American Studies Environment and Native Term Paper

With the advent of Colombo on the American soil, things began to change as Philip J. Deloria asserts in her book Playing Indian (1999): "[T]he self-defining pairing of American truth with American freedom rests on the ability to wield power against Indians... while simultaneously drawing power from them." This is also the basic idea of Shari M. Huhndorf's Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. "As white Americans became disenchanted with how American society was developing, they began to reference Indian people and culture as an answer to such problems of a modernizing America as capitalistic greed; alienating, sedentary life-style of the office worker; imperialistic aggressiveness; and racial and gender challenges to white male hegemony" (Barak, 2005).

The Indians progress was challenged by the so-called American School of ethnology. Therein Christianity became a tool in the American colonial project. The development of an ideology based in religion was made the reason to carry out genocide against the Native Americans. Judeo-Christian tradition was set off by a group people who denied the unity and preached the multiplicity of races. These men rejected the monogenesis of old Judeo-Christian tradition and chose polygenesis, which implies separate creation of the races. Most of the recorded evidence was provided by Samuel G. Morton. In his book Crania Americana, published in Philadelphia in 1839, he wrote disparagingly about Indian capabilities.Environment at large has been subject to small-scale destruction throughout history and people have always considered it as infinitely durable and usable the largest part of environmental problems has its origin in the economy developing over four centuries of American existence. This period was characetrized by the growth of industries which resulted in emissions that had a negative bearing on the environment. These developments apply pressure on the earth's resources, the processes of production, use, and disposition of things Post Columbian Americans required for their reproduction and expansion. The indirect effects on the environment were taken for granted as environment was considered elastic. However harking back to the early twentieth century, the efforts of Aldo Leopold towards the conservation of environment Wisconsin River were immense, to this date he is regarded as a great environmentalist, amidst mounting industrialization and technology leaving by-products of pollution and exhaustion of natural resources. Doling out with conservative backlash from the white Americans, American Indians have stood by with grace to work for the preservation and purgation of environment. To quote a prominent example, Rachel Carson best known for her book "Silent Spring," was a preacher to all the coming environmentalists around the world. The resource conservation movement offset by American Indians was.....