Introduction Blog Post

Hello, I am Willow Berg, I am a senior my major is Environmental Studies, and I am minoring in history. I love to read, crochet, go camping, and hiking. I also like photography. I also love to travel. I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Germany and spend last semester there. In this course, I look forward to learning more about what life is like for Native Americans in the present rather than what their lives were like in the past. I look forward to this because all the times I learned about Native Americans it was always about what the past looked like for them. Looking at this newer perspective of the Native Americans’ life will be very interesting.

The last time I learned about Native Americans was in an introductory course in my freshman year. In this class, we talked and read about the things the Europeans thought about when they first came to the Americas and met the Native Americans. We spent a lot of time reading through the letters Christopher Columbus sent back to the Queen of Spain describing the Native Americans. We also talked about the story of Pocahontas and how this story differs from the one society sees today with the Disney Movie. One of my favorite parts of this course was when we looked at what the structure of their society may have looked like. We did this by looking a the city of Cahokia. I think it was very cool to see pictures of what the Cahokia Mounds look like today and compare them to drawings of what it may have looked like in the past.

Another class I took briefly talked about Native Americans and their treatment in a more modern time. That class talked about the history of National Parks. In this class, we talked briefly about how Native Americans were forced off the land in order to make it a National Park. We also brought up the topic of how these Native Americans are still used to promote some of the parks. Some parks would use Native Americans as a way to get people to come visit their parks. One National Park that did this the most was Glacier. They used to promote the park by saying “Come see the Native Americans in their natural habitats.” Considering this is the most modern topic about Native Americans I have learned about I am interested to learn more about them in the modern world and see if how the rest of the world sees them has differed from then.