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