Why I Chose Estranged As A Woman

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

Kaplan 2). This struggle was the beginning of her independence from her relatives and her coming of age.

Young and not yet attentive to the Americanized way of hate, Jeanne Wakatsuki, youngest daughter of Ko, did not revolt or resist the discrimination her family faced at Manzanar. Forced to live in confining and unsuitable shacks, four persons to a room, the family structure disintegrated while family members grew farther and farther apart. In these camps, privacy did not exist, solitude a scarce thing. These people were thrown into unlivable sheds in the middle of a desert. They were treated as an inferior class, one subordinate to white Americans.

Novels and plays often depict characters caught between colliding cultures-national, regional, ethnic, religious, institutional. Such collisions can call a character’s sense of identity into question. In Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, there is a cultural collision that takes the form of the missionaries coming to Umuofia and forcing their religion upon the people. Different people react differently to this clash of cultures, ranging from simply conforming to going as far as killing somebody.

In the book, The Good Braider, by Terry Farish, the reader follows the story of a young Sudanese girl who escapes from her war-ridden country and eventually comes to find a home in America. The story of Viola in this story is one that shows how the integration of fugitive people into American society today is still relative of the basic principles that were retained by many of the first settlers of this continent, especially those that pertain to aspects of adoption of an alternative environment, assimilation into a new culture, and the continuation of pre-existing ethnic traditions.

Freedoms taken away from her in the hope for education and opportunities. Is it worth it? Is it worth it to give up freedoms, maybe a little bit of ourselves? Do we endure these difficulties now to then better ourselves in the future? I’m sure that’s something Zitkala-Sa thought about. She wanted to be educated like the “paleface” Maybe she thought to be like the “paleface” was to be American. For Zitkala-Sa the ending is a bitter-sweet moment. “There were two prizes given, that night, and one of them was mine! The little taste of victory did not satisfy a hunger in my heart. In my mind I saw my mother far away on the Western plains, and she was holding a charge against me.”

In each instance the individual has been separated from family, it also means a fracturing of their identity. The Identity of Aboriginal people links family and land. The land connection is like a bond to family in a parental capacity; the land is our mother and deserves our respect. Separation from family is also separation from cultural belonging. The family is there to reiterate identity and culture.

In her novel, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Deborah A. Miranda theorizes that the underlying patronage of her father’s violent behavior arises from the original acts of violence carried out by the Spanish Catholic Church during the era of missionization in California. The structure of her novel plays an essential role in the development of her theory, and allows her to further generalize it to encompass the entire human population. “In this beautiful and devastating book, part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir, Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems.” Patching together every individual source to create the story of a culture as a whole, Miranda facilitates the task of conceptualizing how Societal Process Theory could play into the domestic violence she experiences growing up as the daughter of a California Indian.

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.

Zitkala returned to the reservation with a different mindset than when she left. She became “culturally unhinged” from her Native American lifestyle. Zitkala regretted not going to the western plains to be with her mother. However, she accepted the student body who had a strong prejudice of her people and continued her education to receive a diploma.

In Leanne Simpson’s short story “it takes an ocean not to break,” (“Islands of Decolonial Love” 2015), the author, through the continuing change of tone, paints a portrait of the depths of trauma that is persistent in indigenous society and one of its central issues, suicide. The “therapy-lady” is portrayed as the “other” when put into contact with Indigenous problems and her words come off as almost foreign to the speaker. She can be seen as an allegorical character that represents “white” ideology, or even our current government as a whole, who tries to help the Indigenous people but ultimately fails, not only due to lack of caring but in reality a lack of understanding.

“Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman,” written by Marjorie Shostak; is a culturally shocking and extremely touching book about a woman who had gone through many struggles and horrific tragedies in her life. This book also emphasizes the perspective of most of the women in the society. There are many striking issues in this book that the people of the !Kung tribe go through. Marjorie Shostak, an anthropologist, has written this book and studied the !Kung tribe for two years. Shostak had spent her two years interviewing the women in the society. She was very eager to learn more about how women’s roles differed from our own here in the United States. She knew that the !Kung were one of the

There are many countries in the world and every country is unique and individualistic with many exclusive qualities. Everyone in the world has a culture but it is not easy to accept or agree with other people’s culture. The ethnography, “Guests of the Sheik”, written by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea really captures what it is like to live and to be immersed into another culture. Ethnography is “comprised of the writings of the anthropologist, detailing the life ways of a particular culture, investigated by means of direct fieldwork” (Arenson, and Miller-Thayer 1). Elizabeth Fernea lived in a small village of El Nahra in southern Iraq for two years to gather data for her anthropologist husband Bob. In the beginning, she had limited knowledge of Iraq, its religion or culture, but as she started connecting with the women of the society, she came to learn both about this foreign country and about herself. Acculturation is “the process of acceptance resulting for the contact between two cultures, or an individual interacting in at least two cultures” (517). As she builds relationships with the woman’s, she is acculturated.

Never can one fully escape the captivity of their heritage. But rather they hold onto pieces of their culture through daily activities, hobbies, or simple interactions, restraining them from ever completely adapting into another’s culture. With the use of critical arguments from Frederic Nietzsche, Deborah L. Madsen, and Gloria Anzaldua, this thesis will prove that the characters within the works of Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues and Tyehimba Jess’ Leadbelly can never fully assimilate into the dominate culture due to driving elements such as storytelling and dreaming which heavily impact their individual lives, promoting acceptance of their own heritage and cultural identity over that of the oppressive dominating society.

In things fall apart the characters go through the struggle of self finding and colonization in their homeland. One of our main protagonists Nwoye handles this situation a little bit better than most .The novel “Things Fall apart” the Ibo community is experiencing European colonization which causes a major downfall in the clan and leads to new experiences some good some bad.Culture collision is where two or more groups of people who believe in different religions began to have conflict with one another due to their different beliefs.In the novel Things Fall Apart, the author Chinua Achebe conveys that when met with a culture collision you must choose your own faith and decide what is best for you through the development of a character’s shift in identity.