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Native american culture lit essay
Native american culture lit essay
Native american culture lit essay
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Leslie Marmon Silko's Lullaby, Storyteller, and Yellow Woman
Leslie Marmon Silko?s work is set apart due to her Native American Heritage. She writes through ?Indian eyes? which makes her stories very different from others. Silko is a Pueblo Indian and was educated in one of the governments? BIA schools. She knows the culture of the white man, which is not uncommon for modern American Indians. Her work is powerful and educating at the same time.
In this paper, I will discuss three different works by Silko (Lullaby, Storyteller, and Yellow Woman). Each of the stories will be discussed according to plot, style, and social significance. After that, I will relate Silko?s work to other literary genies and analyze her work as a whole.
?Lullaby';
The main character in this story is a woman named Ayah. Ayah is a Native American who lives in a shack with her husband and two children. She is not very close to her husband, (Chato), but she is very loyal to him. This is the way of a Navajo Woman, being loyal to your husband and family. Chato was a well-spoken man who spoke both English and Spanish in addition to his native language. The worst thing that happened to Ayah was the loss of her two children to the welfare board. They were either sick or she wasn?t providing for them. She wasn?t taking care of them in a way that pleased the whites; however, she raised her children beautifully in the Native American tradition.
?Lullaby'; is full of Native Ame...
Shostak, out of all the women in the tribe had made close connections with a fifty year old woman with the name of Nisa. The woman, Nisa, is what the book is about. The book is written in Nisa’s point of view of her life experiences while growing up in that type of society. Nisa’s willingness to speak in the interviews about her childhood and her life gave Shostak a solid basis on what to write her book on. Nisa’s life was filled with tragedies. She had gone through certain situations where Nisa loses two of her children as infants and two as adults. She had also lost her husband soon after the birth of one of their children. According to Shostak, “None of the women had experiences as much tragedy as Nisa…” (Shostak, 351).
In this poem, there is a young woman and her loving mother discussing their heritage through their matrilineal side. The poem itself begins with what she will inherit from each family member starting with her mother. After discussing what she will inherit from each of her family members, the final lines of the poem reflect back to her mother in which she gave her advice on constantly moving and never having a home to call hers. For example, the woman describes how her father will give her “his brown eyes” (Line 7) and how her mother advised her to eat raw deer (Line 40). Perhaps the reader is suggesting that she is the only survivor of a tragedy and it is her heritage that keeps her going to keep safe. In the first two lines of the poem, she explains how the young woman will be taking the lines of her mother’s (Lines 1-2). This demonstrates further that she is physically worried about her features and emotionally worried about taking on the lineage of her heritage. Later, she remembered the years of when her mother baked the most wonderful food and did not want to forget the “smell of baking bread [that warmed] fined hairs in my nostrils” (Lines 3-4). Perhaps the young woman implies that she is restrained through her heritage to effectively move forward and become who she would like to be. When reading this poem, Native American heritage is an apparent theme through the lifestyle examples, the fact lineage is passed through woman, and problems Native Americans had faced while trying to be conquested by Americans. Overall, this poem portrays a confined, young woman trying to overcome her current obstacles in life by accepting her heritage and pursuing through her
The Round House, is a story of justice and tradition and how these two concepts can both help and hinder each other. As Joe, the protagonist of the novel, sets out on a quest to avenge the rape and near murder of his mother, he learns a lot about the culture and traditions that surround him on the reservation. Arguably, the most important aspect of Native American culture that Joe learns of are the stories of the windigoo that Mooshum tells in his dreams. These stories push Joe to seek revenge on his own and help him to develop a better understanding of how and why racial conflict and Native American history are so important in the quest for justice for his mother. Traditional stories are also important in The God of Small Things. The concept of the Love Laws being laid down at the beginning of time influence the relationships of every single character in the novel. When Rahel and Esta are taken to the kathkali dance by their uncle, the reader is able to draw parallels between this ancient story that shows how the Love Laws were broken and the much mor...
The mother is a selfish and stubborn woman. Raised a certain way and never falters from it. She neglects help, oppresses education and persuades people to be what she wants or she will cut them out of her life completely. Her own morals out-weight every other family member’s wants and choices. Her influence and discipline brought every member of the family’s future to serious-danger to care to her wants. She is everything a good mother isn’t and is blind with her own morals. Her stubbornness towards change and education caused the families state of desperation. The realization shown through the story is the family would be better off without a mother to anchor them down.
From the beginning, the author introduces the grandmother and right off you see how she wishes they could take a trip to where she used to live, she tries every chance she gets to change the plans for the trip with her only son. ?Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida,? ?I wouldn?t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it.? As they drive and they talk, everything she says toward someone else is always a put down, towards the people they see and the people in the car. She sees a little ?Nigger? boy and comments ?Little Nigger?s in the country don?t have things like we do?.
Adjusting to another culture is a difficult concept, especially for children in their school classrooms. In Sherman Alexie’s, “Indian Education,” he discusses the different stages of a Native Americans childhood compared to his white counterparts. He is describing the schooling of a child, Victor, in an American Indian reservation, grade by grade. He uses a few different examples of satire and irony, in which could be viewed in completely different ways, expressing different feelings to the reader. Racism and bullying are both present throughout this essay between Indians and Americans. The Indian Americans have the stereotype of being unsuccessful and always being those that are left behind. Through Alexie’s negativity and humor in his essay, it is evident that he faces many issues and is very frustrated growing up as an American Indian. Growing up, Alexie faces discrimination from white people, who he portrays as evil in every way, to show that his childhood was filled with anger, fear, and sorrow.
