Difference between revisions of "426--Week 11 Questions/Comments--Tuesday"
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I feel like Riley romanticizes Native American culture. She keeps making these sweeping, positive generalizations about aspects of Native American culture. Like on the bottom of page 53 she says "Ojibway women and men worked at different duties, yet extended mutual respect to each other and their work." Isn't that a pretty big claim? Another example is on page 18, "Despite the grace and civility of Native American methods of identifying mates..." I would not characterize their courtship methods that way. It seems like too much of a value judgment, which I believe is not super useful in a historical analysis, since value judgments are so much a product of one's own perspective. -- Rebecca | I feel like Riley romanticizes Native American culture. She keeps making these sweeping, positive generalizations about aspects of Native American culture. Like on the bottom of page 53 she says "Ojibway women and men worked at different duties, yet extended mutual respect to each other and their work." Isn't that a pretty big claim? Another example is on page 18, "Despite the grace and civility of Native American methods of identifying mates..." I would not characterize their courtship methods that way. It seems like too much of a value judgment, which I believe is not super useful in a historical analysis, since value judgments are so much a product of one's own perspective. -- Rebecca | ||
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| + | Going off of Celia's comment, as historians we tend to like when things fit into neat little boxes and unfortunately, this book and the Johnson article just elaborates on how impossible that is. The American West is such a broad topic to cover that no two families were truly alike. The American West in the nineteenth century especially since it was such a transitional time for some white families traveling out west and since they were now interacting with Native American families who had a completely different lifestyle in general. Unfortunately for historians, there was no "typical nineteenth century family" and I feel like we keep coming back to this point each week, just more and more disappointed about how true it is. -Kelly W. | ||
== Pictures == | == Pictures == | ||
