The Man Who Killed The Deer Analysis

The United States at one point decimated native people along with their identity and culture, simultaneously, exploiting them as individuals. In the novel “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel”, Sherman Alexie admonishes against toxic stereotypes held by white people against native people thus, showing hegemonic structures of them. This is because the dominance of white culture exploits people of other culture, race, identity and gender to acculturate to the white norms. The novels junctions are informed through a lens of an American Indian to awake the ignorance on stereotypical views for native people. The author draws attention not only to native people’s beauty, but also to their poverty, alcoholism and frequent

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.

Popular culture has shaped our understanding and perception of Native American culture. From Disney to literature has given the picture of the “blood thirsty savage” of the beginning colonialism in the new world to the “Noble Savage,” a trait painted by non-native the West (Landsman and Lewis 184) and this has influenced many non native perceptions. What many outsiders do not see is the struggle Native American have on day to day bases. Each generation of Native American is on a struggle to keep their traditions alive, but to function in school and ultimately graduate.

In American Indian life, they believe their life is interconnected with the world, nature, and other people. The idea of a peoplehood matrix runs deep in Indian culture, in this essay the Cherokee, which is the holistic view of sacred history, language, ceremony, and homeland together. This holistic model shapes the life of the American Indians and how their sense of being and relationship to their history is strong and extremely valuable to them. This essay will try to explain how each aspect of the peoplehood matrix is important and interconnected to each other and the life of the Native Americans.

The Man I Killed is the story of the man that Tim O’Brien killed. However, this story is not true. He later mentions that he did not in fact kill the man, yet he was present and that was enough. This story, according to him, is told to show the reader how he feels, because O’Brien feels as though the truth is that by doing nothing, he killed the man, so in his story, he does kill the man. Imagery is the biggest literary device seen in this story, but diction also helps make the story seem more true, it helps the reader to truly believe that O’Brien did in fact throw the grenade that killed the man. This story is told from O’Brien’s point of view, which would be first person, despite the fact that the word “I” is

“The drink had me snared. I spoke less and drank more, and I became the Indian again; drunken and drooling and reeling, a caricature everyone sought to avoid,”(Wagamese,181). This stomach-turning quote displays what several First Nations thought their identity to be. With this in mind, to begin, “Indian Horse,” by Richard Wagamese is a somber and intriguing novel, with many thought-provoking points within the book. To illustrate this, the book follows a First Nations boy through his youth to adulthood. It is filled with traumatic events, depressing stories and even a few joyful moments. In addition, the novel takes place from around 1960-1980 throughout Ontario. Furthermore, this essay will explore several events and factors which impacted, Saul, the main character's identity.

In this short story, Blue Winds Dancing, depicts a personal closeness of a Native American and his home to values learned along the way. As we continue to read the entire story, you will discover how the content and various selections of literary are well-created. Whitecloud introduces this story in the 1930’s, where this story takes place, about a man struggling with his white culture and his Indian culture way of life. Whitecloud says, that “These civilized white men want us to be like them-always dissatisfied getting a hill and wanting a mountain” (pg. 320). Whitecloud is dissatisfied with the white people’s behavior, but also knows that his people have taken things away too. “They know how to give; how to tear one’s piece of meat in two and share it with one’s brother.” “They know how to make things with their

“The Way of a Cherokee” by Foxxy is about her memories and experiences growing up as a young child with her sister, Sierra, and grandpa. She is a Native American that has lived in a world that is different from the world her grandpa grew up in. In addition, she learned to love and appreciate nature just like her grandpa did. I can relate to her relationship with her grandpa because I have created many memories with my grandpa. My grandpa told me stories about his childhood. In Foxxy’s essay she explores the relationship between identity and cultural history through physical location, family relationships, and language differences.

