Themes In The Native American Writings - Everest

Everest Leo
Mr. Roddy
IHSS
13 October 2021
Themes Within The Native American Writings
    One theme that I noticed when I read the Native American Writings was that none of them could escape the slightly Non-Native-American-Centric view. A very pronounced example of this is how, in Sherman Alexie's Story, he made it seem (whether on purpose or not) like Native Americans were never the main focus. Nothing seems to be built around the Native Americans (who were here first) and instead we forced them to live around us. In the writing by Samson Occom, there was little mention of Native Americans and it instead focused more on God and things that originate from Catholicism. Although the focus of the writing was religious, it shows us that assimilation into the colonizer's culture was very present as these are all things that were introduced by the colonizers. Even the Iroquois creation story, which is supposed to be a completely original story created by the Iroquois, is interpreted and written by a colonizer. What I'm saying is that a colonizer had to learn a different language and interpret it into his own language and write it in a way that he sees fit, all of which makes the writing susceptible to bias and nuance lost in translation. This means that the similarity of the Iroquois creation story to the Christian one could have been a result of the translator taking some interpretive liberties. While this specific example of similarity between creation stories is quite insignificant, it made me realize that we might look at Native American culture in a different way than it actually is and we might be portraying it wrong. Broadening the scope to the whole world, this could potentially mean that other non-literary languages are being portrayed inaccurately as they can only be viewed through literary means that different languages have.

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