Louise Erdrich’s short story “American horse” is a literary piece written by an author whose works emphasize the American experience for a multitude of different people from a plethora of various ethnic backgrounds. While Erdrich utilizes a full arsenal of literary elements to better convey this particular story to the reader, perhaps the two most prominent are theme and point of view. At first glance this story seems to portray the struggle of a mother who has her son ripped from her arms by government authorities; however, if the reader simply steps back to analyze the larger picture, the theme becomes clear. It is important to understand the backgrounds of both the protagonist and antagonists when analyzing theme of this short story. Albetrine, who is the short story’s protagonist, is a Native American woman who characterizes her son Buddy as “the best thing that has ever happened to me”. The antagonist, are westerners who work on behalf of the United States Government. Given this dynamic, the stage is set for a clash between the two forces. The struggle between these two can be viewed as a microcosm for what has occurred throughout history between Native Americans and Caucasians. With all this in mind, the reader can see that the theme of this piece is the battle of Native Americans to maintain their culture and way of life as their homeland is invaded by Caucasians. In addition to the theme, Erdrich’s usage of the third person limited point of view helps the reader understand the short story from several different perspectives while allowing the story to maintain the ambiguity and mysteriousness that was felt by many Natives Americans as they endured similar struggles. These two literary elements help set an underlying atmos...
Lullaby, by Leslie Marmon Silko, is a story about and old, Navajo woman that is reflecting on some of the saddest events in her life. Lullaby shows how the white people have damaged the Native American life style, culture and traditions. Loss and symbolism are two major themes in this story.
In wrapping up the analysis of Silko’s paper the reader is left with a bitter taste. Although Silko points out an important issue, she seems to be too overdramatic when telling of personal experience. Silko leaves the reader too skeptical of what she has to say. The reader has a hard time believing what they read. Silko finds refuge through her writing, but does not handle the subject with as much care as it is due. Silko’s evidence to not justify her accusations, and that hurts the credibility of the work.
Women in society are often viewed as lesser and are expected to have more feminine like roles in many situations. However, in other situations they are expected to have more masculine roles. In The Hunger Games, by the director Gary Ross, shows this way of thinking in society throughout the movie. The Hunger Games uses rhetorical moves to appeal to pathos, ethos, and logos to show how society has unrealistic views on women in today’s society by expecting them to have both feminine and masculine roles.
The way that Tapahonso describes the whole ordeal in detail is critical in describing the events in the poem but also in the format of oral story-telling. The author is telling a story to a daughter. A story that must have been passed down for generations and for generations to come. It is a important story that must be told because it explains the history of the Navajos and how the use of turquoise become a part of the traditional regalia. The story also tells how Navajo fry-bread become famous and is now considered a traditional food for all native tribes. Tapahonso gives strength and hope in 1864 to the younger generation by giving them education of their history.
The main purpose of this story, like many of her short stories, is about main female character struggling with minority who finds herself in a dangerous situation, and she cannot get help from anyone.
Carl Jung was a great, yet, controversial psychological theorist of the twentieth century. Originally, he worked side by side with his role model, Sigmund Freud. Subsequently, the two faced many theoretical clashes and parted to conduct their own research. Mainly, Carl Jung remains famous for his research and discoveries on the collective unconscious, that consists of archetypes absorbed through dreams, myths and symbols.
Freud’s theory of development was based on the assumption that development is influenced by sexual drives. Freud proposed his theory of psychosexual development in his paper “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” originally published in 1905 which was later translated to English in 1962. He theorized that from birth, humans have an instinctual sexual energy (i.e. libido) which is a significant component of personality development. Freud’s psychosexual development theory consists of five linear stages which spans across the entire lifespan. Each of these stages are characterized by a specific erogenous zone which is at the crux of the conflict of in the developmental stage (Freud, 1962). Freud (1962) believed that the erogenous zones involved in development are the mouth, the anus, and the genital region. The conflicts and behaviors in each of the psychosexual stages are closely associated with these erogenous areas. As Freud’s developmental theory is linear, a child is unable to progress to the next stage – i.e. unable to focus on the sexual energy associated with the primary erogenous zine of the next stage (Freud, 1962). The conflict central to the psychosexual stage must be resolved in order for an individual to move on to the following stage. According to Freud (1962), successful resolution of each of these stages involves expenditure of sexual energy. Freud (1962) theorized that the more energy used to overcome the conflict of a psychosexual stage leads to characteristics/ traits/ behaviors of that stage lasting through adulthood. He believed any lasting characteristics/ traits/ behaviors are what may underlie personality and psychopathology in adulthood (Freud, 1962)...
...st of a person's life and the individual develops a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex. (Psychology) This stage represents how an individual is most interested in one’s pleasure seeking thoughts such as relationships and or sexual thoughts. This can compromise how we humans think and how we react to many things. It all does seem like this information doesn’t make sense though it all seems to tie in to each other.