American Indian Hist

The question of what motivates people more than when they act ethnic priorities, much(prenominal) as devotion or tradition, or the so-called rational needs, such as economics and government activity has been maven dogged debated on. This debate has been preferably fierce, members of both purviews providing valid and powerful arguments to support their claims. One of the focal points for this reciprocation be the people known under the blanket term congenital Americans. Where did their motivations stem from? Was it merely pragmatism, a wish to get the closely break through of whatsoever outsiders? Or was agriculture and tradition vital to decision reservation?It is doubtless that both of these fixingss were present, however, the question is, which was the initial factor of influence, dominating prospect and action. Scholars demand attempted to assay points both ways. I support the side which claims that culture was the primary factor. I shall first provide c ounter-arguments to the opposing side, past provide supporting arguments for my own claim. First, however, it must be n nonpareild that inhering Americans is a very catchall term, which is used for lack of a bettor one. As the website of the indigen American research center states, It must be forceful that no one person speaks for Indian People.There argon nearly third hundred distinct American Indian Nations in the present unify States. Each has its own language and history, its own sacred lines and rites. Each is grow in and part of the land out of which it grew. There atomic number 18 gobs of tribes, including some that are officially considered extinct now, that had quite polar customs. If we adduce that at that place were ingrained Americans and they had one kind of culture and, as a consequence, had the same customs, we may just as well say that there are Europeans and they be possessed of one culture, completely losing the obvious signs among different na tions.The cultures of different tribes of natural Americans are very different to deny this would be to unjustly diminish their cultural value and yet there are cultural tendencies, and there are exceptions. I will attempt to prove that the tendency is to use tradition as a guideline, and the occasions where hardheaded reasons have been primary are the exceptions verifying the rule. First I shall run across the political argument. It seems very hard-fought to think that governing in the find that we understand them now had an influence on the intrinsic Americans.When we think of politics we think of diplomatic traditions, of treaties that are made to be broken, of backstabbing. This, however, was non the plethoric case with primal Americans. As Dee Brown wrote in his book withdraw My Heart at Wounded Knee, So tractable, so peaceable, are these people, Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain referring to the Tainos on the island of San Salvador, so was named by Col umbus, that I swear to your Majesties there is non in the world a better nation.They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy. This was verified a number of times by opposite observations, Columbuss report being merely the nigh historied occasion. Time after time, the settlers used the same tactic. While officially recognizing the natives as owners of the land, they used any tactic possible to get them to transport the land, up to getting the chief of the tribe drunk.Then, once the treaty which usually went along the lines of There are ovalbumin men on your lands now anyway, provided give us a part of your land, and we will not go on your land without your permission. was signed, in a few years the refinement continued in the same manner, and new treaties were signed. Despite these circumstances, there have been virtually no instances of the treaties between the Indians and the Europeans being broken by the Indians however, Europeans were break of serve these treaties constantly, in 99% of the casesOne would think that if politics were the defining factor in the Native Americans way of dealing they would have changed their tactic after the first few times these treaties were broken they were not fools, and hundreds of years of such tactics would have destroyed even the most saintly naivete. So the conclusion must be that there was something more than mere hope that the white men would see reason standing(a) behind these promises that forced the Native Americans to keep them. The next common pickax for primary motivation is economics.However, despite the fact that the Indians had private property and were no strangers to interchange, this could hardly be the dominating motivation. First of all, the Indians were completely self-supporting. Even if they did accept something essential the y could not produce themselves which was fairly rare other Native American tribes broadly proved much better business partners, generally being more honest than the Europeans. Consequentially, all the Europeans could offer them were luxuries. This, by nature, should not be underestimated as a lure in any way.However, a trade which truly entails scarcely luxuries is always small by necessity. In any case, trade relationships were not nearly so large-scale as in the Old World. They could not have been the driving motivation Also, we have many documents that detail the interaction between Native Americans and European settlers. The initial reception to the abovementioned land-selling treaties was nearly always quite similar. For instance, an excerpt from the 1752 Abenaki Conference between chief Phineas Stevens and the St.Francis Indians shows the Indians attitude to these treaties 4 But we will not cede one bingle inch of the lands we inhabit beyond what has been obdurate f ormerly by our fathers. 5 You have the sea for your share from the place where you reside you can trade there just we expressly prohibit you to kill a item-by-item Beaver, or to take a single stick of timber on the lands we inhabit if you want timber well sell you some, but you shall not take it without our permission. And there exists a number of other documents revealing a similar attitude.Could this, in truth, only be viewing that the Indians merely wanted a better deal? One could by nature gain a leeway in trade by tutelage the land and selling its resources. However, it is a basic law of economics that one wishing to trade must meet the demand. Had this trade in itself been a factor of dire immensity to the Indians, they would have put forth an grounds to convince the Europeans that trading would prove profitable. However, the attitude that prevails in documents is one of indifference. It seems interchangeable the Indians did not care for the presence of Europeans.If the white men wished a trade, therefore they would get a trade. If they did not, the Indians seemed perfectly content to let them live without reservation any more touch modality than perfectly essential. Trade was not of importance it influenced the relationship between the natives and settlers when it was present, but it was by no inwardness the most important factor. On the other hand, tradition and culture was of extreme importance, influencing correct tribes behaviors especially such a part of culture as righteousness. For Native Americans religion was of utmost