Blog #5

After reading “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” and “Indian Names” I realized that a major theme in both stories is how the white people took over a land that already belonged to another race. In Apess story he writes a lot about how the Indians were forced to retreat from the land that their families had lived on for many years and how now the red skins are forced to live without food or shelter. “…With the females who are left alone, children half-starved and some almost as naked as they came into the world… while the female are left without protection, and are seduced by white men, and are finally left to be common prostitutes for them and to be destroyed by that burning, fiery curse… rum”.  He also calls out the white race on how they destroyed a race and ask if the Indians ever did what the white people did to the red skins. “Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of their whole continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature and God require them to have? And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds welter out their days under the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun?” Apess describes how the white race has taken something that is not theirs to take. He tells the story of how the Indians have been robbed of their God given rights and that the white race has left the Indian civilization with nothing, making their survival almost impossible

 In “Indian Names” Sigourney describes where and how the Indians had an influence on the country before the white people ever arrived.  She rights “their name is on your waters” and “your mountains build their monument”. She also gives the names of states that still hold the influence and names of the Indians. She then goes further to say “though ye destroy their dust” to describe how the whites have tried to destroy the race of the Indians and erase their cultural remains that still are part of the land that they lived in. But she writes “Wachuset hides its lingering voice within his rocky heart, And Alleghany graves its tone throughout his lofty chart; Monadnock on his forehead hoar doth seal the scared trust” to allows readers to see that the Indians are in the American landscape forever and that their race will not be forgotten because we will be reminded of it in our rivers, lakes, valleys and mountainsides.