The European settlers of North America irreversibly changed the way Native Americans lived. These settlers brought different ideologies, convictions, religion and diseases, to the Indigenous peoples. There were frequent clashes between the settlers and the Natives over land rights and usage, religious and cultural differences, and, especially, broken treaties (Calloway 3). Some tribes embraced the new ideas and began to incorporate them into their own culture, while other tribes rejected them entirely (Calloway 4). It is not possible to understand the history of the United States without acknowledging the “very long history, cultural diversity, and enduring presence of America’s indigenous peoples (Calloway iii). They were the ones that first
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In the Revolutionary War, when the colonists needed their help in fighting the British, the Native Americans were thought of as brave and noble. But, when the Natives got in the way and served as an inconvenient obstacle to their plans of western expansion, they became animalistic and bloodthirsty savages (Calloway 76). In the case of the Mashpee Tribe vs. New Seabury Corp trial, as evidenced by the Mashpee Conflict video, the Mashpee were given the stereotype of “Americans of an ethnic cultural heritage." The defendants conveniently labeled the Mashpee in such a way in order to refute a claim that would award the Mashpee with thirteen thousand acres, which the Tribe claimed had been taken illegally. This stereotype arose because they fought alongside Americans and embraced Christianity. This lead people to focus selectively on information that agreed with the stereotype and they, consequently, ignored the information that disagreed with it. In reality, the Mashpee were forced to convert to Christianity. Churches were a sanctuary to them, where people left them alone to conduct political discussions, organize collectively, and converse in their native language. There were three vital mistakes that accounted for the White man’s false imaging of the Indigenous peoples. First and foremost, the generalizing of one tribe’s way of life to that of all …show more content…
These textbooks fail to describe the repudiation of Europeans to recognize the rights of Native Americans, who were themselves the first settlers of North America (Calloway 73). Therefore, there is a major contradiction between our history in United States textbooks of European settlement and the reality of the cruel dispossession of Native American land. So they can avoid this contradiction, Americans believe in the myth of the "empty continent" peopled by nomadic savages and simply overlook the brutal reality of the Native American-White conflict (Calloway 15). This process of denial is called cognitive dissonance. When “new information conflicts with something we already ‘know,” we tend to have difficulty accepting those new ideas (Lecture 1-1). Moreover, in order for Americans to revel in the victory of western expansion and the feat of American democracy and civilization, they fail to recall that in order to settle the continent, they had to inhumanly reject the Indians their rights and culture (Calloway 15). Further evidenced by the video, “Oren Lyons the Faithkeeper,” there is a case of cognitive dissonance when it comes to American history. Around 1744, Benjamin Franklin was present at a meeting where the Six Nation chiefs advised various governors to form an “indivisible
In the Revolutionary War, when the colonists needed their help in fighting the British, the Native Americans were thought of as brave and noble. But, when the Natives got in the way and served as an inconvenient obstacle to their plans of western expansion, they became animalistic and bloodthirsty savages (Calloway 76). In the case of the Mashpee Tribe vs. New Seabury Corp trial, as evidenced by the Mashpee Conflict video, the Mashpee were given the stereotype of “Americans of an ethnic cultural heritage." The defendants conveniently labeled the Mashpee in such a way in order to refute a claim that would award the Mashpee with thirteen thousand acres, which the Tribe claimed had been taken illegally. This stereotype arose because they fought alongside Americans and embraced Christianity. This lead people to focus selectively on information that agreed with the stereotype and they, consequently, ignored the information that disagreed with it. In reality, the Mashpee were forced to convert to Christianity. Churches were a sanctuary to them, where people left them alone to conduct political discussions, organize collectively, and converse in their native language. There were three vital mistakes that accounted for the White man’s false imaging of the Indigenous peoples. First and foremost, the generalizing of one tribe’s way of life to that of all …show more content…
These textbooks fail to describe the repudiation of Europeans to recognize the rights of Native Americans, who were themselves the first settlers of North America (Calloway 73). Therefore, there is a major contradiction between our history in United States textbooks of European settlement and the reality of the cruel dispossession of Native American land. So they can avoid this contradiction, Americans believe in the myth of the "empty continent" peopled by nomadic savages and simply overlook the brutal reality of the Native American-White conflict (Calloway 15). This process of denial is called cognitive dissonance. When “new information conflicts with something we already ‘know,” we tend to have difficulty accepting those new ideas (Lecture 1-1). Moreover, in order for Americans to revel in the victory of western expansion and the feat of American democracy and civilization, they fail to recall that in order to settle the continent, they had to inhumanly reject the Indians their rights and culture (Calloway 15). Further evidenced by the video, “Oren Lyons the Faithkeeper,” there is a case of cognitive dissonance when it comes to American history. Around 1744, Benjamin Franklin was present at a meeting where the Six Nation chiefs advised various governors to form an “indivisible