Native American History & Literature

We really know far too little about Native Americans. In school, history books indicate that when Columbus set foot in America, this was a barren unexplored land with just a few savages running around that he called "Indians" because he thought that was where he arrived. But, as Ward Churchill is quick to point out, "North America was long-since endowed with an abundant and exceedingly complex cluster of civilizations" (Churchill 157). The article is very enlightening because it shows the Native Americans in a way most of us never thought about. Frankly, most of what the average American knows about so-called "Indians" is from Western movies, where they are usually out to kill and burn the white men and their property.

Actually, "the traditional economies of the continent were primarily agricultural based in environmentally sound farming proceduresa.War at least in the Euro-derived sense in which the term is understood today, was virtually un known" (Churchill 157).

There was something the "discoverers of North America" brought that was even worse than war. Disease. The Native Americans were not immune to the various strains of disease, and it killed many of them. "Between 1520 and 1890, no fewer than 41 smallpox epidemics and pandemics were induced among North American Indians. To this must be added dozens of lethal outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, typhus, cholera, diphtheria, scarlet fever, pleurisy, mumps, venereal disea

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opulation was liquidateda.white settlers replaced them on the vast bulk of their land" (Churchill 161). That struggle for survival continues to this very day. Most of the Native Americans still live on reservations, and have a difficult time getting a proper education and a decent career. As this article plainly indicates, Native Americans' plight is the shame of White America. E. Pauline Johnson wrote around the turn of the century. Perhaps she was one of the first "Redskin" women to write fiction. Her mother was English, and she herself lived in Canada, where she was known as Canada's "poet laureate during much of her professional life" (Johnson 125). In her story, As It Was In The Beginning, she writes about this man, the great "blackcoat" who came and, as many strangers tried to do to Native Americans, force a "new" religion on them. It scared the girl who is telling the story and her father: "Now I know he saw its effect upon us, and he used it as a whip to lash us into his new religiona" (Johnson 126). Of course, the idea of outsiders coming to impose their religious beliefs was not unusual in this New World. We know that the Spanish "conquistadors" brought fervent missionaries with them to "convert" the

Category: Literature - N