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Native Americans the story of their culture
Native Americans the story of their culture
Diversity in native american culture
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Native Americans from every tribe, tongue, and nations have passed on oral traditions for centuries. It was a way to keep record of traditions, history, life lessons, and beliefs. It is important to keep oral traditional alive within the tribal communities because it brings the culture together. There have been many Native American multigenre artists in mainstream that has put a voice to the culture. It is important for authors to tell their experiences and culture to put words to and feelings for readers that are going through similar past and current experiences. It is very easy to pick up a book written by Sherman Alexie and identify with his life living on the Spokane Indian Reservation. He captures the feelings of fighting to stay alive
into the Native American way of life and some of the hardships that can befall the victims
Over the course of the past semester we have read several books about Native American’s and their culture. The two books I found to be the most interesting were Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. In each story we see a young person from a reservation dealing with their Native Identities, Love, Loss and everything in between. Both of these novels have their similarities and their differences, but I believe they both offer insight into Native American culture that would be hard to come across elsewhere.
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.
Oral History and Oral Tradition was incredibly important for both tribes. They passed legends and historical stories on through speech, each story holding its own important moral or message. For example,
...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.
Sherman Alexie began his literary career writing poetry and short stories, being recognized for his examination of the Native American (Hunter 1). Written after reading media coverage of an actual execution in the state of Washington, Sherman Alexie’s poem Capital Punishment tells the story of an Indian man on death row waiting for his execution. The poem is told in the third person by the cook preparing the last meal as he recalls the many final meals he has prepared over the years. In addition to the Indian currently awaiting his death, the cook speaks of a black man who was electrocuted and lived to tell about it, only to be sent back to the chair an hour later to be killed again. He also recalls many of the meals he had prepared had been for dark-skinned men convicted of killing white people. The thought of racial discrimination in capital punishment seems to be the theme at first glance, but reading further indicates differently. The cook also ponders his own survival in the prison system as an inmate. Learning to cook and outlasting all the others before him, whether by age or fate, allowed him the opportunity to create food filled with love for the one that will die. After this final meal has been prepared by the cook for the condemned inmate to eat, fear and anticipation takes over his body. Just as proper temperature is needed for cooking, a proper amount of electricity is needed to operate the electric chair and this need creates a dimming and flickering effect in the prison reminding all those left behind of their possible fate:
Wiget, Andrew O., "Native American Oral Narrative" in The Heath Anthology of American Literature 3rd ed., v.1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 24-27.
Can you imagine growing up on a reservation full of people with no hope? The character Arnold in the book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie did. In the beginning of the book, Arnold was a hopeless Native American living on a hopeless reservation. In the middle of the book, Arnold leaves the reservation and finds out that his sister left too. By the end of the book, Arnold experiences a lot of deaths of people who mean a lot to him but he still found hope. Arnold becomes a warrior for leaving the reservation and going to Reardan.
Culture has the power and ability to give someone spiritual and emotional distinction which shapes one's identity. Without culture, society would be less and less diverse. Culture is what gives this earth warmth and color that expands across miles and miles. The author of “The School Days of an Indian Girl”, Zitkala Sa, incorporates the ideals of Native American culture into her writing. Similarly, Sherman Alexie sheds light onto the hardships he struggled through growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in a chapter titled “Indian Education”.
As Silko says, "Where I come from, the words most highly valued are those spoken from the heart, unpremeditated and unrehearsed. Among Pueblo people, written speech or statement is highly suspect because the true feelings of speaker remain hidden as she read the words that are detached from the occasion and audience. " (pg 1 ) Now days, whenever you turn on TV or Radio, and there is somebody giving speech, it is read off the paper that has been written by a professional and proof read by a lawyer or two. Silko is absolutely and right, and I agree with her that the speaker does not express what she or he had in the heart and wanted others to hear. For pueblo people, storytelling is very important. "Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider web - with many little threads radiating from the center, crisscrossing each other. As with the web, the structure emerges as it is made and you must simply listen and trust, as Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made." (pg 1 ) From reading this essay, I noticed that one of the distinctive ways stories are told at Laguna Pueblo, many individual words have their own stories, and there are few dimensions of story telling, which always includes the listeners, and story identity. No matter what kind of story is being told, it always has the origins. And since everything and everybody have different origins an...
Everyone struggles with identity at one point in their life. It will eventually happen to everyone. Identity is how people see one another, it is one of the most important things about someone. Identity goes hand in hand with experience. One’s experiences can impact one’s identity. In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the main character Arnold, also known as Junior, has many health issues, and notably stands out in the crowd. It does not help that he is a poor Indian boy that lives on a Reservation, and that he decides to go to an all white high school. Many of his experiences at school, and on the Reservation impact his identity. Experience is the most influential factor in shaping a person’s identity because
see and feel what the Indians had to go through. Much of the literature they had
Indigenous people are able to keep their culture and heritage alive by passing on knowledge, arts, rituals and performances from one generation to another. Many traditional beliefs include:
Native American literature from the Southeastern United States is deeply rooted in the oral traditions of the various tribes that have historically called that region home. While the tribes most integrally associated with the Southeastern U.S. in the American popular mind--the FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole)--were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) from their ancestral territories in the American South, descendents of those tribes have created compelling literary works that have kept alive their tribal identities and histories by incorporating traditional themes and narrative elements. While reflecting profound awareness of the value of the Native American past, these literary works have also revealed knowing perspectives on the meaning of the modern world in the lives of contemporary Native Americans.
When a story is being conveyed or told via oral tradition, the details of the story are more likely to change. This change in the details of the story is similar to the game telephone we all played as kids. When one tells a story with written language, the story is less likely to change, as the story is written on paper to be read the same each time though traditions. Most of the traditions and accounts that were passed down were mainly conveyed and told via oral translation. The accounts that influenced the Europeans were sickness, traditions, values, and culture. As I was reading, I came to believe that it seemed as if what had influenced the Europeans may have used to better influence the Native Americans. With this being said, the traditions