People of a European descent may never be aware of any stereotypical opinions portrayed by Europeans, yet a large portion of what the general public in America learn contains stereotypical opinions about other cultures. A person living in the United States should not help but notice the slandering misrepresentations of the indigenous people. Many times literacy from another culture chooses to use a layout and wording selection that contribute to idealization of the culture being portrayed; thus, literacy from a non-European culture can many times be shaped and influenced with a particular cultures surroundings. For example, in the movie Where the Spirit Lives, we learned that Native-Americans were looked upon as being savages and very illiterate in the past. Thus, people of a non-European culture may find many words used by Europeans as unfair and incorrect due to the fact that many of the words cultures" use have different meanings to different indigenous cultures. People of a non-Native descent are under a certain type of literacy inferiority to their surrounding cultures and many times their cultures literacy and identity can be altered. This is due to the fact that the Europeans pressured other cultures to be more "like" their culture. Moreover, Europeans beliefs and their literacy were forced upon these indigenous cultures, and, in many cases, cultures were being forcefully taught how to engage upon literacy from a European standpoint. In many instances this left a particular culture "clueless" in the sense of writing or engaging upon their own writings or beliefs in a European way. Clueless, in this case, means that other cultures are unaware or misinformed about their past. Many times the indigenous people were only able to engage upon literacy from a particular cultural standpoint, which in many ways took away more from their culture then it gave. Through the use of words, beliefs and thoughts, and writing styles many cultures of a non-European descent were forced to use literacy as a form of resistance, survival, and assimilation into surrounding cultures.
