Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror

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Pages: 4

A Different Mirror Rough Draft Over the course of the school year I was assigned a book titled “ A Different Mirror”, written by Ronald Takaki from my ethnic studies class. In the beginning, I genuinely thought that this book was going to be an average uninteresting book that most teachers assign to their students for grading purposes, however, throughout the school year I was proven wrong. A Different Mirror has a substantial amount of historical facts, depth and meaning that no other history book can teach us. From the start of the book, I already felt intrigued when Ronald Takaki explained that the Master Narrative is an embedded story in American culture that states America was settled by whites and all americans are white, and that all other ethnicities were inferior. It took awhile for me to apprehend but after taking a good look in the present events that happens in America, he has a …show more content…
To start, let’s take a look at the ethnic group, Native Americans, who were heavily treated unethically even in their own country. Before an abundance of European trespassers reached the United States, the Native Americans owned all of U.S. land. However, throughout the years, the Europeans brutally murdered most Natives, passed many discriminatory laws, and stole their land. One of the most unfair law include the Indian Appropriation Act which stated, “no Indian nation or tribe within the United States shall be recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power, with whom the United States may be contract by treaty”. Although with these laws, the Europeans came into realization that their doings were wrong and tried to help but they still managed to disappoint. For example, the U.S. passed the Dawes Act to give Indians their own land in hopes of civilizing them, however their greedy self-beings took advantage of the Indians and took their land once