Cosmopolitanism or Nationalism:
Which Drives the Ironic Americanization of Native Americans?
Lisa-Anna Migliore
Picture from nyackindians.com
Note: Please do not quote or cite without informing the author- [email protected]
In Kwame Appiah’s piece, “The Case for Contamination”, he highlights what many regard as the “contamination” of indigenous cultures by globalizing influences. Appiah argues that this globalized “contamination” is inevitable in our modern times, and that these hybrid cultures are progressively creating an amalgamated sense of cosmopolitanism. In his opinion, cosmopolitanism conditions that people are bound together in a global village that celebrates difference. Though he suggests that “global citizens” live harmoniously with one another, he failed to mention the aggressive means by which this apparent intimacy came to be. During the 1800s, Anglo-Saxon hegemony aimed to renovate Native American culture to an archetypical European-American culture (Landis). Although Appiah strongly supports that all ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality, American nationalism in the past and present hardly treats Native Americans as global citizens.
After the Civil War, Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania assimilated Native Americans into the idyllic, dominant culture. They were removed from tribal influences in order to “kill the Indian, [and] save the man” through education (Landis). Responding to those who urge the importance of preserving cultures from homogenizing teratogens, Appiah states, “Are we to stop the importation of baseball caps into Vietnam so that the Zao will continue to wear their colorful red headdresses? Why not ask the Zao? Shouldn't the choice be theirs?” (Appiah). However, the Native children enrolled in boarding schools across the nation were not asked in this manner if they wanted to become Westernized; they weren’t asked at all. Within these boarding schools Native Americans were forced to cut their hair, give up their birth names for more Anglo-Saxon versions, and were banned from speaking their native tongues.
If the United States’ government had been permitted to continue Americanizing Native youth, the indigenous dialects and traditions of said youth would have ultimately perished. Native Americans are now free to speak in their own languages, but instead of being silenced by boarding schools, they are by mainstream television. According to the website, Cultural Survival, “Younger Indians are less likely to speak their tribal language because the schools they attend, the music they listen to, and the television they watch are in English. Tribal languages are considered "old fashioned’, ‘out of date’, and ‘not cool’ to children raised on television”. Cultural preservationists argue that, "[Minorities] have no real choice” (Appiah). Minorities like Native Americans, which are marginalized and treated as subhuman, are subsequently unable to contribute to a global village unless they give in to the dominant hegemony.
Though these events are historical, they serve as the foundation to a modern world that is currently anything but cosmopolitan. At one extreme, early nationalism that pressured a Native American to be more of a proper “American”, has directly resulted in a loss of ethos, with seven of the remaining 154 languages only being spoken by one person (Coos, Eyak, Kalapuya, Coast Miwok, Plains Miwok, Northeastern Pomo, and Serrano) (Landis). Appiah argues that the fear of cultural preservationists is misguided: “Cosmopolitans take cultural difference seriously, because they take the choices individual people make seriously. But because cultural difference is not the only thing that concerns them, they suspect that many of globalization's cultural critics are aiming at the wrong targets” (Appiah). While there are convergences and divergences within cultures that take place in media especially now that it transcends boarders, there are still powerful global influences that are not creating the utopia Appiah had in mind, but a dystopia that constrains minority cultures to abide to the whims and customs of dominant ones.
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Works Cited
APPIAH, KWAME ANTHONY. "The Case for Contamination." The New York Times (2006).
Landis, Barbara. Carlisle Indian Industrial School History. 1996. <http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html>.
Survival, Cultural. Cultural Survival vs. Forced Assimilation: the renewed war on diversity. 2001. November 2011 <http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/cultural-survival-vs-forced-assimilation-renewed-war-diversity>.
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