Elements of Place and Their Importance to Sacredness The stories by Winona LaDuke in her novel, Recovering the Sacred, The Power of Naming and Claiming, present some of the many challenges faced by indigenous cultures in a colonial society. Particularly, one of great interest to LaDuke, large corporations, and the government, to name a few, is that of wild rice, otherwise known as Manoomin, of the Anishinaabeg tribe. The problems affecting the Anishinaabeg’s rightful ownership of this wild rice comes from an act of biopiracy; which is basically stealing something biologically sacred to a person or a group, with the intent of pecuniary gain. This paper will address how wild race relates to the four elements of place with in White Earth Reservation: site and situation, tangible built environment, social context, and personal and collective meaning; and how these relationships are sacred to the Anishinaabeg, which makes them victims of biopiracy by the US government. …show more content…
The wild rice native to Minnesota grows in a particular climate, and has for thousands of years. This rice is not natively found anywhere else, and has been innately owned by the Anishinaabeg for such as long. Not only do these factors make the rice a delicacy, and a rarity, they make the rice sacred to the Obijwe because of the miraculous growth of this plant which has sustained their culture for season after season. For someone to believe they have the right to take a living organism out of its natural habitat and modify it because of high demand, truly does seem unethical and
It has come to my attention, as your media advisor, that you have been involved in a sex scandal of massive proportion. Due to the pictures found on your phone and the recent pregnancy of the same young woman, you must find a solution to clear your name to the public(The Associated Press). There are many options that you might be willing to look into to clear your name under these unfortunate circumstances, but in this case I would refer to the ideas of Elizabeth Kolbert for assistance. In her book "Stooping to Conquer" she claims that the best option to relieve your name of this scandal is through " comedy that makes fun of oneself". By following the ideas of Kolbert you will be
The book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Dr. Paul Brand & Philips Yancey gives a whole new meaning on what is studying biology. He starts by describing the very first time he saw a cell. He was amazed and from there on he learn how to be a biology student, while still having strong beliefs. He compares the human body as a community. Since each individual cell can live for itself. All cells come together to sustain the larger organism and properly function the way it should be.The analogy in 1 Corinthians 12, compares the human body to the church, where he states how god put each individual cell in its place for a reason. We all are made up of many cells but, we can not function if there are not together as a whole.
There seems to be a central theme to Sears’ book, Momaday’s book, and the various films we have reviewed, that there are old stories told about all of these "sacred places" that show us how to understand, care for, preserve, and protect the land around them. There are two aspects that stem from this main theme: that the words of these stories are traditional and sacred, and that people value different parts of the land in different ways. Some cultures value land as a worshiping center while others use it merely for entertainment and recreation. A problem comes into play when the culture’s views clash and the people don’t respect each other’s customs. When people don’t understand native’s points of view, they don’t understand how important their values are either.
The novel “Indian Horse” by Richard Wagamese demonstrates the many conflicts that indigenous people encounter on a daily basis. This includes things such as, the dangers they face and how they feel the need to flee to nature, where they feel the most safe. Another major issue they face is being stripped of their culture, and forcibly made to believe their culture is wrong and they are less of a human for being brought up that way, it makes them feel unworthy. Finally, when one is being criticised for a hobby they enjoy due to their indigenous upbringing, they make himself lose interest and stop the hobby as it makes them different and provokes torment. People who are trying
Deconstruction or poststructuralist is a type of literary criticism that took its roots in the 1960’s. Jacques Derrida gave birth to the theory when he set out to demonstrate that all language is associated with mental images that we produce due to previous experiences. This system of literary scrutiny interprets meaning as effects from variances between words rather than their indication to the things they represent. This philosophical theory strives to reveal subconscious inconsistencies in a composition by examining deeply beneath its apparent meaning. Derrida’s theory teaches that texts are unstable and queries about the beliefs of words to embody reality.
