The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines identity as “the qualities, beliefs, etc., that makes a particular person or group different from others”. Identity is a very important part of who an individual is and how they grow throughout their life. Identity is important because it heavily influence an individuals sense of morals. Identity can also give a sense of inner peace to the beholder. A sense of identity that can come from many things, such as a cultural heritage or a community that one lives in. There are two widely accepted types of identity. These are internal and external. Internal identity is who we are with respect to the individual characteristics that define us. This includes physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual characteristics such as talents, capabilities, and personal preference. External identity is how we identify ourselves with respect to the definitions that are passed down or bestowed upon us. This includes nationality, race, religion and gender. There is really no simple way to state what ones identity is, as there are numerous factors ranging from obvious to subtle that go towards the identity of an individual. In a world that is constantly adapting and changing it is getting harder and harder to see where one culture ends and another begins. As cultures continue to spread and collide in this world, they either start to mix to create a new culture or they split to form a new cultures. In either situation the new cultures have bits and pieces from the preceding culture(s). This makes in increasingly hard to find where one culture ends and the next culture begins. I identify myself most simply as a white, lower middle-class, heterosexual, male. I don't identify myself by where my ancestors came from, or the bloodlines passed on to me. This is because there are too many different bloodlines passed down from my parents. There were no strong traditions passed down from generation to generation because in each generation the lines got a little more diluted. Even so most of these bloodlines happen to be white/European, but that's not the reason I identify myself this way. I don't really identify strongly with much of anything. Most of the identifiers I listed earlier are based on physical things such as my skin color, the amount of money my family makes annually, and my gender. I believe the reason that I don't identify with the culture that could have been passed down to me is because of the way I was raised. In my household growing up it was always more important for you to stand for things that made sense to you, not necessarily the same viewpoints as your predecessors had. We did have christian traditions, but it wasn't important that you identified with the christian belief system unless you decided that was right for you. As previously stated, the reason I believe I identify this way due more the the society, and household, in which I was raised. I believe identity plays a role, but it is not on the forefront as much as it may have been in the past. I believe that more prevalent in the formation of identity in this day and age is the culture or society that you live in. Factors such as your family's financial standing, the school you go to, and the community that you grow up in has a much larger role in the development to the majority of young people these days than the history of where your family came from. I believe this is so partly due to the increasingly strong presence the internet plays in the life of the children today. It has opened the possibility for kids to identify with new things that their differ from what their family or people in their communities identify with. This differs from older times where within the community was where all the teaching, playing, working occurred. In these times the elders of the community would pass down their knowledge to the younger generation. With that the younger generation would be instilled
Related Documents: Identity: Specifically the Native American Essay
expansion into Native American territory. Though the issue of encroaching upon western land is usually brushed over in modern history books and seen as just a process in order to fully acclaim the area now know as the United States, the intrusion by the Whites into Native American occupied land was very traumatizing. The power struggle of Whites versus Native Americans was easily dominated by the technologically advanced white settlers who demanded prominence over the Native Americans and treated…
landscape, Native culture, and character attributes to symbolize the Canadian identity. The struggle between Native Canadians and European Canadians to define what makes somebody Canadian is a major theme in this story. The historically inaccurate depiction of Native practices, as well as the less than flattering depiction of Native people, is an all too real issue which is alluded to in this story. Another major reference to Canadian identity is the depiction of the differences between Americans and Canadians…
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American Indian Movement: Activism and Repression Native Americans have felt distress from societal and governmental interactions for hundreds of years. American Indian protests against these pressures date back to the colonial period. Broken treaties, removal policies, acculturation, and assimilation have scarred the indigenous societies of the United States. These policies and the continued oppression of the native communities produced an atmosphere of heightened tension. Governmental pressure…
Developing Cultural Identity Much is to be said about a bilingual learner developing cultural identity. But to understand how cultural identity id developed, we must first understand what cultural identity is. Cultural identity can be defined as the uniqueness of a group, culture, or individual, as influenced by a person’s belonging to a group or culture (afs.org). So what happens, then, when a person, specifically a language-learning student, suddenly feels a clash between two different cultures…
super strength, he gains the ability to adhere to walls and ceilings. Through his native knack for science, he develops a gadget that lets him fire adhesive webbing of his own design through small, wrist-mounted barrels. This differs from mythic heroes who are born with a super power or receive a special weapon from a wise, elderly person. The theme of a heroic story has commonly shown the hero protecting their native city and in this case Spider-Man fights evil in New York City which he puts his label…
African-Indian sculptor. The article is beneficial in analyzing the cultural significance of Lewis’s works. Buick concentrates specifically on six of Lewis’s sculptures: Forever Free, Hagar in the Wilderness, Minnehaha, The Old Indian Arrowmaker and His Daughter, Hiawatha, and The Marriage of Hiawatha. Buick states, “while the subjects of her sculptures are African American and Native American women, invoking her autobiography, their features follow idealized, western European models” (190). In this…
where private ownership consists principally of the rights to happiness, exclusion and disposition. As Barbara Field explains in her essay, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States, “those holding liberty to be inalienable and holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth” (Fields, 101). In a short, both statements examine how the development of whiteness become the explanation for the domination of other groups and the continued avarice of trying…
The definition of what America is, and furthermore what an American is, has been eternally elusive. However, it can be reasonably said that the vision of America rests upon freedom of expression, the right to property, and self-determination. These ideas are explored in one European’s examination of American agricultural society in the late 18th century. Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur illustrates the gilded nature of the early vision of America; one that appears…
Health Care and Native American Indians It’s not often in University that you, as a student, take a class that impacts you emotionally, changes you and leaves you with so many questions about the society you live in. Over the course of this semester I have experienced all of these things and know with certainty that this Intro to NAS 1000 class will stay with me long after this semester is over. Native American Indians endured countless hardships and were the victims of horrific injustices throughout…