10/24/2008 {draw:frame} {draw:rect} EXPLORING DIVERSITY INT 202 C Growing up, especially in elementary school, I was taught about how the Native Americans lived, ate, and slept. Every year at Thanksgiving, we did projects with pilgrims and turkeys, not really understanding the pain and suffering that wasactually occurring in America. We were not told how we bum rushed the Native Americans out of their land and resettled, nor of the bloodshed and death that occurred. Finding this out, after graduating high school, was an eye opener of epic proportions. Hearing what historianssay about the Native Americans’ battle against European settlers brings a whole other argument into the picture. Never were we told the Europeans maimed and killed Native Americans to take their land, or brush them back and force them to settle elsewhere. While being young and impressionable, it feels as if my teachers liedto me my entire elementary school career. While we were not taught that Indians were bad people, we were not taught that our settlers who became Americans were really ferocious, bloodthirsty individuals. In one of the internet films we watched in class, it portrays Indians as beasts and savages in old western movies. In each clip of the film, we could clearly identify the villain and the hero, and it was always the Indian and a white male, respectively. In western movies, the hero was almost always a cowboy. The film acts out how Indians want to kill the white man, and the white man ultimately is able to defeat the Indian by killing him. An interesting and opposing view is explored in the novel, made into a movie, _Indian in the Cupboard_. The shrunken Indian that is locked in the cupboard is also paired with an antagonistic cowboy. In this movie, the Indian is portrayed as the good-hearted, nice, civil person. The cowboy is the one who is a beast, and he is drunk almost every scene he is in. The audience knows right away that the good guy is the Indian and the bad guy...