Excerpt from: http://www.pafb.af.mil/deomi/nahm972.htm"It is commonly accepted today that perceptions form our views of reality. Our perceptions shape our world view. What happens when people
who perceive things differently meet? Their realities collide and conflict often results unless the gap which exists between their worlds is bridged.
Our history is full of examples in which perceptions based upon facts tainted by fear, prejudice, and misunderstanding, resulted in tragic
consequences. This has never been more true than in the case of the Native Americans, commonly called American Indians. This point is clearly demonstrated by an excerpt taken from the introduction of the book, The Native Americans: An Illustrated History:
THE YEAR WAS 1849. The place, the California Trail where it crossed the vast sagebrush and alkali desert of Nevada. To the
hordes of fortune hunters hurrying from the East to the newly opened California gold mines, no part of their route seemed more
dangerous than this inhospitable stretch. Not only were there few sources of water, but the desolate land was full of "treacherous
savages"--bands of horseless Northern Paiute, Bannock, and Western Shoshone Indians. The whites compared them unfavorably with the bold, mounted, buffalo-hunting tribes of the Plains and referred to them contemptuously as "Diggers" because they dug with
sticks for roots, a main component of the diet that had sustained them in their harsh Great Basin homeland for ten thousand years.
In the travelers' diaries, journals, and letters--which served for generations afterwards as the prime source of what white men knew
about these Indians--the writers described them as "wretched, degraded, and despicable," "the meanest Indians in existence," who
hid from sight during the day but came out from amongst the desert vegetation after dark to sneak into the emigrants' camps along the
trail and steal their food and livestock. At night the fearful, travel-worn whites had to mount guard, listening intently for every rustle and sound in the desert. When they heard a suspicious noise, they shot in the direction of its source, and at dawn they often found a dead Indian lying nearby. Sometimes it was the body of a young child, a woman, or a gnarled elder, and the travelers' stories
circulated this information as proof that all "Diggers" were skulking thieves, no matter what their age or sex. (1:14)
Here we have a description of events based upon facts as perceived by white settlers moving to the new California territory through what they
believed to be an unforgiving land--a land possessing hostile characteristics and unfamiliar to these travelers--one that appeared to be filled with little comfort, unexpected danger, and sudden death at every turn. And to make matters worst, it was a land inhabited by an Indian people whose very nature appeared to lack any redeeming qualities regardless of age or sex. A people who would kill you as quickly as they would look at you.
A people who deserved the title of "Diggers"; a title which only helped to reinforce the negative attitudes and perceptions of those settlers passing through the region toward the Native Americans living there. This stereotypical image of the Great Basin tribes was cultivated over the years and became a permanent part of the social consciousness of non-Native Americans. But, every story has two sides. The other side of this one was told by a very articulate Indian woman named Sarah Winnemucca, who had been a five-year-old Paiute child living with her family along the Oregon Trail in 1849. She gives a very different view of events as they occurred during the period in question:
What the whites had believed were "skulking" thieves and murderers in the darkness were in fact hungry and terrified Indian families
trying to get safely across a road that the white men had unwittingly cut directly through territory where for centuries the Indians had
lived, gathered food, and held their ceremonies. The bisecting road had crippled the Indians' freedom of movement across their
lands, for they lived in mortal dread of the stream of trigger-happy white travelers who shot at them as if they were rabbits.
Attempting to get past them, from one part of their territory to another, to reach relatives or a desperately needed wild food source,
Indian fathers and mothers hid anxiously with their children behind clumps of sage or other desert brush during the day, then at night
directed the young ones to scamper silently across the road past the white men's camps and hide on the other side until all the elders,
one by one, also got across.
If the whites had been careless with their livestock, some of the bolder young Indians, who naturally blamed the intruders for
overrunning and destroying their food-gathering grounds and polluting their waterholes, saw no wrong in helping themselves to one or
two of the emigrants' cows--as the Indians perceived it, an acceptable act of reciprocity. These, in short, were what the travelers
cursed as "the meanest Indians in existence"--men, women, and children, trying to survive, but whom the whites occasionally heard in
the night and killed. (1:14-16)
None.
