The place that I’m from is East Turkestan. For most people, the name of my nation was not mention world wide. The reason for that is because we are currently occupied by the People Republic of China. They took over us as a autonomous region and called the province XinJiang which is ironic because is it actually translated as new domain. So we become a group of minority in our own land.
Uyghur is what we identify our self as. Which is an old Turkish word means united. I am really proud of my culture and history and really proud to be an Uyghur in this world. Uyghur people are the most friendly people to anyone who come to our land. Uyghur people always like to have a house full of guests and treat them like your are their family. You will always have the best food in front of you sets on their guest room. The Golden Polo rice, the lamb kabob, the fruit and the naan and a lot of other delicious traditional Uyghur food. After eating, all of the people always like to get together and sit down at the big backyard under the big shade from the tree. They will play music, dance, perform all sort of fascinating play or comedy. They never get tired from that tradition, I say that’s because it brings joy to the community and everyone around us.
Uyghur people are really smart with art. We have really unique style of clothes, beautiful architecture. my favorite art piece of our people is called Yinjisa pocket knife. Because we are the nomadic ethnic that has an old lifestyle from our history, we are allow to carry one with us at all time. That’s kind of like the natives in American history. When we got invaded, most of us were just farmers or business man that sales their product as a living.
I would definitely say that our culture has similarity to native American, we both are tribe minority that has our own traditions. We both have suffer from the colonist from other nation. I would say that I don’t want to see that Uyghur become really disappear and become history. That’s what the native American went through, China is trying to do the same thing. I would like people to know that we are proud of our culture and we would never give up fighting for independence!
The Native American culture shares some similarity to our culture. I was shocked to find out that there are over 100 different Indian ethnic groups living in America. In China there are 56 different ethnicities and it has diverse culture just like the Indians in America. We all live a nomadic lifestyle and we hunt, fish, farm, trade and such. I think the Indians have roots that’s related to our culture. I respect the culture of Indians and it is very interesting to me.
