Most Americans have at least some vague image of the Trail of Tears, but not very many know of the events that led to that tragic removal of several thousand Indians from their homeland. Indian lands were held hostage by the states and the federal government, and Indians had to agree to removal to preserve their identity as tribes. Trail of Tears is an excellent snapshot of a particular situation and will be eye opening to those who are not familiar with the story of the southern tribes and their interactions with the burgeoning American population. The Trail of Tears has become the symbol in American history that signifies the callousness of American policy makers toward American Indians in 1839 and 1839.
The Chickasaw Tribe was named after a Chickasaw Leader named Chikasha. The story is that two brothers Chata and Chickasha who were leaders and they split in different directions and the people that followed them was given the tribal name of Choctaw and Chickasaw.
The Choctaw Indians were an important tribe, and the largest of the Muskogean tribes. The Choctaws have two stories about their origins in their traditional homeland in central Mississippi. One is that their ancestors came from west of the Mississippi River and settled in what is now the homeland. The other is that the tribe is descended from ancestors who were formed by a spirit from the damp earth of Nanih Waiyah, a large mound in northeastern Mississippi. Either way, the Choctaws resided in places, holding most of Southern Alabama and Mississippi with adjoining parts of Louisiana.
In the year of 1828, the president Andrew Jackson was appointed to the office of the American government with this the fact of the remaining Indians tribes were important which were named “The Five Civilized Tribes” including the Cherokee and with the pass of the “Treaty of Etocha” forced the Cherokee out of the land of Georgia also known as the “Trail of Tears” where thousands upon thousands of Cherokee were killed during the extraction of the Cherokee’s land.
The Lakota, an Indian group of the Great Plains, established their community in the Black Hills in the late eighteenth century (9). This group is an example of an Indian community that got severely oppressed through imperialistic American actions and policy, as the Americans failed to recognize the Lakota’s sovereignty and ownership of the Black Hills. Jeffrey Ostler, author of The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground, shows that the Lakota exemplified the trends and subsequent challenges that Indians faced in America. These challenges included the plurality of groups, a shared colonial experience, dynamic change, external structural forces, and historical agency.
In the story “A view from the Bridge” Cherokee Paul Mcdonald creates a character that changes its attitude throughout the story by using several stylistic devices. In the beginning, he was impatient, rude and obnoxious but near the end, he became more friendly and helpful towards the boy after noticing his disability. The story starts out with the jogger walking along one day and finds a young boy along the side of the road that asks him for his help. Since the jogger is living in his own world, just like we all are, his assistance comes out as rude due to his impatience. He's aware of the kid’s appearance and describes it to us in detail, but secretly insulting. The jogger gives the boy advice but up until he figures out that the boy was
During the nineteenth century America’s population saw its largest increase, in which mass immigration occurred. This saw an increase in culture and racial differences as movement was commonly based on those wanting to move away from war, starvation or other forms of oppression. It is how writers of the nineteenth century presented the ‘objective history through literature and turned it instead to the business of myth-making’ (Wardrop, 1997, p. P2) which is an interest of mine. My aim is to focus on the emergence and portrayal of women in sentimental fiction during the nineteenth century, through Coopers novel The Last of the Mochicans (Cooper, 1826) and Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe, 1999). The framework of my discussion will be
The American Indian History of the United States is always associated with the Cherokee Indian nation. The Cherokee's were by far the largest and most advanced of the tribes. This man was Hernando de Soto was the first European explorer to come into contact with the Cherokees, when he arrived in their territory in 1540. Then he went and came in contact with Native Americans Cherokee's since many of their ways and customs is my family that the Cherokees occupied a large expanse of territory in the Southeast. Their homeland included mountains and valleys in the southern part of the Appalachian Mountain chain. Their territory stretched from North Carolina to
