Persistence of Identity Among the Alabama-Coushatta
Our readings in this class have helped us to see American Indians as members of living cultures, neither as artifacts representing some romanticized and fictitious archetypal past nor as the walking wounded of centuries of racist policy by the United States government and its non-Indian citizens. This paper examines the ways in which those American Indians alive today must be seen as both different from other Americans and the same, just as Jewish Americans and African-Americans and just-off-the-boat Russian-Americans are different and the same. Because the historical background of each of these groups is different and because each group has been treated different by the rest of the country, each ethnic and racial group in the United States has chosen different strategies to maintain, or to let go of, its cultural identity.
