Indian Culture In America

Source:-(google.com.pk)
Indian Culture In America Biography
In 1965, the United States Congress liberalized laws that severely restricted Asian immigration.  The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 was framed as an amendment to the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, under which a quota system giving preference to skilled laborers and relatives of US citizens was articulated . This legislative action made a tremendous change. While there were only a few thousand Asian-Indians living in the United States in the 1960’s, by the mid 1980s, over 300,000 Asian Indians had emigrated from India.
These foreigners, termed “new immigrants,” distinguishing them from the “old immigrants” of European descent, were highly educated, skilled professionals, and came predominantly from the urban middle class.  Given the immigrants’ status within their country, what motivated them to leave?
In the case of Asian Indians, an overwhelming majority responded to financial factors.  However, “such a generalization does not do justice to the complexities of the issue.” Although Asian-Indians did leave for financial reasons, they also left for professional, educational, and social opportunities.  For many Asian Indians, emigration was thought prestigious.
Financially, a professional working in the United States could make more than double their annual income in India.  The conversion of capital from dollar to rupees combined with the desire to support family members in India financially made emigration attractive.  Professionally, bureaucratic rules, bribes, and unfavorable working conditions hindered largely sought after career advancement. Moreover, Asian-Indians have placed a great emphasis on foreign education.  The colonial authority of the British Raj engrained in the Indian mentality that foreign education is better than indigenous training.
Ethnicity, Culture, & Family
In his 1782 article, “What Is an American?,” Frenchman J.Hector St. John Crevecoeur wrote, “He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” Since 1782, the definitions of Americans have drastically changed.  Although the post 1965 Indian-American has adhered to the new government, they have simultaneously transplanted their cultural and religious heritage, and have integrated them into their distinct bicultural lifestyle.  Because Indian-Americans face aspects of both American and Indian culture in day-to-day life, Indian-American culture is notably compartmentalized in its current form.
 The Indian-American identity is divided into three compartments: the Pan-Indian Compartment, the Non-Indian Compartment, and the Local-Community Compartment.  Each division serves a unique business, social, cultural, and political role within the United States.  Conflicts in Indian-American life are a largely a result of these compartments.
First-Generation Indian-Americans (“New Immigrants”)
First generation Indian-Americans are acutely aware of readily apparent cultural differences.  The family becomes a battlefield where modernity clashes with tradition, where Indian culture clashes with American culture, and where theory clashes with practice.  American culture becomes the basis for interactions outside the home.  Inside the home, first-generation Indian-Americans attempt to preserve their cultural and religious heritage and expect to live according to Indian cultural values.  For example, women are expected to maintain the household (cooking, cleaning, childrearing, etc) in addition to holding part-time or even full-time job economically mandated by them in the United States.  However, the hierarchies of age and gender patterns based on traditional Indian values are broken along the lines of compromise.
Second-Generation Indian-Americans
For scond-generation Indian Americans, “the sensation of being the in-betweens is particularly accentuated.”  Like their parents, the second-generation Indian American also compartmentalizes his/her life.  At home and within the local community component they are governed by the compromised Indian lifestyle developed by their parents and the broader community.  Conflicts typically arise from the cultural clash of American Individualism vs. Indian communitarianism.  For example, a second-generation Indian-American’s desire to pursue an undergraduate degree in the fine arts will not be supported by the family.  Career decisions are based on their impact on the family’s financial well being, not the individual’s.
Third Generation Indian-Americans
Thus far, research on Indian-Americans has been limited to the first and second generation because data regarding the third is unavailable.  There are several directions the third generation might go.
The first scenario rests on the observation that traditional languages are being lost.  A majority of second-generation Indian-Americans are illiterate when it comes to the native language that comprises their local-community component.  Although they are able to speak the language, they are unable to write or read it.  The linguistic divisions that differentiate sub-communities will slowly disappear.  A result of this development will be pan-Indian marriages that will blur the distinction between the pan-Indian compartment and the local community compartment.  The local-community compartment will lose its business, social, cultural and political forces by becoming integrated into its similar pan-Indian compartment component.
In the second scenario, the key observation is that there are a growing number of local community groups within the Indian-American subculture.  These groups cater to the local community compartment of the Indian-American identity.  The Gujarati Cultural Association of Bay Area in California has a membership of over three thousand families. Given its numbers it is unlikely that this organization will lose its collective force.  Marriage my happen within the local community and participants will remain members. This depends, to a large degree, on the second-generation Indian-Americans and the culture they bestow upon their children.
Concluding Remarks
The relaxation of immigration laws in 1965 paved the way for Indian-Americans to immigrate to the United States.  Attempting to preserve their religious and cultural heritage, these first-generation Indian Americans erected temples and formed local organizations representative of the subcultures (Sindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali) from which they came.  Parents exposed their children to those subcultures through functions hosted by these organizations and within the home.  The second-generation Indian-American assumed the culture of both their parents and the larger American culture that surrounds them.  The compartments that arise from the cultural clash force the second-generation to pick one culture over the other giving rise to a distinct set of bicultural Indian-American values that will be passed to the third generation.  The value system and culture of the second generation is still unclear.  Determining the value system that of the third generation is mere speculation

