Week 1 Readings

5/21/2014

The first week, you are experiencing the New England area and how Native peoples position themselves in the colonial histories you have likely read in school. The readings are helpful in your understanding of the Native Plymouth Tour and your thinking about the mapping project. I've cut and pasted in some thoughts on the readings. Please enter yours using the comments.

Jean O’Brien writes of how Amer-Europeans use(d) a tactic for erasure in their records of incorporation and historical celebrations. These “firstings” which write the Indians out of the histories. Once the transactions for land were made, the Indians blended into the forest and ultimately (for the colonists) into the past. In the Centennial celebration speech for Bridgewater, MA contained “But it is sad to think that of all the race who then peopled this region, nothing now but tradition remains… not a drop of the blood..was to be found in the veins of any living being” (xi). What? O”Brien’s work explores old documents of incorporation, histories, and reporting from cities and towns in New England. She writes,

Local narrators took up the histories of the exact places their audiences lived, and they rooted stories about Indians in those places. The overwhelming message of these narratives was that local Indians have disappeared. These local stories were leashed to a larger national narrative of the ‘vanishing Indian’ as a generalized trope and disseminated not just in the form of the written word but also in a rich ceremonial cycle of pageants, commemorations, monument building, and lecture hall performance. .. The collective story these texts told … created a narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans (xiii).

Because of this, the schools are filled with reenactments of the Thanksgiving Story keeping Indians in a safe and distant past. A memory that is as vivid to me as if it happened yesterday is from my second-grade class. All the children were dressed in paper costumes portraying Pilgrims and Indians. A white sheet was draped over a makeshift stage and bright lights placed in the back so that only the shadows of the actors were visible to the audience. I alone was in a new dress and sat at a table beside the stage to narrate the play. All the while my legs crossed at the ankles swung back and forth as I read the words which seemed so awkward and uncomfortable to me. Of course, I was praised for my fine reading skills of one of the very kind O’Brien writes about. These pageants are still performed in schools, these paper costumes still made even now when we should know better.

Lisa Brooks A Common Pot is an amazing book. I love her work with Abenaki language and the connections she makes. I love that awikhigawôgan is the activity of writing and “a process, an ongoing activity in which we are all engaged” (introduction). She writes, “The communal stories recorded on birchbark and in wampum would connect people with their relations across time, bringing past, present and future into the same place” (12). This also helps us to think about how time is considered in Indigenous ways of knowing –a continuum rather than a discreet unit.

As we are reminded in another text, the land has memory.”

John Paul Jones writes,

“There is no place without a story. Every plant, every animal, every rock and flowing spring carries a message. Native peoples of the Americas learned over thousands of years to listen to messages, and we know every habitat. We know the earth; we know the sky; we know the wind; we know the rain; we know the smells. We know the spirit of each living space. The spirit of each place is deeply embedded within us; we are connected to something larger than ourselves” (1).

I think of this every time I am at the garden planting, weeding, or even sitting among the three sisters.

But in times of great social and political stress, when spiritual traditions have been undermined or are hard to adhere to, living a ‘reasonable, integrated life’ is not easy. Thus we need maps to help us find our direction, to help describe and explain the kind of spiritual and material terrain that we have walked through before and are walking through even now.( Janice Gould 24)

I love this quote from Janice Gould’s “Poems as Maps in American Indian Women’s Writing.” As Wilma Mankiller rightly states, “the world is spinning out of balance,” more and more each day. I constantly need to remind myself to stay on the path—even when I’ve lost the direction. Gould discusses Selu and Mankiller’s introduction to that book. She also writes, “the need to make our own maps is a reflection of the need to know and love our Mother, to repair our bond with her, and through her, with all our Indian family, all our relations” (25). It is time. Gould brings us to observe a number of poems which act as “poetic cartography” (24). Native peoples open maps to reveal home, grief, survival, direction, memories, stories and more.

