Native American Resilience Ever since the Europeans crossed the Atlantic and settled in North American it has caused many hardships for the Native Americans. They have had their land taken away, many millions were killed, and others forced to live on reservations. Life on the reservations has always been difficult for them. Even today they struggle with things such as poverty, but they show great resilience. In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, he shows the struggles of Native American life on reservations. Even though this is a work of fiction, his stories tell how these people live in extreme poverty and struggle to survive; however, many of these stories also showcase the inner strength of the Native American …show more content…
The narrator of the story says “Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation” (Alexie 150). Imagination is what helped these people through their struggles. They had no money or food to feed their families, but they had imagination. The narrator describes how his father and he used to imagine eating things they did not have. Things such as Pepsi, chocolate, and deer jerky. He even imagined if Crazy Horse had invented the Atom bomb, and had attacked Washington D.C. He described what a world where the Native Americans were the prominent people of the country. It is this imagination and creativity that helps the Native Americans continue to fight. Not fight for their lands anymore, but to fight for survival. They suffer from poverty and starvation on the reservation. They use creativity as a way to move forward. Their power of creativity is a tool for the Native Americans to cope with the harsh reality of reservation life. Alexie knew the struggles of reservation life because he grew up on a Spokane rez, as he likes to call it. It had 7000 miles of salmon spawning beds destroyed from the environmental impact of the Grand Coulee Dam (Wilson 1). Alexie was no different from the characters in his stories. Many of his stories are autobiographically written. Alexie knows first had of the struggles …show more content…
“The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” is about Norma and Jimmy. A married couple that lives on the reservation. Jimmy has a tumor and always jokes about it. This is his own way of dealing with the stress that he will die soon. He does not want to live his last days being depressed and having everyone feel sorry for him. This is why he acts to lightheartedly toward his tumor; however, his wife does not like the way he deals with his terminal cancer. He continues to behave this way and Norma then leaves him, but she comes back shortly after to be with Jimmy in his last few days before he dies. Even though she could not stand his attitude and outlook on life she returned to him because she loved him. Alexie shows that love is a powerful thing and if it is true it can overcome a substantial amount of hate and suffering. Love is what keeps the Native Americans together and fighting to survive. Because of love they make the best of life on the reservation. Love is what gives the Native Americans the power to get back up even though they have been knocked down so many
The. In this short story, the narrator, Jimmy Many Horses, who suffers from terminal cancer, keeps joking about his tumor, telling his wife, Norma, that “[his] favorite tumor was just about the size of a baseball, shaped like one, too. Evan had stitch marks” (157). Norma, who cannot tolerate Jimmy’s jokes about his cancer, leaves Jimmy and goes to Arlee, yet she later comes back to Jimmy because the person she lives with in Arlee is too serious. Humor plays an important role throughout this story; at the end of the story, it is again humor which improves the relationship between Jimmy and Norma.
In this essay I will be doing a brief overview of the book Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, by Richard Erdoes. Within this book a monumental task has been achieved, which turns out to provide unparalleled information and a concrete depiction of the Native American Indian. This aspect has been portrayed through the eyes of a Sioux medicine man throughout the book and to many individual’s dismay, paints an accurate picture of both events that occurred and how Native American Indians were being treated at the time. Capturing the true essence of hours of in depth interviews, which have both been written out in detail and videotaped, years of friendship between Richard and Lame Deer, we are able to read upon a magnificent
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.
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...
How White people assumed they were better than Indians and tried to bully a young boy under the US Reservation. Alexie was bullied by his classmates, teammates, and teachers since he was young because he was an Indian. Even though Alexie didn’t come from a good background, he found the right path and didn’t let his hands down. He had two ways to go to, either become a better, educated and strong person, either be like his brother Steven that was following a bad path, where Alexie chose to become a better and educated person. I believe that Alexie learned how to get stronger, and stand up for himself in the hard moments of his life by many struggles that he passed through. He overcame all his struggles and rose above them
“Quantie’s weak body shuddered from a blast of cold wind. Still, the proud wife of the Cherokee chief John Ross wrapped a woolen blanket around her shoulders and grabbed the reins.” Leading the final group of Cherokee Indians from their home lands, Chief John Ross thought of an old story that was told by the chiefs before him, of a place where the earth and sky met in the west, this was the place where death awaits. He could not help but fear that this place of death was where his beloved people were being taken after years of persecution and injustice at the hands of white Americans, the proud Indian people were being forced to vacate their lands, leaving behind their homes, businesses and almost everything they owned while traveling to an unknown place and an uncertain future. The Cherokee Indians suffered terrible indignities, sickness and death while being removed to the Indian territories west of the Mississippi, even though they maintained their culture and traditions, rebuilt their numbers and improved their living conditions by developing their own government, economy and social structure, they were never able to return to their previous greatness or escape the injustices of the American people.
