Crow Testament Analysis

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.

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

In Sherman Alexie’s short story “Superman and Me,” Alexie writes about his life as an Indian child growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in the state of Washington. He depicts his life from when he was three years old, living on the reservation, up to his current self, as an adult writer who frequently visits that reservation. He primarily describes his interest in reading and how it has changed his life for the better.

In a Bill Moyer’s interview “Sherman Alexie on Living Outside Borders”, Moyer’s interviews Native American author and poet Sherman Alexie. In the Moyer’s and Company interview, Alexie shares his story about the struggles that he endured during his time on a Native American reservation located at Wellpinit, Washington. During the interview, Alexie goes in-depth about his conflicts that plagued the reservation. In an award-winning book by Sherman Alexie called “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, Alexie writes semi-autobiography that reveals his harsh life on the reservation through a fictional character named Arnold Spirit Junior. In Alexie’s semi-autobiography, Alexie shares his struggles of a poor and alcoholic family, the

Within the two passages, two Native American writers, N.S. Momaday and D. Brown, deliver two contrasting views on the Native American landscape and experience. Momaday’s awestruck diction and peaceful imagery revel in the seclusion of a scenario which promotes creation. On the other hand, Brown’s forlorn diction and passive tone mourn the lifeless landscape and loss of people forcibly detached from their land. While Momaday writes to explain the admirable beauty of Rainy Mountain, Brown writes to mourn the loss of life stripped in the barren landscape.

America truly is the salad bowl of cultures from around the whole world. However, there is often times a dominating cultural structure that makes it difficult to attain peace among the diverse cultural groups of America. Sherman Alexie’s short story, Because my Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, displays the difficulty of the Native American people having to cope with the dominating culture that they are inevitably being shoved into. The main character Victor, a young boy who reflects much of Alexie’s personal traits, tells the story and struggle of his people through the

When the first colonists landed in the territories of the new world, they encountered a people and a culture that no European before them had ever seen. As the first of the settlers attempted to survive in a truly foreign part of the world, their written accounts would soon become popular with those curious of this “new” world, and those who already lived and survived in this seemingly inhospitable environment, Native American Indian. Through these personal accounts, the Native Indian soon became cemented in the American narrative, playing an important role in much of the literature of the era. As one would expect though, the representation of the Native Americans and their relationship with European Americans varies in the written works of the people of the time, with the defining difference in these works being the motives behind the writing. These differences and similarities can be seen in two similar works from two rather different authors, John Smith, and Mary Rowlandson.

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.

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.

In “A Drug Called Tradition,” Alexie’s humor efficaciously shows the bitter reality on the reservation. For example, at the beginning of the story, Alexie uses humor to reflect poverty on the reservation. After Junior shouts at Thomas, questioning “[h]ow come your fridge is always fucking empty,” Thomas goes inside the refrigerator and sits down, replying Junior “[t]here…It ain’t empty no more” (Alexie 12). As seen in this example, having Thomas sit inside the refrigerator and reply in a humorous tone, Alexie is successful in mirroring the issue of poverty, or the bitter reality, on the reservation. This point can also be supported by Stephen F. Evans’s essay, "'Open containers': Sherman Alexie's Drunken Indians,” in which Evans discusses Alexie’s use of satire and irony in his stories and poems. As Evans claims that “[c]onsidered as a whole, the best artistic moments in Alexie's poems, stories, and novels lie in his construction of a satiric mirror that reflects the painful reality of lives,” this further verifies the argument that humor in Alexie’s stories helps reflect the bitter actuality on the reservation (49).

Sherman J. Alexie, is a short story written in the first person focusing on two Native American Men who grew up together on a Reservation for Native Americans but have been estranged from each other since they were teenagers. Victor who is the narrator of this story is a young man who lost faith in his culture and its traditions, while Thomas our second main character is a deeply rooted traditional storyteller. In the beginning of the story Victor, our Native American narrator learns the death of his father. Jobless and penniless, his only wish is to go to Phoenix, Arizona and bring back his father’s ashes and belongings to the reservation in Spokane. The death of Victor’s father leads him and Thomas to a journey filled with childhood

Before reading this book, I honestly knew little about Native American. I knew that many lived on reservations, but I knew nothing about those reservations. By being brutally honest, Sherman Alexie provided incite to how the everyday life of a teenage Native American is like. This book opened my eyes to the problems that Native American’s face, that I was in the dark about before.

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Unfortunately Native Americans have deep roots with racism and oppression during the last 500 years. “In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven,” Sherman Alexie tries to show racism in many ways in multiple of his short stories. These stories, engage our history from a Native American viewpoint. Many Native Americans were brutally forced out of their homes and onto Reservations that lacked resources. Later, Indian children were taken from their families and placed into school that were designed to, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” In the book there are multiple short story that are pieces that form a larger puzzle that shows the struggles and their effects on Native Americans. Sherman Alexie shows the many sides of racism, unfair justice and extermination policies and how imagination is key for Native American survival.

In Sherman Alexie’s novel The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven shows the struggles of daily Native American life, which is shown through the point of view of male character. All though out the book the following three questions appear: ‘What does it mean to live as an Indian in this time? What does it mean to be an Indian man? and What does it mean to live on an Indian reservation?’ Alexie uses literary devices such as point of view, imagery, characterization to make his point that the conflict of being an Indian in the U.S. in these short stories using the following short stories “An Indian Education” and “Amusement”. “An Indian Education” uses both imagery and characterization to show us what the narrator is

In Sherman Alexie’s, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven the author grabs the attention of the reader when he focuses on moments of racism and discrimination of Indian characters, these situations can be applicable to modern day American society. In the collection, Alexie depicts the life of several Indian’s lives, living on the Spokane Indian reservation many of whom face discrimination on a daily basis. The ideas behind the bigotry in the assortment of stories are backed by Alexie’s personal experiences of being discriminated against as well as the experience of many other Indians living in today’s society. The subject matters of racism, discrimination and stereotyping are very prevalent themes in the stories as they make the