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Source:-(google.com.pk)
Indian Culture In America Biography
The history of this continent's original inhabitants encompasses a broad range of cultures and experiences. American Indians varied greatly from region to region, as did their reactions to European settlement. The Smithsonian is currently building the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in Washington, D.C., that will house one of the world's largest collections of American Indian artifacts.Pocahontas (Matoaka) illustrates the romantic notions that Europeans often built around the people they encountered in the New World. Even today, the legend of Pocahontas remains so powerful that it is difficult to separate the facts of her life from the myth. Pocahontas was the daughter of Chief Powhatan (Wahunsonacock), the powerful leader of thirty-two Algonquian bands known as the Powhatan Confederacy, in what is now eastern Virginia. She, along with some other Indians, came into contact with the English settlers of Jamestown in 1607. Legend has it that the following year she saved Jamestown's leader, Captain John Smith, from a brutal execution after he had been captured by her uncle Opechancanough. Smith later claimed that the story was true, although his initial accounts of Jamestown make no mention of either his close brush with death or Pocahontas's involvement in it. Some believers in the tale have construed Pocahontas's action as an act of love. On the other hand, many suspect that the incident was a total fabrication, made up by Smith to boost his image. Still others have speculated that if the incident did occur, it was simply part of an Indian ritual that Smith may have misunderstood.
In any event, not long afterward, Pocahontas served as a go-between in negotiations between Smith and her father, and on one occasion warned Smith of an Indian attack on a party that Smith had organized to negotiate with Powhatan. Little more is known of Pocahontas until 1612, when she was captured by the English and held as ransom for the return of English prisoners. While in Jamestown, she converted to Christianity, taking the name of Rebecca. She married the tobacco farmer John Rolfe in 1613, and the union initiated a temporary truce between Powhatan and the colonists.
In 1616, the Rolfes sailed to England, where Pocahontas was welcomed by King James I and Queen Anne as royalty. While there, they received a surprise visit from Captain Smith, whom Pocahontas had supposed to be dead. Her troubled reaction was interpreted by some as a manifestation of her undying love for Smith. The next year, as the Rolfes were preparing to return to Virginia, Pocahontas contracted a fatal illness. After her death, Rolfe returned to America, where he died in 1622. Their son, Thomas Rolfe, who was raised by his father's family in England, later went on to become a successful Virginia landowner.
Black Hawk (1767-1838)
 John Cameron (active 1848-1872) after James Otto Lewis (1799-1858)
Hand-colored lithograph, 1836, NPG.79.90
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak) was an influential Sauk chief who took exception to an 1804 treaty whereby the Sauk and Fox tribes of Illinois and Wisconsin agreed to leave fifty million acres of land east of the Mississippi River at that point in the future when white settlers should begin moving onto them. While resenting the treaty's terms, Black Hawk and his dissident allies also challenged the agreement's validity, because the tribal representatives at St. Louis had been intoxicated when they signed the treaty.
Valid or not, the agreement had to be implemented in the 1820s, as more and more settlers streamed into the area in question,. The bulk of the Sauk and Fox tribes affected had moved across the Mississippi River by the early 1830s. Black Hawk and his followers were among those forced to migrate, but they bridled at the resettlement and kept returning to Illinois. For a period outright war was avoided, but hostilities finally broke out in early 1832. Unfortunately for Black Hawk, the Indian allies and British assistance from Canada that he was hoping would assist him in this struggle never materialized. By late summer, the uprising was crushed, and Black Hawk was a prisoner. After traveling to Washington where he met President Andrew Jackson, he was sent to Iowa to live out his final days. In many respects the story of the Black Hawk War is typical of the multitude of conflicts that resulted from tribal displacement during the period of westward expansion. Today his autobiography, Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, dictated while he was in prison and published in 1833, is a classic in American literatu
Geronimo (1829-1909)
 Reed and Wallace Studio (1884-1892)
Photograph, 1890, NPG.80.246
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Geronimo (Goyathlay, or "One Who Yawns") has the distinction of being the last American Indian to formally surrender to the United States government--but only after a long struggle. Geronimo was the leader of the Chiricahua band of the Apache tribe in what is now southwest New Mexico, southeast Arizona, and northern Mexico. He grew up in a time of intense regional conflict between Mexicans, Americans, and Indians. In 1858 Mexican soldiers killed his mother, wife, and children, and Geronimo vowed to take revenge. No settler on either side of the border--and no fellow Indian--was immune to his attacks.
Both the Mexican and the American armies, aided by rival Apaches, pursued him for more than ten years. Though they captured Geronimo twice, he escaped both times. In 1886 Geronimo surrendered for the last time, but on his own terms. He remained in the custody of the army, and after a brief imprisonment, he worked as an army scout in Oklahoma. Later in life, with few other resources available, Geronimo capitalized on his fame, selling souvenirs and appearing at public events such as Teddy Roosevelt's 1905 inaugural parade. Said a judge who presided at his trial, "There is not, probably, in the history or tradition or myths of the human race another instance of such prolonged resistance against such tremendous odds."Many thousands of years before Christopher Columbus’ ships landed in the Bahamas, a different group of people discovered America: the nomadic ancestors of modern Native Americans who hiked over a “land bridge” from Asia to what is now Alaska more than 12,000 years ago. In fact, by the time European adventurers arrived in the 15th century A.D., scholars estimate that more than 50 million people were already living in the Americas. Of these, some 10 million lived in the area that would become the United States. As time passed, these migrants and their descendants pushed south and east, adapting as they went. In order to keep track of these diverse groups, anthropologists and geographers have divided them into “culture areas,” or rough groupings of contiguous peoples who shared similar habitats and characteristics. Most scholars break North America—excluding present-day Mexico—into 10 separate culture areas: the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast and the Plateau.

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America

Indian Culture In America