The American West has always been and continues to be home to numerous groups of heterogeneous Aboriginal people who have formed their different ideas about place, space, and landscape formation. They have, of their own free will or under compulsion, settled territories and interacted with other people at various times. Examples of such actions will be discussed in this paper and a statement related to the formation of landscape morphology, both natural and cultural will be investigated.
There are various examples of the impact of geography on the trivialization of Native Americans in the United States, but of these, I would like to discuss two specific examples. The first has to do with the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere, after which Native Americans faced the fact that they were no longer able to manage space as they were used to. The conquerors immediately began to interpret their paradigms of division, forcing the Indians to migrate from one place to another while limiting these movements as much as possible.
The primary difficulties arose with the arrival of the Spanish, then as the European colonies came in, things got worse and worse. The Greater Antilles and many of the neighboring lands quickly became desolate, the Pacific coast was depopulated, and the population in the areas of the ancient civilizations decreased significantly. As for the Americas to the north and west, colonization came a little later, but with no less enthusiasm. The life of the Indians was one of forced labor in the fields and workshops, and they were forced to separate from their families; they were forced to renounce religion, they were severely punished if people tried to escape.
Secondly, Western culture was influenced in all spheres of life, including their relationship with nature and other people. Of the many forced settlers, the Cherokee, one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, is the most notorious, for whom the Trail of Tears was the result, despite their willingness to adopt traits of Euro-American culture. The most blatant manipulation was not even the removal of the Indians from their lands, habitual environment, and habitat, but the destruction of Indian families.
The doctrine of the landscape is, first of all, geography; all phenomena on the Earth’s surface are landscape components. It is accepted to distinguish between natural and cultural landscapes. The first is the unity of natural bodies – water, air, soil, plants, and many others. Such are either “virgin” landscapes, of which there are very few and very far from cities, or our idea of those places where we do not notice or where we exclude the traces of human activity.
. Culture forms the landscape, experiencing an apparent dependence on its biological basis. But the cultural landscape itself is an imprint of the whole culture, and under the coherence of both culture and geography, it is a peculiar document. In my view, the entire process of colonization of the Americas is an example of challenging the formed morphology of the landscape. In turn, natural examples of such contestation are the migrations associated with challenging living conditions in certain areas, such as the westward migration from the northern lands of the north of Shoshone, who lived in what is now Nevada, the Rocky Mountains being a more attractive alternative terrain for them due to its territorial features and the absence of much open terrain. Another interesting example is the relocation of the Cheyenne, who tried to stick to settlements along the Missouri River. Western Culture has significantly impacted landscape form, and as scientists are concerned, these impacts were rational and planned (Boyle, 2021). The Native American approach to space and habitat is characterized by a more conscious understanding of man’s relationship to nature and the natural elements that also shape the landscape. Space is much more than an abstract concept, so Native American perceptions of space are not identical to Euro-American perceptions.
Work Cited
Boyle, Mark. Human Geography: An Essential Introduction. Wiley, 2021.