Mike Karikari
Canssandra Stancil Gunkel
Culture, Race and Ethnicity
September 17, 2015

Writing Assignment People with different worldviews encounter all the time, one example I would like to start with is in the story “THE SOVEREIGNTY AND GOODNESS OF GOD”.
At the sunrise of Feb. 10, 1676 at Lancaster, Massachusetts was attacked by Indians. Mary Rowlandson was taken hostage with her three children. Mary and her children for more than 11 weeks and 5 days traveled through the wilderness with the indians as they ran away from the bloody scene. She traveled with them to over 20 places. Mary’s belief of a puritan was to clean the churches and she also believed in predestination. Which is the belief that God has already decided who goes to heaven or hell. The Narragansett indians belief was very different from the Puritan because they didn’t believe in a God, they had different gods and relied a lot on nature.
[stereotyping: define] The part where I saw stereotyping was when Mary met the indians, she viewed the indians as savages at first because of the slaughter of her family members but as time went on she realized they were nice people, they fed her meals. They became cool with Mary and she started to make clothes for them in exchange for food. The beliefs of Mary colored the whole situation as a way to strengthen her faith in God and a quote to prove that is (Isaiah 43.2) “When thou passeth through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee” and the bible verse was saying that through any tough time God will be with her and no obstacle would be able to put her down. In the story “Indian Captivity of William Biggs”, the main character William was captured by the Kickapoo Indians. He saw the Kickapoo as good people and a non threat. The reason for that was during the time he was trying to escape them, his body gave out. When the caught up to him, one of their fellow indians tried to kill him while he was wounded. They stopped one of their own to save William’s life. They took him in as one their own, he started to understand and learn their language. They cooked food and fed him. In this story it was a little different because William Biggs embraced the diversity of the Kicapoo Indians, instead of bashing them, stereotyping them as unintelligent savages. He saw his captivity as positive opportunity to get to know the Kicapoo Indian’s culture better.

Hannah Dustin was a mother of 8 children, she was captured by the Abernaki. She had a negative encounter with the indians, she witnessed the death of her new born baby and some of her neighbors. Later on during while she was still in the indians captivity, she hatched a plan to escape with other people. That night her master was in a deep sleep, her and the others killed the family of native americans and escaped to go back home. Europeans think that the native americans for the most part are monsters that kill. I learn that the Abenaki Indian tribe is they were from Quebec. The meaning for Abenaki was “People of the dawn”. In that culture the men were hunters, the women were farmers. Also that the indians ate their food raw without cooking it. The particular native group I would like to do more of research on is the Mahican Indian culture, I would like to know more about where they originated from and the religion that they were closer to identifying as.