The American Identity could be considered and oxymoron in and of itself. From
the very inception of explorers to the "New Land" to American culture today, Americans
still don't have a firm grasp of whom they really are. In any event, I will attempt to trace
the evolution of the American identity using time honored literary figures such as
Columbus, de Vaca, Smith, Rowlandson, and others.
Sent on a conquest to find new trade routes, Christopher Columbus, pummeled
into a land, America that signaled the birthing of a new culture. In Columbus' Journal he
describes the Native Americans response, "They signified their admiration and reverence
of the strangers by touching them, kissing their hands and feet, and making signs of
wonder. They imagined them come from heaven, and signified as much to them. They
were feasted with such food as the natives had to offer" (113). As you can imagine, this
awe and wonder presented to one of the first Americans inflated egos and impressed the
idea that the Native Americans were inherently beneath them.
Playa América
Christoper Columbus arrives in America
English: collage of public domain imagesHowever, all newcomers were not entrenched with admiration as is shown in
Cabeza de Vaca's travels. De Vaca and his men were not shown the kindness Columbus
enjoyed, alternately they were killed and de Vaca himself taken captive. In the excerpt
"In view of the poverty of the land, the unfavorable accounts of the population and of
everything else we heard, the Indians making continual war upon us, wounding our
people and horses at the places where they went to drink, shooting from the lakes with
such safety to themselves that we could not retaliate, killing a lord of Tescuco, named
Don Pedro, whom the commissary brought with him, we determined to leave that place
and go in quest of the sea, and the...