NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN

Native American Indian

Native American Indian

"Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class" by Joseph F. Healey clearly describes the historical life of Native American Indians. In this book the author discusses various elements of class and gender. As Healey indicates that thinking about how we currently use and understand particular terms can help us to see what we take for granted about them. We often expect that everyday terms have clear, consistent meanings. However, the words 'ethnicity' and 'race' are used in many different ways. For example, some people use them interchangeably, without making distinctions between them. Other people use them only to refer to people who are black or Asian or who they consider to have cultures that differ from what they understand to be British or English culture. In recent years, some people have come to prefer to use the term 'ethnicity' because they feel that it sounds more polite than 'race' and is less likely to be controversial. Whatever you wrote down, our understandings of terms affect the representations we have about the people or things to which they refer. These understandings also affect how we see ourselves. It is because of this that the ways in which we perceive 'race' and 'ethnicity' (as well as gender) have been much debated and have changed over time. (Healey, 2008)

The first two chapters analyze the connections between material life and the life of the mind among traditional American Indians, both positing a type of subsistence spirituality as the Indian world view. Christopher Healey "American Indian Environmental Religions" shows that Indian relations with the natural world, although empirical and pragmatic, transcended material considerations while remaining grounded in them. In both criticizing and affirming the image of Indians as cofiservationists, Healey makes the claim that environmental concerns constitute a foremost dimension of American Indian religions, regardless of specific ecosystem.

In the first chapter "Diversity in the U.S. Questions and Concepts" Healey draws conclusions applicable to most traditional Indians. The author clearly describes assumptions, conclusions and recommendations regarding Native American Indians of USA, that they have perceived animals as thinking persons who behave in ways similar to humans and who enter social relations with humans. The point of contact between human and nonhuman persons is the spirituality inherent in each; humans and animals are essentially related because they share the same essence. As a result, hunting and trapping are activities supercharged with symbol and emotion. Both authors ask the reader to keep in mind the Indians' view of the world -a place of powerful, nonhuman persons in order to understand more accurately the Indian role in the fur trade and the effect of environmental change on Indian life ways. These ideas lay the groundwork for the chapters that follow.

Just as nature relations were crucial to understanding precontact Indian material life and history, environmental conflict has been the central feature of Indian-white relations. Other issues over the past five hundred years have been important, of course. However, when we speak of the basic motif ...