American places essay

Philip, who was popularly known as Metacom, led Indians to attack English towns in Plymouth of the colony. This war spread like fire in the bush, a loose confederation between the English colonists’ coalition and the southeastern Algonquians. Both sides fought seemingly without any fearing each other. Each side encroached into each other’s occupation causing a lot of destruction. For instance, Indians attacked and destroyed English towns and farms from the river-valley to the Narragansett Bay. She further shows that the rivalry in Indians was a symbol of war in the nineteenth century. One-character known as Mary describes how the Indians tried their best in preserving “Indiannness” in the current days. For instance, Indians used tough techniques to fight their enemies using guns and atomic bombs (Lepore 62).

Rowlandson’s expressions about “Praying Indians” indicate her bitterness about the past events. She shows how the past actions of wars made more people develop a mechanism of survival. Furthermore, the fact that war only ended after Philip was shot dead indicates how intense and serious Philip’s war had grown during that time. For sure, most of those who experienced this environment felt the real fatal environment; an environment where war could cause both physical and psychological problems to those affected. Here, then, was the solution to the colonists' dilemma between peacefully degenerating into barbarians or fighting like savages: wage the war, and win it, by whatever means necessary, and then write about it, to win it again. (Lepore 11). According to the narrations put forward, it is almost impossible for us to believe her survival.

Question 2A According to Lepore (56), the boundaries between the Indians and Americans had been blurred by “hybrid populations”. This was the population which was partially converted to Christianity. They had native inhabitants because they had not acquired full faith of Christianity as the first priority of colonialists. Lepore asserts that a hybrid Indian population wore English clothes and was capable of speaking English and lived in Wigwams. However, the real English population lived very far from English-built towns. This is evidenced where the colonists feared being shot by their enemies. They relied on these codes to distinguish between the Indians and the English. As mentioned in chapter one, Algonquian and English were “unstable” before King Philip’s War due to the presence of hybrid people of that time.

The language was the first character that caused instability between the two groups. For instance, each group could acquire a language from the other group throughout their life. Colonists wanted to have a clear distinction between those who followed Christianity and those who did not. Therefore, colonialists developed enmity as a way of maintaining the spirit of Christianity, especially when the war become tough to sustain (Lepore 10). Since more Indianans were converted to Christianity at that time, it was not easy to distinguish between the converted Indians and the rest or pure English colonialists who were Christians. As a result, when Indian Christian Sassamon was murdered, it intensifies war making it the worst in the American history (Lepore 87). The intensity of King Philip’s war was felt in different parts till he was shot in 1675.