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Impact of religion on culture
Native american culture vs european culture
Native american culture vs european culture
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Over the course of 408 years, from when the thirteen colonies were first founded and today, the traditions of European and Native American culture have always varied significantly. From their religious to their political views, the European and Native American beliefs have many common characteristics as well as many dissimilarities. These differences and similarities are most evident when comparing their creation stories and their constitutions.
All three of the creation stories, How the World Was Made, The Sky Tree, and Genesis, share several common characteristics. One of these characteristics includes how, when the world was first created, the earth was all water before any land was created. For example, in How the World Was
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Genesis reads that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth,” then “God’s spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters.” Another characteristic is how, after the water, came land. How the World Was Made, describes how the “soft mud,” from under the water “began to grow and to spread out on every side until it became the island we call the earth.” In The Sky Tree, the soil was “placed...until they made an island of great size.” A final similarity, is how after land came animals and how the animals helped to take care of the people on the earth. In How the World Was Made, the world the animals lived in was called Galun’lati. Galun’lati “was very much crowded,” and “the animals wanted more room;” Water Beetle left to find land so that the animals could have more space. While Water Beetle helped find land for the animals, in The Sky Tree a turtle sees a woman falling from the sky after she had jumped after a sacred tree. Turtle told his friends what he had seen and had them “bring up pawfuls of wet soil,” and place it on his back which created a “new earth,” for the woman to “settle gently on.” In Genesis, God created the animals …show more content…
The most apparent difference, is how the Earth was created. In How the World Was Made and The Sky Tree, the earth is created by animals. “The Sky Tree” describes how a group of animals, “Beaver, Mink, Muskrat, and Otter each brought up pawfuls of wet soil and placed the soil on Turtle’s back until they had made an island of great size.” Then it describes “the great tree” falling on the earth and taking root, creating the plants. And How the Earth Was Made tells how a water beetle dove to the bottom of the ocean and brought the mud up where it then “began to grow and to spread out on every side until it became the island we call earth.” That earth was then “fastened to the sky with four cords.” While these two stories are vaguely similar, the book of Genesis differs extremely. In Genesis an omnipotent being commands the earth to appear. It states that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and that “On the seventh day, God finished his work which he had made.” Another example of the many differences of these stories, is why the earth was made. For example, in The Sky Tree, Turtle sees a woman falling from the sky and has his friends “bring soil up and place it on Turtle’s back,” so that the woman would have something to land on. They created the earth to save the woman’s life. In How the World Was Made, the story stated that the sky world that the
The Native American’s way of living was different from the Europeans. They believed that man is ruled by respect and reverence for nature and that nature is an ancestor or relative. The Native American’s strongly belie...
The essay starts with the “Columbian Encounter between the cultures of two old worlds “ (98). These two old worlds were America and Europe. This discovery states that Native Americans contributed to the development and evolution of America’s history and culture. It gives the fact that indians only acted against europeans to defend their food, territory, and themselves.
In his essay, “The Indians’ Old World,” Neal Salisbury examined a recent shift in the telling of Native American history in North America. Until recently, much of American history, as it pertains to Native Americans; either focused on the decimation of their societies or excluded them completely from the discussion (Salisbury 25). Salisbury also contends that American history did not simply begin with the arrival of Europeans. This event was an episode of a long path towards America’s development (Salisbury 25). In pre-colonial America, Native Americans were not primitive savages, rather a developing people that possessed extraordinary skill in agriculture, hunting, and building and exhibited elaborate cultural and religious structures.
In Genesis, god created merely by speaking. It was god who created the heavens and earth also known as cosmos. Water was already pre-existent matter; everything else was created by god. It all began when god spoke in the darkness and said let there be light and there was light. God saw that the light was good. During the day there would be light, and the darkness would be at night. By the second and third day, god created a firmament (dome) which separated the waters from the waters. God called the firmament heaven and said that all the waters under heaven should be gathered as one allowing for dry land to appear. This created one place for the water and another place for dry land. It was the dry land that beca...
People have been living in America for countless years, even before Europeans had discovered and populated it. These people, named Native Americans or American Indians, have a unique and singular culture and lifestyle unlike any other. Native Americans were divided into several groups or tribes. Each one tribe developed an own language, housing, clothing, and other cultural aspects. As we take a look into their society’s customs we can learn additional information about the lives of these indigenous people of the United States.
Native Americans have had a long history of resistance to the social and cultural assimilation into white culture. By employing various creative strategies, Native Americans have attempted to cope with the changes stemming from the European colonial movement into the Americas. There are fundamental differences in world views and cultural and social orders between Indians and Europeans, which contributed to conservatism in Native American cultures. In this paper, two aspects of such cultural and institutional differences of Native American societies will be examined: holistic Native American beliefs versus dualistic world views and harmony versus domination. These two aspects are important in terms of explaining changes (or lack thereof) in Native American societies because they suggest that the Native American world view is more cyclical and its components are interlinked, while Western societies have a clear demarcation between cultural elements, such as religion, kinship, and morality. However, there are certain limitations to the theoretical frameworks that explain conservatism in Indian cultures because these theories are oriented around the Western world view and were developed based on the Western terms; therefore, indigenous population was not taken into account when these theories were developed.