importance.Even the Canadian Jesuit missionaries remarked that the Native Americans were highly religious and not in the Sunday Christian sense, either, but with deep roots and a great influence of every aspect of their lives. This is a characteristic feature of most tribal societies, where little distinction is made between the sacral and the mundane. However, for Indians religion had special relevance, as i t was one of the things that allowed them to cling on to their cultural identity, saving them from assimilation. Yet even in front this was a relevant factor, religion permeated nearly every aspect of Native American life.Their religion was (and remains) one of pure personal experience, not go away any room for dogma. The Native American worldview is mythological. For all practical purposes, this means that religious factors such as hunting rituals and their theoretical results are the sensed as being absolutely as physically real as an arrow fired into an animal, having the same kind of cause-and-effect that a physical topic might. A deal with a spirit, for instance, is treated as seriously as a treaty with a human. A spirits standard was heeded as much as a humans would, with absolutely the same kind of discretion.And magical means of solving problems were taken as absolutely valid. One of the most well known incidents was in 1876, onward the battle at Little-Big-Horn when t he famed Sitting Bull performed a three-day shamanic ritual to decide what to do with the white men, staring at the sun and lesion himself until he fell unconscious. After he came to, he announced that the white men were there for the Indians to take, because he saw white men clear into the Indians camp headfirst, losing their hats, meaning they would be the killed by the Indians.Also he announced that They had no ears, i. e. they were deaf to reason, giving the Indians a moral counterbalance to attack. This is not the only incidence of religion influencing political activity. The Ghost terpsichore religion can be cited as another famous example, video display how Native American religion changed with the times, how it adapted to the flow of time and adoptive alien cultural notions and yet survived without losing all of its cultural value, keeping the spirit, though changing the form.One might say that this lack of dissemination between firm life and religious life simply bring s more factors into the political games. ghostlike leaders are used as figure heads for power play, and hard liquor are dealt with in the same manner humans are dealt with if, indeed, the shamans who contact the spirits even think in them and not use them as a means of their own power and control This is, however, hardly the case, as there are numerous arguments against this position in the study of tribal societies as a whole.Firstly, their religion was always very personal. Every single Indian had their own religious experience and, as with any religion that requires its neophytes to work out their own niche clergy being needed only in extreme cases it is always very strong. The strength of this experience makes it difficult to give anything that is lower than it is a higher priority. The Native Americans did not believe in their gods watching over them they knew the gods were there as much as they knew that their teepee was still standing.And while white men were considere d a maverick nuisance, guests or invaders at best, and were treated that way, the gods were almost like family, and treated with infallible respect and given due priority. Second, as the phenomenon of the Ghost Dance shows, the acts make out of religion were not necessarily the wisest politically such as the sending out of search parties to look for the Messiah said to be an incarnation of Jesus, and this at the time when men were crucial to survival so faking divine inspiration for political power is ruled out.So, if the leaders real believed in what they saw, the fate of hundreds and thousands rested within religion more than luxuriant to define it as one of the crucial influencing factors. It can be seen that politics and trade simply not as much of an influence on life, while religious and cultural activity was always extremely important, direct the life of every Indian to a certain extent. This was the source of much misunderstanding, since for Europeans politics often took the leading role when religion failed to provide the necessary support and guidance.This made both sides misinterpret the others actions, resulting in a long and bloody war that spanned generations. The Native Americans also had also led wars between each other in the past they were no strangers to military tactics. However, their wars had rules ones that the settlers naturally broke, thus spelling defeat for the natives. This also shows just how big a role does tradition play in Native American parliamentary procedure had they adapted to the way of war which the Europeans brought to them, they would have survived losing less than they did.In conclusion, it can be said that, as we have seen, purely empirical evidence proves that the Native Americans did not use either politics or economics as the prime guideline for building the relationships either among themselves or between them and Europeans. These factors were not considered firsthand in any crisis situation, and even 370 years of war against the Europeans did not put them very high on the list of priorities. However, ethics and religion made quite an impact on the decisions made by the Native American people, and remain influential factors in their thinking to this day.This was the true motivation of most Native Americans, and remains so up to modern times. whole shebang cited. 1. American Indian Culture Research Center http//www. bluecloud. org/dakota. hypertext markup language 2. Dee Brown, go down My Heart at Wounded Knee An Indian History of the American West, Henry Holt & Company Reprint edition (February 1, 1991) 3. Terry L. Anderson, Dances with myths truths intimately American Indians environmental ethics, Reason, February 1997. 4. Ghost Dance piety http//www. bgsu. edu/departments/acs/ nineties/woundedknee/WKghost. hypertext markup language 5.Cultures of North America http//www. mnsu. edu/emuseum/cultural/northamerica/index. shtml 6. Cultures of North America http//www. mnsu. edu/e museum/cultural/northamerica/index. shtml 7. David Stannard, The American Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 1992. 8. The Massacre at Wounded Knee http//www. hanksville. org/daniel/lakota/Wounded_Knee. html 9. The Wampum Chronicles Mohawk Territory on the Internet http//www. wampumchronicles. com/index. html 10. George E. Tinker, Religion http//college. hmco. com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_032600_religion.htm 11. NativeWeb http//www. nativeweb. org/ 12. Indian Affairs Laws and Treaties. Compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler http//digital. library. okstate. edu/kappler/Vol1/HTML_files/toc. html 13. Abenaki Conference with Phineas Stevens. Documents Related to the Colonial History of the State of New York Vol. X. pg. 252-254. Donated by Jeffery Miller Administrator of Fort 4. http//www. avcnet. org/ne-do-ba/doc_1752. html 14. The Manataka Oath, Creed and Code of get by http//www. manataka. org/page182. html