Three weeks down, seven to go! This last term of the year is going by super fast I can’t believe it is already week four! This week, we focused a lot on Europeans exploring the Americas and how they interacted with the natives who were already there. We know the main sentiments, that they drove them from their homelands and tried to convert them to Christianity just like the Americans did in more modern times. Against their will, natives were forced from their homes and were completely isolated from the rest of society with the introduction of European settlers. Some of the prompts for this week’s question include sentiments about Columbus and his original discovery of the New World. Learning about that from a young age, I was probably first introduced to him around 2nd or 3rd grade, when we started to talk more about history. Funny though I remember a kindergarten lesson that talked about Native Americans and it is really interesting to look back on and realize, this stuff has been drilled into our brains since we were five years old. Drawing again from the prompt, I think it is really hard for me to expand on a lot of the knowledge I have on Natives and colonialism because as I talked about before, it has been drilled into this generation’s brains since we were five years old, at least for me. I do think some of the details in the book on the Mandans were super interesting to read and talk about. A couple of things we touched on in class about the book that I found super interesting were the archeological methods and understanding of what was going on in native times. Finding some of these scraps of homes, tools, and other things the natives used at the time gives us some really good insight into possibly how they lived and what they did to survive daily. A detail and image I found interesting was the way they talked about hunting eagles. There is an illustration of the method they used to hunt eagles on page 73 and it is fascinating to me. It described some of the injuries many of the hunters got from the talons and beaks of the animals but in their eyes, it was worth the struggle because these were sacred animals and they used mainly their feathers to create headwear that they would wear regularly. Overall, I thought this week was more of a review for me personally, but I also learned a lot of things from the Mandan books and the lectures in class. Excited for what is in store this week!