GFerro - T5 The Colonization of North America

ANALISYS OF T5 made in class:

The 2^nd document is an extract from “Bury My Heart of Wounded Knee” written by Dee Brown. It deals with the colonization of America. The introductory title is worth being analyzed since it conveys a different point of view about the reason why English people, that considered themselves Puritans and persecuted, moved to North America.

Suffice it to say that the extract is part of a text published in 1971 that is much later in time than actual experience. Speaking about “An Indian History of the American West” implies taking into consideration a different history angle from what was generally accepted. Indian history implies that knew events and facts are told by descendants of native Indian people, the ones that  were living in North America when the Separatists first and the Pilgrims later settled in their lands. The text is indeed a research report and therefore valid to be considered, since it takes into consideration a multiplicity of points of view.

The text starts making it loud and clear that the survival of the Pilgrims that arrived in America by the Mayflower was mainly due to the welcoming attitude of the Natives.

The text also provides the reader with information about a kind of support provided by the Indians. They, not only, helped the English to survive after a dangerous voyage, they also gave them different kind of advices to grow agricultural product for their autonomous survival, how to catch fish, gave them “some seeds corn and showed them how to plant and cultivate it”. The function of the first sequence is therefore a clear denial of all that said in Bradford’s “History of Plymouth Plantation” (1650 - 1651).

More than three centuries were necessary for Indians’ voice through their descendants could be heard.

The second sequence informs the reader that after a first period of calm and peaceful coexistence and life on the lands of North America, a second period followed during which a larger and larger number of colonists arrived in America and called for materials and land to be grew to  them. There is also record that, according to which in 1625 Samoset through a ritual and ceremony that belonged to their civilization transferred part of their land to the white new comers. Such research enroots the general idea about the Pilgrims voyage since it implies that they were more immigrants looking for a better life than the possibility to simply profess their Puritan religion.

In the last paragraph the narrator informs the reader that by 1662, date of Massasoit’s death (Massassoit was a great Wampanoags’chief), the Native Americans will be forced to go back in the wilderness, since the colonist were settling in a growing part of the American territory.