Are you Prejudice?

What comes to my mind when I think about the Native Americans; my thoughts are that Native Americans were here first.  I cannot on the top of my head give all the facts and dates about when Christopher Columbus came to meet with the Indians and take away their land, but I do remember the Indians and whites having fought for what the Indians had first.  I feel like those children who drew "Indians" with feathers and aggressive character in the reading, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria" by Beverly Tatum.  Now that I have done some more research about the Native Americans I can come up with some true background about the Native Americans.

From the moment Christopher Columbus stepped off that boat and met with an Indian, I feel as if the Indians were immediately judged, and stripped of respect.  I read that whites thought that the Indians were devil worshipers in their forests.  Indians were so quickly to be stereo typed and misrepresented in just a quick glance.  Whites also labeled them as savages.  I remember watching the Disney movie Pocahontas and the Indians were called savages by the whites.  In the reading, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly D. Tatum, readers are to challenge themselves and view themselves as prejudice.  Not because we want to be but because we were born in a world so exposed to misinformation about each other that it is almost impossible not to be prejudice.  “The distortion of historical information about people of color leads young people to make assumptions that may go unchallenged for a long time” (Tatum, 5).     This is true and an example of this is the misinformation about Native Americans.  Many of us have misconstrued information about Natives history. 

I for one thought that Native Americans were quite helpless when the Whites came to take over.  I thought they were helpless, naïve, victims, too simple and trusting to ever win against the Whites.  The whites who had guns, and who were a bit further ahead in “technology” I would say; and Indians had no chance. 

But I am completely prejudiced.  I have a misconceived judgment based on limited information!

There was, Alexander McGillivray, a Creek chief, a skilled diplomat. Major Ridge was a committed and talented Cherokee nation builder. Tenskwatawa was a shrewd Shawnee negotiator, skilled at playing competing European powers against one another. Henry Standing Bear was a far-sighted Lakota political organizer. And Wovoka, a charismatic Paiute preacher from western Nevada, inspired a religious-political movement that spread from California to the Dakotas. 

It is sad how little I knew about the Native Americans, and how little I still know about their culture and how history is so different than what I thought about the Native Americans.

I will continue to do more research and enlighten myself about history and the correct information about Native Americans.