Sherman Alexe's Evolution: The Museum Of Native American Culture

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The three central images in Alexie’s “Evolution” that I have decided to discuss are the pawn shop, Buffalo Bill, and “The Museum of Native American Cultures (Alexie, 1992, pp. 523-524).” Alexie used the pawn shop as an image of new greedy Americas, with Buffalo Bill as the U.S. government leading the way in slowing taking everything from the Native American people and the degradation of their nations. Alexie’s use of figurative language and using an extended metaphor (Kirszner & Mandell, 2017, pp. 576-580) of Buffalo Bill as the U.S. government and the pawn shop as the new greedy Americans, is amazingly well done. With the pawn shop as the newly settled greedy Americans, Alexie is showing that the pawn shop will always need more items to fill its shelves, like the settlers were always needing more. They needed more land for crops, more land to cut timber, more land to build homes, more wild game to feed their families, more land for more settlers, and more, and more it just kept being more. Then when there was nothing left for the Indians to give, then the settlers wanted the land they were living on, the last little piece and they did not stop until they had it. The lines, “and when the last Indian has pawned everything …show more content…

523-524)” I can almost see an Indian brave standing in a pawn shop handing over his beating heart for a twenty-dollar bill. Alexie’s larger theme of the poem, and that trickery and plotting was pivotal in the systematic Native American degradation are clearly shown within his word choice and language. There is trickery in the first three lines of the poem, “Buffalo Bill open a pawn shop on the reservation right across the border from the liquor store and he stays open 24 hours a day, 7days a week… (Alexie, 1992, pp. 523-524)” He opens a pawn shop right across from a liquor store, and many Native Americans have become addicted to alcohol through a white man’s offer of

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