Alex Clark

Cooper 6th

05/11/18

How does American(Western) perspective affect

other pre-existing, specifically, native culture?

Western culture, since it’s gestation, has been a culture which has developed on the

backs of other, sometimes seen as inferior, cultures. Since Columbus first landed, on that fateful

day, he set a precedent that to this day has not been overridden. This power-complex, which is

characterised by the expansion of territorial America at the cost of other nations and cultures,

can be observed through instances like the Mexican-American War, Trail of Tears and the Black

Hills War. Native Americans and their culture is especially disregarded in today's day and age

with blatant acts of cultural appropriation as well as disrespect towards native reservation land.

Native Americans have been attacked and oppressed at every turn in America’s growth as a

nation and have been poorly compensated for it.

Native Americans lack a once earned trust for most white folk because of historical

incidences in which western, primarily white, people took advantage of that trust and abused it

in order to gain land and resources. In my AP English III class, we watched a TedTalk given by

a white photographer working for national geographic. He was tasked with taking pictures of the

people apart of a Native American tribe on a reservation. He explains how the natives, who he

has befriended throughout his 7 years as their photographer, still lack the trust that was one
their due to the abuse of that trust. This group of Native Americans have a term for white people

which loosely translates into Outsider and Aaron Huey, the photographer, is still considered an

outsider(Aaron Huey TedTalk). An action which shows this Huey mentions is the Uranium mines

which were worked by Navajo people, many of whom encountered diseases due to radiation,

and placed on Navajo land without any native permission. The working conditions in these

mines were poorer than mines elsewhere in the world often collapsing in on themselves,

furthermore increasing the likelihood of loss of life.(Los Alamos Atomic Museum) This, again,

was at the expense of the Native Americans and at the gain of the United States.

The effects of Western expansion can be seen in a multitude of ways that manifest in

Native Culture. Western Culture has such deep roots embedded into other cultures that causes

symptoms which people try and cure, generally ignoring the cause of those symptoms. Some of

these symptoms include in high rates of poverty, mental health issues, and inter-tribal gang

violence. Western culture has spread so far that into marginalizing Native Americans that it has

pitted them against themselves to the point that they are killing themselves in the street (IBL

Project Research). This is often due to the education system that the United States helped to

set up. The way the United States set up the Native American schooling system was in part to

destroy their culture and cause a shift from Native culture to Western culture. When my AGS

class visited the ​To'hajiilee​ tribe’s school we saw how despite the pressure to assimilate with

Western culture the Natives were actually creating their own school program based around their

own culture. The school leader explained to us how the upbringing in a Western school can

cause students to dropout of school and even join gangs. (​To'hajiilee School Visit)

Westernized culture forces a perspective on a culture already stressed about the

boundaries of its territory, and the everpresent oppressor that is waiting as it's not so silent

neighbor. In the essay entitled Pocahontas Paradox, by Cornel Pewewardy, Western ideology
has a certain caricature of what a native person should look and act like, and this is stressed

even further by films and plays which involve Native Americans and use this caricature of them

instead of what they are actually like(Pocahontas Paradox). While caricatures normally don’t

affect a culture and can be funny and entertaining for some, it is especially harmful if the only

symbols found in media of said culture are the ridiculous caricatures. Another way Native

Americans are often portrayed is as a ‘Noble Savage’, meaning that they lack civility, but in their

savagery are somewhat noble. This stereotype of ‘Noble Savage’ is illustrated in the film ​The

Mission​ and can hurt the self image of native americans as well. The reasoning behind this is

that Native Americans are receiving mixed messages from Western culture on how they need to

behave through educational systems, but then media causes a separate image of Noble

Savage or delicate princess to exist causing a conflicting viewpoint.

In Conclusion Native Americans and their culture have been and always will be

interconnected with Western culture. They have been harmed in many ways and have received

little compensation for the damages that have been committed against them. Given the fact that

our two cultures are forever connected it should be goal of Western culture to be more open and

receptive to the differences and afflictions of Native Cultures.