President Bush
“The strength of our Nation comes from its people. As the early inhabitants of this great land, the native peoples of North America played a unique role in the shaping of our Nation's history and culture. During the month when we celebrate Thanksgiving, we especially celebrate their heritage and the contributions of American Indian and Alaska Native peoples to this Nation.”
The contribution of the American Indian to the English language is something that is often overlooked. These words range from such common English words as "raccoon," "moose," "quahog" and "mackinaw" to literally thousands of place names: "Chicago," "Tallahassee," "Cheyenne," "Hackensack," "Keokuk," "Rockaway," and many others. Historians point out that the first settlers on American shores discovered many things they had never seen before and which appeared nowhere else in the world. To get the English words for an Indian objects the settlers simply spelled out as best they could in English their impression of the Indian sounds. Understandably there were often various spellings. An early spelling for skunk was "squuncke," a persimmon was first spelled "putchamins" and the Niagara was the "ongniaahra." One political word widely used today, "caucus," appeared in several of the Indian languages.
A case can be made that contact with American Indians actually served as one of the catalysts for the Scientific Revolution in Europe. In 1571 King Philip II of Spain commissioned physician Francisco Hernandez to document the medicinal seeds, plants, and herbs that the Aztec used. Spanish physicians exploring indigenous American cures soon published three textbooks based on this information including one on surgery.
Although more than 200 of the plants that American Indians (from North, Meso-, and South America) used as remedies became part of the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, an official listing of all effective medicines, the originators of these remedies often remain unacknowledged.
Freeze-dried food, syringes, rootbeer, rubberized clothing, beef jerky, and many of the tenets of the United States Constitution are only a few of the independent inventions and original discoveries that American Indian people gave to the world.
American Indian agriculture has had a significant effect on worldwide agriculture and economy. Jack Weatherford, in his book Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, pointed out that Indians cultivated over 300 food crops, and contributed to the world three- fifths of the crops now in cultivation. The Indian farmers of North and South America gave the world corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, squash, chocolate, vanilla, papayas, persimmons, jicama, pecans, chilies, hickory nuts, peanuts, cassava, sunflower seeds, maple syrup, tapioca, and avocados.
In Eduardo’s conversation with an illegal immigrant, he explains that he is working to get his family across the border
The push-and-pull factors in Enrique’s yearn for the U.S not only allows him to rediscover himself as an individual in a world of uncertainty, it also eliminates his constant fear of failing as a promising human being; in addition exhibits the undying hope of a desperate man found in hopeful migrants. In Sonia Nazario’s “Enrique’s Journey,” his mother’s trip streamed “emptiness” into the heart of a once comfortable child and left him to “struggle” to hold memories they shared. Enrique’s life after Lourdes’ departure triggered the traumatizing demise of his identity. He threw this broken identity away while facing many obstacles, nevertheless each endea...
Indian Givers How the Indians of the Americas transformed the world. This paper tries to explain Jack Weatherford's Indian Givers by examining the history of the Native American connection to many agricultural products that would not have been produced without the knowledge that Indians gave. Weatherford further stipulates that it is through these advances in agriculture that the United States has remained a strong contender in the global market, that without the influences of the Native Americans on the early settlers those early immigrants to America would not have survived. Through his work, "Indian Givers: How Indians of the Americas Transformed the World", Weatherford brings an insight to a people that most individuals have neglected to consider. The paper concludes that it is Weatherford's purpose to demonstrate that Native Americans have been a misrepresented and forgotten people when the history of North America is discussed.
The European influences to the Native Americans were Europeans carried the new diseases to the Indians. “Europeans were used to these diseases, but Indian people had no resistance to them. Sometimes the illnesses spread through direct contact with colonists. Other times, they were transmitted as Indians traded with one another. The result of this contact with European germs was horrible. Sometimes whole villages perished in a short time” (Kincheloe). Slave trade was another influence to American Indians. Europeans soon realized that they could provide commercial goods such as tools and weapons to some American Indian tribes that would bring them other Indians captured in tribal wars, and these captured Indians were bought and sold as slaves. Therefore, “slavery led to warfare among tribes and too much hardship. Many tribes had to move to escape the slave trade, which destroyed some tribes completely. In time, the practice of enslaving Native peoples ended. However, it had greatly affected American Indians of the South and the Southwest” (Kinchloe). Lastly, Europeans change Native America and African’ roots. Native Americans
Microbes from Europe introduced new diseases and produced devastating epidemics that swept through the native populations (Nichols 2008). The result from the diseases brought over, such as smallpox, was a demographic catastrophe that killed millions of people, weakened existing societies, and greatly aided the Spanish and Portuguese in their rapid and devastating conquest of the existing American empires (Brinkley 2014). Interaction took place with the arrival of whites and foreigners. The first and perhaps most profound result of this exchange was the imp...
Whorf, Benjamin L. “Some Verbal Categories of Hopi”. Linguistic Society of America, 1938. Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 275-286. Print.
