American Literature

American LiteratureThe dispossession of the American Indians has been one of the most worri some(prenominal) episodes in U .S . history . From the beginning , settlement and expanding upon dep closing curtained on it , and up to the present it is an act of violence that Americans be unable to forget . Despite innumerable attempts to re economize the Indian as the subject of family history , the ghost of the Indian as the object of genocidal violence has returned inevitably to haunt the nation and its narratives . As such , it forms the focus of this , which concentrates on the nineteenth light speed . This menses encompasses a moment in American history when attempts to chat a coherent narrative of national identity and to demarcate the status and rights of Indians within the United States intersected to create a form that reveals much about the forces driving both projectsThe nineteenth century marked a period of dramatic upheaval for some American Indian tribes , who , in the wake of America s bang-up expansion westward , found themselves dispossessed of their ancestral lands blue in numbers , and confined to reservations . Fearful that their vocal traditions would evaporate forever as the tribal community became more(prenominal) and more fragmented under the demoralizing conditions of reservation life , some American Indians began to write down the legends and folktales of their tribes , as well as their personal narratives , in an effort to preserve their history and nicety for posterity . Writing became a means not only to perpetuate tradition in the face of cultural lawlessness but also a chance for Native Americans to arrange their side of the story to a wider audience . By the end of the nineteenth century a written literature establish on tribal oral traditions was beginning to emerge that would poke out fruition in the 1960s and 1970s in the whole caboodle of contemporary American IndiansZitkala- ?

a , a Sioux of the Yankton band , is one of the untimely Indian who attempted to make the transition from written to oral form and to bridge the gap among tradition and engrossment . Born in 1876 Zitkala- ?a published most of her crap at the turn of the century Impressions of an Indian Childhood , The schooltime Days of an Indian Girl and An Indian Teacher among Indians - the autobiographical sketches included in American Indian Stories - serve as emblems of the experience of many Indians living in transition between two originations - the remembered past and the alien present , tradition and budge . Impressions of an Indian Childhood is an important work because it represents one of the beginning(a) attempts by a Native American woman to write her own story without the aid of an editor , an interpreter , or an ethnographer . In Impressions of an Indian Childhood , Zitkala- ?a presents carefully and , at times sentimentally , the pain and difficulty of growing up Indian in a white man s world . For Zitkala- ?a , the conflict between tradition and acculturation was to chevy her throughout her life . Born as Gertrude Simmons on the Yankton military reserve in South Dakota in 1876 , she spent...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com

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