Analysis Of Indian Education By Sherman Alexie

Theodore Fontaine is one of the thousands of young aboriginal peoples who were subjected through the early Canadian system of the Indian residential schools, was physically tortured. Originally speaking Ojibwe, Theodore relates the encounters of a young man deprived of his culture and parents, who were taken away from him at the age of seven, during which he would no longer be free to choose what to say, how to say it, with whom to live and even what culture to embrace. Theodore would then spend the next twelve years undoing what had been done to him since birth, and the rest of his life attempting a reversal of his elementary education culture shock, traumatization, and indoctrination of ethnicity and Canadian supremacy. Out of these experiences, he wrote the “Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools-A Memoir” and in this review, I considered the Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd publication.

Purpose: Alexie highlights how he ultimately overcame the hardships suffered during his early years due to his Indian ethnicity and displays how Native Americans were, and continue, to suffer from discrimination.

Sherman Alexie, in “Indian Education” tells his experiences in school on the reservation. Some of his teachers did not treat him very good and did not try to understand him. In his ninth grade year he collapsed. A teacher assumed that he had been drinking just because he was Native American. The teacher said, “What’s that boy been drinking? I know all about these Indian kids. They start drinking real young.” Sherman Alexie didn’t listen to the negatives in school. He persevered and became valedictorian of his school.

In the story “Indian Education by Sherman Alexie, he gives the reader a quick narrative of his school experience starting from first grade and continuing all the way through twelfth. It is suggested with many exquisite and not so exquisite points about growing up and being schooled on an American Indian reservation. After reading the story for the first time much of the subliminal messages in it passed me by and the story came across as rather negative and bitter. However, after reading it again I was able to pick up much of the humor such as the analogy to Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham at the conclusion of the second grade. Such concluding remarks come at the end of each chapter and give the story a poetic tone.The story almost reads like

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

Authors write for many reasons; most often because they want to tell a story. This is definitely the case with Sherman Alexie, “a poet, fiction writer, and filmmaker known for witty and frank explorations of the lives of contemporary Native Americans.” He grew up on the Spokane and Coeur D’Alene Indian Reservations, and has devoted much of his adult life to telling stories of his life there. Alexie expertly uses language and rhetorical devices to convey the intensity and value of his experiences.

Education —an institution for success, opportunity, and progress — is itself steeped in racism. In Sherman Alexie’s short story “Indian Education” from his book The Longer Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is set in two places, the Spokane Indian Reservation and a farm town nearby the reservation. The story is written in a list of formative events chronologize Victor’s youth by depicting the most potent moment from each year he is in school. Alexie addresses the issue of racism in education by examining examples of injustice and discrimination over twelve years in a boy’s life. Victor faces his initial injustice in first grade when he is bullied by bigger kids, but his understanding of injustice becomes much more complex in grades two through twelve as he experiences discrimination against his American Indian identity. Familial experiences of a Native woman, Alexie’s style and humor, and Victor’s awareness of discrimination from grade one to twelve all reveal the grim reality of growing up and being schooled on an American Indian reservation.

In the short story “Indian Education” by Sherman Alexie the theme that is represented in each grade is racism. Throughout Alexie’s life he experiences more and more accounts of racism in school. Also, Alexie experiences levels of hardship as he gets older. Thus, the story’s theme statement could be summarized that racism enables hardship in one's life.

First Nation children were forced to attend Indian residential schools dating back to the 1870’s and spanned many decades with the final school closing in 1996. These educational institutions were government funded and church run by Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, United and Anglican denominations (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, n.d.). There were 139 schools where more than 150 000 First Nations children attended. The children of these schools were mentally, physically, emotionally and sexually abused. There were a multitude of accounts of being strapped and needles piercing children’s tongues for speaking their native language. After a sentencing in British Columbia court of a supervisor of a residential school, Supreme Court Justice Hogarth called Arthur Plint a “sexual terrorist” it was also noted that “as far as the victims were concerned, the Indian residential school system was nothing more than institutionalized pedophilia” (First Nations Studies Program, 2009). In 1920 it became mandatory for every Native child to attend a residential school. It was illegal to attend any other main stream educational facility (First Nations Studies Program, 2009). The abuse that the victims suffered during their attendance at the residential school far from concluded at that point. It is evident that it has had an intergenerational effect culturally and psychologically and has caused an incredible loss of family dynamic.

The short story, “Indian Education” by Sherman Alexie is about Victor, a native and his story first grade through his high school education. In the story Victor’s father is an alcoholic. Victor;’s environment was not healthy, his 2nd grade teacher, Betty Towle, was a racist teacher who made him do unusual punishments . His whole education at the reservation was not good. Victor narrates, “That was the year my father drank a gallon of vodka a day and the same year that my mother started two hundred quilts but never finished any. They sat in separate, dark places in our HUD house and wept savagely”(Alexie 5).Victor is narrating that his father was a heavy drinker and his mother would entangle herself in her knitting. Victor came from a home where one would look for the solutions to their problems at the bottom of a bottle and keep it to themselves. Victor’s whole life was in an environment where there was always a serious issue impacting his happiness and psychological well-being. With his second grade teacher he would be picked on by his teacher all the time. His father was an alcoholic, his mother was his mother, he was living on a reservation where the dogs wouldn't eat the food that is given to them. He was not happy in this situation, being in unhealthy environment makes your chance of happiness

My graduating class has a reunion every weekend at the Powwow Tavern” (Alexie2). This quote from Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education” represents how reservation life results in a life cycle of depression and large amounts of risk-taking among Indians who feel confined to what the reservation has to offer. Throughout the short story Junior, whom is both narrator and protagonist gives great insight into what life is like for a young Indian boy on and off the Spokane reservation. He is able to both identify with and distance himself from his Indian ancestors. In “Indian Education”, reservation life reveals the social depression experienced by the Indians, it defines who Junior is and who he

Maya Angelou and Sherman Alexie detailed their lives as a person of color growing up in predominantly white America. When reflecting back on their lives, both authors used various techniques in order to effectively make an imprint on the reader of the trials and tribulations both authors had to go through and what they learned from the experience. By analyzing Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education” and Maya Angelou’s “Champion of the World”, a stark contrast can be seen in how two authors can use structure and various other techniques to tell a story with a similar subject to a different effect compared to the other.

Sherman Alexie’s Indian Education tells of the hardships, such as bullying and racial discrimination, that Alexie faced in reservation grade school; I, on the other hand, faced minimum hardships since I went to private grade school. The rules of the private school I went to are based on the Bible, and this created a friendly Christian environment among the students, so bullying of any sort was scarce. Alexie faced constant bullying in the reservation schools he attended. My elementary school life was peaceful and violence was uncommon, whereas Alexie’s elementary school life was traumatizing for him, facing problems with bullying and racism.

The American desire to culturally assimilate Native American people into establishing American customs went down in history during the 1700s. Famous author Zitkala-Sa, tells her brave experience of Americanization as a child through a series of stories in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” Zitkala-Sa, described her journey into an American missionary where they cleansed her of her identity. In “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-Sa uses imagery in order to convey the cruel nature of early American cultural transformation among Indian individuals.

The fact that the students in this movie actually become friends at the end shows that when looking at this situation from a sociological view, it can be said that cliques are not always what defines people. Cliques can be a negative and a positive thing. Obviously the negatives to cliques are that people get labeled into stereotypes which can be hurtful to some, and that people isolate themselves from other peers that are not in the clique. Positives of cliques can be that the people in the group have a sense of belonging, support from their friends during tough times, and also have a form of identity.