Oral Tradition In American Native Americans And Native American Culture

Similarly, when the first colonizers arrived at the North American continent, they concluded that America was deserted and empty. However, they realized that they had company when they figured out that the land had been inhabited for a considerable amount of time by the Native Americans. Since the colonizers did not make an effort to live peacefully amongst the Native Americans, the following generations lacked the trust of the Native American Community and knowledge on maintaining good relationships with the Native Americans. Unfortunately, the inability to solve this problem has became a common issue among American Native Americans and European Americans throughout the history of the United States. As a result, a series of historical events and governmental policies contributes to the present-day case of identity crisis among the Native Americans. The Native Americans’ attachment to their homeland and oral tradition are essential components of tribal identity for them. For the Native Americans, the original location of their tribes is the center of the universe and is considered a sacred place. According to the Native American perspective, memory of their land is important. Tribal history is built upon the stories told about the land. Hence the Native American Removal in the 1830s paved the way for the emergence of an identity crisis in the twentieth century.The government passed the Native American Removal Act in 1830 under the administration of Andrew Jackson. The act authorized the removal of Native American tribes to a large, unorganized, “permanent” Native American territory west of the Mississippi River. The popular phase of the removal is the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears during the winter of 1838-39. Even though this movement guaranteed a great territorial acquisition for the White Americans, it bruised the mind and soul of every Native American and ingrained a subconscious sense of loss regarding their culture, traditions and spiritual power. A tribe can only reach the peak of its spiritual potential if they are located on the land that their people originated from, and thus the farther they move from their center or indigenous location, the more their spirituality fades. As a result, Native American mortality rates increase. In addition, another important constituent of Native American culture and Native American identity formation is the oral tradition. …show more content…
It is considered important that people live in harmony with both the physical and spiritual universe; this may be achieved through the power of thought and of words. When an individual speaks words they are communicating with the physical world and when one is in thought they are in conversation their inner spiritual self or a spiritual being. However, there are times when one can speak words to communicate with the spiritual world such as during spiritual ritual songs. For tribes, their oral literature reflects the survival of their culture and spirituality because it enables a generation’s ability to pass on cultural and spiritual traditions from one generation to another, as words are used to communicate historical stories, autobiographies, rituals and heroic stories. This places them in the world because it gives a particular Native Tribe the ability to express their history or proof of existence, but these words are better off spoken in their tribal language. The tribal language further allows a particular Native American tribe to preserve their culture. Hence, the US government not only removed the Native Americans from their homeland, but also took the natives away from each other as well. After the federal government realized that reservations isolated the Native Americans instead of resolving the tense relationship between the Native Americans and the government, Congress decided that the best resolution for the problem would be for the Native Americans to completely assimilate into White culture. In order to make this assimilation possible, federal boarding schools were established outside the reservations, and were far from the reservations. A phrase that encapsulates this federal policy was expressed by “the Father of the US Boarding School Movement,” Richard Henry Pratt, in 1890, and goes as follows: “Kill the Native American and save the man,” meaning destroy the identity of the Native Americans and then build them into the dominant White society. To achieve this goal, federal boarding schools deprived children of the ability