Skip to main content

Finders Keepers, Losers Weeper

During class we discussed the spread of European ideology into the Americas, and how this spread helped the Europeans rationalize the oppression of Native Americans. I could not help but feel extremely frustrated as we continued our conversation. Our society today places a huge emphasis on the idea of African slavery and tend to make there disgust with the matter very clear, but what they fail to mention is that Native Americans were also enslaved.

The enslavement of the Native Americans was easily achieved due to the "European Advantage". The Europeans were way more advanced in every aspect than the Native American during the first interaction that they had together. The European explorers had weapons, advanced agriculture, will to conquer, and immunity to behavior. All these aspects were not present in Native American society.

Following this was the "Great Dying". This event changed my feeling of frustration into sadness. I could not believe that 90-95% of Native Americans were killed and nothing was done about it. THey not only had their lives ripped away from them, but also their sense of self. They no longer could have their own belief and language. The new invaders forced this individuals to conform and if conformity did not take place they risked death.

Not having the ability to think, feel, or believe what you want freely is extremely depressing. I hope that nothing like this every takes place again in our society.

PS: This assignment was late because my computer crashed and I just got it back and repaired today.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Collapse Of The Center

The collapse of the center refers to the collapse of western influence. European ideology was seriously brought into question after the Great Depression, the Holocaust, the two World Wars and the Cold War, all of which were brought up from a lack of capitalism working properly. For years leading up to these events European ideology was seen as the superior way to go upon living whether it were in terms of politics (democracy), economics (capitalism), religion (Christianity and Catholicism), or even just language (European native languages); however, without regulation the core structures easily collapsed. I feel that I was extremely shocked when it came to the collapse in capitalism during the Great Depression. The United States history books put a huge emphasis on how terrible and evil communism is as a structure, but do not care to lay out the limits that capitalism has. The introduction to loans and credit cards were used so immensely that the value in money heavily decrease...
Post a Comment
Read more

Atlantic Slave Trade

I felt very frustrated when we began talking about the Atlantic Slave Trade. I believe that the colonizers had no right to force the African Americans to work for the Europeans without paying them.  They took advantage of the African Americans human rights and dehumanized them in doing so. It is sad to see that that portion of society was so oppressed, and that same oppression is still slightly present in daily life today.  Europeans were the ones that forced people into confined spaces and failed to keep them fed and healthy. Instead they starved them and kept them below deck to sit among the rats with no space to move as they sat shoulder to shoulder with another individual at both side of them. This mistreatment, however, seems to have been forgotten in present day. Instead, our new president has made it his job to talk down about minority groups (in which African Americans are a part of) and make those groups look like criminals.  I think the most shocking ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Holocaust A Threat to Capitalism

We discussed the rise to fascism as a reaction to the failure of capitalism during the period of the holocaust. The Jewish community tend to live within the ghettos and when Hitler began to assert his power he forced all the Jews into the area and placed a gate/wall around them. In the beginning the Jews were allowed to work in the city and just returned to the slumps to sleep, but shortly after their ability to travel to the city was taken away. Eventually the ghettos were not enough to keep the Jews out and concentration camps were established in hope to improve their isolation. One thing that really upset me was reading about the castration laws that were put into place. When doing the partner readings, one law stated that the parent or legal guardian of any child that is 18 years of age or younger can choose to castrate their child. Most of the castration that were done were a result of pure fear. Jewish individuals in the concentration camps feared that their experience wo...
Post a Comment
Read more