Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee Essay

They do not allow Native Americans to do what their ancestors did, instead they are kept inside to be made into white men and women. To finally fell the cold breeze Charlie escapes the school and ends up feeling “the cold [pierce] his chest” (177).He was so desperate to get away from the restricting school that he risks his life to get away. Big Tom is working a terrible job barely getting by, he is selling baskets to tourists. His wife has to work for white folks cleaning out their houses and not even earning money. After Big Toms baby died he went to break to news to his wife, Mary, where he watched a car pull up and “[she] and another Indian girl….

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a book that depicts cultural differences; the issues of alcohol; and friendships in a harsh, yet humorous way. Junior, the main character of the book, stands out in many ways, both to the reader, and in the book itself. He is courageous, yet also emotional and smart.

In her essay “My Two Lives,” Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian American, explains the balance between the identities of the two countries inside her heart, as well as her psychological struggle between her bicultural identities. She describes herself as an Indian-American because she moved with her family from India to the United States when she was very young. However, confused with her identity through her growth, she feels that she doesn’t belong to either of the two countries because of its completely different cultures. When she is at home, she deals with her parents in an Indian way, which is strange compared to the American way that she come across outside. She says that she has a distinctive identity in spite of her Indian appearance

supported a man by the name of Andrew Jackson who was running for President of the

In Sherman Alexies novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, the protagonist, Junior, overcomes many obstacles such as stereotypes, poverty and hopelessness.

One of Victor’s first experiences of racial injustice occurs in second grade when his white missionary teacher discriminates him against his outstanding academic skills and his Indian heritage. Victor has pulled aside and is assigned a junior high-level spelling test; he recalls “When I spelled all the words right, she crumpled up the paper and made me eat it. ‘You’ll learn respect,’ she said” (Alexie 173). Here Victor faces two types of discrimination: the injustice of being singled out from his classmates in order to take a more difficult test, and the injustice of being penalized for performing well on the test. Instead of being praised or awarded for his outstanding ability, Victor is punished severely for his high-level skills by having to eat his test. Later on, the teachers send a note to his parents telling them “to either cut [Victor’s] braids or keep [him] home from class.” This injustice towards Victor’s culture over a hairstyle has no impact on a child’s education or accomplishments. Alexie incorporated this injustice to show the readers that such discrimination occurs and his stories are not fiction. In fact, native women, P. Jane Hafen responds to

The death and burials of the Cherokee along the Trail of Tears, will determine if the forced relocation can be considered an act of genocide. However, determining the number of how many people lost their lives on the Trail of Tears is difficult to calculate. An exact death toll of the round-up alone cannot be verified by historians. Most modern historians and other professionals agree on the number 4,000 deaths or one-fourth of the Cherokee Nation (Thornton, 1984). 4,000 deaths, is an estimate determined from the 1835 Census that tallied roughly 16,000 Cherokee in Georgia. Only 12,000 made it to Oklahoma, so the death estimate is 4,000 (Wilkins, 1986). A missionary by the name of Dr. Butler, who traveled with the Cherokee, estimated the death toll using eyewitness accounts and his personal observations along the journey. One traveler from Maine described an encounter of one of the detachments stating, “…we learned from the inhabitants on the road where the Indians passed that they buried fourteen or fifteen at every stopping place, and they make a journey of ten miles per day only on an average,” (Wilkins, 1986). Observations like the traveler’s, were the kind Dr. Butler would use to determine his estimate. Later he did bump his estimate up to 4,600 Cherokee deaths when presented with more evidence. However, the 4,600 is still an estimate and the exact number of lost lives is still unknown.

The Trail of Tears is part of the immoral history of the United States. The information in this paper will be about the causes, history, deaths, and the hopes that were lost. There were at least four causes for the Indian removal act of 1830. The history of the trail discussion about the Native Americans, and what happens to them when they were moving to their new home in the west, as well what happened after the removal act.

During Westward Expansion, white settlers saw the Indians as a hindrance to civilization. Therefore the mindset of settlers were to convert Native Americans into white culture. To begin assimilating, the government should, “cease to recognize the Indians as political bodies,” adult male Indians should become a citizen to the government, Indian children shall be taken away and “be trained in industrial schools,” and Indians should be, “placed in the same position before the law.” Assimilating Indians wasn’t a simple teaching of a new culture instead, it was brutal. The boarding schools were merciless towards the Indians, mainly because they wanted to force Indians to drop their culture. Native Americans were obligated to change and lost their

As Diary of a Part Time Indian progresses and Junior enrolls in Reardan, he continues to belief that he does not deserve hope, unlike the kids at Reardan, but not necessarily because of his race anymore. Resulting from his choice to leave the reservation, Junior struggles to fit in at Reardan, but not leave his identity behind, since for him living on the reservation is entwined with being poor.

The book Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee was written by Dee Brown. Dee Brown wrote a handful of books and the central theme around those books were tales of Native Americans and civil war stories. He spent a long time studying different tribes all around the United States. He has brought out the voice of the Native Americans which was muffled and silenced by the army and government. This book brought much awareness to a cause many had forgotten about, and to the shock of many when they realized he was not a Native American. Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee tells the stories of many Native American tribes and their hardships when facing the government, army, and settlers. While reading this book, I came to quite a shock. I learned the point of view that was hidden in history books, the loss instead of the win, and the sadness felt throughout the book that made it unpleasant to read. I believe this book has brought to light the mistreatment of Native Americans in the past, the main hardships including countless false treaties, harsh treatments from the settlers, and the unjust massacres. I found this book to be quite a difficult read but incredibly worth it. It is written in such a manner that you feel immersed, you feel the all the emotions and imagine how everything came to be. It is figurative, but also incredibly factual. In the beginning of almost every chapter, before the actual start, there is small paragraph with the year and the events in that following year, a quote, or

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.”

Soon children were removed from their homes and placed in Indian Boarding Schools some of which were off the reservations. The goals of the boarding schools, which were run by the religious orders that were being paid by the government for the purpose of assimilating the young Indian population and desecrating their culture, were to Christianize Native Americans in hopes that they would accept our capitalistic system. “Kill the Indian…Save the Man”.

Over the course of your life, you come to struggle with the philosophical idea of personal identity; the thing that makes you, you. Oneself may shape their identity around aspects of their life that they have no control over like race and physical traits, as well as decisions that are made throughout their lives like affiliations and religion. Your personal identity can be seen through your passions and interactions with others. An individual’s search for their identity is something that may occur in everyone’s’ life. In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie highlights the theme of how the search for identity is always prevalent, through the conflicted characters of Junior and Mary throughout the novel.

On the morning of December 29, 1890, many Sioux Indians (estimated at above two hundred) died at the hands of the United States Army near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Indians were followers of the Ghost Dance religion, devised by Wovoka, a Paiute prophet, as a spiritual outlet for Indian repression by whites. The United States Army set out to intercept this group of Native Americans because they performed the controversial Ghost Dance. Both whites’ and the Sioux’s misunderstanding of an originally peaceful Indian religion culminated in the Battle of Wounded Knee. This essay first shows how the Ghost Dance came about, its later adaptation by the Sioux, and