Summary Of Powwow At The End Of The World By Sherman Alexie

Back when the United States wasn’t so immense and powerful, its people and their leaders wanted to expand. The people thought that the entire country should be theirs, and anyone who stood in their way, including the Native Americans, would pay for it. Manifest destiny was the “motto” for the country in this time. The first railroad that could cross the entire country was built. This encouraged many to move out west. While this was good for the Americans, it might not have been so good for the Native Americans. Native American land and culture was impacted by western expansion of the United States because of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the United States army, or militias, and government.

One of the themes used in the book is of racism towards the Natives. An example used in the book is of Edward Sheriff Curtis who was a photographer of 1900s. Curtis was interested in taking pictures of Native people, but not just any Native person. “Curtis was looking for the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the imaginative construct” (King, 2003; pp. 34). He used many accessories to dress up people up “who did not look as the Indian was supposed to look” (King, 2003; pp.34). He judged people based on his own assumptions without any knowledge of the group and their practices. Curtis reduced the identity of the Native Americans to a single iconic quintessential image of what Native meant to white society. The idea related to the image of this group of people during the 1900s consisted of racism in terms of the “real looking Indian”. This is not

The Native American’s way of living was different from the Europeans. They believed that man is ruled by respect and reverence for nature and that nature is an

These statements suggest that the English didn't come to the Americas simply to plunder gold and riches from the native Indians. As stated in A People and a Nation, "Unlike the Spanish, other European nations did not immediately start to colonize the coasts their sailors had explored. They were interested in exploiting the natural wealth of the region, not in conquering territories."# However, the English did, at times, exploit the Indians for their profit. Actually, they came to America for a number of reasons, but mainly to escape religious persecution and seek a new start in the world. People whom were mere peasants in England, and possessed no land, would soon become owners of many acres of their very own property.

For years, the Native Americans lived a very solitary life with their own unique way of living, that was until the European’s showed up with their very complex way of living. Harmony with nature was a very important aspect of Native American culture. The Native people embraced nature with no intention to modify it unlike the Europeans. They simply cared more about nature and what it had to offer. The spiritual connection between the land and these Natives were distinctive from the Europeans also due to the fact that to the settlers, land meant wealth. As a European, if you owned any land you were considered a wealthy upper class human being. As a Native, no one owned the land and anyone could benefit from the land.

“The Powwow at the End of the World” by Sherman Alexie appears to be a modern free verse poem with varying line length and no end rhyme. It is actually a ceremony to preserve and restore the Native American land and way of life. The repetition of the beginning of the lines and the strong rhythm suggest the drumbeat and dance of the apocalyptic powwow, or communal dance of Indians at the end of the world when all will be put right again. The speaker is an Indian answering the demand for forgiveness by the audience, who imply the Indians should forget four centuries of the atrocities committed by European settlers. He speaks in authoritative chant-like native rhetoric as though he can actually do what he says, like a medicine man. The poem in a few lines undoes the effects of modern civilization, destroying dams and allowing the waters to flow and the salmon to return.

* How would tens of thousands of settlers immigrating to New England with this image of their own purpose shape the development of that colony?

Many people heard about the new land and thought with this new land would come a new beginning so they started arriving in fleets from Britain to come for the new land and with so many people coming we needed food and settlers for them and laws. The thing is though the people who were coming over and going to the south needed workers for farms so they used natives at first and that didn’t work out too well, many of them died because of our diseases and the natives couldn’t fight them off. The native americans also new the land much better than

In the world of Appalachia, stereotypes are abundant. There are stories told of mountaineers as lazy, bewildered, backward, and yet happy and complacent people. Mountain women are seen as diligent, strong, hard willed, and overall sturdy and weathered, bearing the burden of their male counterparts. These ideas of mountain life did not come out of thin air; they are the direct product of sensational nineteenth century media including print journalism and illustrative art that has continuously mislead and wrongfully represented the people of Appalachia. These stories, written and told by outsiders, served very little purpose to Appalachian natives other than means of humiliation and degradation. They served mostly to convince readers of the

During the manifests destiny era, the white settlers of our new country were full of land-lust, they didn't think twice before taking ownership of land. "...Facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them,

-A ship leaves New York for San Francisco on the first of every month at noon, and vice versa for a ship coming from San Francisco.

     With Native Americans being the first inhabitants of North America, many people often question what traditions they have created on their own, before the ideas of the pale settlers. When taking a look into their interesting beliefs, it is obvious to see an intricate basis or animals and spirits that guide the lifestyles of Indians all over the country. Even their society had a special way of doing things, including gender roles of both men and women. There are many customs that have seemed odd to the average American throughout the centuries, but Indians found these a normal way of life. Even the lifestyles of Native Americans were unique, from hunting animals to tanning buffalo hides. Gender was a major

In the 1830’s America was expanding its border and completing manifest destiny. The one thing standing in the way of Americans moving west was the Native Americans. President Andrew Jackson had a dilemma on his hands. Jackson wanted to create a plan that would make everyone happy. But in the end, Jackson had the Native American removed from their land and led to the “Trail of Tears” where many Native Americans would lose their lives. Looking at the articles by F.P Prucha, Mary E. Young and Alfred A. Cave each one says that the Indians needed to be removed from their land for a different reason.

“Manifest Destiny” stretches a process of cultivation that naturally occurred over one hundred years into one single elegant painting. The painting has a natural transition across the frontier, from the right to the left, in chronological order of expansion. In the top right of the art piece a river lazily bends and twist along flat, barren land. Dotting the banks of the river, if someone looks closely, they can notice specks of ships sailing the river. Just the idea and challenges of moving people, livestock and raw materials to an unknown land shows the huge amount of dedication, and a crucial step, in developing America. The basin that the river is painted in is also bathed by warm sunlight flowing from a newly risen sun. Just as the sun painted in the picture looks bright and new, so did the hopes and dreams of the Americans painted. From the first corner of the painting, we begin to see the frontiersmen develop a land unknown to them.

In his painting, he portrays the American frontier and the contrast between American and Native American society. The Eastern territory that has been touched by American peoples is portrayed as light and fertile, demonstrating America’s conception of its expansion as enlightening the native peoples, whose little remaining territory is dark and strewn with ominous clouds. The Americans leading the frontier are laying the foundation for such modern means of transportation as railroads, carriages and telegraph wires that provide stark contrast to the Native Americans, portrayed as running on the backs of seemingly untamed animals and carrying swords and spears. This imagery of technological advancements extending into the West suggests that Americans felt morally obligated not only to extend their territory from coast to coast but also to help civilize the savage and outdated ways of the native peoples. In the top right corner of the painting, from which the sunlight