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“Crazy Brave” is the story of how Harjo survived abandonment and abuse, the temptations of alcohol, and youthful struggles with failed marriages and single motherhood to become one of the most successful Native American poets. Crazy Brave highlights the earliest parts of her life through her early 20s as she grew up in Oklahoma. She had given birth to two children, but cared for three. The story explains the difficulty and struggle with periods of respite. The larger moral of the story is how she faced the survival of spirituality and creativity in the face of generations of dispossession, racism, and familial dysfunction. In the beginning of the book, we find out how society was in the time period she was living. A quote from the book, “We enter into a family story, and then other stories based on tribal clans, on tribal towns and nations, lands, countries, planetary systems, and universes,” written by Harjo, “Yet we each have our own individual soul story to tend.” Harjo wrote this in a …show more content…
At the institute she and her new friends, “sensed we were at the opening of an enormous indigenous cultural renaissance . . . The energy crackled. It was enough to propel the lost children within us to start all over again.” Starting off with the event that she decided to be on her own and move away from abuse shows the audience how strong and brave she was to leave the house so early to begin her own life. “Crazy Brave” also reveals the use of alcohol abuse and domestic violence in Harjo’s native communities. Harjo finds herself to be like her mother and grandmother. They had both were married to an abusive man who uses alcohol to cure there own pain. But this also reveals the persistence of art. This is exemplified as she looks back for inspiration to her musical mother, storytelling grandmother, and artist grandmother and
Harjo uses wisdom of the medicine wheel to reveal her life lessons and their often misunderstood, yet meaningful, directions. The first direction she writes of in Crazy Brave is that of ‘The East’. She opens the memoir with The East as being ‘the direction of beginnings, and the direction of where she was born, on the Creek Nation in Oklahoma” (Harjo 15). Setting the beginning of her story ‘at the beginning’ is rather misleading, as the direction she goes with her story does not follow an expected chronological order. Instead, she tells her story through patterns, memories, and settings that seem to come and go in and out of her consciousness. Her natural way of telling a story is very poetic and does not follow the standard rules of genre or memoir. The use of poetry and italics reveal these types of wanderings and ‘stanzas’ in her own life. Life to Harjo is not linear, and it shows in the beautiful rhythms, words, feelings, and experiences that she so ‘bravely’ places on each page of her
Leslie Marmon Silko will enlighten the reader with interesting tales and illuminating life lessons in her story “Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit”. Silko, being a Native American will show the style in which people in her tribe, the Laguna Pueblo functioned and how their lifestyle varied from westernized customs. (add more here) Silko’s use of thought provoking messages hidden within her literature will challenge the reader to look beyond the text in ornate ways and use their psychological cognition to better portray the views of Silko’s story.
We have all been alienated, stereotyped, and felt the general loss of control at one point in our lives, weather you are black, native American, Hispanic, or white. Race, skin color or nationality does not matter. This is the reoccurring theme in both of the text, “Women Hollering Creek” and “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”. Women Hollering Creek is a story by Sandra Cisneros a noted Mexican novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist (b. 1954). It is a story of a young Mexican girl Cleofilas, who with visions of grandeur leaves her family to marry a man she barely knows and begin a new life across the border in the United States. The second short story is by Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) who was born on a reservation to Native American parents. This story is about the struggles of a Native American man who tries to disprove the stereotypical view society has of Native Americans, and to fit into society outside of the reservation. In one way or another, both characters in these texts have experienced being singled out and made to feel as though they did not fit in.
