To reveal the main ideas and facts, the paper presented Native Americans in the United States today, particularly social, economic, and political situation of the Indians as indigenous inhabitants of the American continent, representatives of one of the races living on the territory of the modern United States of America. The paper focuses on the Native Americans influence on American culture, and how its traditions and values helped shape the development of a multicultural society. Still, as it was predicted, this influence was better analyzed through the prism of mutual influence, Native Americans’ influence on the rest part of the American society and vice versa. This is due to different sizes and effectiveness of mentioned influences, because western Americans or European origin Americans’ cultural particularities are something other cultures strive towards. However, Native Americans’ influence does exist, has its volume and historical weight.
Here is a piece of interesting information to proceed. Native make up 0.9 % of the American population. According to the U.S. Census, in 2010, their number reached 2.9 million people, which is 18 % more than during the previous census in 2000. Mass media stated gambling to be the main source of Native Americans’ income. The second important way to replenish generate income by activity is cigarette manufacturing. In addition, American Indians are engaged in livestock, crop production, art crafts, and commerce. The federal government subsidizes the Indians and provides them with significant tax benefits.
Despite government subsidies, the special status of Native Americans and the efforts of civil society organizations and the leaders of a number of tribes to improve the lives of Indians, social problems on Indian reservations are bigger than in American society as a whole. Alcoholism, unemployment, ignorance, disease, poverty are widespread in reservations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is a governmental organization in contact with the Indian tribes. Indian tribes are maintaining a dialogue with the independent reserves by U.S. authorities concerning their urgent problems; fight against domestic social problems, return once selected by government land, the development of new business areas.
Pre-Colonization Period
It is assumed that before the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, from 6 to 60 million Indians lived on the continent, with 1 to 8 million living in North America. American Indians spoke 550 languages. By the end of the XV century, there were 2200 Indian tribes and people in both Americas.
American scientists consider the careful attitude of pre-colonized Indians to nature, to which environmentalists appeal, to be a myth. This myth exists today and has existed on the eve of colonization. In the beginning of the XXI century, scientists from Baylor University, the Smithsonian Institute and Temple University showed that, in XI-XVII centuries, Indians intensively cut down forests and led other economic activities, leading to soil erosion and the silting, growth in the number of floods, change in migration routes of the local fauna.
Colonization Period
According to the adopted on May 28, 1830 "Indian Removal Act", Native Americans were ordered to leave the United States territories and move to the other side of the Mississippi River (The Library of Congress). The same year, from south-east of the country, representatives of five tribes - the Cherokee Indians , Cree, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole went to Oklahoma ("Five pacified") ceased to resist. This movement was full of hardship and became known as the "March of Tears" or "roads of tears".
Indians migrated to the land guaranteed to them by the federal government, but after a few years, white began to invade these territories, securing a military confrontation with the Indian tribes for 40 years. The number of Native Americans by the end of XIX century gradually declined to 200 thousand people. By the end of the XIX century the Indians were settled on the reservation.
Current Situation
First Indian reservations in the United States emerged after the Civil War of 1861-1865, when white settlers began to populate the western part of the country. According to the U.S. federal sources, separate places of Indians’ residence had become a kind of intermediate stage in the process of integration into the new Indian civilization. Some experts, however, see an attempt of the complete destruction of the Indians in the idea of reservations, both in the physical content, and at the level of national consciousness. Indians themselves do not like the word "reservation", preferring the term education in the sense of state education. Actually, reservation is not a kind of concentration camp. Any Indian can leave it when he or she wants to move to a new place. Moreover, any Indian can become a full citizen of the United States with all the rights and responsibilities.
Reservations were established initially on marginal lands; in the early years, there was the problem of overpopulation. Many Indians, because of the extreme poverty, were subsequently forced to sell a significant part of the land at a very low price. Tribal politics was also criticized. Some tribes were scattered and fragmented, while others were settled adjacent within one reservation. There was a problem of language barrier, Indians did not know each others’ dialects; they were more likely to communicate in English, gradually losing their linguistic culture.