9 Comments

Stephanie Vaz

5/26/2014 11:11:26 pm

"Firsting and Lasting," by Jean M. O'Brien was an interesting look at the history of Indians. O'Brien states his aim on page xii when he says, "understand how non-Indians in Southern New England convinced themselves that Indians there had become extinct even though they remained as Indian peoples- and do so to this day." I enjoy how she organizes her writings from first to last, hence the title, "Firsting to Lasting." She compares and contrasts the lifestyles of Indians and of New Englanders which I think is important to put this into the reader's perspective.

Lisa Brooks', "The Common Pot" demonstrates an interesting view on English writings by Native people. She elaborates on social concerns and influences that the natives encountered. Brooks focuses on teachings of the land, such as land use and language, as well as their culture. I enjoyed how she incorporated historical context to display the Native's views through her writing. A quote that I found significant while reading was when she stated, "Any act, whether destructive or creative reverberates in the network of relations. When the network falls out of balance, everything else must shift into action to create a new equilibrium" (6). I believe this quote is significant in emphasizing the idea that whatever takes place in the world, whether it be positive or negative, has an effect and a way of making necessary changes. Yet no matter what, the world will recover.

"The Land has Memory," edited by Duane Blue Spruce and Tanya Thrasher was an interesting view on the differences between the traditional Native philosophies and that which has dominated the recent life of America. Moreover I enjoyed the overview of the National Museum of the American Indian. It was interesting how this museum displayed the different landscapes to show the diversity of these developments. This reading overall focuses on the landscapes and ways of the land. What I thought was a meaningful quote was when the author writes how the viewing of landscapes seen through the Indian's eyes can mean many things. "They could offer a colorful palette that becomes an abstract painting or a piece of bead-work art, or they could provide a setting for remembering the ancestors who cam before us" (7). This quote underscores how what the Indians or others do, as far as traditions or overall way of life shapes the land for what it becomes while demonstrating how the land has memory.

Jocelyn Bettencourt

5/26/2014 11:25:19 pm

After reading “The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present”, I have realized that the American people have stereotyped Native Americans for centuries. It’s interesting to know that for so long the white people of America have judged and stereotyped all Native Americans together as one because of the lack of knowledge about the many tribes. According to Robert Berkhofer many Americans stereotype because of their lack of knowledge, “White countrymen continued to speak and write as if a specific tribe and all Indians were interchangeable for the purposes of description and understanding of fundamental cultural dynamics and social organization. Today, most Whites who use the word Indian have little idea of specific tribal peoples or individual Native Americans to render their usage more than an abstraction, if not a stereotype” (26). In reality, not all Native Americans are even close to the same. Even today many people judge Native Americans as one tribe or one colony of people. After reading this article and the other articles assigned, it is apparent that many people don’t know enough about Native Americans to make any kind of judgments. Native American’s and their many different tribes are extremely different. Throughout the years whites have judged and criticized Native Americans for the way that they live. Due to the difference in way of life between the whites and the Native Americans, whites have viewed the Native Americans as morally wrong because they live a completely different life. Whites compare Native Americans to the way they live, because of this the Whites believe what the natives are doing is wrong. This stereotype leads to many judgments, “Another persistent theme in White imagery is the tendency to describe Indian life in terms of its lack of White ways rather than being described positively from within the framework of the specific culture under consideration” (Berkhofer 26). Whites have created an image for Native Americans that most people follow. Native Americans are described as they are seen in the eyes of the whites rather than their own eyes. It wasn’t fair for whites to stereotype the Native Americans, “whites overwhelmingly measured the Indian as a general category against those beliefs, values, or institutions they most cherished in themselves at the time” (Berkhofer 27). In my opinion I think that people still do that today. Some Native American beliefs and everyday life decisions may be different from the general populations. This is not fair but it happens all the time with many different races and life decisions. I hope that this course will help open my eyes to what the Native Americans’ lives are all about. Although I knew that the Native Americans have many different tribes and those tribes are different, I hope to further my knowledge on all the different cultural differences. This class will help further my outlook on the different cultures and lifestyles that people have.

