Analysis Of We Are People Not Property By Suzan Shown Harjo

Suzan Shown Harjo’s article “We Are People, Not Property” argues for the respect of deceased Indians in museums, from the archaeologists finding them, and the language they used to house their ancestors. Harjo gives a list of laws that in which she helps fight for. However, there has been a rollback on how Indians are and now she is back to help the issue get resolve again due to archaeologists not wanting to classify Indians properly. The main purpose is to get people to understand the problems they are going through and help them fix it by advocating for the laws of the deceased Indians. Harjo uses pathos, logos, and ethos to ensure the meaning of her article gets across to the readers and help understand how much their ancestors mean to …show more content…
Harjo starts the beginning of her article with an anecdote by saying, “It was my great good fortune to be part of the historic gathering in June 1967… reform the way we were treated in museums” (198). This allows readers to understand how much Harjo cares about Indians in a museum. By telling her readers, “We struggled for more than 20 years to achieve the human rights contained in the repatriation laws” (198) only to have them taken back. Harjo attempts to appeal to Native Americans and Non-native Americans who find the situation unfair to them. Harjo forms a sense of sympathy from her readers by giving them a chance to put their self in the predicament of her race. Along with her showing what she and other Natives Americans went through to get those human rights in the repatriation laws, she illustrates how language and terminology disrespect their ancestors in museums. As Harjo and others began to fight for their relatives and objects, they set the rules of the ways to properly classify their relatives, “Instead of “grave goods” and “artifacts,” the terms in law became… the legal terminology became “human remains”