I believe this was written around 2004 for a college class on Native American literature.

Racism, by definition, is the belief that one particular race is superior to another, or all other races for that matter. Many associate this belief with the color of a person’s skin – that one person hates another because their skin is a lighter or darker shade than the other. I believe, however, that racism is more related to culture than pigment. It is one race’s inability to peacefully co-exist with another, differing way of life that causes tension and, eventually, hatred of the other. While evidence of this can be seen in many instances throughout history, I will focus on the settling of what would become the United States by the English, French, and Spanish and the effect this had on the Native Americans who had already settled there for the purposes of this essay. While the Native Americans received the Europeans hospitably, they would soon learn that neither peace nor violence could settle the differences between the two cultures, and eventually these contrasts would almost completely destroy the Native Americans and their lifestyle.

To begin to understand how two cultures’ dissimilarity led to conflict, one must first fully understand the basic fabric that makes up the cultures themselves. The Europeans, while diverse from each other in slightly different ways, held many common beliefs, both political and religious, that secured their place in United States history forever. They brought with them the spirit of capitalism, which is founded on competition, the quest for wealth, and the expansion of power. The land not only provided more space for empires to grow, but also more natural resources with which they could increase their affluence. Military force was a common way to settle differences with those they met during their “exploration” of the world.

At the center of these expeditions was a strong belief that they alone possessed “the truth,” or the ultimate knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. They also believed that it was their god-given duty as Christians to convert any “heathens” they met along the way, and most of these “pagans” happened to be people of color. God also have them power over the land and its animals – humanity was at the top of the food chain and could control everything beneath them. God granted them an afterlife, but it would be a time of judgment where he would decide whose lives were worthy of heaven and who must be punished in the fires of hell.

They had very strict ideas about government and its responsibility to keep order and provide employment and education for its people, and citizens were divided into a hierarchy with various positions that determined their status in society, which included the bottom rung – slaves, who were not even considered true citizens. Daily life for the Europeans revolved around a time schedule and their focus was on a brighter future, saving money and goods and rarely living for the present. There was an emphasis on staying young and beautiful, and little consideration was given to the aged (Teaching About Native Americans, 44 – 45).

Native Americans, on the other hands, had vastly divergent principles. Their culture centered around appreciation and respect for nature because they believed that they were a part of the natural order, not the leaders of it as the Europeans contested. They used the land only for what they needed for survival and hunted for food, not for sport. Every rock, tree, animal, and person was an equal and integral part of the ecosystem, a topic that Native American author N. Scott Momaday wrote about often, specifically in an essay entitled, “A First American Views His Land” (Wilson, 33). Any disruption of this circle of life was offensive and disrespectful. Some tribes were monotheistic, believing in a “creator” greater than them, while others were polytheistic. Either way, most of them were spiritual and often performed traditional ceremonies of song and dance to ensure fertile land, good health, fair weather, etc. The belief in the afterlife was also a common one amongst all tribes, but it was not a time of judgment of the soul for them. Rather, it was the time when the soul could leave the body and truly be free in the natural world (Lincoln, 127).

While some tribes fought with each other on occasion, it wasn’t a dispute over land or power, but rather pride or to avenge a wrong. With such strong communal support, they did not understand the concept of “owning” the land, as they believed that the necessities of life were to be shared by all. Native Americans believed wisdom comes with age, and the elders were held in high regard. They were to pass the traditions and stories of their tribes to the young so that their culture would live on through the generations. Daily life did not revolve around a set calendar or time of day, and they lived every day in the present, respecting the past but embracing and enjoying each new day as it came (Teaching About Native Americans, 44 – 45). The only sense of government found among them was the Iroquois League, which loosely headed all the tribes and kept peace among them, but the individual elders of all the groups played the biggest role in keeping order (Jennings, 217).

