Indians vs. Modern Society
When you were a little kid you played the game Cowboys vs. Indians and
you always wanted to be the cowboy because he was the smart, handsome and the
hero of the story, but have you ever thought why the American Cowboys were
always fighting with the Indians? And how the Indians felt from this invasion? The
Indians have been living in California for around 15,000 years, away from
civilization. When the white man (Cowboys) arrived to the Indian Territory they
wanted to remove them because they were not white civilized people they gave
them the name savages. To better understand the situation between how the white
men treated the Indians and how the savages felt towards them, I am going to
compare Indian Cartography and The First.
Indian Cartography by Deborah Miranda wrote one of the most vivid image poems of what society used to be in
America. The word Cartography means the practice of drawing geographical maps,
in the beginning of the poem by opening the map to California to locate the
places the Indians used to be “My Father opens a map of California –traces
mountain ranges, rivers, county borders like family bloodlines”(CDR, 72). On The First by Gary Soto, the poem opens in a very similar way “After
the river gloved its fingers with leaves and the autumn sunlight spoked the
earth on two parts, the villagers undid their houses, thatch by thatch” (CDR,
426). These two writers have something in common, they have some Indian origin
and their parents are the latest Indian generation. When they opened the two
poems by identifying the places their ancestors used to live by passing their
fingers thru a map and thru the imagination of how the river gloved its fingers
in the autumn it makes them feel glorious of how much they used to have and how
beautiful it used to look. The tone of the opening in both poems is powerful
and proudly happy. A lot of history in America and especially in California has
been removed through natural and physical ways, these poems unfolds the
landscapes that California used to have, and gives us an idea of how the modern
world has changed California to the present day.
Those beautiful verses on the poems are just the good memories of what
the Indians have left in the world because the white men sweep them away from
their lands. In the Indian Cartography has
a remarkable paragraph “[In] my Father’s boyhood: days he learned to swim the
hard way, and days he walked across the silver scales, swollen bellies of
salmon coming back to the river that wasn’t there. The Government paid those
Indians to move away”(CDR, 72) In this sentence the tone and the theme on the
poem is starting to shift to the sad part of how the Indians felt when the
white man took their lands away. In history the Indians where struggling with
the white man because they were unfair on the payment they were offering to
them, to the Indians the land was their mother not a thing that is in dispute.
On The First poem has a similar
phrase just in this one it uses the personification and metaphors to identify
the atrocity of how the white man were “What the sun raised- squashed and
pumpkin, maize collared, in a white fungus-they left for the earth was not as
it was remembered”(CDR, 426) The white fungus is a personification of the white
man, the fungus comes and never leave always killing what it touches. This
symbolize that both poems have the same ideology that Indians were replaced in
their own land by what the modern society is about. Sadly the Indians lands are
not recognizable anymore because of what the modern society has done to it by
creating industries, factories and entertainment, therefore is no longer any
natural beauty to the Mother Earth.
Another aspect is discrimination. The Indians suffer discrimination and
racism from the white man because they look different from them. The Indians
were natural and have no concerns of who owned the land, while the white men
wanted to take everything feeling superior from them. The white man though they
have no knowledge of anything, that by treating them like animals would be the
solution to get rid of them. The Indians remember how dark this period of time
was in Indian Cartography shared the
feeling of an Indian who lose everything “Maybe he sees shadows of a people who
are fluid, fluent in dark water, bodies long and glinting with sharp-edged
jewelry, and mouths still opening, closing on the stories of our home”(CDR, 73)
and on The First “A path that closed
behind them as the day opened a smudge of its blue, they were the first to
leave, unnoticed, without words, for it not longer mattered to say the world
was once blue”(CDR, 427) Both poems show the closing of the Indian life, there
is no go back to what they once had. The only way to go back is to remember the
good memories they have. They were the first in California; they had the right
to keep their home as a civilized people. Unfortunately our modern society has
always being the fungus that is destroying the world. Would you play the Cowboy
again?
