Week 4 Post #1

I thought the reading in Chapters 4-6 to be very informative. From the decisions of John Marshall and its impact over tribal sovereignty, to the abandoning of making treaties with Indian tribes, the United States played a huge role in the fragmentation of Indian tribes and their removal from their own lands. This lack of acknowledgment of the Indian tribes to be involved with the making of treaties showed that Indian sovereignty was dead. The United States denied viewing Native Americans as a foreign nation or entity, but instead a ward that needed to be protected by its guardian. I think the United States did this because they didn't want to have to justify their seizing of land from the Native Americans, who were technologically incapable of preventing the Americans from pushing them aside and doing whatever they wanted. The United States, when you look back at history, was pretty harsh and very inhuman in its treatment of the Indians. For as romantic as the making of America is made out to be, we sure have our dark spots. Regarding language, some of what I find striking is their distinguishing between animate and inanimate nouns. Also, the intricate nature in which their language is created with close attention to 'details of position, direction, motion, form, shape, and texture' (87 Kidwell). Native American language is also highly metaphorical; words are not simply things, they express in highly complex and imaginative poetic thought the relationship between physical and spiritual forces. In Indian literature and aesthetics, telling a story is a way of maintaining the order of the world.