Rebekka Eiben

5/27/2014 01:58:20 am

After reading through the articles it is very clear that there is a common theme among most Indigenous writings. This common theme is one of nature, balance, and ownership. The articles “Firsting and Lasting” by Jean M. O’Brien and “Poems as Maps in American Indian Women’s Writings” by Janice Gould both explore these reoccurring themes.
Jean M. O’Brien looks at the historical aspect of Indians in a very interesting way. Jean uncovers that there are not many historical documents that pertain specifically to the Native Americans and that the British settlers only documented things that they found important. There is no integration or respect for the Indigenous people. Many of the first towns and cities built by the English do not have any legal turnover of the land from the Indians to the English. The English simply took over what they thought was rightfully theirs and this is where most of the problems stem from. O’Brien describes the idea of “firsting” by stating that the English had conceived the notion that they were the first ones to inhabit America: “By the time the Europeans stumbled onto the eastern seaboard of North America- the Norse around the year 1,000 and then other Europeans in the late fifteenth century- New England Indians had been forging their own histories and destinies for tens of thousands of years” (2). The English did not know how long the American Indians had been living in America and they were also so obsessed with expanding that they did not care. Even as the English began to try and make relationships with the Indians and learned more about their history they decided that they were going to take over anyway. The Indians were so drastically different from the English that they began alienating them almost immediately: “In their minds, in the histories they constructed, and in the stubborn reproduction of ideology, Indian peoples became forever ancient- mired in the static past” (4). The English did not want to try and understand the Indians because they felt as though they were beneath them, so instead they decided to take over.
Janice Gould explores this as well by describing much of the poetry from American Indian Women as trying to reclaim this lost land. She explains that many of these poems are a way for the American Indians to map out their territory and take back what is theirs. The English took so much away from the Indians and turned their whole life upside down. The Indians live in balance with nature, never taking too much without giving back, and the English did completely the opposite. Many Indians felt that the English were destroying the land and so many of the women poets write about this destruction. Gould explains that, “Native women’s literary maps are constructs that symbolically provide direction or describe a known, remembered, imagined, or longed-for terrain” (22). Through poetry these writers are able to recreate and imagine the land that they lost and forever have a way to hold onto that land. Gould also explains that the poetry is a “way to find our way back to the ‘right’ ways of living, thinking, feeling, imagining, speaking, and praying” (24). In other words, they not only find a way to reclaim their land but also to reclaim their whole way of living. To the Indians, the English did not just steal land from them; they stole their whole way of life.
These readings have brought a new light to the conflict between the Indians and English. The Indians lost so much to the English and they deserve something back. This class is going to be very interesting and eye opening and I look forward to it.

Katie Kirkpatrick

5/27/2014 02:15:49 am

Firsting and Lasting is an interesting look into how the history of the Indians was written and how we see those histories today. The chapter explains how the histories did not start until the English settled in America and the history that was written was mostly just the first things that happened to each settlement. The first church, the first marriage, the first child and the first building are all examples of things these settlements found important. They also happen to be what differentiated the English from the Indians because the English were more civilized and looked at everything the Indians did as uncivilized. The mention of the first three Indians is only related to the first Indians that were friendly and hospitable to the English. That is why those three Indians, Samoset, Squanto, and Massasoit, are the most popular to include in American history lessons; they were included in the history of the English settlement.
The Land has Memory by Johnpaul Jones is about the reasons why the National Museum of the American Indian incorporates different aspects of Native American life into the museum. It also talks about different Native American philosophies about the land compared to the English philosophies. The Native Americans believed that they “had to ask the earth not to be angry if we dug or removed soil, and we had to thank it for its sacrifice” (2). The land was everything to the Native Americans so when the museum was being built, they tried to incorporate all of the beliefs of the Native Americans while constructing.
The Common Pot by Lisa Brooks starts off with the story of how the Iroquois Indians believed the earth was created. They believe that as Sky Woman fell from a hole in the sky and brought with her a seed which was planted on the back of a turtle. Their creation story shows the importance of feminine characters as well as animals and water. The definition of a common pot is “that which feeds and nourishes” (4). The Native Americans believed that the earth was only self-sustaining when all the inhabitants participated. When Europeans came to American they were a part of the common pot. However, they didn’t know that all the ideas, materials and behaviors were potentially harmful to the common pot. All of these ideas and more are brought together in this writing about the common pot for Native Americans and how English influence changed the common pot.

