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More handpicked essays just for you.
Factors of culture that affect an individual's personality development
Ecological literacy in education
Reason for studying environmental literacy
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Personal Ecology
A deep desire to cry. The hanging, haunting chant of Gordon Comes at Night, waves of sweat crystallizing on the skin, loosened joints, unfolded from the lodge into the cold night air. Wiped clean, nothing to say. Reach inside for a voice, a meaning, the distance between the earth and the moon in its fullness. Which orbits which? For a year I sat in the only seat that was not part of the circle. "Me" is still a long way off. Each stanza seems a step in a different direction. For predictive value I wear my lapis necklace, just now Blackfeet-blessed. Gil will become a soulmate but for the time being he is just there. The one I adore I can barely speak to, can barely reach, although he is the nexus of my system. Letting go is a skill. But for all the growth, movement, experience—for all that, I learn, there is loss. Dances and costumes and heart-pounding drumbeats of the powwow hold the mind in temporary suspense. Men of the tribal council give away blankets, toys, dollar bills, scarcely affordable tokens of an amicable nature. I am at peace, but I feel raw, the agony of a first love and an ideal whose flaws I can never know. There is garbage everywhere on the reservation, but people leave an offering of tobacco when they pick sage or sweetgrass—a love and a hate of the land where I expected only love. I gather refuse wherever I go because work is the only sure way to avoid long awkward pauses. This fear—perhaps it is inherited, perhaps it just rubbed off on me, but it is a legacy of my mother. Pause is earned, the awe of an eagle feather pressed into the hands, the return for the playground we build. Gil works just as hard and so we work side by side, joined in this practice of leaving a record behind. Community has many meanings. Even now I know that the real beauty, the real friendship, will come later, when words can supplant presence. But I am still here, you know, extracting something and leaving something behind. If I rub my necklace I can sense the continuity with no center.
Practice of leaving a record behind
The possibility of a recipe. Our Ahtna friends cook a feast of fresh salmon and banok, fry bread.
Lives for Native Americans on reservations have never quite been easy. There are many struggles that most outsiders are completely oblivious about. In her book The Roundhouse, Louise Erdrich brings those problems to light. She gives her readers a feel of what it is like to be Native American by illustrating the struggles through the life of Joe, a 13-year-old Native American boy living on a North Dakota reservation. This book explores an avenue of advocacy against social injustices. The most observable plight Joe suffers is figuring out how to deal with the injustice acted against his mother, which has caused strife within his entire family and within himself.
In this essay, McFarland discusses Native American poetry and Sherman Alexie’s works. He provides an overview of Alexie’s writing in both his poems and short stories. A brief analysis of Alexie’s use of humor is also included.
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
...that actually experienced it. The author gives a good background of the relationship white settlement and Indian cultures had, which supported by the life experience. An author depicts all the emotions of struggle and happiness at the times when it is hard to imagine it. And it actually not the author who is persuasive, but the Black Elk himself, because he is the one that actually can convey the exact feeling and images to the reader.
Throughout the poem, the subject of the questions shift from general inquiries to questions that are specific to the pain, suffering, and alcoholism that Indians
“This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona” discusses the physical and mental journey of Victor, a Native American man in the state of Washington, as he goes to Phoenix, Arizona to claim his father’s remains and his savings account. While on this journey, Victor learns about himself, his father, and his Indian culture with the help of his estranged friend, Thomas Builds-the–Fire. The author, Sherman Alexie, plays on the stereotypes of Native Americans through the characters of Victor and Thomas. While Thomas is portrayed as the more traditional and “good” Native American, Victor comes across as the “bad” Native American. Through the use of this binary relationship, Alexie is able to illustrate the transformation of these characters as they reconcile with each other, and break out of these stereotypes in the process.
