Mark Schauer

Native Genocide and American Imperialism in Simon Ortiz's poem From Sand Creek Mark Schauer

Essay from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: A, Northern Arizona University, course: Native American Literature, language: English, abstract: The late cultural critic Neil Postman spoke frequently about the tendency of technology to become mythic, or accepted without question as something that always existed in the natural world. The same can be said of territorial boundaries, a manmade construct that had no relevance for the Cheyenne and Arapaho people of the foothills and high plains of east of the Rocky Mountains in the mid-19th century. By the latter 20th century, however, the more than two million residents of the state of Colorado who lived amidst the arbitrary demarcation lines of a state without natural boundaries felt a strong enough affinity for and identity with their place in the world to honor, grieve and demand action over the "XXXX number of Coloradoans... killed in Vietnam," or, "...on the highways." (Ortiz 15) Little more than one hundred years earlier, however, several indigenous tribes had thriving and venerable societies that were destroyed by American troops, and like most non-native residents of the United States, the typical Coloradoan had no concern for this fact. "Repression works like shadow, clouding memory and sometimes even to blind, and when it is on a national scale, it is just not good."