Native American teenagers face a lot of challenges because we are still trying to recover everything that we lost when we were originally thought to be the inferior race. One might actually wonder how the nations indigenous populations became "inferior" cultures on their own land, or how a nation could have committed such atrocities in the name of "progress". Whether or not its on their own land, the acts that were committed by Columbus and the Europeans should never be done, it is wrong and immoral. When you look at a Native American`s life, you can see very clearly that culture is a huge part of their life. Natives have a lot of ceremonies that they use throughout time. Whether it is blessing the canoes so that they can be put in the water, or it's the giving back to nature when you collect cedar or roots of any kind. Any of these things that the natives do is very sacred to them. When you take these ceremonies from them you aren't just taking a routine from them, you are taking a part of their very being. When a Native American does one of these ceremonies to take something from the earth, we don`t do it just to do it, we do it because we see that the earth is our only home. We have to treat the earth with the respect that it gives us.
Since the Europeans came in to America, the natives have been being treated as the inferior race. The Europeans started to control us and what we do. Native Americans have long been fighting to protect their religious freedom from repeated acts of governmental suppression--including the denial of access to religious sites, prohibitions on the use or possession of sacred objects, and restrictions on their ability to worship through ceremonial and traditional means. They would take native children and put them in boarding schools to try and get us to become more like them and less like the savages they thought we were. Everything that they did back then have led to a lot of issues for Native teens today.
