Essays On Native American History

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At worst, Indians were cast as treacherous villains and bloodthirsty savages; at best, as co-conspirators in their own undoing or tragic heroes who valiantly resisted before accepting the inevitability of their demise.A Poetry Portfolio: Featuring Five of Our Country’s Finest Native Poets by Natalie Diaz“Learning and speaking one’s native language is an emotional and political act.Each time a poet brings a native language onto the white space of the page, into the white space of the academies and institutions of poetry, it is an emotional and political act.”read more Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets by Joy Harjo“Those who took care of our Mvskoke culture taught me that our arts carry the spirit of a people.Turner bemoaned the fact that 400 years after discovery, the frontier had finally closed—and with it, he surmised, came the end of Indian history.Soon, Turner clearly believed, the savage Indians who had done so much to inspire the unique American spirit would be gone.Learn more: Native America: A Story of Survival Either way, Indians exited stage left eventually.History, thus conceived, served as a handmaiden of conquest, and a powerful one at that.In 2016, President Barack Obama attended the eighth annual White House Tribal Nations Conference, where he proclaimed November 2016 as National Native American Heritage Month and announced November 25, 2016, as Native American Heritage Day.In celebration of Native American Heritage Month, check out this selection of poems, essays, books, and more by and about Native American poets.He writes: Because most Indian history is written within the university, and because most university campuses are centers for left-of-center beliefs, most recent Indian history has emerged packaged in what anthropologist Edward Bruner of the University of Illinois has called an "ethnic resurgence" model (1986).From earlier models of acculturation and assimilation, the new Indian history views the present as a "resistance movement," the past as "exploitation," and the future as "ethnic resurgence." Terms like exploitation, oppression, colonialism, resistance, liberation, independence, nationalism, tribalism, identity, tradition, and ethnicity, Bruner notes, are the "code words of the 1970s.(p.92)As an historian, I will accept nothing on religious faith, on ethnic tradition, […] History to me means a commitment to truth […] Neither Indian history by itself – least of all that parody of history that asserts ideologically the rightness of an Indian point of view merely because it is Indian – nor white history in its now discredited "settlement of the West" form, in which the Indian is merely a surrogate for nature, can stand the test of a bicultural history grounded in the commitment to a non-ethnic, non-religious, non-ideological truth.(p.97)But what does "commitment to truth" actually mean?