cultural Crossroads Of The Americas

For the longest time, Americans have celebrated Columbus day, commemorating the admiral’s supposed discovery of America. But, in “The Inconvenient Indian”, Thomas King shatters this idea and develops a new thought in the mind of the reader about natives. By using excellent rhetoric and syntax, King is able to use logos, ethos and pathos in his chapter “Forget Columbus”, where he develops the argument that the stories told in history aren’t always a true representation of how it actually happened.

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

Upon the European’s discovery and colonization of the Americas an irreversible transformation was triggered. The extreme differences in the cultures of the Europeans and Native Americans would prove to be fatal to the way of life that existed before European colonization.

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.

The fascination with Native Americans has been a constant with outsiders since explorers first “discovered” the New World. The biggest surge in this fascination came in the mid-19th century when the Indian Wars were starting to come to an end and the belief that Native Americans were disappearing, walking into the sunset never to be seen again. This led to an increase in the collecting of anything Native American, from artifacts to stories to portraits. The inevitable outcome of this was that Native Americans, who were never considered very highly to begin with, where now moved into a category of scientific interest to be study. This scientific interest in Native Americans is what many museums and other institutions based their collections and exhibits on and is one of the issues that many Native Americans have with how both their people and their culture were, and to some extent still are, represented in these places.

American archaeologist and anthropologist, Stephen Plog, wrote an account of the pre-Columbian natives of the Americans titled Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest. Plog’s purpose is to communicate the cultural and ritualistic lifestyles of the prehistoric natives of the southwest, which spans across the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada with some mention of trade with Mexico. The author has demonstrated an effective approach of an objective viewpoint on the lives of the prehistoric south westerners using sources from excursions from previous archaeologists such as, Paul S Martin and David R Wilcox among many others who excavated the vacant villages of the southwest.

The history of European presence on the North American continent is tragic and violent for the indigenous peoples. Though Europeans brought with them horses and materials, such as cotton that were more easier to work with than animal hides, ultimately Euro-Americans took more than they ever gave. Native American art shows some of that battle to retain their identity as people under the marginalization Euro-Americans. That marginalization has happened from the first exposure of Europeans to North America to present day society under the banners of United States of America, Canada, and Mexico. Early in the United States history was an artist, Wohaw who drew a picture titled Between Worlds. He went to a boarding school that tried to cement

Christopher Columbus and James Baldwin were both bearers of a new culture to their new frontiers. At first glance, Columbus’s and Baldwin’s experiences are rather dissimilar; these two men were of different races, lived in different time periods, and faced different social contexts. Despite these differences, Columbus’s and Baldwin’s experiences parallel each other well. Both were outsiders visiting an already established society and came from their own very different established societies. These huge culture shocks between Columbus, Baldwin and their respective encountered natives made the minority visitors a source of great wonder to the residential population. The Native Americans marvelled over

When you hear of an Advanced Ancient civilization in North America, you usually think of either Mayans, Aztecs, or sometimes the Olmec. But in this paper I won’t be talking about any of those civilizations, we’ll be talking about the Native Americans that lived in the Mississippi Valley, by the Mississippi River. That have their capital not 6 miles outside of St.Louis.

My parents are the epitome of the classic tourist archetype, and forced my siblings and I on many a road trip in our green minivan at least twice a year during my childhood. I have spent time in forty five of the fifty states, experiencing museums and tourist traps galore, but one of my favorite sites to see as a child was the Crazy Horse monument in the side of South Dakota’s Black Hills. The face of a Native American chief, memorialized in mountainside, is incomplete, but taking shape to pay homage ____. The overwhelming fascination and curiosity with Native American culture has caused a rift between the Native American community and the archaeological community; the paths of tribes and scientists have converged messily in the past century as sacred burial grounds have been transformed into excavation sites. This convergence caused the passing of the Native American Graves and

“During what time period did Native Americans live here?” asked the young girl in the fourth-grade class. Others asked, “What culture of Native Americans resided here in the past,” “What is the purpose of the different mounds and huts,” “What is the black drink,” and “Why is the Town Creek Indian Mound important to the history of the state of North Carolina?”

In November of 1528, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca with a small contingent of three men find themselves stranded in what experts believe to be near present-day Galveston Island, Texas. Surviving in the New World for eight years traveling across what is now Texas and northern Mexico Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain in 1537 where he wrote an account titled La Relación. Analyzing La Relación as a primary source for understanding American Indian life in the early 1500s provides a unique firsthand account of a people and culture just prior to the arrival of European influences which majorly altered, and frankly decimated, the societal and cultural landscape of the American Indians. Through an in-depth examination of the text Cabeza de Vaca describes

This weeks reading concentrated largely on the discovery of the “new world” and how Europe came to understand the peoples from these newly discovered lands. Of course since this discovery was long before the advent of camera or telecommunications, artists were commissioned to interpret logs and accounts of those who experienced the Americas first hand. This made way for a great deal of artistic interpretation as the artist translated these descriptions in pictographic form. The three assigned readings each concentrated on an artist and their approach to depicting the Americas. Of course each had their own positive and negative aspects, but one thing that remained common between the three ( Stradando’s, de Bry’s, and Burgkmair’s) was the comparison

Native American literatures embrace the memories of creation stories, the tragic wisdom of native ceremonies, trickster narratives, and the outcome of chance and other occurrences in the most diverse cultures in the world. These distinctive literatures, eminent in both oral performances and in the imagination of written narratives, cannot be discovered in reductive social science translations or altogether understood in the historical constructions of culture in one common name. (Vizenor 1)

In the other hand a cleaning duster. If the viewer is standing right in front of the sculpture, her gaze seems to be straightforward. Staring right at the observer. There’s also a sense of motion, as if she is going to step right to you. She might have something to say, her voice might want to be heard. She has a hopeless and overworked look on he face. It’s evident that she has been working hard because of the sweat on her body. Her mouth isn’t open while she works she is silent. The sculpture embodies the working class, the people who endure manual labor to serve the wealthy. It’s a social commentary of how the working class is not heard. These people are the 1%. They are what we call “the other”. These people are usually the victims of marginalization. The sculpture represents the American dream. How you can achieve your goals if you work hard enough. But that isn’t always true. Its part of the system. Generally you are born into the