Stereotypes

My blood boils when I hear stereotypes. One of the most stereotyped groups in American history is the Native Americans. First of all not all Native Americans wear feathers, hunt bison, or collect scalps. They don't all live on dusty plains or ride horses. Please this is the year 2007, lets try living in the modern world. Certain groups such as the Iroquois a league of 7 different tribes had a complex system of government and social structure with laws, a written language of wampum belts and elevated matriarchs. Some Native American groups were and are lead almost entirely by women such as the Navajo. The first mistake people most often make is that we they refer to Native Americans as if they are one universal group, tribes of Native Americans are as distinct and different as The US is from Papua New Guinea. In California alone their were several hundred tribes with that many different languages.

The "Bad Indian" image of scalps, war bonnets, and kidnapping white women and children is as equally dehumanizing as the "Good Indian" image of a child of nature which is just a romanticized story much like the idea of an Uncle Tom . Simply put, Native Americans are people the same as any other group of ethnicity or race, they are not entirely blameless or savage. To stereotype a people is to deny their humanity. Each time a people or person is denied humanity, we deny and kill their culture, unique, faults, successes and purpose of life. America speaks of Native Americans like a people of the past, a picturesque quantifiable historic record. There are more Native American remains in storage in the Smithsonian than their are living Native American people. How can we explain this away? We name sports teams the Redskins, the Braves, the Indians. We act as though its all in fun and games...yet calling a Native American a Redman or Redskin is the same as throwing out a racial slur. How dare Americans continue injustices of the past by labeling and stereotyping living people. We remember the Japanese internment, we remember the Holocaust, but we choose to forget the Trail of tears.