The Rhetoric Of The Anti-Indian Sublime

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.

“The Indian presence precipitated the formation of an American identity” (Axtell 992). Ostracized by numerous citizens of the United States today, this quote epitomizes Axtell’s beliefs of the Indians contributing to our society. Unfortunately, Native Americans’ roles in history are often categorized as insignificant or trivial, when in actuality the Indians contributed greatly to Colonial America, in ways the ordinary person would have never deliberated. James Axtell discusses these ways, as well as what Colonial America may have looked like without the Indians’ presence. Throughout his article, his thesis stands clear by his persistence of alteration the Native Americans had on our nation. James Axtell’s bias delightfully enhances his thesis, he provides a copious amount of evidence establishing how Native Americans contributed critically to the Colonial culture, and he considers America as exceptional – largely due to the Native Americans.

description of native life are described in such a way as to emphasize some of

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.”

When the European settlers arrived on the east coast of North America they believed that the Indians who occupied the land live a primitive life style. The Settlers felt it was up to them to develop this land and create a civilized world. From the time European colonists first arrived in North America and throughout the 1800s it was a constant battle between colonists and Indians over culture, land, and religion. The book “Red Eyes” suggest that natives understood that war would be detrimental to their existence.

While Pocahontas and “The Labor Problem” describe in great detail a few years at most, “The Indians’ New World” provides a much more comprehensive overview of Virginia from the early 17th to 19th centuries. Its lengthy time span enables it to present multiple stages of the colony’s history and the Indians’ peaks and valleys. For instance, early interaction is characterized by disease and depopulation on the Indian side. A smallpox epidemic, according to John Lawson, could destroy “ ‘whole Towns without leaving one Indian alive in the Village’ ” (Merell 543). Only “The Indians’ New World” recounts these deadly epidemics, some of which erased generations of wisdom and traditions. Another case is the merging of various Indian peoples, which receives attention in both “The Indians’ New World” and Pocahontas. However, Pocahontas implies that a union would only occur during a war, and afterwards the Indian groups would return to their respective ancestral lands. In actuality, once the Indians left the land of their ancestors’ spirits, very few were able to return to their homeland (Merell 546). Furthermore, “The Indians’ New World” illustrates the high level of trade between

The Pequot war was a bloody conflict that demonstrated the hatred and distrust between the the Puritans and the Pequot Tribe. Both sides were deeply suspicious of each other” (10). The Puritans viewed the Native Americans as “godless savages” (19) while the Native Americans viewed the Puritans as invaders. Rather than trying to coexist, the English firmly believed “there would be no assimilation of Indian culture” (24) which lead to even more tensions that eventually manifested in the form of the Pequot war.

In, A Severe and Proud Dame She Was, Mary Rowlandson recounts the treatment she received as prisoner of war from Natives in the Wampanoags and Nipmuck tribes written in her perspective. In 1675, Mary Rowlandson found herself and children held captive in the hands of Massachusetts Native Americans. Mary writes with a bias that seems to paint the Native Americans as a species different than her own, but her tone suggests she tried her best to understand their tribe. The purpose of this article appears to be written with the intent of persuading the masses on account of personal experience; that is the interaction among Natives and their customs to be seen in a light of hypocritical behavior. Through the lens of the captured author, she details the experience of her captivity with merciful gestures on the Native’s behalf, despite them keeping her for ransom. Rowlandson suggests traditional Native warfare surrounds a central recurring theme of manipulating mind-games; psychological warfare.

One of the bloodiest conflicts in U.S history that occurred in the 17th century was Metacom's war (also known as King Philip's War). In Proportion to the population, it is also recognized as the deadliest war in American history. By the end of the war, the English population of New England had declined by thirty percent and the Native Americans population declined more than twice the percent as the English. The dreadful war was a violent and destructive conflict, which was triggered by the devotion of maintaining cultural identity and preserving authority and power, both in religious and society capacities in which one believed to be his land. As a result, this crisis has impacted Americans and the culture of themselves for many years. This essay will analyze the history of Metacom's war chronology from June 1675-August 1676 informing the readers with knowledge about King Philip, the cause and effects of the conflict, and the impact it has made towards Americans.

Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. Author: Peter Silver. Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company New York (2008)

The Indian-White relationship had long been breaking down, due to a developing question between the pioneers and the Indians. One of the reasons of this doubt was that the pilgrims were exploiting the positive attitude of the Indians. The King Phillip's war was a contention between the Native Americans and the pilgrims. This contention was the aftereffect of numerous abuses toward the Indians executed by the homesteader. The King Phillip's war was an advocated war. Numerous elements added to the flare-up of this war, for instance numerous Indians felt that they did great to the pioneers and that the settlers were the first doing incorrectly. Another variable was that Englishmen were exploiting the Indians when arranging land; the pioneers were

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.

Although white European settlers and the native Indians had existed moderately peaceful for around 40 years pressures rose in the mid-seventh century. Conflict arose due to decline in Indian territories, population, and their cultural integrity. These differences ultimately lead to conflicts in which collectively became known as King Philip’s War. What types of complaints did the Indians have against the settlers? How were the Indians expected to survive if the settlers kept taking their land? The primary sources in this collection of source documents touch upon on what each group (Indian or white settlers) did to survive: an excerpt from a narrative written by John Easton, a second hand account written by Thomas Church, a report written to the English leaders by Edward Randolph, a petition written by an Indian named William Nahton, and an excerpt of an account from a book written by Mary Rowlandson. These documents illustrate the main causes that sparked the war between the Native Indians and the white English settlers, narratives written by both sides to find peaceful solutions, and actual accounts of people who survived the conflict. The second hand account written about Benjamin Church’s meeting with the Indian group known as the Sakonnet Indians displays that the Indians knew their only chance of survival was to fight while the report written to English leaders by Randolph suggest that the settlers who viewed the Indians as uncivilized had ultimately forced the Indians

In 1675, the Algonquian Indians rose up in fury against the Puritan Colonists, sparking a violent conflict that engulfed all of Southern New England. From this conflict ensued the most merciless and blood stricken war in American history, tearing flesh from the Puritan doctrine, revealing deep down the bright and incisive fact that anger and violence brings man to a Godless level when faced with the threat of pain and total destruction. In the summer of 1676, as the violence dispersed and a clearing between the hatred and torment was visible, thousands were dead.(Lepore xxi) Indian and English men, women, and children, along with many of the young villages of New England were no more; casualties of a conflict that

In his essay, “Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment” Kevin Kenny argues that conflict between Europeans and Native Americans was indeed inevitable. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, attempted a sort of “holy experiment”; a utopian land of equality and peace. Kenny argues that, despite the fact that “…Penn purchased land from Indians fairly and openly,” he did not do so for the Natives’ sakes (29). He had an agenda to sell the land to settlers and pay off prior debts. Still, Pen did want harmony and peace with the neighboring tribes and his legacy endured through hundreds of years (30). Despite William Penn’s efforts in creating a peaceful land with equality for settlers and natives alike, it all came to an end in a massive collapse eighty years later when the Paxton Boys entered the scene. The Paxton Boys were made up of a group of 50 or more “frontier militiamen” who went around to Native American villages, massacring whole tribes and then seizing and claiming the Natives’ lands for themselves (Kenny 29). Because these “Irish ruffians” or “squatters” weren’t really punished for killing entire Native American villages, other colonists started to follow suit and violent seizure of Native American lands became the norm. Kevin Kenny’s argument states that any chance of peace through William Penn’s vision was condemned by “…European colonists’