Jackie Henry

5/28/2014 04:18:56 am

“The Land has Memory,” edited by Duane Blue Spruce and Tanya Thrasher, included several interesting. Although the points themselves may not be of great significance, they forced me to further my thinking and opened my eyes. I found it very interesting how Native American associations are often times associated with the promotion of global warming awareness. As ignorant as it sounds, I never made the connection between an epidemic involving out earth and the strong association that Native Americans often have with Mother Nature. I think it is a wonderful idea to have a group of people with such a strong connection to the earth, promote its ‘well-being.’ Having that initial personal connection is what speaks to others and can ultimately help to make a positive impact. Yet at the same time it was made very clear that this single [and often stereotypical] Native American portrayal does not apply to all. This is where the importance of education comes is, particularly through exhibits such as museums.
Jean O’Brien’s, “Firsting and Lasting” instantly grabbed my attention with its mention of Bridgewater, MA and soon went on to discuss Indian subculture and how we as a nation are exposed to it. This reading makes it clear how prominent our misconceptions truly are. We rely on ‘valid’ sources, such as primary source narration. However, it turns out that even these sources can relay false information at times. It makes me wonder how exactly we are supposed to determine what the truth is. We acquire all this information, only to find out that the majority of it is false. It makes it very difficult to be able to grasp the ‘truth’.
In “A Common Pot,” Lisa Brooks explains the concept of ‘common pot,’ and explains just how that ‘pot’ is what makes a community a stable one. What I really appreciated about her stance was that she put emphasis on the role of women, and made it quite evident that many Natives believed in matriarchal communities rather than a stereotypical patriarchal. She then goes to elaborate on women are the bases for these communities, and everything is connected and affected by one another.

Angela Skrabec

5/28/2014 09:50:30 am

The reading Firsting and Lasting resonates with the modern American mentality of viewing America as the ‘best and most significant’ country because it focuses on the supremacy of the Anglo-American race. The quote from the Massachusetts historian, on page 20, places this idea of ‘Anglo-superiority’ into perspective, both in the past as well as in the present. In America’s past, “The Red Men…hunted the bison and the deer, fished the lakes and streams, gathered around the council-fire” (20). Native Americans created communities based on strong familial ties both with humans and nature itself, which served as a cultural lineage. However, from the European viewpoint, “they [Native Americans] made no history” because “they planted no states, founded no commerce, cultivated no arts, built up no civilizations” (20). Measuring native tribes by European standards reveals the shortcomings of the native people, as seen through Anglo eyes, and devalues the contributions of indigenous people to America’s national story. This idea of Native American inferiority extends beyond the colonial period and can be seen in the contemporary relations among European descendants (Anglo- Americans) and Native Americans. Oppression of the indigenous people continues in present-day America through racial prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination. Many generations and centuries have passed since the initial encounter between the Europeans and Native Americans, but the American egotistical attitude still remains the same.
Lisa Brooks’ discussion of “The Common Pot” sheds light on the belief in and the importance of collaboration within a Native American community. The common pot essentially being the sustainability for the tribe as a whole is very telling of Native values. The greater good always needs to come before individual satisfaction, making sure that everyone within the community partakes in the benefits from the resources. Success of a community is based on the “equilibrium” of “Native space” with “shared consequences and shared pain” (6). All tribes within an area participate in the “Native Space” and collectively take stake in the achievements as well as the burdens that come along with communal living. Applying this reading to previous knowledge, I can better make sense of the cultural challenges pilgrims and Native Americans had to face in their interactions with one another. For example, European settlers, unbeknownst to them, would have immediately entered into the “Native Space” of the tribes surrounding Plymouth and Cape Cod as soon as the ship made contact with the land. As time progressed and relationships formed between various tribes and the pilgrims, Native Americans would have understandably believed that the pilgrims were now a part of the native community and would be taking part in the construction of an effective and efficient society based on mutual gain. The strong Native belief in “the common pot” was not reciprocated by the European settlers who saw the world as ‘every man for himself.’ The stark contrast in ideology, even on this point alone, emphasizes the difficulties Europeans and Native Americans would have experienced when trying to live together peaceably and relate on a common ground.
The Land Has Memory piece contributed to my understanding of the Native American relationship to the land itself. I had a baseline of previous knowledge about Native land from my Early American Literature course, but this work strengthened my grasp of Native Americans relation to the land. A striking passage in the introduction that sets the stage for the whole literary work is “It was our firm conviction that we should not simply come and build on the land. We needed to speak to the land first and explain our intentions, promise to use it wisely, and not deviate from that promise” (1, 2). A tone of respect and reverence is expressed in these lines which encapsulates the Native American deference to the earth. An emotional relationship needed to be established between the builders of the museum and the soil before any construction could occur. A general Native American belief in honoring Mother Earth as a living entity can be extracted from this passage and applied to a reading of First and Lasting which focuses on the Native American definition of how they as a people have left a mark of history on the land Europeans deemed ownerless. By reading these texts together, readers gain a more comprehensive view of Native American land beliefs and European land beliefs. This reading assignment particularly piqued my interest with its accessible language and ideas. I definitely want to go visit the National Museum of the American Indian after reading this piece.
Jill Lepore’s broad definition of a document and an expla