“What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” by Sherman Alexie gives readers a look at the life of homeless, easygoing, middle aged Native American, Jackson Jackson. The story, which is set in Seattle, describes the conditions that Jackson finds himself in. Alexie’s choice of motifs emphasizes the significance of cultural and historical references. With these concepts in mind, the reader is taken through a journey of self-realization. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” narrates the internal struggle Jackson feels trying to figure out his personal identity as a Native American. The story chronicles situations that illustrate the common stereotypes about Natives. Through Jackson’s humble personality, the reader can grasp his
N. Scott Momaday, shares the cultural background of the Kiowa tribe in “The Way to Rainy Mountain”. He is a long descendent that has no experience with the tribe during their traditional era but from the stories he has heard from his grandmother, he feels more connected to the Kiowa culture. He spreads light about who the Kiowas were and described who his grandmother was as well. With the experiences he shared with his grandmother, likely influenced the person he is today. In the end he is happy and proud of who his grandmother was and will remain even after death.
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...
In a desperate attempt to discover his true identity, the narrator decides to go back to Wisconsin. He was finally breaking free from captivity. The narrator was filling excitement and joy on his journey back home. He remembers every town and every stop. Additionally, he admires the natural beauty that fills the scenery. In contrast to the “beauty of captivity” (320), he felt on campus, this felt like freedom. No doubt, that the narrator is more in touch with nature and his Native American roots than the white civilized culture. Nevertheless, as he gets closer to home he feels afraid of not being accepted, he says “… afraid of being looked on as a stranger by my own people” (323). He felt like he would have to prove himself all over again, only this time it was to his own people. The closer the narrator got to his home, the happier he was feeling. “Everything seems to say, “Be happy! You are home now—you are free” (323). Although he felt as though he had found his true identity, he questioned it once more on the way to the lodge. The narrator thought, “If I am white I will not believe that story; if I am Indian, I will know that there is an old woman under the ice” (323). The moment he believed, there was a woman under the ice; He realized he had found his true identity, it was Native American. At that moment nothing but that night mattered, “[he], try hard to forget school and white people, and be one of these—my people.” (323). He
In the early 1950s when Rock and Roll was born, it was so new and so different than anything heard before that by the time the above song was released more than 25 years later, it seemed like nothing had existed before it. Punk Rock had a similar effect on the music scene. Just as the original Rock and Roll was embraced by the youth culture as something new, exciting and possibly dangerous, Punk Rock was embraced by many as a new revolution with the potential to change everything. But did it? This essay will address the question of whether Punk Rock changed anything. It will focus on the business and industry that evolved within and around the punk scene, the politics of punk and the internal ideological debates within the scene.
Wyckoff, Jason, and M.A Bertz. "The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation? - By Gary L. Francione & Robert Garner." Journal of Applied Philosophy 28.4 (2011): 414-16. Print.
Identity. Social Injustice. Coming of age. Those are three out of several other themes that are touched on in The Diary of a Part-Time Indian, written by Sherman Alexie.
Singer, Peter. “All Animals Are Equal” in Environmental Ethics edited by David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott. Oxford University Press, New York. 2002. p. 17-27.
The music business entered a dramatic change in the 21st century. These changes appear in the way of how people access and consume music. According to Hull, Hutchison and Strasser (2011) the music business has developed throughout three stages. While moving from the agricultural age, where the music business made its revenues through live performances, troubadours and patronage, the industrial age introduced new innovations that were assumed to be associated with long-term economic growth. Commencing the year 1950 sound recordings experienced a drastic raise in sales by an average of 20% a year (Krasilovsky and Shemel, 2007). While the music industry was dominated by six major record lables (Time Warner, Disney, Vivendi Universal, Viacom, Bertelsmann, and News Corp.) (Hull, Hutchison and Strasser, 2011), further growth in the industry has been recorded in the 1970’s, where record sales “rose from less than $2 billion at the beginning of the decade to over $4 billion in 1978”, which took a sharp turn entering the Depression around the middle of the 20th century (Krasilovsky and Shemel, 2007:5).