In the colonization of Turtle Island (North America), the United States government policy set out to eliminate the Indigenous populations; in essence to “destroy all things Indian”.2 Indigenous Nations were to relocate to unknown lands and forced into an assimilation of the white man 's view of the world. The early American settlers were detrimental, and their process became exterminatory.3 Colonization exemplified by violent confrontations, deliberate massacres, and in some cases, total annihilations of a People.4 The culture of conquest was developed and practiced by Europeans well before they landed on Turtle Island and was perfected well before the fifteenth century.5 Taking land and imposing values and ways of life on the social landscape
Many Native groups, because they were nomadic, didn't see land as belonging to one person. The idea that someone could come in, claim a piece of land and ban them f...
Pages one to sixty- nine in Indian From The Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal by Dennis McPherson and J. Douglas Rabb, provides the beginning of an in-depth analysis of Native American cultural philosophy. It also states the ways in which western perspective has played a role in our understanding of Native American culture and similarities between Western culture and Native American culture. The section of reading can be divided into three lenses. The first section focus is on the theoretical understanding of self in respect to the space around us. The second section provides a historical background into the relationship between Native Americans and British colonial power. The last section focus is on the affiliation of otherworldliness that exist between
Native American’s place in United States history is not as simple as the story of innocent peace loving people forced off their lands by racist white Americans in a never-ending quest to quench their thirst for more land. Accordingly, attempts to simplify the indigenous experience to nothing more than victims of white aggression during the colonial period, and beyond, does an injustice to Native American history. As a result, historians hoping to shed light on the true history of native people during this period have brought new perceptive to the role Indians played in their own history. Consequently, the theme of power and whom controlled it over the course of Native American/European contact is being presented in new ways. Examining the evolving
Sandefur, G. (n.d.). American Indian reservations: The first underclass areas? Retrieved April 28, 2014, from http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc121f.pdf
In Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s book This Earth of Mankind, the depiction of the Natives in this novel permits the author to expose the effects of colonization by the Europeans in Indonesia. Throughout this novel, the Natives are consistently portrayed as the social group, who are deemed inferior in comparison to the Europeans, which contributes to their oppression. The two characters that represent this attribute are Nyai Ontosoroh and Minke.
When a native author Greg Sams said that the reservations are just “red ghettos”, the author David disagree with that. He thinks there must be something else beyond that point. After his grandfather died, he somehow changed his mind. Because he could not think anything e...
As a child during frequent road trips through East Texas, I would press my face against the cool window of the family station wagon, look out, and wonder, “Who planted these rows of cotton? How did they make them so even? What are these black lines in the sky stretched between poles? Where do they begin and end? Who made all of this?”
Take a walk down Bourke’s main street and about midway, on the northern side, you will see a panoramic mural spanning the roofline of a simple brick building. It is a kind of timeline. At one end there is a panel devoted to Aboriginal life and Dreaming before colonisation, while the rest of the panels show a sequence of white exploration, pioneer settlement, a changing pastoral industry, reminders of historic floods, and a modern outback town. Where are the Aboriginal people in the rest of this story? Where are the Ngemba, Morowari, Paarkinji, Weilwan, Barabinja, Ualarai, Kamilaroi, or any of the other people from 21 different language groups who have settled in Bourke? The mural is typical of perceptions of Indigenous people as timeless. Forty-thousand years can be represented in one panel because traditional culture is unchanging; history begins with the arrival of whites. This perception has had broad implications for law and policy, such as constraints in Native Title legalisation that require Indigenous people to not only prove that they owned the land (according to Western notions of ownership), but that they prove continuing practice of ‘traditional’ customs. Historian Heather Goodall (2008) points out that pressure to construct Indigenous knowledge as a ‘static repository of pre-colonial knowledge’ also came from the environmental movements that emerged in the 1960s, where ‘indigenous people were depicted as exotic “noble environmentalists” living “in harmony” with the non-human environment’. These perceptions have also shaped how environmental managers and policy-makers have understood and made use of Indigenous knowledge for ecology.
Post colonialism is a discipline which concerns itself with the effects of colonialism and imperialism on the native people and their land. It is a subset of the post-modern intellectual discussion and is an active area of research in current times. The term ‘post-colonial’ generally refers to the period from when the colonialization began to the present times rather than from the period when colonization ended. Theories in post colonialism explore and analyse the legacy left behind by the European imperial powers and how it continues to affect the native society despite the end of colonial rule. An interesting aspect of this colonization is the duality that exists. Conquest can be both physical