Moving Encounters

Download or read book Moving Encounters written by Laura L. Mielke and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How literary portraits of Indian-white encounters shaped nineteenth-century disputes over Native rights. An old Indian woman comforts two young white children she finds lost in the woods and lovingly carries them back to their eager parents. A frontiersman sheds tears over the grave of a Mohican youth, holding hands with the mourning father. According to Laura L. Mielke, such emotionally charged scenes between whites and Indians paradoxically flourished in American literature from 1820 to 1850, a time when the United States government developed and applied a policy of Indian removal. Although these “moving encounters,” as Mielke terms them, often promoted the possibility of mutual sympathy between Native Americans and Euro-Americans, they also suggested that these emotional links were inherently unstable, potentially dangerous, and ultimately doomed.