by Tre
This assignment asks a great question pertaining to the outlook of our history. Which two factors pose the greatest challenge to a broader public understanding of Native American women’s history? Indigenous women especially are such a minor part of our education became very obvious to me. I believe we can all start off by agreeing that, when it comes down to the two different factors, it becomes real bias by not giving both sides of the story. I feel that it all comes down to who it is that is explaining the situation. Throughout history all we ever see is men telling the story, you rarely if ever see any women telling their own side of the story. Even more traditionally there are usually white me telling the story, and the media and books are usually written by white males as well. The second factor I personally believe posts a greater challenge to a broader public understanding is the fact that the people who study Native American women base their findings on theories and not actual evidence or facts. Our society when it comes to history has always been like this, and it is coming to the forefront to historians now a days. People are starting to finally realize the bias, and more women stories are being put out in history, some changing history as we speak in major ways. A the general stories you where use to hearing are changing drastically because the women and their sides of the story gives another outlook on things.
To speak on the first issue, back to what I said my first factor was, the majority of people who already have a prejudged idea of predominantly the white male, but have also been prejudged by many other races as well. Most of history is written by a white males, politicians and army men. History about Presidents, and history about all the wars are told by the white man. History has a lot more to offer if it was told by multiple cultures because more information would be provided. America holds back a lot of information from society, making people more bias to hearing any other story of history, from what they already have learned. Through these one sided stories we, as a nation have built up the bias that Native Americans are at the bottom of the food chain so to speak. As time goes on, these stories are passed down through generations still being told by the white man.
The second issue posing a challenge to this part of history is the fact that a majority of the studies on indigenous women are based on what people have heard, believed or off of a basic theory. Milhesuah states it best in regards to a group of graduate students by saying, “how these graduates could call themselves Indian Historians if they had not worked with specialists in the field of Indian History” (26). If you think about it, the history that the Indian historians is more than likely being taught the information by people that are not even natives, people that never have even went through and understood the material, just basing things off the theories. For example, that’s just like me as a African American trying to teach another person about the Asian culture or history. Yes, I might have a pretty good understanding about Asian history but most of my research is based off theories that I too had to learn at some point (27). This is how universities are teaching Native study students and these students are then going on to teach the rest of us. It becomes a chain reaction, theories on top of theories. This causes people to start becoming bias to one story, believing they are true when in reality, if a real native American was to come along and actually tell there side of the story, the entire story could possibly change. The native American culture a tough culture to write about because there are not a lot of history books with an actual native American narrating the book. The only way to teach and educate students is getting the inside scoop on things by receiving that insight from an actual Native American woman.
This book was interesting and helped provide me with a lot of information. It goes to show how drastically our society is changing to reach out to other cultures, hearing them out and inputting there information to our history.
Hi Trey,
While I agree with you that the way in which we currently research and study Native populations can be biased and misogynistic due to the Western concept of gender and race, I don’t necessarily agree that you need to be of the same race to tell the historical account of that group of people. In fact, I think we in this country need to start teaching the history of the word race and remove the created concept entirely. As we learned through the story of Ticie, race is a condition of compliance whereas ethnicity is something you carry inherently. If I had been born in China, a white woman, and raised in that culture, I would be 一个中国女人. If I were born in Florida I would be a Floridian. If I were raised Cuban I would be una cubana. Even being a white American born in Idaho I could move to a reservation and acculturate myself and become a Native American. Our genes don’t make us different, our experiences do and have the skin tone white, brown, purple or pink does not define our culture.
I like the argument about theories based off of theories. As historians, our resources are ideally primary sources. However, the “primary sources” that we draw from are first or second hand accounts of a very biased white male dominated culture from colonial expansion to today which make up the base knowledge in the Western style historical field of Native American studies. These “primary sources” express the inferiority believed of a culture they did not understand at the time and these biases have reverberated to todays “understanding” of Native Americans, and especially women.
Overall i have learned alot of important information while doing this assignment. Its good to see the arguments people came up with and it was also even better that we got a certain feedback to our own arguments. If i had to change anything about my paper/argument i would be a bit clearer on the race aspect. I am not bias to any other race becasue I know we are all equal and have equal opportunities. I am in no way prejudice or do I take sides to any type of culture in my paper. As i said in the conversation of my paper i agree that we are all equal, the only thing that changes our views is the actual experiences we have been through. Thanks for a great assignment filled with alot of information and good feedback form my fellowed students.
Interesting discussion in the comments here. I do take issue with your comment, Tre, that “we are all equal and have equal opportunities,” as not everyone does have an equal opportunity to succeed, and too often the opportunities are denied because of race or ethnicity.
In your post, you seem to collapse the general public with graduate students and professional historians. I’m wondering if you might better tease out the differences in experience and approach each of these groups might have.