The Native American Experience Essay

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Life on the Spokane Indian Reservation is filled with tattered dreams and lost Indian psyches submerging the sorrows of their people in intoxicant. Reservation Blues. a novel by Sherman Alexie. depicts the narrative of an improbable group of Indians coming together to trail their dreams with the aid of a charming guitar. Large Ma. and their Indian blood as they struggle with the worlds of being Indian in a white universe. The supporter Thomas is the lead vocalist for their set. Coyote Springs. and a reserve foreigner.

Victor. Junior. Chess and Checkers are the other set members. each of them as improbable to be in a set as Thomas. Reservation Blues sheds visible radiation on the stricken life of a modern Spokane Indian. while besides conveying attending to the manner whites tend dainty minorities in America. Alexie uses a combination of cultural and psychological issues. in concurrence with his linguistic communication in the book to convey the adversities modern Indians face. The alcohol addiction. loss of civilization. and racism drives the Indians into the land. as it is about impossible for them to truly experience as though they belong anyplace.

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Most of the cultural issues are coped with in the signifier of alcohol addiction on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Their ascendants were pushed onto the reserve and faced so much grief during that clip period that the full Indian population today still mourns those losingss. Thomas shows a really blunt illustration of how him and his people were treated when he wrote “The Indian 10 Commandments” in his journal. The most important of the commandments are figure five and figure eight ; “Honor your Indian male parent and Indian female parent because I have stripped them of their land. linguistic communication. and Black Marias. and they need your compassion. which is a trade good I do non provide. . . You shall non steal back what I have already stolen from you” ( Alexie. 154-155 ) . They’ve had their basic human rights stripped for coevalss because of their race.

Their land has been stolen and they have been put on reserves that are designed to do the Indians more “white” . as if there was something incorrect with the manner they lived. Indians grieve the losingss of their ascendants as a folk. Every Indian has the blood of those ascendants running through their venas. banding them together like brothers. They all know the adversities their people went through and will hold that in common until the twenty-four hours they die. Violence. alcohol addiction. and grief are the outward consequence of the people mourning who have cipher to mourn with them.

Psychologically the Indians are really unsound. White persons have clip and clip once more proved how racialist they are against non-whites. and the Indians are no exclusion. Native Americans have been dehumanized and treated like animate beings largely because of the inaccurate representation of their civilization in popular media. For illustration. when Coyote Springs was seeking to subscribe on with a record company in Seattle. they witnessed first manus precisely how misinformed the companies were approximately Indians. On one juncture. after being informed of their race. the adult male on the other terminal of the telephone merely said “Indians? You mean like membranophones and material? That ululating sort of singing? We can’t afford to do a record that ain’t traveling to sell. Sorry. ” with no farther Inquisition about the set ( Alexie. 187 ) .

This type of favoritism against minorities. in this instance Indians. is a disturbingly common happening in our society. It makes the Indians feel ashamed of their background. As Checkerss so articulately puts it. “You ain’t truly Indian unless. at some point in your life. you didn’t want to be” in mention to some white adult females claiming anyone could be Indian if they wanted to ( Alexie. 97 ) . Bing Indian isn’t an sole nine. it’s non some higher more enlightened life. The good can non come without the bad in order to truly be Indian. The household. the civilization. the traditions all come along with the hurting. the unhappiness. and the cumulative jobs your people face.

Alexie’s authorship has a manner of acquiring you into the existent lives of Indians on the Spokane Reservation. The manner he writes casually implants in your caput
the slang. the wit and the twenty-four hours to twenty-four hours lives of these people. He teaches footings like “Ya-hey” as a salutation and “enit” as a manner to hold ( Alexie. 12 ) . These small things cause us to truly do a connexion with the narrative and acquire lost in the civilization every clip the book is opened. It is so of import to acquire this type of exposure out to more people because one time they have been exposed to another civilization. they become more likely to develop a kind of regard for the people who live it. After reading this book. a much better apprehension of the underlying issues behind jobs on the reserve is reached.

A phrase that is invariably repeated in the book to maintain everything in position is “the Equus caballuss were screaming” . which references a narrative from the beginning of the novel. In this narrative. Large Ma listens to her kids. the Equus caballuss. as they were all viciously murdered by white work forces coming to free the Native Americans from the land they wanted. The phrase represents the manner Whites have taken from the Indians. so every clip one of the characters does or is capable to something that takes off from their civilization. it is brought to the readers attending by this phrase. It’s a originative and powerful manner to steer the reader’s ideas throughout the fresh towards the auctorial purpose.

Reservation Blues truly provides solid information that discredits the false gloss sing Native Americans and the manner they live. It brings consciousness of the troubles Indian civilizations face in visible radiation of the urbanisation of the Western universe. The importance of this novel is unmeasurable because even if the reader doesn’t love the narrative itself. it still piques their involvement and brings of import issues to the tabular array. Racism is existent and can frequently be disguised as something else. but this alone position makes it all plain as twenty-four hours. The manner Alexie writes makes the characters relatable and the narrative existent plenty to acquire in to. yet contain adequate phantasy that there’s a certain enigma to the existent Native American experience.

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