Native American Experience Essay Research Paper THE

Native American Experience Essay, Research Paper

THE NATIVE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE American Indians and Alaska Natives have played a vital role in the life of our country, and their many contributions have enhanced the freedom, prosperity, and greatness of America today. Native American culture is very rich. Among Native Americans they speak at least three hundred and fifty languages and have developed complex genre systems of verbal art within the familiar categories of speech, chant, and song. Foreign invaders took these to be the oral literatures of the Native American communities. These works thus correspond well to the most fundamental notions of literature, however many of their themes, forms, and styles may differ from European American traditions. Oral literature is less a tradition of texts than a tradition of performances. The age of reason and discovery in Europe coincided with the age of book and for this reason and others, most Europeans were slow to recognize the existence of these Native American literatures. As a result of this the process of documenting the literature did not begin till the early nineteenth century as the Native American communities themselves were beginning to emerge with great Native American authors.Transformation of oral literature into textual literature is a complicated process because it involves reflection of audience who are non-Indians at whom it is aimed and due to the specific interests motivating it. Europeans understood language to be a good tool to learn important cultural information about Native American culture, which caused some of the statements to be framed in the third person, thus obscuring the Native American speaker’s meaning or point of view. Being an author is a cultural role burdened by many assumptions of society. In most Indian society both stories and songs are considered common property, while others are the property of a particular social or religious group, and still others are said to belong to individuals. Culture is a system of beliefs and values through which a group of people structure their experience of the world. By working with this definition of culture, which is very close to the way current criticism understands the impact of ideology upon literature, we can begin to pluralize our notion of the world and understand that other peoples can organize their experience in different ways, and dramatize their experience of the world through different symbolic forms. If culture is a system of beliefs and values by which people organize their experience of the world, then it follows that forms of expressive culture such as these myths should embody the basic beliefs and values of the people who create them. These beliefs and values can be roughly organized in three areas: 1. Beliefs about the nature of the physical world. 2. Beliefs about social order and appropriate behavior.3. Beliefs about human nature and the problem of good and evil.Both the Zuni story and the Iroquoian story of the origins of the confederacy also talk about how society should be organized, about the importance of kinship and families, about how society divides its many functions in order to provide for healing, for food, for decision making, and so on. The Iroquoian confederacy was a model of Federalism for the drafters of the Constitution, who were much impressed by the way in which the confederacy managed to preserve the autonomy of its individual member tribes while being able to manage effective concerted actions, as the colonists to their dismay too often found out. The Navajo story of Changing Woman and the Lakota story of White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman are important illustrations not only of the role of women as cultural heroes, but also every peoples necessity to evolve structures such as the Pipe Ceremony or Navajo healing rituals to restore and maintain order in the world.The Raven and Hare narratives are stories about Trickster Figure. Tricksters are the opposite of culture heroes. Culture heroes exist in mythology to dramatize prototypical events and behaviors; they show us how to do what is right and how we became the people who we are. Tricksters, on the other hand, provide for disorder and change; they enable us to see the underside of life and remind us that culture, finally, is artificial, that there is no necessary reason why things must be the way they are. If there is sufficient motivation to change things, Trickster provides for the possibility of such change, most often by showing us the danger of believing too sincerely that this arbitrary arrangement we call culture is the way things really are. When Raven cures the girl, for instance, he does so to gain her sexual favors and in so doing calls into question the not-always-warranted trust that people place in healing figures like doctors. The Bungling Host story, widespread throughout Native America, humorously illustrates the perils of overreaching the limits of ones identity while trying to ingratiate one’s self. Perhaps the most important thing that needs to be done is to challenge peoples’ notions of myth. When people hear the word “myth,” they succumb to the popular belief that mythology is necessarily something that is false. This is good place to start a discussion about truth, inviting people to consider that there are other kinds of truth besides scientific truth (which is what gave a bad name to mythology in the first place). Consider this definition of myth: ” The