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“. . . every little war, every little hurricane. I’ll take my Indian thumb and my white fingers on my strong right hand and I’ll take my white thumb and my Indian fingers on my clumsy left hand and I’ll make fists, furious.” In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in
Heaven, written in 1993 by Sherman Alexie, he describes the present-day Native American experience through a series of short stories. Throughout the stories Alexie describes Native
Americans in a very sad way. Many of the characters have overlooked their want to become a warrior because of their issues with alcohol. Alexie shows how alcohol has a very negative effect on Native American culture. Some characters started to believe that drinking alcohol would fix all of their issues. Natives thought that, “one more beer could save the world. One more beer and every chair would be comfortable. One more beer and the light bulb in the bathroom would never burn out. One more beer and he would love her forever. One more beer and he would sign any treaty for her (Alexie).” However, alcohol only made their lives worse. Native Americans throughout the story began to realize that sticking to tradition was more important than following the negative roads of white American culture.
``Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is (Alexie).'' The skeleton behind you is in the past, and the skeleton in the front is the future. These skeletons wear watches for the reason that they are like recollections. There is a moment in the past that you can't overlook; you know what occurred, when it happened, etc. That ...
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...ecause My Father Always Said He Was the Only
Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock” Alexie states,
“Indians were pretty much born soldiers anyway. Don’t need a uniform to prove it (Alexie 29).
Native Americans on the reservation were aware that people think of them a certain way but then again they did not want to accept it. They understood that they had to move on from the past and start a new life for their selves. That is why the deep longing of young men to be warriors emerged in many of the stories. The younger generations believe they have something to owe to the older generation. In addition they want to feel a since of belonging and actually believe they earned everything. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a reminder that everybody has a place in society, it just takes a little time and understanding.
Early French Jesuits linked alcohol to the destruction of the North American Indian, mainly because alcohol hindered their ability to converge the Native Americans. [anthropologica] Liquor was blamed for the violence and disorder among tribes however this violence was common even before alcohol due to the importance of dreams. Dreams are vital in Iroquois culture and religion and there was a certain emphasis on the interpretation of such dreams. Since these dreams represented the desires of the soul, acts that take place in a dream or vision are regarded as sacred and must be carried out in reality, usually without consideration of its moral consequences.
In the play, Ruined, Lynn Nottage the playwright shows how alcohol is important to the people of the Congo and how alcohol changes oneself. The play is based in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo in a bar/brothel that is owned by Mama Nadie. People come in the bar for sexual service and for a drink. The people of this area come to the bar to let go of their regrets because of the war or there hard work. One important man comes to the bar and changes from alcohol. His name is Christian a salesman to Mama and an uncle to one of Mama's workers. Throughout Ruined Christian a once respecful sober man changes because of his new desire for alcohol instead of Fanta.
In her book American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa's central role as both an activist and writer surfaces, which uniquely combines autobiography and fiction and represents an attempt to merge cultural critique with aesthetic form, especially surrounding such fundamental matters as religion. In the tradition of sentimental, autobiographical fiction, this work addresses keen issues for American Indians' dilemmas with assimilation. In Parts IV and V of "School Days," for example, she vividly describes a little girl's nightmares of paleface devils and delineates her bitterness when her classmate died with an open Bible on her bed. In this groundbreaking scene, she inverts the allegation of Indian religion as superstition by labeling Christianity.
The effect alcohol has on people is overwhelming. It can change your life in an instant. Drunk drivers kill loved ones right and left. This is the kind of life the Native Americans face every day because of alcohol and no self-control. They feel shame for what others do with alcohol and receive shame from families who lost loved ones because of
Meanwhile, the American drinkers were joined by waves of European immigrants, who drank no less. Europeans brought the alcoholic crafts of their native countries, so the American melting pot was enriched with Scots-Irish distillers, German brewers and Italian winemakers. Liquor was sold in Saloons, which often served also as the only pla...
