American history that are told nowadays appear that of white settler. The Modern World that has been made to show the social orders that the settlers had known in Britain, France, and Spain. But anthropologist Jack Weatherford, author of Native Roots and numerous more brilliantly shows how the Europeans really connected their civilization onto the profound and d nourishing roots of local Native American traditions, and beliefs. These include but are not restricted to names of places, Native American farming and hunting techniques, traditional crafts, and the very blood that flows through their veins. All this and the United States continuously fails to see.
After reading this book numerous myths are unmasked but a few stood out and ought to be said in my paper. To begin with, Weatherford appears that the NativeAmericans had numerous and distinctive shapes of life past only wondering and agricultural. He shows this when he talks about the city of Cahokia. Cahokia ruins which are found east of the present day day St. Louis gives the peruser an impression of a dynamic, settled culture with complex exchange systems and an extended structure of government; much more like the Aztec and Incan Empires.
Another imperative myth is the thought that Native Americans Native Americans only died off from the United States due to wars fought, massacres and infections. Instead Weatherford goes into an almost century long process of intermarriage and how it brought the Native Americans blood into American and Canadian people groups as a whole. Driving Native Americans to not be the same bunch of people who stands before us. Rather that one of which has been somewhat mixed. An example of this is the Metis people from Canada. This is a group of French and Native American mix that has a concept of its own ethnic identity and this is just a start to the myths.
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. This book shows a large amount of evidence documenting the facts that American Indians were not the “savages’ claimed to be by the early European settlers. He shows that they were not without sophisticated cultural systems, and not wandering around purposelessly waiting to be saved and started on a path of progress facilitated by a doctrine of Manifest Destiny. He lists many crops first domesticated in the Americas and points out that these crops constituted one-third of the annual harvest in the United States. Among the many other contributions of American Indians are items of hunting equipment and clothing, art objects, the Navajo code-talkers in World War II, a multitude of places names and frequently used words, and the intellectual achievements of people such as Ely Parker, George Hunt, and Ella Deloria.
Another argument of Weatherford’s is that European Americans ‘do not know the story of the land on which we live. We take nourishment from this soil, but because we cannot see our roots down deep in the American dirt, we do not know the source of that nourishment.’ The roots in which the author talks about extends back into when records where not taken or written down. Weatherford uses a broad holistic perspective where he gathered information from archaeological data. This data is related to existing patterns, economic systems, architectural styles, and the art forms that came from the Hohokam, Mississippian, Adena and Hopewell cultures.
He also included earlier hunting groups throughout North America. Weatherford argues that ‘this past deserves our attention not merely for the sake of antiquarian curiosity, but because our culture and society today descend from ancient Cahokia as much as from medieval London, Renaissance. Rome, and ancient Athens.’ Weatherford also examines ethnohistoric and utilizes his own cross-cultural ethnographic observations in commenting on social structures and political systems.
His discussion of Native American warfare patterns for example is an impartial treatment. Scalping has been acknowledged as a pre Columbus practice but it is placed in the context of head hunting throughout the Old World. He also notes that the practice of scalping that took place in North America was made by the Europeans for their own political purposes. Even more intriguing is Weatherford’s discussion of Native American peacekeeping activities and his challenge to European Americans to learn these lessons.
The continuity and vitality of Native cultural traditions is also placed in a provocative perspective. In speaking of long-standing Native American fishing traditions along the Northwest coast, for example, Weatherford comments, ‘They do not fish today with the same tools they used a century ago, any more than today’s farmer would walk behind a plow pulled by a mule.’ His description of the honoring of military veterans and the American flag at the powwow in Mankato, Minnesota, is equally thoughtful.
All readers are made to be mindful of the truth that the Native Americans presented corn to the Europeans, but they will also be shocked to learn that both cotton and tobacco were items utilized by the Native Americans. These materials were afterward presented to Europe through the North American settler population. Furthermore we know Native Americans did not utilize European military strategies but what one may not realize is the degree to which Native Americans were pioneers within the development of guerilla warfare. Which numerous troops within the U.S. Armed force used during the Revolutionary War used against the British with the information they retained.
All these lessons and more are spread throughout the whole book. Native Roots isn’t only a collection of myth-busting stories but Weatherford stories to create a single point, that the Native Americans are not an individual entirely unmistakable from Americans of European decent. Instead, the social, mechanical, racial, agrarian, authentic commitments made by Native Americans appear that it is way better to conceive the people groups of North America as a wide range of differing individuals who are related to one another on a continuum instead of seeing the Native Americans and Americans of European decent as restricting racial and social poles.