The first time he hears the heart pounding is when he is killing the old man and it continues to drive him to complete his murder. He then even puts his hand to his heart and explains that there is no pulse and in fact it is the man’s heart he is hearing (paragraph 10). Then he beginning to hear this same rapid pulsation towards the end of the story that finally ends the whole situation and brings him to admit what he had done (paragraph 17-18). He hearing this heart beat might not be wither heart, but something else. It could be his self-conscious speaking to him driving him crazier. So every time he was doing some3thing bad or thought he was going to get caught his conscious would begin to make him think it was in fact the old man’s heart beating so loud that anyone and everyone could hear it. Finally at the end his conscious gets the better of him and he finally admits to the murder (paragraph
Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. His discovery happened when Europe and its growing states were ready, both technologically and financially, to explore the world in order to settle trade relationships and colonies. Mercantilism, which is an economic system that measure the wealth of country by the amount of precious metal (ex: gold) which it possessed, drove the policies of expansion of many European countries such as Portugal, Spain, England or France. For instance, England began the European colonization of America through a joint stock company, the Virginia Company, in Chesapeake. However, the colonization of America by Europeans had serious side effects for local populations. These populations historically came from Asia, and millions of people - estimations vary between 10 million people and 50 million people - formed them before the first contacts between Native Americans and Europeans. These local populations had been living in North as well as in South America for millenniums, but the arrival of Europeans changed everything. Europeans brought many diseases from Europe and Africa such as the smallpox, the yellow fever, the malaria or the typhus that resulted in the death of many Native Americans, who were not immunized against these unknown diseases. Colonization also resulted in dramatic environmental changes for local populations that resulted in a shift of values, customs and relationships between and within American Indian tribes. These brutal changes led many tribes to incomprehension. They did not understand why the white people were destroying the environment on which they relied to live. This situation engendered many wars between Native Americans and European colonizers (in North America, but also...
Ordinarily, Native American tribes were separated by ethno-linguistic groups. The immense linguistic diversity was due to the isolation and disperses of the tribes all throughout the United States. The surviving languages were not numerous and they had the widest geographic distribution that was all over the country. A few became combined with roots of other tribe languages, which evolved new languages and dialects causing a great deal of miscellany and variety. Unfortunately, a large quantity of these languages became extinct with the European contact the...
That feeling of leaving his parents in the Philippines to go with a stranger when he was 12 years old is truly unfortunate, but his mother was looking looking out with his best interests in mind. She just wanted her son to get a taste of the American dream, and have a better life in America rather than suffering with her in the Philippines. Vargas’s essay moves the reader emotionally as he explains when he was finally successful in getting the highest honor in journalism, but his grandmother was still worried about him getting deported. She wanted Vargas to stay under the radar, and find a way to obtain one more chance at his American dream of being
In Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator is “tortured” in a piercing ringing as he accommodates a group of policemen sent to the old man’s house to investigate. While he is making small talk with the men, a sharp ringing appears, growing louder and louder as time passes. In hopes to rid himself of the noise, the narrator attempts to talk faster, changing the pitch of his voice as time progresses. This is described as follows, “I talked more quickly—more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased” (Tell-Tale Heart 4). However, these attempts were made futile as the ringing never ceased, ultimately prompting the narrator to admit his crime. The noise could be inferred as the manifestation of the guilt the narrator contains for killing the old man, of who was a kindred spirit and had watched over the former. It could also be said that the noise is the beating of his heart, of which the rate of the heartbeat would increase as he becomes more nervous and anxious. Correspondingly, the husband in The Black Cat has the same problem. In addition to the murder of Pluto, the husband attempted to kill to his second cat, of which did not result in the death of the actual cat, but the wife instead as she moved to protect the pet. In his rush to hide the evidence of his murder, the narrator accidentally walls up the living black cat with his wife. Once officers come to investigate the
Throughout the course of day-to-day business life, the business professionals come in contact with quite a sum of ethical dilemmas. There are various ways to handle these ethical dilemmas, but failure to follow the appropriate manner could result in an unethical outcome. The ethical guides related to the book definitely help students develop an ethical character that is sure to stand out for highly ethical companies. In addition, there are companies that test how ethical applicants are before hiring them, this in turn makes getting the job more difficult and costly. However, despite the high cost and difficulty said companies stay firm to ethics, guaranteeing they get top-of-the-line employees who will act in an ethical manner. Ethics is defined
South and Central American Indians made many prehistoric discoveries of drug-bearing plants. Mexican Aztecs even recorded their properties in hieroglyphics on rocks, but our knowledge of their studies comes mainly from manuscripts of Spanish monks and medical men attached to the forces of the conquistador Hernan Cortes (1485-1547).
Traditional herbal medicine comes from many different areas of the world (Indian, Chinese, African, Western, Native American herbs, Ayurvedic and other indigenous medicines) and in most all of them they are still b...
Many sports were invented to pass time. Basketball, the game, was one of the greatest to ever be invented. Basketball is truly an American game. It is competitive and fun. This winter indoor game has become a very popular sport among all ages.