Traditions and old teachings are essential to Native American culture; however growing up in the modern west creates a distance and ignorance about one’s identity. In the beginning, the narrator is in the hospital while as his father lies on his death bed, when he than encounters fellow Native Americans. One of these men talks about an elderly Indian Scholar who paradoxically discussed identity, “She had taken nostalgia as her false idol-her thin blanket-and it was murdering her” (6). The nostalgia represents the old Native American ways. The woman can’t seem to let go of the past, which in turn creates confusion for the man to why she can’t let it go because she was lecturing “…separate indigenous literary identity which was ironic considering that she was speaking English in a room full of white professors”(6). The man’s ignorance with the elderly woman’s message creates a further cultural identity struggle. Once more in the hospital, the narrator talks to another Native American man who similarly feels a divide with his culture. “The Indian world is filled with charlatan, men and women who pretend…”

The American Indian occupies a unique place in the White American imaginary. Indians, one is told, are cordial, wise, poor in the “humble poverty” sort of way, brown, there assist whites with either mystic knowledge or humorous ignorance. Figures such as Squanto, Tonto and Disney’s Pocahontas along with a large smattering of Westerns and cartoonish depictions have created this image of the Native American – an image which rarely translates into the present day. In contrast to this, Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a Native American coming-of-age story centered around the first-person point of view of the Native protagonist Arnold “Junior” Spirit, Jr. and his dual life on the Spokane Indian Reservation and his time off the reservation at an all-white public school in the town of Reardan, Washington. The novel revolves around themes like race, identity formation and mortality and details life on Indian reservations as it attempts to give a realistic account of contemporary Native American life, each which shape the novel in unique ways.

This book is the story of Thomas Yellowtail, a religious leader, and a “pivotal figure in Crow tribal life”. In his youth, Yellowtail lived alongside great men who have tasted the freedom of the days before the reservations life, and were familiar with the sacred ways. Thomas Yellowtail was a Crow healer and also a top religious figure in the Sun Dance, which was the most important part of the Plains Indian spirituality. Yellowtail describes the social problems in reservations, and explains how alcoholism, drug abuse, and poverty were manifested by declining values (pg.28). By trading their daily contact with the nature and prayer, for the modern day fast pace, and things like television, Yellowtail suggests that Indians have become out of

In this original study, Elizabeth A. Fenn challenges researchers of Native American history to reevaluate the ways that we see and compose such history. All the way, Fenn inundates perusers in an entirely Native world particularly, the Mandan people groups of present-day North Dakota where everything from the names of the seasons to the spaces the Mandan possessed or adored are remade from the Mandan point of view. Some of the most important things the Mandan did are influence the people around them, which customs would be beneficial to my life, and applying Mandan way to my life.

The United States has been built on a land with a history of its own. Native Americans lived all throughout North America before colonization. Although some of them are long gone, they have not been forgotten. Native Americans have rich and diverse culture that has been preserved through stories, myths, songs, and legends; all passed down through generations. One of the most important themes in Native American literature is the relationship between people and nature. This plays a role in almost all of their stories. Two of these stories are “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” by Leslie Silko and “The Way to Rainy Mountain” by N. Scott Momaday. I will be comparing these stories and exploring similarities and differences in their

The setting was early November, the weather was cool, the leaves crisp and falling to the force of the frigid fall breeze. Deer season was in full swing, while Jon and Lance were on a mission to kill a monster buck the two of them had been watching. Over the course of the last two months Jon and Lance had been bowhunting several times in search of the monster buck the two of them had seen. This buck was bigger than either one of them had ever seen. The buck stood as tall as a horse and the bucks rack went towering in the sky, which was visible from miles away. With the size of this buck it should be super easy to hunt him they though, he cannot hide very good. There was an issue though, because every time Jon and Lance seen this monster buck in the woods while hunting, strange things seemed to happen. For example, every time Jon or Lance sighted the buck it would quickly vanish into thin air. As weird as that seems to be that is not the craziest thing that has happened. Every time the buck would vanish there would be some sort of violence directed towards Jon or Lance. One time for instance, the buck was spotted between Jon and lance while hunting and it disappeared. Soon after that Jon just about got shot in the head with an arrow. Jon was just sitting there in his tree stand dazed at the pure amazement of the buck disappearing and he felt a quick breeze go by his head followed by a loud crack in the tree. There was an arrow stuck in the tree

Native American literatures embrace the memories of creation stories, the tragic wisdom of native ceremonies, trickster narratives, and the outcome of chance and other occurrences in the most diverse cultures in the world. These distinctive literatures, eminent in both oral performances and in the imagination of written narratives, cannot be discovered in reductive social science translations or altogether understood in the historical constructions of culture in one common name. (Vizenor 1)