I thought that the reading was
interesting up to a point but I did not really care about its overall message.
The reading suggests that American Indian’s possess a history that many
Anglo-Historians have failed to recognize and then gives a brief overview of
this history. None of the information in the article was new information for me
and just seemed to reassert facts I was previously aware of. What I found most
interesting however, was the information the article does not give in terms of
the special status that Native Americans occupy vis-à-vis the United States
government. Essentially, Native lands are held in trust by the federal
government and Native peoples are considered to be a trustee of the state. Even
though Native are technically autonomous from the U.S. government the truth is
that they are kept dependent on federal support and money. The article also
does not describe the prolonged period of graft, exploitation, and ineptitude
that has characterized the federal government’s handling of its duties towards
the Native Americans.
I did like the article’s critique
of how historians have chosen to depict American Indian history. Very few
people seem to acknowledge that Native people have a long history that predates
Euro-American history by several centuries. This fundamental lack of acknowledge
was the basis by which Euro-Americans justified appropriating land that they
held highly questionable legal claim to. By not admitting that Indians were
themselves American, it became possible to turn them into an “other” which led
to the exploitation of their land, and the coerced deportation of tribes.
Another interesting facet to the
article, in my opinion, was the parallel that was drawn between Native
Americans and Europeans during the phase of European migration to the Americas.
It is interesting to know that both societies were going through a tremendous
amount of upheaval much of which lead to the current societal composition of the
United States today. It is interesting to think about what might have happened
had Europe not gone through such an intense period of religious standardization,
which had the end result of forcing many Europeans to flee their home
countries. This process proved to be extremely damaging for Native Americans
who were introduced to a host of new infections, and human predators intent on
acquiring their land that otherwise they may never have come into contact with.
This part of the article highlights how so many seemingly disparate events in
history are actually tied to one another. It is like historical events are the
inner workings of a clock with each gear a vital mechanism working in
conjunction to produce a certain product. In the case of the clock that product
is time, in the case of history the product is a vast series of events that are
all interconnected. The article’s main point however is showing that America’s
history cannot be told purely through a Euro-centric lens, but does in fact
stretch farther than most history books care to mention. This might be the most
important thing I took away from the article, the mind-set that I needed to
think outside of the Euro-centric historical point of view that I have been raised
in.