With the Europeans preconceived notions of the Native Americans as inferior, uneducated, and heretical, it is no surprise that the early treaties made between the two were quickly broken. The Christians were eager to fulfill their “missions,” so they quickly invaded the tribes and hoped to convert them to their ideology, to mixed results. Their preaching genuinely moved some, since many already believed in a higher power, and they meditated on these new doctrines. This was rare, however, and more common was the result described in “Wolf ‘Aunt’” by Maurice Kenny, where a “Black Robe,” or priest, disrespects their religious beliefs by imposing his own and is met with violence (Nothing But The Truth, 508-509). Still others “converted” in hopes of preventing any future hostility, but many realized that this was going to occur anyway, such as in Florida and Massachusetts Bay, where Native Americans were Christianized by force (Jennings, 187). Native Americans probably could have lived and let live if they were left alone, but the Christian god relied on power in numbers, and their numbers would grow as attempted assimilation began.

As time passed and “Manifest Destiny” beckoned, the Europeans took more and more land as they moved west, pushing the Native Americans off the land they set aside and promised to them by various transitory documents. It is difficult to argue that skin color was the main reason whites showed prejudice against Native Americans when one takes into account all the attempts made by whites to integrate the races into one unified culture, once it became obvious that these people weren’t simply going to disappear no matter how many times they were relocated.

The Christian missionaries had failed, as a whole, to convert the adults, especially the elders, so the Europeans’ new target would be the impressionable youth. By cutting their hair, dressing them in English garb, and sending them to private schools to be re-educated, they hoped to rid the Native Americans once and for all of their “blasphemous” beliefs and anti-capitalist lifestyle. Their attempt to “bring them up English” failed in the sense that they could never truly erase their heritage completely, but it did break the spirits of most. Native American culture was a proud one before the invasion, but after the destruction of their homeland and the desecration of their once natural surroundings, they began to lose faith and give in to the forced feeling of inferiority pushed by the Europeans (Axtell, 179).

Whereas in European culture the children are educated in a public school system away from their families, the Native Americans were used to being educated at home by their families. This separation from family denied them cultural context, and they were not taught what it was to be a true Native American. Traditions, customs, religion, and language were lost during this period, and children began to grow apart from their families and feel further isolated than they already were. They were taught to be ashamed of their “strange” culture, and this emotional drain on the people led much more to submissiveness rather than assimilation (Horne, 114 -115).

As Conrad Shumaker points out in his essay (Telling the Stories, 83), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is about, in many ways, the contrast between Native Americans’ feelings of both interconnectedness with everything (as in nature) and the isolation and separation they feel (as in dominant society). The land set aside soon became strictly regulated reservations, which encouraged a learned helplessness – an enforced dependency on the white government to provide for them rather than being self-sufficient, which was the last source of great pride for the Native Americans. With mass depression settling in the new Native American mindset, they turned to another form of the white man’s burden – alcohol. The rest, of course, is history, as alcoholism is still the worst health problem facing Native Americans to this day.

Could the clash of these cultures be blamed on simply the ignorant inability of one to comprehend the logic of the other? It is possible, but the Europeans should not get off so easily. One thing they could have learned from their fellow Americans were the concepts of sharing the land with each other, as rival tribes often had to do, and acceptance, not just tolerance. These are simple concepts advocated by Christ himself, but the Europeans were too busy justifying their own greed and selfishness to see through their own hypocrisy.

In the long run, however, their “mission” has failed. Native American culture still exists to this day, and both authors and historians are keeping a more accurate record of history’s past mistakes. With this knowledge at our fingertips, will Americans continue to repeat these mistakes or can we preserve our varying cultures to make up one greater culture? Racism may still be an issue, but at least in today’s society, the majority sees it as an issue in the first place.

Works Cited:

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Harvey, Karen D., Lisa D. Harjo, and Jane K. Jackson. Teaching About Native Americans. Washington, D.C.: National Council of Social Studies, 1990.

Horne, Dee. Contemporary American Indian Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Jennings, Francis. The Founders of America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993.

Lincoln, Kenneth. Sing with the Heart of a Bear. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000.

Nelson, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Malcolm A. Nelson, eds. Telling the Stories. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

Purdy, John L. and James Ruppert, eds. Nothing but the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature. Prentice Hall, 2001.

Wilson, Norma C. The Nature of Native American Poetry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.