Common Stereotypes Of Native Americans

The European arrival into North America was an extremely significant point in history. The arrival in 1492 led to a cultural diffusion between the immigrants and the Native Americans who helped form America as it is today. Although many colonies made peace with the Native Americans upon arrival, there were many people who did not mind executing the Native Americans for their land. The Chesapeake Bay colonies (Virginia and Maryland) were the first of several colonies to begin massacring the native peoples for land. The execution of the Native Americans later led to a genocide during Lincoln’s presidency, and Indian reservations were created with the means of concentrating the Native Americans. Although many new inhabitants to North America
Common stereotypes are that Native Americans still live in tee-pees, are warlike savages, dumb, always serious or mean, alcoholics, and so forth. Stereotypes of Native Americans are so overpowering through the 1998 production of Smoke Signals that contained characters who disagreed on how a Native American must look. As one character said to another, “‘You gotta look mean or people won’t respect you. White people will walk all over you if you don’t look mean. You gotta look like a warrior, like you just came back from killing a buffalo.’ ‘But our tribe never hunted buffalo; we were fisherman’” (Alexie). False accusations about Native Americans have become so dominant that Native Americans think they must act a certain way to be part of their own culture such as when Sherman Alexie referenced back to his childhood when he questioned why his father drank. Alexie’s father responded back, “I drink because I’m Indian” (Alexie). But Alexie later referred to alcoholism among Native Americans as a “damp reality” because most Native Americans he knows are alcoholics and he himself is a recovering alcoholic. Although alcoholism is a “damp reality” the description of Native Americans being bloodthirsty savages is but another false accusation often made by many sports teams. Many Native Americans are beginning to take offence to the
The Europeans were the ones who purposely killed the Native Americans, opposite to what Americans have been raised to believe. Native Americans did not actually create reservations, “the U.S. military and government made reservations. It was a place where [Native Americans] were supposed to be concentrated and die and disappear… I think it’s out of self-destructive impulses that Native Americans have turned reservations into sacred spaces” (Alexie). Along with reservations, the story of Pocahontas was not the story that actually took place. In Disney’s version of Pocahontas, “the movie makes little reference to the European greed, deceit, racism, and genocide that were integral to the historical contacts between the Indians and Jamestown settlers” (Pewewardy). Since children are raised through most of their childhood to believe stories that are not true, when the time comes to actually learn about the historical events the brain has to almost erase all prior knowledge to the