Historical Truth Historical Truth? As a child sits through history class in the first grade, he or she learns of the relationship between Christopher Columbus and the Indians. This history lesson tells the children of the dependence each group had on each other. But as the children mature, the relations between the two groups began to change with their age. So the story that the teenagers are told is a gruesome one of savage killings and lying. When the teenagers learn of this, they themselves might want to do research on this subject to find out the truth. But as one searches, one finds the inconsistency between the research books. So the question is, who is telling the truth? Mary Louise Pratt and Jane Tompkins probe these difficulties of the reading and writing of history, specifically at the problems of bias and contemplative historical accounts. In “Art of the Contact Zone,” Pratt explores the issue of whose version of history gets favored and whose gets limited by analyzing the circumstances surrounding Guaman Poma’s and de la Vega’s letter to the King of Spain. In “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” Tompkins investigates how history is shaped in accordance to personal biases and cultural conditions of historians by questioning different writings about Native Americans. Each author comes to the conclusion between history and subjectivity, meaning that history is problematic. The historical accounts pondered by Pratt and Tompkins through historical text allows them to realize that every account that a historian calls a fact is really a perspective. Pratt’s concepts of “contact zone,” “autoethnography,” and “ethnography” are supported by the historical ideas in Tompkins essay. The c... ... middle of paper ... ...from reading both essays one would find this to be true. For example, the historical documents encountered by both authors found some conflicting ideas. Comparing the two authors strategies to read history, Pratt does a complete job. A complete job means reading primary sources from both the inferior and superior cultures. This way she could get the full picture of the actual accounts of the “contact zone.” On the other hand, Tompkins does not read both types of texts, only “ethnographic texts” and comes to her conclusion. But the basis of Pratt’s and Tompkins’ essay is of the essays they read. Therefore each author is biased in their own nature. There biases come from their culture, which affects the way one sees or understands, and writes history. So whose view is right? It is oneself who ultimately decides on which historical point is true based on ones biases.
One question posed by the authors is “How did Columbus’s relationship with the Spanish crown change over time, and why?” In simple terms, Columbus’s relationship with the
“California is a story. California is many stories.” But whose story is heard? What stories are forgotten? In the memoir, Bad Indians, Native American writer and poet Deborah A. Miranda constructs meaning about the untold experiences of indigenous people under the colonial period of American history. Her memoir disrupts a “coherent narrative” and takes us on a detour that deviates from the alleged facts presented in our high school history books. Despite her emphasis on the brutalization of the Indigenous people in California during the colonization period, Miranda’s use of the Christian Novena, “Novena to Bad Indians,” illustrates an ‘absurd’ ironic stance amidst cruelty and violence. The elocution of the Novena itself, and the Christian
In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.
[2] No matter who the colonizer is, the problem with all historical documents is that they cannot be separated from the subjective interests that create them. Mexican poet and novelist Octavio Paz writes, "Historical circumstances explain our character to the extent that our character explains those circumstances. Both are the same" (72). Our history implicates how we, as individuals and a culture, judge ourselves. There is always a vested present interest in how we view ourselves in the past. And even for those historians who are trying to voice the oppresseds' counter-histories, the historical text will still be inscribed through his/her present ideological limits that bind historical circumstances to character.
Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, turns many heads as Richter changes the traditional outlook of the Westward expansion all the way to the American Revolution by viewing certain events through the eyes of the Native Americans who were settled in this land years before the new colonizations started. It was not easy to try and make a complete work about the different perspectives that the Natives had, due to the fact that many sources are works from Europeans or they were filtered by them. Richter explains that Native people sketch out elaborative paintings in their house or on barks of living trees, many of these sources obviously have not lasted long enough for us to examine. This book, however gives great detail and fully analyzes the "aggressively expansionist Euro-American United States" (p. 8-7) that rose from what belonged to Indian Country. Richter challenges you to compose a new framework of the Indian and European encounters reforming the "master narrative" of early American colonization from the Native point of view.
In the text Columbus the Indians and human progress Zinn has put forward clearly the journey of Columbus along the islands in search of gold and treasures. Throughout the text zinn has argued how the history is written and how historians have distorted it. Zinn has plainly discussed Columbus reactions towards the people he met on the islands. Also, he has tried to show the pictures of history writing. Zinn clears that history has been written only from the prospective of leaders, warriors and elites, by showing their achievements and struggle. But it is not written from the view of suppress and powerless people that become the victim of the leading historians. Such that historians have showed a bias work. The historians only write history in their prospective where it sounds and seems good for them, but that cannot be accepted by other people in the world. He has specified that, writers have written half truth of history and gone quickly over the dark truth of historians in terms of atrocities made by them on the weak people. Zinn has said that, historians put much attention on thei...
