Reading 2

“The ‘Tempest’ in the Wilderness” Summary

1. Indians, “such people” of this “brave new world,” personified the Devil and everthing the Puritans feared – the body, sexuality, laziness, sin and the loss of self-control. They had no place in a “new England.”
2. Ronald Takaki is arguing that the Native Americans had no chance to establish peace with the new European Americans. He also argues that the European settlers purposely did not want to establish peaceful relations with the Native Americans that way they could have all of the American land to themselves. They also thought that the worst possible thing that could happen was for the European settlers to fall into the Native’s way of looking at the earth. Takaki mentions on page forty and forty-one, “They represented what English men and women in America thought they were not – and more important, what they must not become. As exiles living in the wilderness far from ‘civilization,’ the English used their negative images of Indians to delineate the moral requirements they had set up for themselves.” Due to this Takaki feels that the Europeans Americans felt that they must eliminate the Native Americans from the Americas so they could have the land to themselves. He says on page forty-eight that Jefferson’s main focus was expansion and not the survival of the Native Americans. He quoted Jefferson later in his article when Jefferson said, “These will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be abliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains.”
3. It is often said that if the Native Americans would have adopted Christianity than the European settlers would have included them in their society. But why would the Native Americans have wanted to do that? They lived together in a very peaceful atmosphere, where the European invaders instantly killed or destroyed Native American property if they didn’t get exactly what they wanted. Why would they want to live in that kind of society, since when they offered food and help to the European Americans during the winter, the Americans tried to steal more from them and would burn down their villages? The Native Americans lived relatively peaceful together so when met by this violence, it is very clear why the Native Americans did not want to change to that kind of lifestyle. When the Europeans landed in America it was inevitable with the two drastically different lifestyles of the Europeans and the Native Americans that they would not be able to live together without violence. His conclusion that the Native Americans were brutally forced out of their lands by the Europeans is correct, but as I just stated I don’t think it could have ended any differently than it did.
4. This article was very similar to the other article that we just read. Many people see Thomas Jefferson as one of our nation’s heroes. But similarly to Columbus, he did many inexplicable things to the Native Americans. We aren’t told this in our history classes. It is truly sad that the Native Americans greeted the Europeans peacefully and the response from the settlers was the exact opposite. But greed won out in the end. The greed for America and to be the capitol of the world triggered these inhumane actions toward the Native Americans. Interestingly, I don’t think the Native Americans had much greed toward the Europeans. But that’s how the history of the world has progressed. Native Americans were just a few of the many cultures that were unjustly persecuted. Finally, I think Takaki did a neat thing by including Shakespeare’s play to further state what the English thought of the Native Americans.