The Iroquois nations, one of the oldest and most prestigious tribes in the history of all Native Americans. In this paper I will be showing why the Iroquois ended up siding with the English through the French and Indian, and Revolutionary wars through factors of colonization. I will also be showing some features of their culture, considering the iroquois are not well known in the western United States, and discussing the fall of the once great tribes. The main reason I 've chosen the Iroquois is because of my own prior knowledge of the Iroquois, and their relationship to lacrosse. I started playing lacrosse my freshman year of highschool. The very first thing I learned, before any stick skills or any basics of the game, was the history of it. Our coach insisted that we knew the history and the culture of the game, and that we respected it. I was intrigued by how interesting the game was. The game was made as a form of war. Lacrosse was sometimes even referred to as “Little brother of war”. It would be called this because injury, even death were common during a lacrosse game. When two tribes had a disagreement, but didn 't feel the need to have a legitimate war, the opposing tribes would send their best warriors to the battlefield and play a lacrosse game. Games would be played to a score of 5-7, but considering how long the fields could be, these games could take hours, days even, however long it took for one of the tribes to win,
die. The Red Chief was also in charge of the lacrosse games which were called
The last of the Mohicans is an adventure novel about Native American interactions with English, French, and frontier settlers during the French and the Indian war in 1757. The background of the novel is based on the French, and the British army who are fighting against each other and both have Indian allies to assist them. Nature, as itself, is introduced to the reader as a character among all the other characters which the author explains in good detail. Of all the characters in the novel, Hawkeye and Magua play an important role, Hawkeye as the hero who saves the day and Magua, as the villain whose appearance brings fear and terror to the reader. The story changes its pattern as soon as Magua appears on the scene and executes his evil ambition and plans.
David Cusic’s, “The Iroquois Creation Story,” was published at the height of tensions between the Native Americans and the expansion of the United States into their territory, and illustrates how the Iroquois creation beliefs are actually similar in some comparison to that of Christianity. The story is about how The Iroquois Confederacy believed the world was created and their views of good and evil. This writing by David Cusic was extremely significant at the time because it was now the only written account of this orally told story on paper written by a native of the Iroquois. Now by saying that, there was already a version of the story written down before David Cusic, but it was by Frenchmen, Gabriel Sagard, therefore his story did not have necessarily as much authentication and reliability behind it.
Having little knowledge of the Cherokee removal and the history that took place in this moment in America’s past, the book Trail of Tears: Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle, offers an insight to the politics, social dynamics and class struggles the Cherokee Nation faced in the late 1830s. The book was very comprehensive and the scope of the book covers nearly 100 years of Native American History. Ehle captures the history of the Native American people by showing the readers what led to the events infamously known as the Trail of Tears. The author uses real military orders, journals, and letters which aid in creating a book that keeps
Most Americans have at least some vague understanding of the Trail of Tears, but not many know about the events that led to that tragic removal of thousands of Indians from their homeland. Indian lands were held hostage by the states and the federal government. The Indians had to agree to removal to maintain their tribe identities. Trail of Tears is an excellent example of a particular situation and will be eye opening to those who are not familiar with the story of the southern tribes and their interactions with the rapidly growing American population. The Trail of Tears has become the symbol in American history that indicates the callousness, insensitivity, and cruelty of American government toward American Indians in 1839 and 1839.
Cooper challenges the assumption that white characters exhibit certain character traits simply because they' are white and Native Americans exhibit certain character traits simply because they are Native American. He does so by introducing the interracial friendship of Hawkeye, Chingachgook and Uncas who have a very different racial history but look past race and develop a bond that saves other and leads to unification between whites and Indians. The novel’s setting is three years into the French and Indian War, and the struggle over the unfamiliar Native frontier brings about tensions between an expanding national culture and a diminishing Native American population (Cooper 13). Chingachgook and his son Uncas are the last of the Mohican tribe who have an uncommon friendship with a white man named Hawkeye. While Hawkeye may identify as white, he most closely associates himself with the Indians, he is a