Will Taylor

AP Language

Cooper 4th

5/21/19

Junior Year Essay

Creating my portfolio for my junior year, I have had to organize my entries around one

essential question. How well did the European countries and citizens of the United States

preserve the unique cultures of Native Tribes in the Americas and how or how did they not

involve Native Americans in the development of their respective countries? Throughout the

year, I addressed this question many times in the form of many different projects and

assignments. The first of these were the various summer assignments that I had to complete

analyzing both Howard Zinn’s essay “Columbus, The Indians and Human Progress” and

Sepulveda vs. De Las Casas. In his essay, Zinn dedicates this section to talking about how

Columbus and other early Europeans reacted to the Native Americans of the caribbean islands

and the North American mainland. “Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine

servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we

want.”(para. 2) This excerpt in Zinn’s article taken directly from Columbus’s log shows how

immediately after encountering the native peoples of America and upon seeing how much less

technologically advanced their societies were compared to European society that he began to

think about enslaving such an “inferior” race. This was continued in the debate between

Sepulveda and De Las Casas, were Sepulveda, siding with Columbus’s beliefs, thought that the

Natives were good for nothing more than being servants, where De Las Casas was able to see

that there was more to native society that so many couldn’t realize. As stated in an article

published by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, “Sepulveda rationalized Spanish

treatment of American Indians by arguing that Indians were "natural slaves" and that Spanish

presence in the New World would benefit them.”(para. 4) To which De Las Casas responded
that, “All the world is human!” and no one should be enslaved by others just because they are

viewed as inferior. However, this was not an idea shared by many and this event was an

exception to the Spanish beliefs about Native Americans. I learned of this while exploring the

Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico while on our academy trip in late april. As explained by our tour

guide, the Acoma people were living in peace when a group of Spanish conquistadors came

upon them. Discovering this independent and unique society, the Spaniards decided that

instead of preserving their culture and coexisting with the Acoma people that conversion and

forced submission was a better alternative. After several armed conflicts that inflicted casualties

on both sides, the Spaniards forced the Acoma men to build a church in the name of god,

making them carry the wood needed for the building rom mountains miles away without any

support from horses or any other mode of transport at the time other than just walking.

However, as I had already learned from previous projects earlier in the year, it wasn’t just the

Spanish who treated the natives this way.

In AP U.S. History in the second six weeks I worked on a project that evaluated various

important historical events and writings of the Revolutionary War. Now, after reflecting on that

project, I couldn’t help but realize how throughout that entire conflict Native Americans had no

place in it whatsoever. Throughout the creation of America, there was little regard for the

preservation of Native culture and there was great neglect for the Native American peoples and

the ties that they had to their lands. During the third six weeks in APUSH, I worked with my

friend Carter to evaluate the infamous event known as the Trail of Tears in depth for our

lightside/darkside project. What I discovered was that the American government, in order to

secure much of the southeastern portion of the continent, forcefully removed multiple Native

American tribes, specifically the Cherokee, and marched them hundreds of miles across the

American west to Indian reservations created in Oklahoma. This event, which many still feel

guilty for today, represented how little the United States cared about what happened to the

people that they had essentially come in and kicked out of lands they had occupied for
generations, not looking at how much pain and sorrow they were causing but how much land

they gained and how quickly they could advance their own agenda of Manifest Destiny. These

trends would be carried on up through the 19th century, and would eventually lead to major

issues within Native American reservations that the United States rarely recognized, let alone

tried to fix.

One of these major issues was the problems with alcoholism among Native American

men. During the fourth six weeks in AP Lang I worked with two other group members to

evaluate this issue in depth for our IBL assignment. Upon completion of our research, we had

found that poor living conditions, low emphasis on education and little help from the United

States were all major factors in contributing to Native American alcoholism. In addition to this,

we found reports and evidence to show that exposure to settlers and soldiers, both of whom

drank and made drinking a part of daily life, may have influenced the beginnings of alcohol

becoming such a factor in Native American lifestyle. All of these factors just further prove how

poorly the natives were and still are treated, and how introduction of alcohol into their culture is

the fault of Americans settling on land that was not theirs and promoting cultural assimilation

through the adoption of alcohol into native society.

Throughout my junior year, beginning with research for my summer assignments and

ending with my experiences in New Mexico, I have been able to understand and see firsthand

how negatively European influence has corrupted Native Culture and ways of living, and I

understand now that America especially has done a poor job at keeping Native American

culture alive and prosperous, and only in recent years have we begun to recognize our mistakes

and start to try to right the wrongs of the past, even though what had happened happened and

can never be changed.

 Works Cited

1.Zinn, Howard, History Is a Weapon, Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress,

2. Casas, Bartolomé de Las, Bartolomé De Las Casas Debates the Subjugation of the

Indians, 1550, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

 3.https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yRIOrCNou4zzOtugIFmErbOPrmz6aqFqIo9Lf

h5ri6s/edit?usp=sharing