Our hearts fell to the ground Essay

Colin Calloway has done a masterful job of selecting and presenting an array of speeches, letters, documents, and drawings that tell stimulate stories about the Plain Indians in the 1800s. His introduction alone has just the right level of information and link up basic themes and events to the documents presented in the text. In short, a model of how an introduction should be done.Colin Calloways intentions were to focus on the humanistic study of the Plain Indians views on how the West was lost. It provides us with the actual perspectives of Indian people who lived by agency of those times of manifestation and assimilation. From the Lewis and Clark expedition to the building of railroads, he attempts to explain the traumatic changes of the Native Americans during the nineteenth century. He opens our eyes from what earlier historians whose work seems now outdated, preferring to rescue elements of their work.The narratives are divided into fourteen chapters, which supply historic document and secondary essays placing these documents within their historical context. Each chapter unfolds 1 OUR HEARTS FELL TO THE GROUND to establish the tragedy the Plains Indian had to endure from the white settlers and their greed for land and prosperity.From the slaughter of whole tribes, the out ramify of the unseen killer, and the forced assimilation through the reservation systems were only a few explanations for why the Indians poetry dwindled in the 1800s. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that the reality of their suffering showed up in annals books. Any writings prior only portrayed the Native American as savages and rebellious people, about to a romance climax. Unlike the books in the past, Calloway used tribal custom as a means to manifest the actual torment the Plains Indians encountered.The Native Americans were regarded as people without history, when in fact the Indians put down their history by songs, dances, stories, legends, and visual records on buffalo robes known as winter counts. Calloway reveals to the reader the ship canal the Native American used the winter counts as a mnemonicdevice passed from one times to another marked with pictographs that recorded noteworthy events in tribal life that took place each year. It was these customs that enabled 2 OUR HEARTS FELL TO THE GROUND elders to chronologically pass on their heritage to ensure the pick of their tribe.Calloway disclosed through speeches of the Native American that they were generally counterinsurgencyful and friendly people who wanted peace and not war with the white man. Most speeches contained disagreement but acceptance of the white man ways, from the pause of treaties to the inconceivable slaughter of their buffalo. The American Native hoping to maintain their hold on what little land and horticulture remained to them tried to accept the ways of their new neighbors.After reading this book I have a new perspective about the Native American. Unlike before, when I heard the word Indian I thought of them as savages of the Wild West for the most part. I now think of them as intelligent, prideful, and clement people who just wanted to be left alone to live the life they were accustomed to. undersurface line, if it was not for the white settlers forcing their way of life onto the Native Americans, they would not of reacted as they did. The settlers left them no natural selection