Native American Worldviews In 'The Girl Who Sang To The Buffalo'

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 American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will

“Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.-Native American proverb” This is a Native American proverb that shows how important storytelling and stories are to the Native Americans and their culture. Storytelling was a big way of teaching their lifestyle to their younger generation. Storytelling is very important to the Native American culture because it helps explain their way of life, faith, and helps teach life lessons to the younger generation.

In her book American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa's central role as both an activist and writer surfaces, which uniquely combines autobiography and fiction and represents an attempt to merge cultural critique with aesthetic form, especially surrounding such fundamental matters as religion. In the tradition of sentimental, autobiographical fiction, this work addresses keen issues for American Indians' dilemmas with assimilation. In Parts IV and V of "School Days," for example, she vividly describes a little girl's nightmares of paleface devils and delineates her bitterness when her classmate died with an open Bible on her bed. In this groundbreaking scene, she inverts the allegation of Indian religion as superstition by labeling

Erasure. Imagine having almost every detail of your life – your beliefs, your family, your culture, and success – erased by those only focused on their own personal gain. That is what happened to Native Americans over the course of American history. Due to the settler colonialism that laid the foundation of our nation, many Native Americans became the victims of horrific abuse and discrimination. As “whiteness” became the ideal in society, Native Americans lost their voices and the ability to stand up for themselves. Through her memoir, Bad Indians, Deborah Miranda reveals the truth of the horrific pasts of California Native Americans, and gives her ancestors’ stories a chance to finally be heard. In the section “Old News”, Deborah Miranda writes poems from the “white man’s” perspective to show the violent racism committed against Native Americans, as well as the indifference of whites to this violence.

Lives for Native Americans on reservations have never quite been easy. There are many struggles that most outsiders are completely oblivious about. In her book The Roundhouse, Louise Erdrich brings those problems to light. She gives her readers a feel of what it is like to be Native American by illustrating the struggles through the life of Joe, a 13-year-old Native American boy living on a North Dakota reservation. This book explores an avenue of advocacy against social injustices. The most observable plight Joe suffers is figuring out how to deal with the injustice acted against his mother, which has caused strife within his entire family and within

In Lakota Woman, a biographical account of Mary Crow Dog, there is established a reoccurring theme centered around Native American women and their outlasting strength as they play their roles of wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters. Especially so in trying times, which Crow Dog illustrates, that have spanned for centuries and are as inescapable as they have ever been. Remarkable are her feats of bravery fueled by strength she’s derived from other influential women in her life and her love for her people and their traditions. Without a doubt, Native American women had and always will play a large role in keeping the ardor behind their fight for equality and justice lit. Whether it be physically, such as it was in Wounded Knee, spiritually, in their participation in keeping up rituals and religion, or traditionally, as they help uphold old values beloved by their people for centuries.

Storytelling is a large component of Native American’s culture. Storytelling has the ability to connect people, events, and things to each other which transcends racial and temporal boundaries. Van Camp transcends the binary’s boundaries through storytelling, bringing Native traditions and events into the modern world. For example, Larry is a Dogrib, yet he is not living on a reservation and more or less seems to know little about his Indigenous identity, “Due to the novel's multiethnic small-town setting and his parents' residential schooling, Larry seldom receives cultural knowledge that might explicate... a traditional Dogrib social structure” (McKegney). However, through storytelling, specifically oral storytelling, Van Camp sets up a connection between Larry and his tribal knowledge. Larry is told his tribe’s creation story which serves as a vessel to deliver tribal knowledge into Larry’s modern world. The creation story can also be seen to transcend boundaries between the different Indigenous tribes of Jed, Larry, and Johnny. Larry is also seen to share stories with the readers as well as the characters of Juliet, and Johnny. Juliet is white and learns of an Indigenous story through Larry, “I closed my eyes and decided to let the story lead. I was just the voice, and I knew the story would tell itself.” (Van Camp 113). The story connected Juliet with

Native Americans and the Frontier The Native Americans of today are descendents of the Mongoloid people who migrated from Asia into N. America somewhere in between 20 to 40,000 years ago. When the Europeans rediscovered N. America at the end of the 15th century, the Native Americans whom they discovered were particularly diverse in nature. They were diverse in terms of their religion, political organisation and their language. Aspects of the relationships between Colonists/Europeans and the Native Americans Co-habitation:

Like a coin dropped between the cushions of a couch, traditional oral storytelling is a custom fading away in current American culture. For Native Americans, however, the practice of oral storytelling is still a tradition that carries culture and rich history over the course of generations. Three examples of traditional oral stories, “How Men and Women Got Together”, “Coyote’s Rabbit Chase”, and “Corn Mother”, demonstrate key differences in perspectives and values among diverse native tribes in America.

Sherman Alexie show how non Native Americans treat Native Americans in court and day to day life.

“What I’m about to tell you, Corporal, cannot leave this room. Under no circumstances can you allow your code talker to fall into enemy hands. Your mission is to protect the code… at all cost.” In the movie, Windtalkers, this is how a commander wants his marine to treat the paired Navajo code talker. That is, if it’s necessary, his marine could kill the Navajo, just like abandoning one of his properties. Even in the mid 1900s, the Native Americans were still treated not as human beings, but rather, machines; therefore, it is not hard for us to imagine how even more frightening the Native Americans’ circumstances were in the early days when they were first colonized by the western settlers. In Deborah Miranda’s “Indian

The Native American Trickster is usually described as a character that “is a wandering, bawdy, gluttonous, and obscene” (72). The Trickster is “usually male but able to alter his sex at will,” he “may copulate with his daughter or daughter–in-law or send his penis swimming across rivers in search of sexual adventure” (72). He is often characterized as being “selfish, amoral, foolish, destructive, and as his name indicates, given to duping others in his own interest” (72). However, the trickster “is also a culture hero, someone often with godlike power who long, long ago helped to establish the order of the world that we know today” (72). Though, his folly caused him to forget his purpose of ridding the earth of evil entities, he is still a staple in Native American tales. Every tribe has their own version of the trickster!

Back in 1995, as a 20 year old woman, I was, absolutely, still in love with everything Disney. I was still very much enamored with the romance and fairy tale aspects of all their stories and movies. So when the Walt Disney Company released the animated feature “Pocahontas” in the summer of my 20th year, I had to see it. At the time, I thought I had hit the jackpot with this movie. “An American legend comes to life” is the tagline to get viewers interested in this movie. [1] A heroin, whom was a beautiful Indian and a love story, who could ask for more from a Disney movie, I thought to myself. Now, being ignorant of the true facts about the Indian woman Pocahontas and even about Indian culture and history itself, I took this story more

Native American literature transformed a dark world into a place of creativity in order to understand the concept of life