Reservations were directly subordinate to the federal authorities. Just as the American state, a reservation had no right to declare war, to independently enter into official relations with other states, or to have their own currency. However, the residents of the tribe may have a nationality. Reservations were headed with own government, internal police controlled the society’s functioning, issued its own laws. Own administrative bodies gave licenses for various activities in the territory of reservations. Inhabitants of reservations were a subject to the federal government and its own administrative bodies only. State laws had no effect on the Indian Territory.
In the culture of Native American tribes’, martial art had a special place. Indians accepted and took part in all American wars. Earlier, one of the reasons for the popularity of military service among the Indians was a chance to get the U.S. citizenship. During the Second World War, 25 thousand Indians fought on the side of the United States. Navajo soldiers played a special role in the World War II Japanese campaign. The 3600 Navajo military served in all divisions of American translators-cryptographers troops, as the cipher used a little-known Navajo language, which Japanese scouts could not understand. The idea of using less common languages emerged during the First World War, in which signalers-Indians also provided invaluable services to the U.S. Army.
Indian woman, Lori Ann Piestewa, living from 1979 till 2003, was the first U.S. Army soldier who died in Iraq. Piestewa was born in the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. Serving in Iraq as a private, she was killed by battle wounds together with nine other soldiers. Her father is a Vietnam War veteran, grandfather was a veteran of World War II. She was a single mother of two children. Squaw Peak and Squaw highway were renamed in her honor, now they are called Piestewa peak and highway [21]. According to the FAA in 2003, 56 Hopi Indians served in the U.S. Army, 48 of them being in Iraq.
For a long time, the Indians were not considered as citizens of the United States. Their special legal status was the reason. Indians living in the U.S. could only obtain the American citizenship in case of military service, marriage to a U.S. citizen, and the transfer of allotments on the reservation in the property of non-indigenous administrative unit. Indian Citizenship Act was finally passed in 1924.
In June 1934, Indian Reorganization Act, IRA, also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act, was introduced. It was designed to develop each of the tribes’ own administrative resource management apparatus and the constitution. The new law abolished the ban on traditional Indian beliefs’ confession. The Indians were able to use the services of the Revolving Credit Facility. Territory reserves increased many times due to emerging funds to purchase land, and curbed the practice of transfer of tribal lands to private ownership. To this day, this law remains the basis of the legislation of Indian Affairs (Encyclopedia Britannica).
In 1949, the Indians were granted the right to make land claims to the government. On August 1, 1953, Congress adopted Resolution number 108, which repealed the control of reservations administrations and removed the limitation of their powers. At the same time, however, subsidy programs were suspended. Termination of guardian and ward between the federal government and tribes was called Indian termination. However, the Indian population was not adapted to market conditions, and the process had to slow down.
In 1989, the U.S. Congress decided to establish the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). As reported in The Washington Post, one of the goals of the project was the destruction of the stereotype of who the typical Indian is. NMAI is included in the famous complex of the Smithsonian museums, including the Museum of Natural History and Space Museum (Smithsonian Institution). At the opening, collection of the museum consisted of 8000 subjects. The building was designed by Douglas Cardinal, the architect of Indian origin from Canada. Construction cost was $220 million; half of that amount has been collected by private donations.
Indian rarities and historically significant objects are on demand. Indian languages are of particular interest for the scientists. In the XIX century, Americans have accumulated extensive linguistic material. Analyzing it, they found that the structure of the Indian languages is fundamentally different from usual designs and is based on the difference of the key cultural concepts. The famous American linguist, an expert on American Indian languages, Benjamin Whorf, cited the language of the Hopi Indians: “We have time ... in the language and culture largely arranged by type of space, we consider the time either linear or otherwise, but it's still kind of spatial figure. We are members of time pieces into pieces, we can use the word "day ", " hour ", " instant". Hopi have no nouns denoting time, some bricks are not obtained. There is a separate part of speech, completely separate, which serves only to express time. And they have the world works differently. They have a herald who announces an event, and that since the announcement of the event begins, although in reality it might not even start. The event itself is also not a brick, but is stretched in time”.
From here the Whorf’s idea, so-called linguistic relativity, appeared as the idea of a decisive influence on the thinking of human language, and today this phenomenon is studied as a problem at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and culture.
In the 1960s, Indian culture began to come into vogue, including items of clothing, music, and dancing. This interest has spawned dozens of commercial projects. For example, on certain days, tourists come to the reservations for contemplation dances or other rituals. Business with Indian motives may be more costly. Thus, participation in certain programs in the "Spiritual Warrior" of James Ray is worth $ 9-10 thousands.
