Native American Texts

     For class, we read two texts written by Native Americans in the 1960s and 197-0s. I was most struck by the complete lack of anger in the readings. I would not find myself so calm if I were in their positions. After thousands of years of inhabiting this land, a foreign force with malicious hearts and more advanced weapons took everything from the Native American tribes. Suddenly, every subsequent generation had to learn, and learn quickly, to cope with the new land they were allotted. I’d be livid. I would be ranting and raving about this injustice to everyone who would listen to me. I would write every single day with scathing language in the futile hope that someone with power and authority would help. But there was mostly a resigned sadness in the tone of these two works. Leslie Marmon Silko writes of sneakily cutting wire fences built around miles of land that used to belong to the local tribes. He and his friends could have very easily stuck up their middle fingers and systematically hacked away at the fencing. But this does not happen. Instead, he is sneaky and snake-like in cutting the wire, waiting until nightfall to begin his work. “Their lies will destroy this world,” he say, the “they” being the white people. Personally, I did not feel any heat in this comment. There was no rage behind it, no anger with the destruction of the land or the natural order of life.

            I also noted the respect of the land I have never noticed in “white” writing. Native Americans have lived off the land in a more intimate way then I could ever experience in my lifetime. I love nature; I appreciate what it gives and the awe-inspiring aesthetics of it. But Native Americans lived and died by the land. They worked with it and alongside it. Nowadays, we work against it or merely exploit it. I can just see the intense reverence for the Earth no one can fake.

            It’s also a showcase of how our destruction hurts people. Some individuals, or a great many individuals, scoff at the destruction. They can try to claim we needed that exorbitant number of animals or that those forests are fine to just be felled. But what we’ve done and what our forefathers have done had disrupted and obliterated the lifestyle of an entire race. And that’s a fact you can’t brush off.