Complete removal of a culture is sickening. Many Native tribes in America aren't even known, they have been forgotten because no one knows their language, or they have been killed off. Wooden Leg, a Cheyenne Native, believes that someone's culture shouldn't be removed completely, but they can change and adopt new ways of life. Act of Sadness, describes this view.
Wooden Leg starts us off with an old Indian teaching, "that it's wrong to tear loose from its place on the earth anything that may be growing there." The Native Americans had a spiritual connection to nature. They did not believe in completely removing something in nature "It may be cut off, but it should not be uprooted." Natives believed that removing grass and trees should be done in sadness and will pray for forgiveness "because of his necessities."
Wooden Leg is not only using the removal of trees and grass to show the readers or white people that, that goes against their beliefs. He uses that as a metaphor for his own life. Wooden Leg was a pastor, trying to combine the whites and Indians together, to live peacefully with one another. Wooden Leg has also been pictured wearing a suit, a hat and holding a gun, which are items that the Natives wouldn't typically wear. While he believes that trees should not be uprooted, he feels the same way about his own culture. He's still a Native at heart but has adapted white culture.
The removal of cultures is sickening, but it doesn't have to be that way. If the dead Native tribes learned to adapt white culture they wouldn't be alive. However that wouldn't necessarily mean their culture might survive, they would still need people speaking the language. It seems as though that's the only way to live in America, to adopt white culture.
No comments:
Post a Comment