Our hearts fell to the ground Essay Essays

Our hearts fell to the ground Essay Essays Our hearts fell to the ground Essay Essay Our hearts fell to the ground Essay Essay Colin Calloway has done a consummate occupation of choosing and showing an array of addresss. letters. paperss. and drawings that tell obliging narratives about the Plain Indians in the 1800’s. His debut entirely has merely the right degree of information and links basic subjects and events to the paperss presented in the text. In short. a theoretical account of how an debut should be done. Colin Calloway’s purposes were to concentrate on the humanistic survey of the Plain Indians positions on how the West was lost. It provides us with the existent positions of Indian people who lived through those times of manifestation and assimilation. From the Lewis and Clark expedition to the edifice of railwaies. he attempts to explicate the traumatic alterations of the Native Americans during the 19th century. He opens our eyes from what earlier historiographers whose work seems now outdated. preferring to deliver elements of their work. The narrations are divided into 14 chapters. which supply historical papers and secondary essays puting these paperss within their historical context. Each chapter unfolds 1 OUR HEARTS FELL TO THE GROUND to demo the calamity the Plains Indian had to digest from the white colonists and their greed for land and prosperity. From the slaughter of whole folk. the out interruption of the unobserved slayer. and the forced assimilation through the reserve systems were merely a few accounts for why the Indians Numberss dwindled in the 1800s. It was non until the center of the 20th century that the world of their agony showed up in history books. Any Hagiographas prior merely portrayed the Native American as barbarians and rebellious people. about to a love affair flood tide. Unlike the books in the yesteryear. Calloway used tribal imposts as a agency to attest the existent torture the Plains Indians encountered. The Native Americans were regarded as â€Å"people without history† . when in fact the Indians recorded their history by vocals. dances. narratives. fables. and ocular records on American bison robes known as winter counts. Calloway reveals to the reader the Ways the Native American used the winter counts as a mnemotechnic device passed from one coevals to another marked with pictographs that recorded notable events in tribal life that took topographic point each twelvemonth. It was these imposts that enabled 2 OUR HEARTS FELL TO THE GROUND seniors to chronologically go through on their heritage to guarantee the endurance of their folk. Calloway disclosed through addresss of the Native American that they were by and large peaceable and friendly people who wanted peace and non war with the white adult male. Most addresss contained dissension but credence of the white adult male ways. from the breakage of pacts to the impossible slaughter of their American bison. The American Native hoping to keep their clasp on what small land and civilization remained to them tried to accept the ways of their new neighbours. After reading this book I have a new position about the Native American. Unlike earlier. when I heard the word Indian I thought of them as barbarians of the Wild West for the most portion. I now think of them as intelligent. prideful. and humanist people who merely wanted to be left entirely to populate the life they were accustomed to. Bottom line. if it was non for the white colonists coercing their manner of life onto the Native Americans. they would non of reacted as they did. The colonists left them no pick!