American Indian Life
American Indian life has been base
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American Indian life has been based on endurance, on the ability to survive and adapt. At one time, the Native American population was much larger than it is today and ruled the entire continent. The coming of Europeans also meant the beginning of a policy of extermination, a genocidal war against a people because they had a different worldview, a different religion, and were in possession of vast tracts of land whose resources the Europeans wanted to exploit. There was a fundamental difference between the way Europeans viewed the world and its relationship to the human community and the way Native Americans viewed these issues. Europeans believed God had given them dominion over nature, while Native Americans believed that humanity had links to the chain of being of living nature and were part of it instead of rulers over it. The settlers and the Indians fought numerous times early in American history, but the new American government after 1789 generally attempted to institute a sort of paternalistic policy with reference to the Indians. The Cherokee in 1828 were under the protection of the United States, and the people had adopted republican institutions and an agrarian mode of life. Most of the lands the Cherokee still had was within the boundaries of the state of Georgia, and Georgia wanted to exercise its sovereignty. In 1832, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall tried to prevent Georgia from extending its laws throughout the Cherokee territory, bu
. . .
ves from rightful ownership of it. . . Defining the Native Americans as "savage" and "brutish". . . armed [the English] with a moral justification for doing so when their numbers became sufficient.
The very land was sacred to the Native Americans who lived here before the white settlers arrived, and the relationship these people had with the land was not given much respect by the Europeans, who had a very different view of nature and their own place in it. To the Native American peoples the land they inhabited was sacred and sanctified. The first Europeans to witness Native American rituals failed to perceive this as a form of deep religious expression, for to their Christian minds, these were deplorable pagan rites. Worship of more than one deity, and sacrificial offerings directed at the natural world, stamped Indians as a misguided, lesser form of mankind. The attitude of the Christian Europeans toward the Native Americans was paternalistic as a consequence, and the result was that the Native Americans were treated like children and also were made to labor for their Christian betters as a way of atoning for their paganism. The Native Americans, of course, saw things differently:
Unimpressed with most settler practice
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 3227
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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American Indian life has been base
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