When I think of Native Americans I
think of tradition. I’m not trying to be harsh toward Native Americans when I
say that the original Native Americans were as close to the most natural form
of human possible. What I mean to say is that they obeyed the laws of nature.
They treated the Earth with care and respect. Although cruel, Europeans
referred to them as savages, and that is kind of what humans should be like; we
are animals. Unlike Native Americans, after conquering the New World Europeans
continued to take the world by storm through innovation. Native Americans did
not have a method of manipulating nature as we do now through technology. As
humans we have developed methods to manipulate the normal human capacity on
Earth. We’ve been able to increase food supply to enormous unnatural amounts
and found solutions to fight off once plague causing diseases. All of these
resources have created a world in which humans are in control and where
innovation is sought. This idea is what lead me to believe that Native
Americans, compared to others, would have a much more traditional view on life.
I believed that they would follow nature’s course of only female and male
genders. However, it seems that I was wrong, and in reality Native Americans
were more innovative and accepting of gender and gender variance than even
modern Americans.
It’s amazing to see how Americans
were able to surpass Native Americans in technology by such large amounts, and
yet something such as gender variance was accepted by Native American culture
much more readily than American culture. Why is that? Could it be that their
ties to nature, really do allow them to realize that nothing is perfect; nature
is not perfect. Nothing is black and white in this world, there are always the
colors in between, or in this case the identities outside of the norm in which
we identify with. There is a whole spectrum of identities in which the majority
of the population resides on either side with no respect for the in between.
No comments:
Post a Comment