Reclaiming What Has Been Forgotten We Still Live Here, a film by Anne Makepeace, is about the reclamation of the Massachusetts Wampanoag language by the linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird, the creator of the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project. The film illustrates the hardships and struggles in which Jessie Little Doe Baird and her colleagues had to go through, translating ancient Wampanoag texts, reuniting members of contemporary Wampanoag communities, and reclaiming the language itself. The film illuminates the life of the Wampanoag language and cultural meanings. How there had been threats posed to both since the times of European colonization, when the Wampanoag people had put up little resistance. The film is not a recap of the Wampanoag …show more content…
We see scenes where Mae is happily conversing with her mother in both English and Wampanoag in the car as they pass through a town of Wampanoag named streets. This visual imagery urges the viewer to wonder how these familiar representations of Indian words and sayings work to hide how the indigenous people live in modern times. With the lack of presence of local Native peoples in the forms of mass media, people have started to believe the myth of the disappearance of the Native peoples in places such as New England. The film also briefly gestures, through interviews, that people have started to dismiss Indians as being long gone from the world, and that non-Natives see them as “invisible people” in order to justify the Euroamerican absorption of indigenous regions. The film encourages us to understand that, even with the impact of history, Native peoples still live here, and that they are still connected to their native land, that their homeland is one of the most important relationships. Jessie explains, “I lost my land rights” Translated into Wampanoag is “I fall down onto the ground,” because “For Wampanoag people to lose one’s land, is to fall off your
The Hawaiian culture is known throughout the western world for their extravagant luaus, beautiful islands, and a language that comes nowhere near being pronounceable to anyone but a Hawaiian. Whenever someone wants to “get away” their first thought is to sit on the beach in Hawai’i with a Mai tai in their hand and watch the sun go down. Haunani-Kay Trask is a native Hawaiian educated on the mainland because it was believed to provide a better education. She questioned the stories of her heritage she heard as a child when she began learning of her ancestors in books at school. Confused by which story was correct, she returned to Hawai’i and discovered that the books of the mainland schools had been all wrong and her heritage was correctly told through the language and teachings of her own people. With her use of pathos and connotative language, Trask does a fine job of defending her argument that the western world destroyed her vibrant Hawaiian culture.
Wade Davis’ article, Among the Waorani, provides much of the content brought to light in Nomads of the Rainforest. His article delves deeper into their culture and motivations allowing one to more fully understand their beliefs, relationships, and savagery. Both the documentary and article attempt to create a picture of their close-knit relationships and their desire f...
At the beginning of the documentary, it explains the situation of the conquest by the Europeans. How they arrived to native people's lands, how they assimilated the native population. And their success was guns, germs and steel. The documentary says that these three elements shaped the history of modern world.
“Quantie’s weak body shuddered from a blast of cold wind. Still, the proud wife of the Cherokee chief John Ross wrapped a woolen blanket around her shoulders and grabbed the reins.” Leading the final group of Cherokee Indians from their home lands, Chief John Ross thought of an old story that was told by the chiefs before him, of a place where the earth and sky met in the west, this was the place where death awaits. He could not help but fear that this place of death was where his beloved people were being taken after years of persecution and injustice at the hands of white Americans, the proud Indian people were being forced to vacate their lands, leaving behind their homes, businesses and almost everything they owned while traveling to an unknown place and an uncertain future. The Cherokee Indians suffered terrible indignities, sickness and death while being removed to the Indian territories west of the Mississippi, even though they maintained their culture and traditions, rebuilt their numbers and improved their living conditions by developing their own government, economy and social structure, they were never able to return to their previous greatness or escape the injustices of the American people.
The first factor that we shall discuss is the concept of ‘The Other’ and ‘Boutique Multiculturalism’ in order to understand how Disney's portrayal of Pocahontas in its film has misrepresented the actual historical account. The notion of The Other is defined as, ‘An individual who is perceived by the group as not belonging, as being different in some fundamental way’ and at the same time, ‘The Other is almost always seen as a lesser or inferior being and is treated accordingly’. (Melanie 2010). In the case of Pocahontas, she was considered The Other because her Native American world was considered to be fundamentally different to the explorers of the New World, who were physically similar yet different, speaking another language and using distinct signs (Coppi Agostinelli 2012:2). Through the understanding of The Other, we begin to understand how Pocahontas and her tribe are seen as The Other in the eyes of the colonists who considered themselves to be from a more civilised culture. Similarly for the Powhatan’s tribe, the unwelcomed colonists are considered to be The Other as they are seen to come from an unknown culture. As Melanie has suggested, The Other is often treated as the inferior group, especially in the face of what is considered to be backwards and tribal versus civilised and modern. According to Ono and Buescher, while Pocahontas’ story is meaningful in the Native American history, it is not told as such because of its inferiority in comparison to colonists’ account of the turn of events (2001: 25). From this brief look into the notion of The Other, we can begin to understand how Disney's portrayal of Pocahontas in its film has misrepresented the actual historical account.