Many people do not realize that Indian people are around us everyday. They could be our neighbors, our bus driver, or anyone that we see on a daily bases. In Thomas King’s essay “You’re not the Indian I Had in Mind,” and his video “I’m not the Indian You Had in Mind,” he exemplifies the stereotype that many people make about Indians. King mentions in his essay that people always would say to him, “you’re not the Indian I had in mind,” because he did not look like the stereotypical Indian. Through King’s essay and video, I have been educated about this stereotype that I was unaware of. Since I now have an understanding of how unrealistic this stereotype is, I now can educate friends and family members on this issue.
In Drew Hayden Taylor’s essays, he creates and manipulates various tones that each appeal to a different reader, which allows for his writings to be accepted and related to by various people. Through his use of shifting tones in “What’s an Indian worth These Days” and “Why did the Indian Block the Road”, from humorous to informative to sarcasm, Drew Hayden Taylor challenges stereotypes about First Nations people.
Ghosh, R. P. (2012, February 11). Native Americans: The Tragedy of Alcoholism. Retrieved May 21, 2014, from International Business Times: http://www.ibtimes.com/native-americans-tragedy-alcoholism-214046
Musser, George. Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other
When most people think of "Indians," they think of the common stereotyped of the wild, yelling, half-naked "savages" seen on the television movies. With more modern movies like Dances with Wolves and some of the documentaries like How the West was Lost, some of these attitudes have changed. But the American public as a whole is still very ignorant of what it means to be a Native American-today, or historically.
Alcohol was introduced into Native American culture many years ago and has been a source of suffering since. In Flight, Zits states that his father “was more in love with vodka than with him and his mother,” and it is this statement that helps drive the story along (Sherman 4). Zits addresses the stereotype that come along with being Native American. The major one mentioned in the story is that Native Americans consume a lot of alcohol. This follows what is known as the firewater myth, which says that Native Americans “…may be genetically predisposed to crave ever increasing doses of alcohol…”—this was and still is believed by several researchers (Lamarine). This alcoholism leads to instability within homes and leaves the child to suffer. A perfect example of this is when Zits says that his father “vanished like a magician” shortly after he was born (Sherman 5). It was fear that made Michael’s father run, but it was fear mixed with alcohol that...
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.
It was approaching dusk as the conspicuous line of dark vans entered the reservation. These vehicles served the purpose of furnishing transportation for about 30 members of a Cleveland area youth group, whose mission was “to bring good news to the badlands';. In short, the group was ministering to the Indian children of the Pine Ridge Reservation, which was in close vicinity to the natural wonder found in the foothills of “the badlands';. The trip became a tradition for my church and I traveled there on three separate occasions. Each year, the team received a welcoming that could be described as anything but inviting. In fact, the first year the trip fell on the Fourth of July and as we drove in, our vehicles were bombarded with fireworks. I could never really grasp why we were so despised. After all, our intentions were commendable. The matter became clearer after I read Zitkala-sa’s “American Indian Stories';. Within this text, a Native American expresses her beliefs that actions similar to ours serve merely in altering culture.
According to Deloria, there are many misconceptions pertaining to the Indians. He amusingly tells of the common White practice of ...
“Can the future affect the present, and can the present affect the past?”(1) This is the question posed by the philosophical concept of retrocasualty – the product of time travel to the past. Time travel has been a common staple in science fiction writing, so many of its explanations owe their origins to tales of protagonists discovering its often confusing implications. Many people may already have a great understanding of a few hypothesized behaviors of time travel due to popular media, such as Back to the Future, Star Trek, and many other works of fiction. Currently, scientific knowledge is too premature to know if time travel is possible, no less how it behaves, so questions and answers are open for anybody to contemplate. The most famous question of time travel is the one posed by the temporal paradox, in which the time traveler invokes a condition which causes the circumstances that led up to time travel, or the time traveler’s presence, to become impossible. Many theories have attempted to answer this paradox, introducing behaviorally diverse concepts such as merging time lines, multiple dimensions, or a nature of time where everything is predestined. The act of time travel can produce radically different effects, depending on which solution to the temporal paradox is applied.