The Western story begins with the history of the first cultural encounter between
the Native Americans and the Anglo settlers. The divergent perspectives tell the past conflict from a biased view, creating a blurred story that is now being questioned. Some Anglo Western settlers like Frederick Jackson Turner considered Native Americans to be of little significance and failed to recognize or accept the Indians rights to their land, culture, and way of life. Viewed by settlers as faceless obstacles to be overcome in the process of ultimately conquering the West, Indians posed a common danger to the White settlers and served as a uniting agent in our history. Given the tradition of teaching about the West as movement and as frontier, Indians usually became important only in the context of their relationships with whites and in the era before 1890. Now, over one hundred years later, the skewed story of the West remains unchanged because there are still those with essentially the same opinion of modern Indians as unimportant obstacles in the larger picture of the development of the American West.
Although Anglo settlers historically viewed the Native Americans as trivial, their
presence was and is still significant to the Western story today. Native Americans in the twentieth-century American West have been physically and culturally persistent as special ethnic individuals and communities in the face of overpowering odds. Five hundred years of disease and conquest, removal and reservation, reduced the native population of the continental United States from a conservatively estimated 2 to 5 million people to only 228,000 survivors by
The Essay on Native American Storytelling Culture trickster Stories
Native American Storytelling Culture (Trickster stories) The character of Trickster in the Native American Storytelling is very difficult to define or categorize. Even though it appears in myths of many countries of the world, Native American culture has the most pronounced presence of Trickster both as a beloved, feared and revered figure. He is usually portrayed as having some features of both ...
1890. Despite their loss and suffering, Native Americans did not disappear, but instead demonstrated cultural resilience and experimentation in the face of the government policy for allocation, reorganization, and termination. The Native Americans struggle in the West is absolutely comparable to the larger struggle of the American West. To provide jobs and economic opportunities for growing reservation populations, western tribes turned to their land and natural resources. This is an example of the Western retreat from small-scale agriculture and a move toward growing dependence on natural resources and the boom-and-bust cycles of extractive industries. Maybe the land, which has sacred cultural meaning, could be the ultimate symbol that unites Indians and Anglos in their beloved West. Whites and Indians must accept each other as a part of the larger American society; and because they both covet the West as a
borderland, it is where both cultures belong.
The Mexican-American story is a continuing story of cultural conflict in which
Mexican immigrants dare to explore the American West and break through the borderlands of the Western Frontier. Limerick calls the Western frontier that exists today la frontera, the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. In the idea of la frontera, according to Limerick, there is no illusion of vacancy, of triumphal conclusions, or of simplicity. Simply put, with the numbers of Latinos in the US growing at such rapid rates, an estimated 20 million illegal immigrants, the immigration in la frontera has brought an extreme cultural change to the American West. Race, ethnic, and cultural conflict have arisen in the West because of this immigration rush, leaving no doubt that Americans are concerned about the issue. “A growing number believe that immigrants are a burden to the country, taking jobs and housing and creating strains on the healthcare system,” writes the Pew Hispanic Center. Many Westerners also worry
The Term Paper on Western History Comparison American West
A Comparison Between The American West: A new interpretive history and The Legacy of Conquest: The unbroken past of the American West In comparing Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faracher's book The American West and Patricia Nelson Limerick's book The Legacy of Conquest, it is apparent that the extent of their similarities basically end at their topic of discussion. Both books write about the ...
about the cultural impact of the expanding number of newcomers in the US. This story of cultural conflict cannot be simplified by the separation of boundary lines because Mexican culture and American culture are becoming intertwined within the West’s la frontera.