As a result, both films represent Natives Americans under the point of view of non-Native directors. Despite the fact that they made use of the fabricated stereotypes in their illustrations of the indigenous people, their portrayal was revolutionary in its own times. Each of the films add in their own way a new approach to the representation of indigenous people, their stories unfold partly unlike. These differences make one look at the indigenous not only as one dimensional beings but as multifaceted beings, as Dunbar say, “they are just like us.” This is finally a sense of fairness and respect by the non-native populations to the Native Indians.
LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999. Print.
“Reclaiming Culture and the Land: Motherhood and the Politics of Sustaining Community” is about a mother who is a Native American activist who has two children, she wants them to be raised and go to school in an Indian community. “I put my children in that school because I wanted them to be in the Indian community.” She explains that she is not sure if her children know what she is doing is common, but they know that what she is doing is right. “My children do have the sense that what I do is not necessarily common. Recently my daughter started asking me if I’m famous.” She has fought for her children to have a good life, full of community, ritual, and an understanding of who they are and where they come from.
The film Wodaabe: Herdsman of the sun, by Werner Herzog, gives the audience a unique perspective of the lives of the Wodaabe Tribe. The film captures the men of the tribe getting ready for the festival called Gerewol, art is captured through out the film when the men are getting ready by applying the elaborate makeup, hats, body adornments and dancing performance.
Across Canada and the United States there are many First Nations languages which are a part of the Algonquian language family, all of which with varying states of health. Although these languages share many characteristics of the Algonquian language family, the cultures, systems of beliefs, and geographic location of their respective Nations differentiate them. In being shaped by the landscape, cultures, and spirituality of the First Nations, the language brings the speakers closer to their land and traditions while reaffirming their identity as First Peoples. Using the Blackfoot Nation to further explore this concept, this paper will show that while language threads together First Nations culture, spirituality, traditions and land, as well as their identity, each of these essential components also maintain and revitalize the language.
In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will discuss the major themes of the book and why the author wrote it, it will describe Native American society, its values and its beliefs and how they changed and it will show how Native Americans views other non-Natives.
In the chronological, descriptive ethnography Nest in the Wind, Martha Ward described her experience on the rainy, Micronesian island of Pohnpei using both the concepts of anthropological research and personal, underlying realities of participant observation to convey a genuine depiction of the people of Pohnpei. Ward’s objective in writing Nest in the Wind was to document the concrete, specific events of Pohnpeian everyday life and traditions through decades of change. While informing the reader of the rich beliefs, practices, and legends circulated among the people of Pohnpei, the ethnography also documents the effects of the change itself: the island’s adaptation to the age of globalization and the survival of pre-colonial culture.
In a desperate attempt to discover his true identity, the narrator decides to go back to Wisconsin. He was finally breaking free from captivity. The narrator was filling excitement and joy on his journey back home. He remembers every town and every stop. Additionally, he admires the natural beauty that fills the scenery. In contrast to the “beauty of captivity” (320), he felt on campus, this felt like freedom. No doubt, that the narrator is more in touch with nature and his Native American roots than the white civilized culture. Nevertheless, as he gets closer to home he feels afraid of not being accepted, he says “… afraid of being looked on as a stranger by my own people” (323). He felt like he would have to prove himself all over again, only this time it was to his own people. The closer the narrator got to his home, the happier he was feeling. “Everything seems to say, “Be happy! You are home now—you are free” (323). Although he felt as though he had found his true identity, he questioned it once more on the way to the lodge. The narrator thought, “If I am white I will not believe that story; if I am Indian, I will know that there is an old woman under the ice” (323). The moment he believed, there was a woman under the ice; He realized he had found his true identity, it was Native American. At that moment nothing but that night mattered, “[he], try hard to forget school and white people, and be one of these—my people.” (323). He
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...
On Wednesday, May 15th George and his team saw an indian village while on the road. He wrote that the wigwams, or homes, in which...