"The land was not `new' to the Indian, and the Black who worked it didn't own it." Discuss the ways in which Native American and Afro American attitudes to the land, as represented in Beloved and The Names, differ both from one another and the attitudes of European Americans.

Native American and Afro American cultures both have differing attitudes towards the land. These two perceptions of the land, as portrayed in Morrison's Beloved and Momaday's The Names are significantly different from the established European American view.

Upon his discovery of the `new world', Columbus described the land as a "terrestrial paradise" (Fiddick p.51), a place that opened up an infinite concept of the future. The first European settlers were looking for a place where they could forget the persecutions of the past and focus upon building themselves a future on the land. Momaday concurs with this idea of...