He wanted a chance to have more opportunities than what was given to him on the Indian Reservation. The structure of Alexies piece was specific and purposeful due to the fact that it truncated his life into years; the years of education. The audience is aware of the thematic shift in the seventh year when he “.kissed the white girl” (Alexie). The shift between his time on the reservation and his resilience through taking matters into his own hands despite the backlash he received through growing up. Alexie knew that he didn’t want to leave his culture behind, but it was something that he had to do in order to change his life and take charge of it like an “Indian” would do.
The systematic racism and discrimination in America has long lasting effects that began back when Europeans first stepped foot on American soil is still visible today but only not written into the law. This racism has lead to very specific consequences on the Native people in today’s modern world, and while the racism is maybe not as obvious it is still very present. These modern Native peoples fight against the feeling of community as a Native person, and feeling entirely alone and not a part of it. The poem “The Reservation” by Susan Cloud and “The Real Indian Leans Against” by Chrystos examine the different effects and different settings of how their cultures survived but also how so much was lost for them within their own identity.
Hardship is everywhere but Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian” is an amusing and intelligent novel that clearly provides the reader with perfect examples of poverty and friendship on an Indian reservation. Alexie incorporates those examples through the point of view and experiences of a fourteen year old boy named Arnold Spirit Jr.
As a White American, I have been virtually unaware of the harsh living conditions that Native Americans have been enduring. This past summer I was fishing and camping at a resort in northwestern Minnesota with my family. I realized that this resort was located on the White Earth Indian Reservation. As I drove around the towns that the resort was near, I saw that the Native Americans were terribly poverty-stricken. Besides the resort that my family and I were staying at and a small casino that was nearby, most of the buildings and houses were in poor condition. The majority of the houses were trailers and not something that I would call “livable.” This raised a few questions in my mind: Why are people on Indian reservations living this way and what other things besides housing are Native Americans lacking? As I began research on these questions, I found three major issues. Poverty, health, and education are three tribulations that, at this point, remain broken on American Indian reservations.
Among these well known hardships, was the loss of culture and tradition. As the New World continued to develop, the presence of European guns, alcohol, and culture, slowly began to whittle away at individuals within Native Society. “And so you see what has happened to us. We were fools to take all these things that weakened us. We did not need them then, but we believe we need them now. We turned our back on the old ways” (Tenskwatawa 1). War, disease, loss of land, are terrible atrocities to endure. But unlike these, the feeling of losing touch with one’s own history and tradition, is a helpless and somber experience. To watch as the ‘pillars’ of one’s society begin to weaken, takes a toll on the will of a human being in distinctive way, as compared to the violence that is usually thought of. “Indian country is more about the people than the land itself” (1/19). Watching the people within your country, begin to neglect the deeply rooted traditions, stories, and values that give your society its identity, is something that only the Native Americans experienced as the New World continued to take shape. This is quintessential disconnect between the challenges the Europeans and Native Americans endured. The Native Americans had no home to sail back to, no safety net to fall back on as life as they knew it
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.
Overall, Alexie clearly faced much difficulty adjusting to the white culture as a Native American growing up, and expresses this through Victor in his essay, “Indian Education.” He goes through all of the stages of his childhood in comparison with his white counterparts. Racism and bullying are both evident throughout the whole essay. The frustration Alexie got from this is clear through the negativity and humor presented in the experiences he had to face, both on and off of the American Indian reservation. It is evident that 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.
Although the work is 40 years old, “Custer Died for Your Sins” is still relevant and valuable in explaining the history and problems that Indians face in the United States. Deloria’s book reveals the White view of Indians as false compared to the reality of how Indians are in real life. The forceful intrusion of the U.S. Government and Christian missionaries have had the most oppressing and damaging affect on Indians. There is hope in Delorias words though. He believes that as more tribes become more politically active and capable, they will be able to become more economically independent for future generations. He feels much hope in the 1960’s generation of college age Indians returning to take ownership of their tribes problems and build a better future for their children.
Alexie Sherman’s, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” displays the complications and occasional distress in the relationship between Native-American people and the United States. Despite being aboriginal inhabitants of America, even in present day United States there is still tension between the rest of the country, specifically mainstream white America, and the Native-American population. Several issues regarding the treatment of Native-Americans are major problems presently. Throughout the narrative, several important symbols are mentioned. The title itself represents the struggles between mainstream America and Native-Americans. The theme of racism, violence, and prejudice is apparent throughout the story. Although the author