Lakota

fought over the land with surrounding tribes. Historians have argued that “Pawnee fought more battles with other enemy tribes than they did against white settlers” (“Pawnee Tribe History, Facts, and Culture”). Tribes that the Pawnee battled were the Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, Arapaho, and Sioux (“Pawnee Tribe History, Facts, and Culture”). Yet, the Pawnee did not always fight with other tribes, they also traded with them. They traded with tribes such as the Comanche and Omaha (“Native…

This essay will analyze how the creation of the nation-state systemically marginalizes indigenous women because of their race, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. I will briefly define the concept of spatial segregation to understand how it relates to the film Finding Dawn and the book Ravensong. The nation-state facilitates violence towards indigenous communities through their laws, social practices, and institutional policies. Moreover, aboriginal women are highly vulnerable to male…

greed on their minds, the wars brought out the worst in the people, namely the Iroquoian tribes. Not only were they expanding north, but they continued west as well. Their expansion west pushed the Algonquin out of the Ohio area, and as well as the Lakota from the east. This event altered the Lakota’s lifestyle to a nomadic one as they were now in the Plains and had just to adjust to their new surroundings. It wasn’t until the French lead a counter attack that the Iroquoian stopped their…

THE CULTURAL SHOCK OF NATIVE AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOLS Native American Boarding Schools in the United States was an American effort to assimilate the Indian children, ages three through the teen years, into becoming Americans. In these schools, they would strip the children of their Native culture and introduce American culture. The American government would take the children from their parents to schools that were not located on reservation property, but rather on United States property. The…

For Native Americans and First Nations members, being forgotten or disposed of in the name of progress is not unprecedented. A history of genocide, oppression, and homogenization by white people cannot be ignored when discussing the way these societies changed, nor can it be ignored when analyzing the way the aboriginal people of North America have been assessed within academic circles. Too often the basic knowledge established to build a foundation for continued learning is established by…

From the moment Columbus set foot on present-day America, the Native Americans have fought for the right to live. European-Americans came in with a lack of understanding and respect for Native American culture as they imposed their ideals on the Native American way of life. White society “saw everything in terms of freedom” to which Native Americans found no value in (Nerburn, 1994, p. 158). In turn, all white society can do to heal wounds, is to “give [freedom] back to [Native Americans] in the…

In 1991, the movie Dances with Wolves was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and won seven of them, including Best Picture of the Year. This was originally a novel by Michael Blake in 1986 but became a movie in 1990 and was directed and produced by Kevin Costner and Jim Wilson. The main characters were Lt. John Dunbar (Kevin Costner), Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), and Kicking Bird (Graham Greene). This movie was set in 1864 and told the story of a soldier named John Dunbar who chose to…

Indigenous Epistemology Countless times,the western dominant society has discounted Indigenous Knowledge and discredited their beliefs and lifestyles. Deloria(2001) said“For many centuries whites scorned the knowledge of American Indians,regarding whatever the people said as gross,savage superstition and insisting that their own view of the world, a complex mixture of folklore,religious doctrine, and greek natural sciences, was the highest intellectual achievement of our species?”(p.1). Western…

In the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota, Mount Rushmore, a large granite peak was dedicated in 1925 to be sculpted into a monument. That monument today is one of the most visited monuments in the United States. Mount Rushmore is a staple of the United States. On it, it has the faces of four of the most important Presidents of the United States. According to the Sculptor Gutzon Borglum “The purpose of the memorial is to communicate the founding, expansion, preservation, and unification…

How do you define religion? Is it a belief system based on supernatural beings? Or is it something as foolish as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? According to Geertz in Religion As a Cultural System religion can be broken down into five parts. Geertz writes that religion is a system of symbols (1) which acts to establish moods and motivations in men (2) by formulating conceptions of organizations of existence (3) and covering those conceptions by making them seem factual, (4) while…