Th Portrayal of Native American in Today's Mainstream Society

Society has portrayed an incorrect image of the history and lives of the Native Americans. History textbooks have given Christopher Columbus credit for Discovering America yet; they don’t claim that the Native Americans were already here. History textbooks have also made us ethnocentric by giving credit to the Europeans for having established a civilization, recalling that the Natives were savages. Native Americans were civilized in a different way. They were so civilized that they maintained their own government and established their own way of life. After having thousands of years of a peace (excluding the wars they had between themselves), European settlers came over to take their land, their culture and tradition, claiming that the natives needed to civilize themselves. The Europeans established a frontier which separated them from the Indians. They executed treaties with the Indians promising not to touch their sacred land, yet, every single treaty ever made with the Indians was broken. Today many historians agree with the Europeans. Frederick Jackson Turner, the writer of the article “The Significance of The Frontier in American History”, argues that as a result of the frontier that the Europeans established with the Indians, American is what it is today. Similarly, movie makers and the people that give sport teams their names support Turners argument.   In contrast, Plenty coups, the Native American chief of the mountain crow, disagree with the settlers taking the land from his people. The representations of Native Americans in popular culture pushed them away from mainstream society.
The history of the Native Americans and the Europeans has established today’s American culture. James W. Loewen, the writer of Lies My Teacher Told Me, explains that the synthesis of Native American Culture and European culture established a new America. Loewen state; “Just as the American societies changed when they encountered whites, so Europeans societies changed when...