The purpose of this essay is that history is a result of point of view.
The accounts of Spanish explorers in the Americas each provide a unique representation of the “New World.” In the first-person chronicle of an explorer’s turbulent, nine year journey through the American southwest, The Relation, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca writes “I hope in some measure to convey to Your Majesty not merely a report of positions and distances…but of the customs of the numerous people I talked with and dwelt among, as well as any other matters I could hear of or observe” (28). Having lived alongside the Native Americans, deep within the landscape, De Vaca attempts to deliver an accurate and candid representation of the “New World.” His disenchanted portrayal illustrates how America was not a miraculous land, devoid of civilization
The discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus led to the inevitable captivity of the indigenous people as well as of people who were considered ‘different’. A new literary genre had grown from the brutal clash between the native Indian settlers and the British colonists during King Philip’s War. Some of these Native Indian Settlers or Colonialists were undeniably captured and kept prisoner by the British and out of this involvement came autobiographical literature of these experiences. This became a new literary genre called captivity narratives which developed a vast audience universally. Both Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson and Phillis Wheatley’s On Being Brought from Africa to
These reports are filled with interesting and entertaining details that put exciting, exotic images in the reader’s mind. Aware that his readers had never seen Native Americans and that most likely never would, Cabeza de Vaca made sure to fill his pages with the most shocking and foreign aspects of the natives’ cultures. Of the Capoque and Han people he met, he writes, “The men bore through one of their nipples, some both, and insert a joint of cane two and a half palms long by two fingers thick. They also bore their lower lip and wear a piece of cane in it…” (61). Of their eating habits, he writes, “Three months out of every year they eat nothing but oysters and drink very bad water”
Early Native American literature was a transition between the oral tradition. It captured the history of specific Native American groups including their migrations and the challenges they faced after the arrival of Europeans. Over time, the American literature authored by Native Americans was text- based and written in English. Literally, American traditional narratives are a form of autobiography containing a unique structure and distinctive themes that provide a window to life at a different time. The American traditional narratives started from the early 16th century in North America describing a case of the process of colonization and continued until the late 18th century including slave narratives. Typically, there are four types of American narratives. Those are travel narratives, tales of life in North America, captivity stories and slave narratives. This essay will compare and contrast Mary Rowlandson’s captivity story and Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative critically with a different view involving aspects and perspective.
Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones” was applied to the written accounts of the First Encounters in America in many ways. Mary Louise Pratt stated that the relationships between the natives and explorers “Usually involved… conditions of coercion.”(141). An example of this concept can would be in “Coming of the Spanish and the Pueblo Revolt.” This example is when the Spaniards lied to the natives. The Spaniards told the natives that Spaniards were more powerful than the witches. It states that the natives were so scared that they allowed “themselves to be made slaves.” (261). “In Imperial Eyes" Pratt also discussed an “asymmetrical relations of power.” (141). Two examples of this concept is also in the “Coming of the Spanish and the
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
In Thomas King’s novel, The Inconvenient Indian, the story of North America’s history is discussed from his original viewpoint and perspective. In his first chapter, “Forgetting Columbus,” he voices his opinion about how he feel towards the way white people have told America’s history and portraying it as an adventurous tale of triumph, strength and freedom. King hunts down the evidence needed to reveal more facts on the controversial relationship between the whites and natives and how it has affected the culture of Americans. Mainly untangling the confusion between the idea of Native Americans being savages and whites constantly reigning in glory. He exposes the truth about how Native Americans were treated and how their actual stories were
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien distinguishes between two kinds of truth-happening truth and story truth. Happening truth is the events that actually took place and are true, the unbiased skeleton. However, story truth is adding fictional substance to the bones of the truth, by adding more details that are not necessarily false but not exactly true and show the perspective of the soldiers. Story truth is a more effective way than historical truth to tell about the Vietnam War because it shows how the war was actually viewed by some of the soldiers. Historical truth is only pure facts and sometimes in order to really comprehend what actually took place a little exaggeration is needed.