One piece of writing I read this semester and did a previous blog post on was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I had previously talked about the confusion of the story’s main character as he was distraught by what do to within the colony, before Europe had taken over the colony. This system had a middle central capital in which their people moved down power and clan heads. But within this also brought warship and competition between positions of power between people. I feel that this concept also influenced the main character when it came to his power towards the slaves and having sympathy for them as well.
These communities before the European colonization traded within each other and allowed inter-marriage rights between the different communities which now seemed to be absurd. As I mentioned previously in my blog post, Conrad Marlow, the colonists referred to the natives as savages and/or wild men and then referred to the colonist (like themselves) as civilized men. Why? Why did they refer to themselves as that? It is because they thought of themselves as more superior to the other surrounding communities within and that was quite sad.
Along with that comes the treatment of natives from the colonist which in the story is also very sad. But while being sad, it is still confusing being that the main character is conflicted with his thoughts about the natives (savages). During this time, natives were sold, killed and violated in a place where they called their homes and to me that is quite inhumane. Thinking about this conflict today, people still recognize this as a way of living and how things are supposed to be and that is why there are natives today who live in the United States who will never call this place home because they experience the same consequences as people did back in the day.