An Introduction to Native American Literature

American literatures embrace the memories of creation stories, the tragic wisdom of native ceremonies, trickster narratives, and the outcome of chance and other occurrences in the most diverse cultures in the world. These distinctive literatures, eminent in both oral performances and in the imagination of written narratives, cannot be discovered in reductive social science translations or altogether understood in the historical constructions of culture in one common name. Vizenor 1) Since the end of the 15th century, the migration of Europeans to America, and their importation of Africans as slaves, has led to centuries of conflict and adjustment between Old and New World societies. Europeans created most of the early written historical record about Native Americans after the colonists immigration to the Americas. 3 Many Native cultures were matrilineal; the people occupied lands for use of the entire community, for hunting or agriculture. Europeans at that time had patriarchal cultures and had developed concepts of individual property rights with respect to land that were extremely different. The differences in cultures between the established Native Americans and immigrant Europeans, as well as shifting alliances among different nations of each culture through the centuries, caused extensive political tension, ethnic violence and social disruption. The Native Americans suffered high fatalities from the contact with infectious Eurasian diseases, to which they had no acquired immunity. Epidemics after European contact caused the greatest loss of life for indigenous populations. In 1830, the U. S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the government to relocate Native Americans from their homelands within established states to lands west of the Mississippi River, accommodating European-American expansion. Perhaps the most important moment of governmental detribalization came with the passing of the Dawes Act in 1887 which set aside 160 acres for each Indian on the reservation, and opened the â€Å"leftovers† up for settlement. According to the U. S. Bureau of the Census (1894), the Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. Native Americans were thus pushed out from their own lands and were forced to live in small reservations assigned by the federal government who claimed that setting the Indians on the course to civilisation best ensured their survival. Tribal customs were then forcibly altered and nomadic tribes became sedentary. All Native Americans felt the impact of the new reservation policies, which sought to isolate and contain Indians to make room for an expanding American nation. At the same time that Native Americans were being excluded from the nation, white Americans began to look to them as the source of a unique national identity and literature, distinct from European traditions. Literature from the period depicting Indian characters was incredibly popular, and many works are still celebrated as classics, including James Fenimore Coopers The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Catharine Maria Sedgwicks Hope Leslie (1827), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellows Song of Hiawatha (1855), to name only a few. These texts employ the trope of the disappearing Indian, which represents the deaths of Indians as natural, similar to the changing of the seasons or the setting of the sun, rather than the result of political exclusion or social discrimination. Thus the disappearance of Indians from the American social landscape was not only depicted within this body of writing but also implicitly approved of. At the same time the government sponsored authors and art programs; the proletarian themes of discovery, regionalism, and tourism were new forms of dominance over Native Americans. Therefore, early Native American authors wrote within a hostile political climate and in response to a dominant literary tradition that sentimentalized and condoned the death of Indians. But they found the means to engage with their detractors by authoring their own accounts of Indians that challenged stereotypical beliefs, demanded equal political rights, and proved that Indians were neither disappearing nor silent. Native American authors have faithfully presented some of these issues of inherent native rights, the duplicities of federal policies, and the burdens of racial identities in their short stories and novels. Wynema by Sophia Alice Callahan published in 1891, was the first novel attributed to a Native American author. Callahan, who was a mixedblood Creek, was aware of tribal issues at the time and therefore devoted most of her novel to native issues. Since then many novels by distinguished Native American authors have been published. One of the most important writers among Native Americans in the 1930’s was D’Arcy McNickle, a member of the Flathead tribe of Montana. His first novel The Surrounded was published in 1936, two years after the Indian Reorganization Act was passed near the end of the Depression in the United States. His novel is the poignant story of a mix-breed family and the tragedy of their exclusion from both the red and the white worlds. Because of cultural misunderstandings, which begin between the Indian mother and Spanish father, suspicion, fear, and finally death take their children. The novel is a history of alienation. Kenneth Lincoln who coined the term Native American Rennaissance pointed out that in the late-1960s and early-1970s, a generation of Native Americans were coming of age who were the first of their tribe to receive a substantial English-language education, particularly outside of standard Indian boarding schools and in universities. Conditions for Native people, while still very harsh, had moved beyond the survival conditions of the early half of the century. The beginnings of a project of historical revisionism, which attempted to document—from a Native perspective—the history of the invasion and colonization of the North American continent had inspired a great deal of public interest in Native cultures. During this time of change, a group of Native writers emerged, both poets and novelists, who in only a few years expanded the Native American literary canon.

