Analysis Of Native Girl Syndrome

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Native girl syndrome, as explained by Mrs.Semple, is a route that every native girl is bound for. “…It starts out with the fighting, the running away, the lies. Next comes the accusations that everyone in the world is against you. There are the sullen uncooperative silences, the feeling sorry for yourselves. And when you go on your own, you get pregnant right away or you cant find or keep jobs. So you’ll start with alcohol and drugs. From there, you get into shoplifting and prostitution and in and out of jails. You’ll live with men that abuse you . And on it goes…” Throughout the book we see April stays away from native pride and Cheryl embraces it. Three examples of why this occurs are how they view their parents, their involvement with the With April six at the time she was taken away from home, she was able to remember all the things her parents did like drinking “taking medicine," having parties, and seeing her mom “kissing” other people “insert quote”. When April is older she remembers all of these things and realizes that it can ruin her life if she starts going down the same path. When April was living in the DeRosier house she was reminded of her parents behaviour because she was being taunted by the DeRosier kids “insert quote”. That is when April feels ashamed of what her family did and realizes that she doesn 't want to end up in the same position, which would be native girl syndrome. She also realizes that her parents were to dependent on alcohol that they couldn 't even stop to get their children back. April feels that her parents didn 't care about her and Cheryl. With Cheryl only four when she was taken away from home she has no memory of her parents. She doesn’t know about the drinking, the parties, or the cheating that her parents did. This is one reason why Cheryl went down the native girl syndrome path. By not knowing what these things did to her parents, she dose not have the sense to stay away when she is Cheryl has a very strong native pride and she wants to help the native people by showing the community that they are not the stereotypes white people set them out to be (quote). In order to help, Cheryl volunteers at a Multicultural centre. Their she meets a lot of homeless native people that are there because they are into drinking and selling sex, just like they are imaged to be by the people in the community. Cheryl sees past all the problems they have and thinks she can help them get rid of their problems and make them break away from the stereotypes they have. While helping out Cheryl finds herself doing all things girls going down native syndrome path do. This is mostly because she is exposed to the problems every day by the people she is trying to help. April has a very different view of her culture. She disagrees with the multicultural centre saying there is no point in trying to help the people there. April says that no matter how many people you help there is always going to be natives going down the same path and white people are always going to see them the same (quote). April knows what she is talking about in this situation because she has been living with in non native houses all her life. The native lifestyle has been gone for a long time. April sees the way people look at them and know it is impossible to change there

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