Native American Life Stories

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Native American life stories

Native American epistemologies have greatly helped the current U.S. generation to understand their native culture. Close reading, interpretation, and understanding of the native oral tradition together with their translation into written word by the current generation has revealed the secrets underlying the native culture and the impacts it brought in terms of personal identity formation. Delfina Cuero and Momaday unique native personal cultural experiences revealed how deep tradition was in modeling their personal character identity.

Indigenous Americans suffered extreme oppression and their cultural ideologies and practices were greatly influenced by the invasion of early missionaries and settlers into their native land. These so called intruders influenced the native cultures to the extent of even telling them to change their traditional practices as evident in autobiography literatures written on the Native Americans' culture. For instance in "The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero" (Cuero) and "The way to rainy mountain" (Momaday) tries to show us how indigenous cultures in their lands impacted their overall identities by foreigners who came to their lands tried to dominate it in terms of treating the natives oppressively and changing their traditional practices (Cuero and Shipek).

Cuero in her autobiography book tries to give us a picture on how life was throughout her life. Her life together with her native people was greatly influenced by the coming of settlers and missionaries from the western countries into their indigenous lands and making them like their own. In U.S. indigenous Americans also known as Kumeyaay were known to harbor the county of San Diego. Cuero grew up in this county and her narrative revolves around the kumeyaay culture and how foreigners played a major role in changing their traditional practices. Apparently for survival they had to change their practices as civilization pressure had set in (Cuero and Shipek pg 23).

The kumeyaay people depended on traditional and natural foods like vegetables, nuts, insects, and wild animals' meat. They termed these traditional diets more nutritious and they saw it as their way of life but coming of foreigners into their lands saw them incorporate their western foods into them hence eroding the kumeyaay traditional diets. This clearly shows how native individual personalities were influenced by the foreign cultural practices in the nutritional diet point of view (Cuero and Shipek pg 31).

Natives' traditional rituals also suffered westernization as narrated by Cuero whereby she explains to us how practices like initiation of girls to adulthood was abandoned as the missionaries advocated for them to