Different Color, Different Treatment (Research Paper) Research Paper

Different Color, Different Treatment ( ) - Research Paper Example Many of these spheres are defined by stereotypes. Those stereotypes determine the nature of the space that is inhabited. How someone reacts to the others around them must be understood through the culturally developed stereotypes that define the potential of the experience that someone has in coming into contact with others on the street. The experience of the American street is a place where visceral prejudices come alive. Where in social gatherings prejudices can be dampened, set aside in order to create relationships that cross boundaries and develop into meaningful interactions, when one encounters an unknown person on a street, the only framework in which to define the potential of that experience is through culturally developed ‘types’. The unfortunate consequence of these types is that the nature of some are automatically considered to have a negative connotation. The concept of the young African American male brings forth a sense of fear, the nature of his repres entation in culture being angry and violent. The media represents the young African American male through concepts that have developed through stereotyping that occurs on television, through music videos, and through past prejudices that created the concept of the militant angry young African American youth. ... This, of course, is not limited to the African American male. There are many stereotypes that become prominent in public spaces when encounters are not framed through introductions. Part of the problem is the high level of population condensed into cities in which most of the people have no interconnections to one another. Because the nature of modern life has created smaller and more intimate conditions of community, there are far more strangers in the world than were once part of American life. In addition, with some of the more prominent crime sprees that have happened, including terrorist acts, more people are now considered ‘enemies’ which creates a type of anxiety that ends in a hyper vigilance that performs as a barrier between people. Being open to interactions with strangers leaves one open and vulnerable to ‘dangers’ that are perceived through the many communications that have framed ‘types’ for their ‘inclinations’ toward s creating chaos. Prejudice In 1954, Gordon Allport wrote a seminal book on the nature of prejudice and how it affects human relationships. He states as he begins to define the concept of prejudice that â€Å"No corner of the world is free from group scorn†, which is an appropriate way in looking at the nature of prejudice. Society groups people into categories in order to impose order upon the integration of multiple cultural backgrounds that ends in differences that can be visually seen in ethnic qualities. The way in which language is used to define groups, by suggesting that someone is African American, Native American, or Asian American, suggests that when someone has ethnic markers, this places them in a different social groups. However, it is important

Discuss these abstracts in the context of academic research and recent Essay

Discuss these abstracts in the context of academic research and recent developments in audit regulation and practice - Essay Example ted in the financial statements can be termed to be material if its omission or misrepresentation can have an effect on the decision-making process among the users of these records (Ndreca, 2013, pp 350). In simple definition, materiality in financial accounting is the intolerable misstatements that are embedded in the financial statements with the intention of justifying a non-existent transaction (Dodaro, 2013, pp419). In other words, materiality is the intolerable or unacceptable errors which cannot be ignored because they have a greater effect on the financial information represented in the records (Brannan & Gray, 2005, pp26). These errors are huge hence, when neglected; they may lead to big losses of the firm’s resources. This paper explores the concept of materiality in the financial accounting showing the importance of materiality in auditing process, the main development of the concepts of materiality over time. Materiality can be categorized into two; quantitative materiality and qualitative materiality. Quantitative materiality is the actual financial value that a certain misstatement can cause to the organization. On the other hand, qualitative materiality can be just a mere statement that has either misled certain transaction (Brannan & Gray, 2005, pp41). Accountants and management teams in most cases misstate the financial information to conceal particular information not to be known by the shareholders for their own benefits. Sometimes, certain information may qualify to be material without the intention or knowledge of the accountants and the management (Brannan & Gray, 2005, pp26). Therefore, the auditors have the task of exploring all the financial records and scrutinize them to establish, justify and certify that the information represented in them is quite relevant to the true status of the organization (Dodaro, 2013, pp419). Any deviation should be investigated to establish whet her it can amount to the material or can have an effect on