The Missing Peace essays

The Missing Peace essays The original Americans which were the Native Americans like all human communities, were people of both peace and war. These text however shows the battles of the Native Americans the victories as well as their defeats and their sufferings. There is a missing piece to the Native American story, the challenge is to recover it. Each of the five hundred Native American tribes or nations had its own distinctive peace tradition. The invasion by the whites challenged and subverted the tradition of the peace heritage. The authors felt that American history has been based too much on violence and not enough on the peace efforts. Has carnage and inhumanity been the only focus on American history? For the majority, yes. It has a great deal to do with the way history is taught in the classroom. Text books consistently speak of great turning points in American history which generally are results of war, taking of land, and most importantly the killing of man. There has always been little focu s on the peace aspect of history. The purpose of this text is to begin the process of altering U.S. history from the tyranny of our violent imaginations. These thoughts and imaginations built from stories of liberty and freedom accomplished through violence and war. Constructing our understanding of who we are, and our meaning and purpose as a country and the reasons for evaluating past events and the options we feel are available. The authors of this book James C. Junnke and Carol M. Hunter, challenge the myth of redemptive violence in American history. Their challenge consists of three main goals. The first is to demonstrate that violence in the United States has done more harm than good, has often encouraged rather than discouraged violence. The second goal is to offer a different viewpoint of history. To look at history with mutuality and interdependence rather than with self-willed triumph. The last goal of the of the three deals with providing hope ...