The Inconvenient Indian –Essay II
Imagine you are one of the sailors on Christopher Columbus’s voyage to cross the Atlantic Ocean in route to the East Indies. At 27 years of age you’ve lived your whole life in the small town of Andalucia as a sailor. Like most others in the region you grew up worshiping a Christian God and praising the monarchy that governs you. Two months have passed since you have left port and at last you reach shore. A lush green horizon that unfolds in front of you as you step upon the lunar shores. What do you see? Terra nullius, or a land unowned and unmanaged? That’s what these men who landed there in 1492 believed they were gazing upon. Ecstatic, these men thought of how great it will be to populate the land with the same values and ideas instilled in them growing up in Spain. What they didn’t realize was that past that line of wilderness was an entire society with developed …show more content…
In the book The Inconvenient Indian the author Thomas King humorously states, “Columbus didn’t discover anything [he] simply ran aground on an unexpected land mass”. That’s probably not how most American citizens would say they believed that the new word was discovered. The author describes in the first chapter how history shows that Columbus really wasn’t all he has been made out to be in the stories. The problem with the general European mindset is that we believe what is more appealing. Regardless of all the evidence that shows Columbus really didn’t know what he was doing when he discovered the new world or that he was not even the first to discover it King states that to Europeans, “Columbus sailing the ocean blue is the better story”. That’s the kind of indigenous knowledge that our European culture possess. This concept is extremely relevant in today’s cinema. We have this idea that everything has a start point and an end point. You meet the characters, then boom explosions and/or a happy
Imagine you are one of the sailors on Christopher Columbus’s voyage to cross the Atlantic Ocean in route to the East Indies. At 27 years of age you’ve lived your whole life in the small town of Andalucia as a sailor. Like most others in the region you grew up worshiping a Christian God and praising the monarchy that governs you. Two months have passed since you have left port and at last you reach shore. A lush green horizon that unfolds in front of you as you step upon the lunar shores. What do you see? Terra nullius, or a land unowned and unmanaged? That’s what these men who landed there in 1492 believed they were gazing upon. Ecstatic, these men thought of how great it will be to populate the land with the same values and ideas instilled in them growing up in Spain. What they didn’t realize was that past that line of wilderness was an entire society with developed …show more content…
In the book The Inconvenient Indian the author Thomas King humorously states, “Columbus didn’t discover anything [he] simply ran aground on an unexpected land mass”. That’s probably not how most American citizens would say they believed that the new word was discovered. The author describes in the first chapter how history shows that Columbus really wasn’t all he has been made out to be in the stories. The problem with the general European mindset is that we believe what is more appealing. Regardless of all the evidence that shows Columbus really didn’t know what he was doing when he discovered the new world or that he was not even the first to discover it King states that to Europeans, “Columbus sailing the ocean blue is the better story”. That’s the kind of indigenous knowledge that our European culture possess. This concept is extremely relevant in today’s cinema. We have this idea that everything has a start point and an end point. You meet the characters, then boom explosions and/or a happy