In the article “A Healthy Balance: Religion, Identity, and Community in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine” by Karla Sanders, argues that the Native American people are having a hard time finding themselves through the community, religion, and identity because of other traditions are becoming more prominent than theirs. Sanders relies on the article “Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the fiction of Louise Erdrich” by Catherine Rainwater. Rainwater helps construct Sanders article by providing examples in the story. The examples Rainwater pinpoints helps clarify how Native Americans are dealing with the interference of another religion. Also, another article that Sander used to establish her article was “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Loving …show more content…
Each article provides enough knowledge about Native Americans and their problems. In order to understand the short story “Love Medicine” people would need to know what type of community it is. While I agree with Sanders that community, religion, and identity was a problem in the story Love Medicine. The story also points out a considerable amount about life, and it's unexplainable events. In the article “A Healthy Balance: Religion, Identity, and Community in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine” by Sanders, she explains the difficulties Native Americans are having with adapting to a new tradition. One problem that the Native American are having, is the western traditions brought by catholic missionaries. Sanders talks about the community for Native Americans because the community contributes a great deal of tradition and rank. Sanders writes “Just as her fiction displays individuality and community so does it celebrate both magic and reality of Ojibwa life and heritage” (Sander 131). Moreover, the Ojibwa community shows that everyone in the faction has rituals they honor. Also, another part that equally important beside rituals are social roles; Sanders …show more content…
Sanders talks about June, and how she had trouble finding her identity. Sanders uses June as example for identity issue when Flavin says “June’s attempts to make something of her life---as a beautician, a secretary, a waitress or salesclerk, a wife and mother---become the story of failure”(Flavin 63). This quote says that June was having identity problems, and didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. This could be corresponding to the transition of tradition, and June not being able to adjust. June was shadowed by the darkness, and couldn’t escape until it triumph over her. Flavin later explains “Her last affair with a drunken oil boomer outside a Williston, North Dakota, bar ends with her death as she attempts to walk home in a snowstorm. While her death was not defined as a suicide, anyone familiar with the intensity of a North Dakota snowstorm would know the risk” (Flavin 62). This quote correlates with Sanders description of June, and the burdensome with the interference of another religion her. Throughout the story June wasn’t pleased with what she accomplished in life, and decided to take her life because she didn’t feel it was worth living. June identity problem was severe, and it continues to another person in the community, Marie. Sanders uses Maire as another character in the story who also questioned their
In addition to the issues within the family, the crime committed against mother has cause inner turmoil for Joe. He is faced with the feelings of obligation to avenge his mother. He sees her sheltering herself every day in her bedroom, slowly becoming just a shell of the woman she used to be. “The damned carcass had stolen from her. Some warm part of her was gone and might not return. This new formidable woman would take getting to know, and I was thirteen. I didn’t have the time” (Erdrich 193), says Joe. Feeling more and more alone, Joe is forced into
American history is riddled with destruction of Native cultures and societies, and “Indian Boarding Schools” by Louise Erdrich, and “There There” by Tommy Orange, showcase the historic trauma of Native Bodies from loss of homeland and culture, while emphasizing how Native Bodies strive to reclaim their culture. In the “Indian Boarding Schools”, Erdrich vividly describes her experience with having to go to Indian Boarding Schools, where she was forced to let go of her homeland and culture. She describes how when they got caught running away, they would be taken back in the sheriff’s car on “The highway”, which “hums like a wing of long insults” like “worn-down welts of ancient punishments” that “lead back”(Erdrich, Line 8 & 9). In this line, we see how the highway
All Our Relations by Winona LaDuke describes the neglect and unfair hardships that Native American people have had to experience over time. LaDuke uses Aristotelian appeals such as logos and pathos to tell how the white man disparaged these people. She spoke of Gail Small, a Montana State University professor and a well-known advocate for Native peoples. The way LaDuke tells Small’s story is perhaps the most and persuasive of all.
The Indigenous people of America are called Native Americans or often referred to as “Indians”. They make up about two percent of the population in the United States and some of them still live in reservations. They once lived freely in the wilderness without any sort of influence or exposure from the Europeans who later came in the year of 1492, and therefore their culture is very different from ours. The Iroquois are northeastern Native Americans who are historically important and powerful. In the following essay we will discover some differences between the religious beliefs of the Native American Iroquois and Christianity to see if culture and ways of living have an effect on the view of religion, but we will also get to know some similarities. I am going to be focusing on the Iroquois, which are the northeastern Native Americans in North America.
1. Paula Gunn Allen (“The Patriarchalization of Native American Tribes” has explained that she chose to write about Native American tribes to restore the “lost perspective” of people whose stories were “erased”. But what does her historical work have to do with gender, and contemporary understandings of the “place” of women in society? • Allen’s concept was about how Western traditions changed the Native American culture. Native Americans, before Western traditions, had women as Chief’s of a tribe.
