Native American Lost Traditions

Lost Traditions In any culture, traditions organically change over time. They are influenced by incoming generations, the shift in culture, the changes in the land, and the progression of knowledge. Change is healthy and crucial for any culture to survive. But what about traditions that have been completely lost? Traditions that once played an important role in the lives of many people but are now no longer to be seen. These traditions did not just fade away by natural causes but rather were sought after and snipped out by forces that didn’t understand the significance of those traditions. America often gets called a melting pot, meaning that it is a combination of multiple traditions all mixed together. That term, however, is not actually …show more content…
Religiously, Native Americans are connected to the land. They relied it for their physical survival but also for their emotional survival. Their ceremonies and traditions revolved around land monuments, their shrines were engrained with the earth, and they felt a deep connection to earth. They didn’t merely live on the land, they inhabited it and respected it. Starting with the Doctrine and Discovery and continuing indirectly today, Native Americans have been forced to located from their beloved lands. The loss of their led to the loss of some of their traditions. When many of their ceremonies and beliefs were revolved around a specific location, when that location was no longer available to them, they had to readjust and often that required them to forfeit some of the ceremonies that they had previously done. Settlers wanted to simply use the land for profit and didn’t realize, or care, they detrimental effects that the actions …show more content…
They wanted to erase their culture and traditions. They did this by focusing on the one thing most likely to keep tradition alive, the children. For years, they sent children to boarding school trying to rid the children of the “Indian” in them. They didn’t let they practice their beliefs and refused to let them speak in their native languages. Unlike many Western cultures, Native Americans didn’t write down their beliefs, they told them to future generations. They kept them alive by word of mouth and by faith. Removing the native language from a culture removes a large chunk of the soul from that culture as well, a part of their