Devon DiMartino

5/29/2014 02:03:15 pm

Jean M. O’Brien’s “Firsting and Lasting” was impacting for me as a reader because she develops an intense argument about the way history is taught today. For me, the most persuasive argument she made was against the idea that Indians some how became “extinct”. With New Englanders dominating the culture of print, it is no wonder their self-fashioned providential history was what was accepted as fact (xii). Why aren’t students taught about the nineteenth-century Indian? The fact of the matter is that it is because non-Indian’s “publications formed a vernacular historical sensibility of enduring influence, as their work, however fanciful or downright erroneous, became blueprints for understanding the past” (xvii). This “history” does not account for Indian lives and their part towards the history of our country unless of course it was for the benefit of the Englishmen. O’Brien wrote about how the Indians, “rather than gaining fame as firsts who will be a part of an enduring modernity, they are famous because they set into motion the processes that are the beginning to their end.” (20) Indians kind hearted attempt to form an ally ended up being their biggest failure as they eventually became subordinate and overpowered by the Englishmen.
Native Women’s literary maps are an interesting topic in which Janice Gould discusses in “Speak to me Words”. She examines the relationships between the Euro-American and the Natives, and writes about the potential for Indian individuals to find their way back to the state of mind because the Europeans disrupted their peace (23). I really loved the quote, “subsequent awakening will be our human undoing”, (30) because it tied in very closely to what O’Brien discussed. The knowledge that the Indian’s supplied to the colonists about the land made the colonists believe that with this new knowledge they were now superior to the Indians because of their “lacking” in every other area such as religion and purity of blood and culture. However, regardless of the fact that the colonists destroyed the Indians way of life, these maps can still express emotions and “what is displaced- dispersed, deferred, repressed, pushed aside- is significantly, still there.” (26)
In “The Common Pot”, I loved how on page six Lisa Brooks included how “numerous Abenaki stories tell of the disastrous effects of hoarding resources and acting on selfish impulse” and “when the network falls out of balance, everything else must shift into action to create a new equilibrium”. Before there is even mention of the Europeans, it is obvious that once they were in the common pot, they would disrupt all that these tribes believed because they were driven by selfish acts. While the outcome was obvious as a reader that is knowledgeable about European ways, I really like the way Brooks turns these facts into a tale rather than nonfiction history. She writes how, “this violent redistribution of resources sent the valley through cycles of dissolution and reconstruction ” (22) and “the result was rupture in the networks that constituted the common pot, violence that spread like rapids through a river, a shared grief that could not be contained.” (24) It is difficult to read how the Indians continued to try and facilitate peace and trade with the colonists regardless of all the harm they had done to the common pot. And while it may seem like a brighter story to teach students about how this country came to be, the Indian’s history should not be swept under the rug.