Pocahontas was the most important Disney film. Not only does it have beautiful songs, and colorful animation, it speaks to Western Cultures' relationships to the indigenous people of North America. Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas' father, says, "these white men are dangerous." He was right, Western Culture eventually dominated all the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, this is also known as "Manifest Destiny". This is western cultures' excuse for the genocide of millions of indigenous people. In Louise Erdrich's novel, Love Medicine, Erdrich exposes how western cultures, specifically Christianity, have white-washed Native American culture by personifying her own upbringing through her characters' battles between religion and society.
The complex (incompatibility) of the Anishinabe culture and Western society provided for the complete breakdown and restructuring of traditional Native American society. Time- honored culture, belief systems, and conception of self underwent severe distortion under Western Colonialism. Louise Erdrich in her novel, Tracks, draws heavily on the complex nature of the Anishinabe deity Misshepeshu and the Western spiritual construct of Jesus Christ, to create a cultural metaphor for the assimilation of native identity. This metaphor, seen in the relationship between Pauline and Fleur, illustrates the traumatic relationship between the lost identity of self and the steps one will take to find purpose and acceptance.
Throughout the history of the Native Americans, no one has suffered more because of the white man’s atrocity than the children of the Indians. Most of them, if not all, were taken away from their reservation to live in a boarding school. Whether they liked it or not, they were to follow and obey the school’s rules and regulations even though they deemed it unforgiving. In her poem, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” Louise Erdrich meticulously depicted the sufferings of the Indian children at a boarding school created just for them to better assimilate with the white man’s culture. The speaker of the poem and the imagery used to describe this wonderful heart-warming literature made it possible to convey the real existence of the pain
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.
From the first landing of Columbus’s ships in 1492, the Native Americans have been grossly misunderstood by the Europeans and subsequently, the Americans. Even the name coined for them, Indians, was only conceived due to the fact that the Spanish thought they had landed in India. Just from sheer ignorance of the culture alone, Americans have indirectly and directly persecuted thousands upon thousands of Native Americans young and old. Author Louise Erdrich, a Native American herself, explores the themes of stereotypes and disregard for a culture in her poem “Dear John Wayne”. Through her use of irony and juxtaposition, in combination with imagery, Erdrich paints a picture for the audience detailing the struggle of being a Native American teen in a largely white America.
Native American medicine is a holistic approach that emphasizes the treatment of body, mind, and spirit. Because Native Americans believe that the health of an individual is inextricably linked to the people and objects surrounding that person, their healing practices promote harmony among everyone in a community--and with the physical environment and the spiritual world as well.
The relationship between the protagonist and the therapist is disagreeable, but they do work together to achieve emotional understanding and healing. The relationship between Indigenous people and Canadian society draws parallels to this, with a history tainted with atrocities being mended with growing amounts of social and emotional awareness. It leaves the possibility for reconciliation. The course to healing would be incomplete without a “Lucy” as well, an entity motivating your strength and fighting for your success. Despite the residential school system and other attempts at assimilation, Indigenous culture and traditions are still alive today – beautiful, unique, and something worth fighting
An emphasis on family is one of the central facets of Native American culture. There is a sense of community between Native American. Louise Erdrich, a Chippewa Indian herself, writes a gripping bildungsroman about a thirteen year old boy named Joe who experiences all forms of family on the Native American Reserve where he lives. He learns to deal with the challenges of a blood family, witnesses toxic family relationships, and experiences a family-like love from the members of the community. In her book, The Round House, Louise Erdrich depicts three definitions of the word family and shows how these relationships affect Joe’s development into an adult.
In Louise Erdrich’s Famous work of poetry, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”, shows how the context of the work and the author play major roles in understanding the poem from different aspects and angles to see between the lines of what we really call life. The Author Louise Erdrich is known for being one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and her writing on Native American literature is seen throughout the world. Through word decision, repetition, and symbolism bringing out her incredibly fierce tones, the author recalls the hurt and enduring impacts of Native American children being forced to attend Indian boarding schools. These schools emerged of a post-Civil War America in an effort to educate and also “civilize” the American Indian people.
Native Americans hold a type of esoteric concept that comes from their philosophy of preserving their environment as well as their kinship that ties them together (Access Genealogy, 2009). They not only have social ties, they are politically and religiously organized through their rituals, government, and other institutions (Access Genealogy, 2009). They work together to reside in a territorial area, and speak a common language (Access Genealogy, 2009). They are not characterized by any one certain structure (Access Genealogy, 2009). However, the society agrees on fundamental principles that bond together a certain social fabric (Access Genealogy, 2009). Different Native American tribes throughout the years have had different ideas, opinions, philosophies, which are not always predetermined by their past ancestors.