I chose to write my perspective of the encounters with Native American people and the Western European cultures in the late 1700's. I am on a Chickasaw scholarship and will share my knowledge of our unique history as a people and a nation. The Chickasaw tribe made its first encounter with the European explorer Hernando De Soto in 1540 in what is now the Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky area of the United States. The first encounters were friendly and had good relations since the meeting of cultures and communication had no influences from De Soto just a contact through passing. In the later part of the 17th century the first Euro-settlements within the Chickasaw Nation of prehistoric times habitation areas took place. The outside communication influence was definitely negative and created new perspectives for the Chickasaw people of their views of land ownership and materialism. We as a people had sophisticated laws, religion, and hierarchical power structure and were previously to western contact agrarian people similar to Hawaiians. We have facial tattooed warriors and restrictions of natural resources based on cyclic events and had a balance between what we needed for ourselves and what nature needed to grow simultaneously like Hawaiians did during the Kapu system. The Chickasaw people came to rely more on European supply and tools for society and less on their own passed down information of the environment and its secrets to life through prejudices, restrictions and racism and theft. The information passing of these valuable skill sets slowly deteriorated over passing generations and in that we lost our tradition and oral history and information passing leaving us with a shell of a culture now being rebuilt from pieces of stories through families over time. We also from the cultural meeting of another culture adopted ways of another society and tried to integrate them into our own and it did not work well. Chickasaw Native Americans became completely dependent on western society for survival and have been ever since. The exposures of other cultures presented disease and illness that ravaged our people and its culture and we were captured and forced to walk the trail of tears to Oklahoma. The Chickasaw people are now residing in Oklahoma not anywhere near our real homelands and had the Mississippi river taken and several other valuable natural resources. We have been exploited for our honey from the Tupelo blossoms of the Mississippi for its rich honey. We as a nation have suffered for being exposed to European culture without knowledge to save ourselves from their ways and technology. Today we as a nation are growing in size and strength but weakening in our bloodlines and maybe a few thousand pure Chickasaws still exist today and will probably decline until we only exist in quanta of blood and not as ourselves. I hope we will learn from this story about a people being forgotten and lost to save the ones left that are savable. We have to be conscious of our advertisement and exposure to another culture when encountering them and sharing information to change the views of each other. Seems like over looking or missing the higher information contained within that is not being seen about nature, humanity, society, and values with understanding got lost in translation or were not considered. The world is now a global village and we have, as information holders, the responsibility of doing what is right and needed to protect and save ourselves as cultures, people, and societies for our children of tomorrow and look at everything and most of all listen. I will close this with a cool saying I have heard: "You can use a ounce of prevention, or a pound of cure" I will assure you curing is much harder then preventing look at our history and you decide for yourself….
exploitation of Native Americans was terrible and we are still recovering from such dehumanization.
Thanks for reading Jon Ellison (Wolf Clan)
