Assignment task:
Approaching the folk and creation stories of the indigenous people requires a respectful acknowledgment of the differences between indigenous American and European cultures.
As Wendy Kurant and Jenifer Kurtz write in their "Introduction-Native Accounts,"
Many Native American tales are performative as well as oral-the meanings of the words supplemented by expressions, movements, and shared cultural assumptions-and so the words alone do not represent their full significance. That being said, the examples of Native American accounts that follow give us some starting points to consider the different ways in which cultures explain themselves to themselves.
There are more differences than similarities between creation accounts, as Kurant and Kurtz explain:
Some Native American creation tales show motifs of movement from chaos to duality to order and beings of creation and destruction paired together, themes also found in European accounts of creation. However, these tales feature significant differences to the European way of understanding the world. These tales often show the birth of the land and of the people as either contemporaneous events, as with the Earth Diver stories, or as the former figuratively birthing the latter, as with the Emergence stories. This suggests the context for some tribes' beliefs in the essentialness of land to tribal and personal identity.
The editors claim that the indigenous, compared to the European, view of nature is worth noting, as well:
Native American cultures did not differentiate between animal behavior and human behavior to the extent that Europeans did. While the European concept of the Great Chain of Being established animals as inferior to humans and the Bible was understood to grant man dominion over the animals, the Native American stories to follow suggest a sense of equality with the animals and the rest of nature.
"What is your experience of reading the works assigned this week?"
Do you relate to the readings?
Did you search for similarities, or approach them being hyperconscious of the differences?
Did you find security, or anxiety, in consulting the outside sources (Kurant and Kurtz's introduction, my introduction, the video clips, or online websites)? Explain.
What was it like to learn this week?
Here is example of the professor would like it
Yes, the past is incredibly important, and should not be overlooked in favor of writings of the present.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is with an example from another medium.
One of the most interesting films I've ever watched is a film called Africa Addio. It is a an Italian "shockumentary" film about decolonization in Africa. It is also incredibly racist, eurocentric, and generally exploitative (there are plenty of corpses and executions shown). However, it gives an excellent view of how Europeans viewed the decolonization of Africa, and how they viewed Africa. By watching the film, with modern knowledge and context, one can figure out how people in the past viewed the world and why they may have viewed it that way.
This also applies to the writings of Americans from the past. By reading literature from the past, we can better understand how people viewed the world and why they did the things they did. Reading American literature from the past can give us insight about why Native Americans were slaughtered, why slavery was accepted and even encouraged, and why so many of America's problems are about the color of someone's skin. It is a bad idea to condemn works of the past.
For example, we do not ignore Caesar's recollections of the Gallic Wars despite the fact he committed a genocide against the Gauls. We do not ignore Mein Kampf despite the fact that it laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. We should not ignore the writings of America's past which give us the context and meaning behind the most horrific and terrible events in American's history.
Otherwise, how else are we supposed to learn from our forefathers mistakes?