DIRECTIONS: Read Chapter Sixteen and answer the following questions in complete sentences. Your responses must be either typewritten or hand-written in black or blue ink.
PART ONE:
1.
How was the Sioux's close dependence on nature demonstrated in their culture and
experience?
2.
What was the purpose and impact of the reservation system and the result of
efforts to reform it?
3.
How did ecology shape white settlement on the Great Plains?
4.
Why were mining corporations able to replace prospectors on the mining frontier,
and what was the result on the economy?
5.
What impact did Chinese immigrants have on the frontier economy, and what was
the response of whites?
6.
How did writers contribute to the development of a distinctive California
culture?
PART TWO:
A.
Read American Voices, Ida Lindgren: Swedish Emigrant in Frontier Kansas
in Chapter 16 of the text. After reading the document, write a brief
paragraph-length response to each of the following questions.
When immigrant farmers from Scandinavia arrived on the Great Plains, they viewed
the countryside with alarm. Having come from countries where mountains and
forests dominated the landscape, the vast landscape of the plains must have
seemed to them to be a Great American Desert (an earlier designation for the
Great Plains). Many left the country because of the combined effects of
grasshoppers, low crop prices, high railroad rates, and the aridity of the
environment. There are a number of memoirs from this period, many written by
women. Most of them view the hardships of this period from the perspective of
eventual triumph over the harsh landscape. But letters and diary entries give
historians a more direct access to the thoughts and concerns of ordinary people,
who never expected that their writings would ever be read beyond their immediate
family.
1.
What
features of the landscape made an impression on Ida Lindgren, and how did such a
landscape change her expectations of what was considered as being "normal,"
especially in terms of the baby's death? Pay particular attention to comparisons
that she makes within her sentences and the adjectives she uses?
2.
Carefully read Lindgren's account of the grasshopper invasion. How does she use
language to convey her reaction to this event, especially within the context of
the four years with "no fun" and the severe summer that they were experiencing?
B.
For
this exercise, refer to American Voices, Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin):
Becoming White in Chapter 16 of the text. After reading the document, write
a brief paragraph-length response to each of the following questions.
Many policies were adopted by American officials to solve "the Indian problem."
Policymakers insisted that Indians would not be able to maintain their cultural
identity surrounded by the United States but would have to be transformed into
"Americans." The counterpart to the military actions and massacres of the U.S.
Army was the bureaucratic effort to suppress Indian culture through the
establishment of mission schools on reservations. These schools had the task of
eliminating distinctive elements of Indian culture from the children. In the
following selection, one adult remembers her early days in a mission school. The
author, named Zitkala-Sa as a child, would go on to become the author Gertrude
Simmons Bonnin.
1.
What
elements of Indian culture were being eliminated in the mission school? Compare
Zitkala-Sa's appearance and actions to those of the children who were already at
the school.
2.
What was the cultural significance to the author of having her hair cut short
and shingled? How did she react?
3.
Remembering that the author is a skilled writer, how does she use the
hair-cutting incident as a metaphor to explain her eventual surrender to
"becoming white"? What language does she use to convey the symbolism of this
struggle, and how does she tie the scene to the question of whether "real life
or long lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization"?