The history of the American West is shaped by the interactions of peoples and cultures as expanding nations encountered communities different from themselves.  Often Anglo-European nations are seen as opportunistic and civilized.  However, when faced with cultural practices alien to their own, they attempted to change and assimilate the foreign ideologies.  These expanding nations saw the cultures different to their own as inferior and, on many occasions, heathen, and would often try to civilize them.  This collective superiority complex shown by expanding nations over peoples and cultures foreign to themselves forced cultures to transform from their normal habits, usually by force, weakening the culture and redesigning it under the expanding nations image.  By changing cultural practices, the expanding nations showed ignorant and insular views on what society should look like.  The condescending view of foreign cultural practices by expanding nations led to the forced change and assimilation of peoples and cultures concerning practices integral to their way of life, such as religion, berdache, and polygamy.

     Religion is an integral and personal part of life in many cultures.  Native Americans had a very developed religious structure long before Europeans made contact with the Americas.  Most Indian cultures had unique and elaborate cosmology including creation myths, which were passed down through the generations orally (Heyrman).  Additionally, Native cultures often believed in one supreme creator with several lesser deities, as well as an evil god or devil (Heyrman).  Most cultures also believed in some form of afterlife or immortality of the soul (Heyrman).  These ideas parallel closely the ideas set forth in the Judeo-Christian beliefs.  However, they differ in the methods of execution of those beliefs.  Native Americans took a much more pagan look at religion, often making offerings and ritualizing religion to an extent foreign to European practices.  This combined with the lack of the thriving Christian doctrines of the time led to the condemnation by expanding countries on native religion.  Such condemnation was seen most often in the form of missions, notably the Franciscan missions in California.  The Franciscan missions began as early at 1541 in California, but truly thrived in the eighteenth century.  Its high point was in the 1820s, when over twenty-one thousand Native Americans were in missions (Weber).  These missions sought to convert Native Americans to Christianity, accordingly making them civilized by teaching Judeo-Christian morals and teaching them the arts of civilization (Carter).  These missions taught the indigenous people to abandon their beliefs and adopt the ways of Christianity and civilization.  They were forced to abandon their hunting and gathering methods for more institutionalized agriculture and living arrangements.  This changed the Native American culture drastically, and when missions were broken up in the early nineteenth century, many of the civilized peoples who had lived in missions found themselves as outcasts: unaccepted in Indian and Hispanic cultures (Weber).  This attempt at assimilation not only significantly changed native cultures, but also left them further alienated from other cultures.

     The berdache, or Two-Spirits, were very alien to Europeans.  Berdache were men and women who did not identify with their biological gender, and instead dressed and participated in society as the opposite sex.  The term berdache is a generalized term to describe such people, though each tribe had their own name for berdache and specific customs.  Berdaches were common throughout Native American and Latin American cultures.  Berdache played an integral role in their societies, often acting as spiritual leaders, as they were thought to embody both the male and female spirits.  They were considered to be some of the cleverest people (Lurie) and were held in high esteem (Radin).  When the expanding nations were exposed to indigenous peoples, they were appalled by the berdache.  The concept of a third gender was completely foreign to them, and they considered it disgusting and offensive to the traditional roles of men and women.    In the missions, one priest stated in reference to the berdache that "[w]e place our trust in God and expect that these accursed people will disappear with the growth of the missions (Kane).  The root of the problem laid in the misunderstanding of berdache which led to problems: "Religious and lay Spaniards alike, who considered homosexuality an execrable sin against nature, one to be extirpated at all cost, had no other sexual framework within which to understand Indian' cross-gender roles. (Hurtado).  Consequently, they tried to get rid of the custom and to engender berdache.  In certain missions, berdache would be separated from everyone and forced to stay in the mission center naked for a week (Carter).  Such treatment was common throughout the missions.  The priests assimilated berdache into Spanish customary roles, and in 1820 a proud missionary stated, "At the present time, this horrible custom is entirely unknown to them." (Hurtado).

     Polygamy was an issue brought up not by Native Americans, but by Mormons.  In 1931, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith had a revelation stating that Mormon men were to begin taking multiple wives (Cushman).  This practice was recognized by many Americans to be barbaric and uncivilized.  They fought against the practice, and in 1862 the Morril Act was passed, prohibiting polygamy in the territories, for, at the time, Mormons were living in Utah (Cushman).  Years later, in 1878, the case Reynolds v. United States brought before the case George Reynolds, a Mormon who had taken a second wife.  The court unanimously sustained, stating that, to permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious beliefs superior to the law of the land, and in effect permit each citizen to become law unto himself.  Government could only exist in name under such circumstances. (Reynolds v. United States).  Four years later Congress passed the Edmonds Act, prohibiting cohabitation with more than one female (Cushman).  Utah was refused statehood numerous times until a clause prohibiting slavery was added.  Finally, in 1890, the Woodruff Manifest declared polygamy to be no longer a practice within the Mormon Church (Cushman).  Polygamy came into being and was obliterated by American dissent within sixty years.  Such radical coercing of beliefs revamped Mormon culture in the way Americans thought it should be.

     Throughout the engagements and interactions of the expanding nations and the peoples they came in contact with, there is a theme of foreign practices being restructured into the expanding nations ideology of what it should be.  The Im right, youre wrong attitude caused many cultural practices to be belittled and replaced.  This caused the deterioration of culture among different peoples.

Works Cited

Carter, William.  (2003, September)  The Colonial Spanish Borderlands.  Charlottesville, VA.

Cushman, Barry.  (2003, September). Mormons and Polygamy.  Charlottesville, VA.

Heyrman, C. L.  (October 2000)  Native American Religion in Early America.  Retrived 22 October 2003 from the World Wide Web.  http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:8080/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/natrel.htm

Hurtado, Al. (Fall 1992).  "Sexuality in the California missions: cultural perceptions and sad realities." California History.  (p. 127).

Lurie, Nancy Oestreich.  (1952). Winnebago Berdache.  American Anthropologist 55, #1 (pp. 708-712).

Kane, Rich.  (13-19 August 1999). An Incomplete History of Gay & Lesbian OC. OC Weekly.  Retrieved 22 October 2003 from the World Wide Web.  <http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/99/49/news-kane.php>.

Radin, Paul. The Chief of the Heroka. Unpublished. Winnebago Notebooks (American Philosophical Society Library) #33, (p. 52.)

Reynolds v. United States. 98 U.S. 145.   US Supreme Court.  1878.

Weber, David J. (1994).  The Spanish-American Rim.  In Claude A. Milner II, Carol A. OConnor, Martha A. Sandweiss (Eds.) Oxford History of the West.  (p. 47)  New York, NY: Oxford University Press.