The attitude of the Indians to promotion of their world is usually cautious. They do not like copying Indian dance and clothing, mainly because when reproducing the form, people usually do not think about the sense of movement and patterns (Indian designs usually do not have the aesthetic function, they always carry a heavy meaning).
What form the Indian culture should be preserved in is a relevant question. Russell Means, speaking in an interview about its future, expressed doubt that it must be completely reduced to the format of "fire - wigwam - dances"; “We proceed from the reality. We mean the exercise of all options when we talk about the return of culture. We do not want Americanization. But we are not reactionaries or call anyone back to the Stone Age, in isolation or in the ethnological museum in rituals which involve money. This is a special kind of spiritual prostitution, which involves Indians hard. It is believed that the way we maintain our identity when we dance our sacred dances to the public”.
Powwow is an Indian culture festival, usually focused on dancing. Initially, the powwow meant voodoo ritual healing Indians. Later, the word has expanded to become known as ritual dances of all Indians mass performing. Powwow plays an important role in preserving national identity. Sometimes, ritual dance were performed especially for tourists in reservations and became one of the sources of income. Largest powwow is considered a great national festival of Indian culture in Washington, established by NMAI. The first gathering was dedicated to the opening of the museum, and has been held annually in Washington since, with the participation of Indians from different countries, who perform traditional dances and melodies. There are competitions for the best dancer or musician during the festival.
In recent decades, Westernized adaptation of exotic Indian teachings, spiritual practices became fashionable. The most famous popularizer of Indian shamanism or "magic" is Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda’s magic series began to be published in 1960, and were translated into 17 languages. Teachings of Don Juan have followers all over the world. Shortly before his death, Castaneda founded center "Tensegrity", in which his practices acquired the character of the commercial practices of learning.
The most controversial of those who tried to get rich on the Indian theme is James Arthur Ray, the author of a number of so-called systems of personal growth using Native American rituals. "Spiritual Warrior" – is one of these programs, including post and brief meditation on nature. Its purpose is to win over the people’s "four enemies": fear, clarity of thought, strength, and weakness. The latter is borrowed directly from the books of Carlos Castaneda. Three of the participants of the program, Kirby Brown, James Shore, and, later, Liz Neuman, died because of this procedure to get "out of body experience" in "sweatshops hut ", 19 more people were hospitalized.
In burlesque satirical “South Park” TV series, which represents the most topical issues of contemporary American society, Indian theme with casino (Red Man's Greed), fascination with pseudo-rituals was announced in several episodes.
The indigenous population of the U.S. is a collection of dozens of people, differing in their historical and cultural traditions, lifestyle, degree of acculturation, and other Euro-Americans conditions defining the modern development of their cultures. Most of the people of the Atlantic coast retained very little or even nothing at all saved from Indian traditions in the field of material and spiritual culture. They almost completely switched to English. The predominant part of the same Indian people has sufficiently expressed ethno-cultural characteristics that distinguish them from the U.S. population.
Cultural heterogeneity of the indigenous population of the USA is usually found inside Indian ethnic groups, which is a direct consequence of their fragmentation and uneven progress in their social development. At first glance, these facts are explained by the peculiarities of acculturation of different social and ethnic groups of the Indian population, i.e., the direct impact of Euro-American culture on aboriginal culture. However, at the heart of these features are the processes of socio-economic development, affecting the life, social practice and social consciousness of Native American,s and conditional nature of the interaction of Indian and Euro-American cultural traditions. The more changes in economic activity and industrial relations, in other words, the closer the socio-economic structure of Indian Society of American society is, the greater the change in culture is, and the closer it is to the culture of the white population.
It also turns out that the material culture of Native Americans transformed generally faster than the spiritual. This is understandable, because the material culture is directly related to the economy, welfare, the level of consumption of goods and services, and spiritual culture, reflecting the material conditions of life indirectly. It depends on many factors shaping the public consciousness. The relative conservatism of consciousness and the revival of cultural traditions based on the growth of ethnic consciousness of Indians, and a set of socio-psychological characteristics of Indian adaptation to the world play a significant role as well.
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