著者

刈田 元司 Motoshi Karita

雑誌

中京英文学 = Chukyo English literature (ISSN:02852039)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.4, pp.1-23, 1984-03-10

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The concept that America was discoverd by Columbus and that the American is a single race with its own culture must now be corrected. Because before the 'discovery' of the continent in 1492 there were already many inhabitants, and Cortes the conquerer was embarrassed to find many a variety of Indians, each of whom having quite different types of government and society. So the definition of types of civilization on the part of Marx and Morgan was too idealized to be true to realities. New trends of the study of American Indians might be said to start with Peter Farbs' Man's Rise to Civilization (1968). When Europeans with refined civilization began to conquer uncivilized people in the New World, there were scarcely any trait in common, between them, Western intellectuals from the end of the 17th to the middle of the 18th century had antithetical views of the Red Men. On one hand they thought Indians mute and dumb people who had prevented the progress of civilization, but on the other hand they thought them 'nature's noble savages', 'unspoiled child of the land.' How the conquered Red men met the White men? On Thanksgiving Day, 1970, two hundred Indians from twenty-five tribes gathered at Plymouth Rock to commemorate the landing of pilgrims as a national 'Day of Mourning'. A direct descentant of that Wampanoag tribe who had welcomed the pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in curiosity and friendship declared this act of friendship of his forefathers was 'their greatest mistake'. Since then, they were confronted with multitude of tragic mal-treatments. They had to find some solution to assimilate themselves to the White. Two examples will show their efforts of assimilation. They are Pocahontas and Sacajawea, both of whom were married to Europeans. As for their literature, the first trait to be noticed is oratory. No writing systems comparable with Old World systems had been developed in the New World. Indians lacking an effective writing system had to establish oral tradition. In this oral tradition they had enough reasons to respect words. "The Ritual of Condolence" of Iroguois and "the Night Chant" of Navajos are to represent characteristics of Indian poetry and thought.

著者

刈田 元司 MOTOSHI KARITA

雑誌

中京英文学 = Chukyo English literature (ISSN:02852039)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.5, pp.1-28, 1985-01-20

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Indian Princess Pocahontas was a daughter of King Powhatan and her relation with Captain John Smith has been so often discussed and talked of among historians and romancers that she has been regarded not only as the firsht woman in the history of the United States but has become a heroine of many dramas and novels in the nineteenth century. But since the turn of the century, especially during and after the World War I, poets such as William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Vached Lindsay and Hard Crane, looked Pocahontas as the origin of Americans or as The Earth Mother; she was taken not as a historical figure bus as a mythical lady. And after the World War II, the Pulitzer Prize winner poet Louis Simpson portrayed a new princess Pocahontas in his At the End of the Open Road, and the novelish John Barth showed us a quite different princess in his farcical, picaresque and black humored novel The Sot-Weed Factor.