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In the play, “The Rez Sisters” by Tomson Highway there are seven closely related Cree women who live on the Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve. Highway writes his play with lighthearted humor. Yet, Highway’s play has a serious meaning that pushes boundaries and gives the audience an insight into what life is like living on a reserve. Mainly, throughout the play there is a strong message of finding the women’s identity, and empowerment within the women. Initially, my essay will begin that Highway’s play is a view into what life on a reserve is like. For example, in the academic journal "Cultural collision and magical transformation: the plays of Tomson Highway." by Anne Nothof she says that “Wasaychigan means window in Ojibway [thus] the reserve …show more content…
Furthermore, I will be discussing the women’s loss of identity. The women believe that life outside of the reservation is better. For instance, the women believe that “the bingos ... are getting kind of boring...”(Tomson, 14) on the reserve. Therefore, the women believe that they should leave the reserve and go to Toronto for more opportunity. Also, the women feel that white men treat women better, however, the white men treat the women harshly too. After the feeling of lost identity for the women, the women begin to empower each other. Highway portrays a special bond between the women and shows that together they can achieve their goals of raising enough money and going to the bingo. Also, while the women are driving, the women empower each other when they share intimate stories with one another. Additionally, when Marie-Adele almost faints the other women are there to protect her and make sure Marie-Adele is okay. Thus, like in the research journal, “Constructing the Female Self-A Reading Of Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters.” by KS Reschmi
In the text “Seeing Red: American Indian Women Speaking about their Religious and Cultural Perspectives” by Inés Talamantez, the author discusses the role of ceremonies and ancestral spirituality in various Native American cultures, and elaborates on the injustices native women face because of their oppressors.
This book report deal with the Native American culture and how a girl named Taylor got away from what was expected of her as a part of her rural town in Pittman, Kentucky. She struggles along the way with her old beat up car and gets as far west as she can. Along the way she take care of an abandoned child which she found in the backseat of her car and decides to take care of her. She end up in a town outside Tucson and soon makes friends which she will consider family in the end.
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.
Women Hollering Creek is a collection of several seemingly unconnected stories beginning with adolescence transitioning to the teenage years and ending with adulthood. While the two stories seem to have little in common, a closer examination shows there are many similarities as well as differences. “Women Hollering Creek” is a fictional story written using life experience relating to cultural differences while “The Lone Ranger...” is a narrative story written by a Native American about the challenges he faced during his own personal experience while trying to fit into another culture. As minorities, the main character of each story strives in an atte...
The story depicts the injustices experienced by both women of the land owning class and the indigenous people.
Tomson Highway is a playwright of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kaspukasing. The play is based on the real life of Highway as he was born as a full-blood Cree, lived in a Native community that takes place in Wasaychigan Hill, and registered as a member of the Barren Lands First Nation (“Biography”). Native people have their own culture and beliefs; unique language and mythology. Most of his plays use Cree and Ojib language and show the issue of the women power in the community. As the period changes, the Canadian government tries to implement a new system to ensure that native people can cope and adapt with the world that keeps changing. The government tries to assimilate Christianity and Western culture by forcing the kids to go to the residential schools. They are not allowed to speak their own language, Cree, and stay with their parents so that they have less time spend on having a normal family life. As one of the ways to preserve Native cultures and beliefs, Highway uses the play as a medium to express their hardship in facing social challenges by the government. Tomson Highway explain the uniqueness of Cree language, the value of women in Native community and how the government’s strategy on modernizing Native people leads to the destruction of Native cultures.
Fitts, Alexandra, and University of Alaska. "Sandra Cisneros's Modern Malinche: A Reconsideration of Feminine Archetypes in Woman Hollering Creek." Sandra Cisneros's Modern Malinche: A Reconsideration of Feminine Archetypes in Woman Hollering Creek 29 (2002): n. pag. 2002. Web
It describes the many positive and memorable events shared there. These experiences allowed the woman to cherish and appreciate the revere and all it can naturally offer. The speaker also discusses the significance of the life on the reserve in regards to nature for aboriginal in contrast to how non-aboriginal views it.
This book is about how this family try's to see their life a hopeful life (poor, happy and a father in the war) ) and makes it work out. The attitudes about these woman is amazing to read about, their ready for adventure, not caring if their poor while everyone is rich, the attitude is the right attitude for these girls, its the truth. The society expect the girls to behave themselves, go to school, have jobs, do their chores, always do the woman work and let the men do the men work and always respect others. Which in this book you can see what the society wants. The social change is big, one of the girls becomes a writer and moves away which in that century its very rare for a woman to become a writer. For the another girls she goes to Paris with her Aunt and becomes a painter, and then marries her best friend who is ten or more years older than her which is rare too. This book shows and describes about the woman and how they should be but than how they decide to take their own
Spirituality is universal to human beings in the sense that each individual searches for a meaning to their life by taking a look at the bigger picture. The Cree author, Tomson Highway, displays the importance of Aboriginal spirituality in his play, The Rez Sisters. In particular, an Aboriginal sacred figure, called Nanabush (Gadacz), attempts to restore lost morality to a reserve known as Wasychigan Hill. Similarly, a Canadian author, Joseph Boyden, introduces a bringer of Christian spirituality named Christophe “Crow”, to a tribe of Huron, in his novel called The Orenda. In The Rez Sisters, Nanabush focuses to return Aboriginal culture to
In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will discuss the major themes of the book and why the author wrote it, it will describe Native American society, its values and its beliefs and how they changed and it will show how Native Americans views other non-Natives.
This novel shows the struggle of two women suffering against the Taliban society. Their similar suffering leads to the mother-daughter bond they created later in the book. The quote, "Women like us. We endure. It's all we have", can be used to exemplify the importance of hope, strength, and courage. Everyday, Mariam and Laila faced oppression and injustice, yet the book ended with a sense of pleasure. Mariam's mother believes that women have no choice but to be tough and survive.
Fitts, Alexandra. "Sandra Cisneros's modern Malinche: a reconsideration of feminine archetypes in Woman Hollering Creek." International Fiction Review 29.1-2 (2002): 11+. Academic OneFile. Web. Mar. 2014.
... However, through the narrators partial freedom she more importantly finds a new compassionate/humane path on her journey to womanhood. Also, this new path in itself acts as a sort of self-healing for the grief experienced by the narrator. Though only partial freedom was found and cultural boundaries were not shattered, simply battered, the narrator’s path was much preferable to that of her sisters (those who conformed to cultural boundaries).
Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna writer, uses Storyteller as a way to express and bridge the gap between oral tradition and writing. Silko connects the past with the present and details the unique way Native Americans have experienced the world. Through these stories, we see the Native American struggle to maintain identity and independence as white culture infiltrates society and attempts to destroy tribal identity. It becomes clear that the Laguna people reject the danger of uniformity and thus use stories to maintain legacy, seek out identity, and as a powerful weapon against assimilation and colonialism.