Question: Does
the white man attempt to care for or respect the earth?
Claim: Indians
share common thoughts on different aspects of the earth on how the white man
does not care for or respect it.
From the beginning of time, we have been in
confrontation with the American Indians. In most of the confrontations the
white man is to blame. From the beginning we have been trying to take advantage
of the Indians in many different ways. Most obviously it has been in the aspect
of taking advantage of there land and not respecting the earth.
The following
three exerts, Chief Seattle's speech, Sitting Bull's speech and the passage of
Land of the Spotted Eagle, pertain to the fact that we do not respect the land
that the Indians live on. Of these three pieces, the first two take place in
the 1850's to 1870's. The passage of The Land of the Spotted Eagle takes place
at a later time in the 1930's. There is also agreement of the three in the
spiritual sense of the land.
In Chief Seattle's speech, he talks in more of
the spiritual sense of the land. But it is in direct relationship to the abuse
that the White Man exerts on the land. He makes many references towards the
Indian Spiritual being, that he is very different from that of the White Man.
He makes many analogies towards that of the spiritual importance of the burial
grounds and the worshipping grounds towards the after life. "To us the
ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed
ground." And he also says, "Your dead cease to love you and the land
of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander way
beyond the stars."
In the speech of Sitting Bull, he speaks of the
abuse of the land by the White Man but on a different level then that of Chief
Seattle. He says that the Earth is not ours, not theirs, not anybody's to own.
He cannot understand the concept of having someone own land. His belief and
understanding is that the Earth owns us. We are part of the earth, and the
earth cannot be owned, we are just simply here to use its resources and return
it to the way that it was before we used it. He relates the actions of us to
the earth's natural disasters of destruction. "That nation is like a
spring freshest that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path." He also speaks of the treaty's that we have
broken. The abuse that we put forth on the Indians land in the way that we keep
pushing them off the land that we keep promising them. "Only seven years ago
we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be
left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us."
In the stories of The land of the Spotted
Eagle, by Luther standing Bear, he speaks of the dehumanization of the Indian.
He refers to the land and the Indian as being one. "The American Indian is
of soil, whether it be the region of forest, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits
into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned
the man for his surroundings." He makes many analogies of the land and the
Indian being together on a higher level. He explains how the white Man does not
understand the Indian and therefore does not understand America. And if that
goal cannot be reached then the White Man can never understand America. He
states that all of the problems that exist today as a result of the White Man
some how. He proclaims that the White Man says that he is forgiven by the fact
that he says his God has guided him to this path. He speaks of the ways in
which the White Man dehumanizes the earth. He agrees that the white man brought
about great change, but the fruits of his society are both sickening and
deadening. He says that a true civilization lies in the dominance of self, not
in the dominance of other men. He states that the hand is the tool that has
built the man's mind, it too can refine it.
In all three cases the Indians are talking
about the abuse that the white man puts out upon the land. In common, Indians
believe that land has a spiritual aspect to it. Indians foresee that the White
Man will never be able to be one with the earth. This is because the White Man does not understand the
earth. White Man does not respect the
holy grounds of the dead. He does not respect the fruits that the earth has
offered to him, but rather walks all over these offerings. All three Indians
make references to nature in their description of the land. I found that very
interesting. It just supports the fact that Indians are really in tune with the
earth and its meaning and surroundings. Indians all hold a common bond, in the
fact that White Man have no respect for land that had been promised to the
Indians. Indians had created sacred burial grounds for these lands and could
not understand how one could just walk all over them and take away the land.
Another reason Indians believed the White Man abused the land and could never
understand the vast sacred lands of the American Indians.
It is for these reasons that the Indian sees
the a common train of thought in that the White Man abuses the Earth. And this
practice by us today still goes on in modern society. White Man still abuses
the Earth. We dump our garbage in the ocean, we have no place to safely dump toxic waste. We
disregard the environment in the same practices we did some two to three hundred
years ago, and most importantly we still do not respect the Indian in still
trying to squeeze land out of there grasp and moving them around.
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