Although primarily known as a poet, Harjo conceives of herself as a visual artist. She left Oklahoma at age 16 to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, originally studying painting. After attending a reading by poet Simon Ortiz, she changed her major to poetry. At 17, she returned to Oklahoma to give birth to her son, Phil Dayn, walking four blocks while in labor to the Indian hospital in Talequah. Her daughter, Rainy Dawn, was born four years later in Albuquerque. For years, Harjo supported herself and her children with a variety of jobs: waitress, service-station attendant, hospital janitor, nurse’s assistant, dance teacher. She then went on to earn a B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico in 1976 and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa’s famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1978. She then went on to an impressive list of teaching positions beginning with the Institute of American Indian Arts and ending with her current position with the American Indian Studies Program at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Sherman Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington as a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member (Sherman Alexie). He began his personal battle with substance abuse in 1985 during his freshman year at Jesuit Gonzaga University. The success of his first published work in 1990 incentivized Alexie to overcome his alcohol abuse. “In his short-story and poetry collections, Alexie illuminates the despair, poverty, and alcoholism that often shape the lives of Native Americans living on reservations” (Sherman Alexie). When developing his characters, Alexie often gives them characteristics of substance abuse, poverty and criminal behaviors in an effort to evoke sadness with his readers. Alexie utilizes other art forms, such as film, music, cartoons, and the print media, to bombard mainstream distortion of Indian culture and to redefine Indianness. “Both the term Indian and the stereotypical image are created through histories of misrepresentation—one is a simulated word without a tribal real and the other an i...
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.
The narrator from The Toughest Indian in the World starts off my withholding his struggles with self- identification. Only to then have it exposed in a defining moment when he asks the fighter to stay the night with him. The repercussions of his overnight visit with the fighter serve as an unfamiliar course of action. Initially the narrator reserves many of his natural inclinations as a sign of struggle with his self- identity. This can be demonstrated through “I almost protested, but decided against it.”
The author, Sandra Cisneros, grew up as a Mexican-American woman in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother was Mexican -American and her father was from Mexico; she makes a clear point the difference between the two cultures. She graduated from Loyola University in Chicago and from there enrolled in a Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Bad Boys, a book of poetry, was published by a small press company that specialized in Latino literature in 1980. It received little notice. But her first fiction collection, House on Mango Street, was published in 1984 and gained the noticed of the New York publishing establishment. “The work is organized, like Mango Street, around the central female protagonist, whose views of her extended family help to clarify her own character” (Perkins, 390). The story “Woman Hollering Creek” came from her 1991 book of stories entitled Woman Hollering Creek and Othe...
“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” is a humorous and intuitive novel written by Sherman Alexie. The reader gets an insight into the everyday life of a fourteen year old hydrocephalic Indian boy named Arnold Spirit, also referred to as Junior Spirit. He is living on the Spokane Indian reservation and is seen as an outcast by all the other Indians, due to his medical condition. Against all odds Arnold expands his hope, leaves his school on the reservation and faces new obstacles to obtain a more promising future at a school off the reservation. The novel is told through Arnold’s voice, thoughts, actions and experiences. Alexie incorporates one point of view, different themes and settings, such as poverty, friendship, Spokane and Reardan within Arnold’s journey to illustrate the different hardships he must overcome to gain a higher education.
As this poem characterizes the view of a native woman expressing feelings of passion relating to her culture, it also criticizes society, in particular Christianity, as the speaker is experiencing feelings of discontent with the outcome of residential schools. It does not directly criticize the faith, but through the use of a heavy native dialect and implications to the Christian faith it becomes simple to read the speakers emotions.
McNickle, D'Arcy. "A Different World." Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology. Ed. Vizenor, Gerald. United States of America: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1995, 111-119.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Samuel Cohen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. 346-357. Print.
The author, Sherman Alexie, is extremely effective through his use of ethos and ethical appeals. By sharing his own story of a sad, poor, indian boy, simply turning into something great. He establishes his authority and character to the audiences someone the reader can trust. “A little indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly…If he’d been anything but an Indian boy living in the reservations, he might have been called a prodigy.” Alexie mentions these two different ideas to show that he did have struggles and also to give the audience a chance to connect with his struggles and hopefully follow the same journey in becoming something great. By displaying his complications and struggles in life with stereotypical facts, Alexie is effective as the speaker because he has lived the live of the intended primary audience he is trying to encourage which would be young Indian
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...