Jordan Berry

6/1/2014 12:23:21 pm

Jean M. O’Brien’s “Firsting and Lasting” analyzes the records of the early histories left behind by the colonials and pilgrims. As western settlers immigrated to the New World, they began to record their experiences. They wrote about the building of their town’s first church, the first wedding they witnessed in the New World, their first month, year, decade. However, while it is very clear the colonials had their share of firsts, those who write the histories seem to forget that before 1620 there was a civilization living where they had built that church. They also seemed to forget that the civilization of people, the Native Americans, they attempted to write out had not died out nor had they just disappeared. Jean M. O’Brien’s “Firsting and Lasting” gives insight to first written histories of New England and points out the effort made to erase Native American existence from the texts.

Thanksgiving is one of the oldest and most celebrated holidays in the United States, and the influence of colonial histories has influenced the way the holiday is celebrated today. O’Brien writes “the emergent national literature that [text] luminaries produced certainly gave shape to an understanding of American history, culture, and identity” (xiii). The histories may have given a quite peaceful description of the first Thanksgiving, possibly influencing the way books write about the even today. She also says that “local texts grounded those stories in the concrete” (xiii) and one could argue oral tradition also helped this process. Through this process, Thanksgiving is seen as a holiday celebrating peace between two unlikely sorts of people, the Natives and the Pilgrims, and its goal is to bring families together and encourage them to set aside differences for a feast; which is why Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday after the Civil War. Native American tour guide Tim gives a different, more historically accurate perspective of the holiday. He explains that the Pilgrims were shooting fire arms in celebration of the harvest they had and after hearing gunshots Massasoit rallied about ninety men to aide Plymouth in what he thought was sure to be a battle. Walking in on their celebration, the Pilgrims felt forced to extend an invite to the Natives. This celebration also only occurred once rather than the annual feast the United States celebrates.

New England colonies were also one of the most influential on writing. O’Brien writes that “New Englanders dominated [the] culture of print, obsessed over its self-fashioned providential history, and defiled itself at the cradle of the nation and seat of cultural power” (xii). The Pilgrims were on the first to interact with the Natives and therefore their diaries and notes of the first contacts with the Natives were very powerful and very influential on future arrivals. Because the Pilgrims decided they were “heroically struggling to triumph over their ‘savage’ foes”, their poor opinion influenced the future immigrants and the Pilgrims “stood at the center of local narration in the nineteenth century” (4). This power allowed them the “privilege” to write-in and write-out whatever and whomever they chose, and fortunately they did not succeed.

Kate Pallis

6/4/2014 08:24:32 am

Journal 1
Jean O’Brien delineates the circumstances necessary for European settlers to attain forward mobility at the expense of the indigenous people who inhabited the country prior to the colonization of America in the introduction to her book “Firsting and Lasting.” O’Brien argues that for Amer-European’s to achieve modernity was to erase the Native American culture, asserting that “non-Indians were the first people to erect the proper institutions of social order worthy of notice,”(xii) in order for the new population to move forward, the old population of people could only move backwards. Atavistic and primitive connotations were directly associated with Indian people; there was no way for them to continue existing if the first European settlers of New England held the cultural power to establish a “non-Indian modernity.” The production of mobility in turn was the result of the purification of the landscape of Indians; this led the ideal Indian to embody a representation of the past, a state defined by the absence of modernity.
“The Common Pot” by Lisa Brooks is an allegory for that which nurtures the Native American people, “It is the wigwam that feeds the family, the village that feeds the community, the networks that sustain the village,”(4) this concept of Indian networking is a broad communicative concept that encompasses not only human relationships with other humans but also human relationship with animals and the land. Native American communities did not privatize the family unit; they rather shared the experience of nurturing a child with one another. Because of this close proximity with the land and each other as well as the broader definition of what constitutes a family, Indians were more aware of the effects of their actions. The necessity of balance was quintessential to survival; Brooks argues that it was the result of the arriving European settlers that lead to the disruption of this equilibrium.
In “The Land Has Memory” John Paul Jones provides insight on the multitude of stories that have led to every physicality one experiences on earth, in this way he binds metaphysical connotations to the land that give it retention for memory as well as trauma. His mission was to erect a museum that resisted commodifying the land it resided on. This was ultimately because colonization established the land as territory, thus breaking the sacred bond that man has with the land that nurtures him, his predecessors and his children.

Week 1 Readings

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