Myths – as they are known to most of the world – give insight into the pasts of various countries and religions as the people saw them. They have been used to explain phenomenons in nature or describe the tales of courageous and important men and women throughout history. Creation myths in particular define how the Earth itself was created, along with the universe, heavens, hell, people, and creatures that exist today. Genesis of Christian mythology, for instance, tells the story of how the single deity God spoke and formed everything from day and night to man and woman. Various African creation myths, such as with the Yoruba, explain the creation of the Earth through at least a couple gods working together and all life sprouting from a seed. But all share a common themes, such as a form of chaos or nothingness before life is created. Joseph Campbell notes that “... the idea of an absolute ontological distinction between God and man – or between gods and men, divinity and nature - first became an important social and psychological force in the near East, specifically Akkad, in the period of the first Semetic Kings, c. 2500 B.C.,” showing another similar trait – a god or set of gods exists to create in each story (626). Joseph Campbell makes a comparison of how both Genesis and the Book of the Dead of Egypt share the same idea of their bodies belonging to their god in some way, or being reabsorbed into them at death (630-631). Others, like the Japanese and Iroquois creation myths, claim the Earth was once covered entirely of water before land was formed. Adam and Eve of Genesis and Izanagi and sister Izanami of Shintoism provide examples of myths that share both a passive and active pair of people who eventually create the Earth's population. In any case, certain popular creation myths, some closely tied to prominent religions, share more common characteristics than others. An entire sub-study, called comparative mythology, gives insight into this subject.
There are several different stories and theories as to how the Earth was created. Iroquois is a story of how a sky woman who disobeyed a single rule, not to touch the roots of the great tree. The Bible is similar a story which countless numbers of people believe, says that God created Adam. To company Adam he created a woman from one of his ribs, Adam named her Eve, she was to become mother of everything living.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Europeans started to come over to the new world, they discovered a society of Indians that was strikingly different to their own. To understand how different, one must first compare and contrast some of the very important differences between them, such as how the Europeans considered the Indians to be extremely primitive and basic, while, considering themselves civilized. The Europeans considered that they were model societies, and they thought that the Indians society and culture should be changed to be very similar to their own.
Both the Theogony and the Creation in Genesis show nature as a blessing for humans but with negative affects, However the myths differ in the ways that the Earth and humans were created and how humans interact with the deities of the creation stories. These differences include how Gods treat humans and why the Gods/God created Earth. These stories are still being passed on in today’s world and are two of the most influential creation stories to have ever been written. The similarities and differences in the creation stories show that different cultures and religions throughout the world really aren’t that far off from each other.
Where Genesis I describes a more ordered creation - the manifestation of a more primitive cultural influence than was responsible for the multi-layered creation in Genesis II - the second creation story focuses less on an etiological justification for the physical world and examines the ramifications of humankind's existence and relationship with God. Instead of Genesis I's simple and repetitive refrains of "and God saw that it was good" (Gen 1:12, 18, 21, 25), Genesis II features a more stylistically advanced look at "the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens" (Gen 2:4). While both stories represent different versions of the same Biblical event, Genesis II is significantly more complex than its predecessor and serves both to quantify the relationship between God and his creations and lay the foundation for the evolving story of humankind as well.
Genesis 6-7 reads, “And God said, ‘Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water’. So god made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so”3.
All three stories represent how the Native Americans say life came about or how the world was created. They are for the most part, very similar to each other. The stories can be told differently through the Native Americans and are commonly said orally. The stories are either a creation myth or an origin, but these three stories were creation myths. The beliefs and customs of The Earth on Turtle’s Back, When Grizzlies Walked Upright, and The Navajo Origin Legend, were all very similar to each other in the sense that they all had some sort of a creator and that they all say there is a superior force.
Genesis is the first creation story. God creates, establishes, and puts everything into motion. After putting all of this in motion he then rests. He creates everything on earth in just seven days. Before creation Gods breath was hovering over a formless void. God made earth and all of the living creatures on earth out of nothing. There was not any pre-existent matter out of which the world was produced. Reading Genesis 1 discusses where living creatures came from and how the earth was formed. It’s fascinating to know how the world began and who created it all. In Genesis 1 God is the mighty Lord and has such strong power that he can create and banish whatever he would like. His powers are unlike any others. The beginning was created from one man only, God.
The Book of Genesis which appears in the Old Testament of the Bible displays two stories of Gods ultimate creation of the world, its inhabitants and most notably human beings. However, these stories differ in literary description as well as terms of events that brought about the unyielding and mystifying question of; how did we get here? These stories are both key elements in the lives of billions of people around the world, they are the foundation of faith and what ultimately keeps people believing in the everyday purpose of their lives.