Is Jack Weatherford's Stereotypes Of Racism Toward African Americans?

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Today’s society is flooded with racism in every direction we turn, not just racism toward African Americans and people of color, but towards the Native Americans as well. There are countless stereotypes, racist remarks, and myths that rest upon the lives of these people, and this book by Jack Weatherford helps to debunk some of those myths. He goes on to tell the countless stories and things that the Native American people did during their time, even helping the whites and colonists who were forcing them out of their land. Whether it was creating maps, prescribed burns of the forests, building, fur trapping, hunting, farming, the European settlers learned it from the Native Americans. If society knew how many things that the Natives did, and what the white settlers were able to learn from them, then maybe racism wouldn’t be such a problem. Despite being forced out of their homeland and territory, the Native Americans made some of the earliest maps for the explorers (Weatherford, 23). They knew the land so well that they were able to create functioning maps, and were willing enough to let the explorers use them. “Their personal knowledge of the land allowed them to draw maps with precise and accurate detail at the request of the whites” …show more content…

We still use the same hunting techniques that they once did, such as wearing camouflage, trapping, and imitating sounds of the animals. The natives studied the behaviors of animals so that we didn’t have to. When the settlers came they learned everything that they knew from the Native Americans. “Men and women go out to hunt wearing camouflage clothes… and they carry with them bird decoys and assorted whistles and callers, without realizing that all of these devices came directly from ancient Indian hunters” (Weatherford, 69). That sentence by Weatherford is a powerful one, and it sums up his

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