“I tell the stories not to play on your sympathies but to suggest how stories can control our lives, for there is a part of me that has never been able to more past these stories, as long as I live.” (9)

“So you have to be careful with the stories you tell.  And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.” (10)

“Why we tell our children that life is hard, when we could just as easily tell them that it is sweet.” (26)

“Though certainly we understand that we clearcut forests not to enrich the lives of animals but to make profit.  We know that we dam(n) rivers not to improve water quality but to create electricity and protect private property.  We make race and gender discriminatory markers for no othe rreason than that we can.  And we maintain and tolerate poverty not because we believe adversity makes you strong, but because we’re unwilling to share.” (27)

“You can’t understand the world without telling a story.  There isn’t any center to the world but a story.” (32) – Gerald Vizenor, an Anishinabe writer

“For the real value of authenticity is in the rarity of a thing.” (56)

“What’s important are the stories I’ve heard along the way.  And the stories I’ve told.  Stories we make up to try to set the world straight.” (60)

“Indians were seen as a threat both to the war effort and to the acquistion of land, and the Puritans set about creating the stories that were needed to carry the day.” (75)

“They aren’t just entertainment/Don’t be fooled/They are all we have, you see/All we have to fight off/Illness and death.  You don’t have anything/If you don’t have the stories.” (92) -Leslie Silko, Laguna storyteller

“And we were both hopeful pessimists.  That is, we wrote knowing that none of the stories we told would change the world.  But we wrote in the hope that they would.” (92)

“We live by stories, we also live in them.  One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves.  We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness.  If we change the stories we live by,  quite possibly we change our lives.” (153) – Ben Okri, a Nigerian storyteller

“But for the most part, I think of oral stories as public stories and written stories as private stories.” (154)

The Truth about stories by Thomas King is an amazing text! I absolutely loved the first chapter of this book. I have always been interested in the importance of stories in life, but I never realized how American Indian studies would make this idea more concrete and important.

The first chapter discusses creation and origin stories. King first tells an American Indian origin story about Charm. He takes many pages to tell this story and tells it in a way that the reader feels as if he is verbally telling you this story. This shows how amazing King is at oral storytelling! He then recounts the Christian origin story from Genesis. He tells this in just a few paragraphs.

What I found interesting was his commentary about these two stories. He states that you might think that basically they are similar stories, since they both explain the creation of the world, humans, animals, etc. , but how they are both based on two different belief systems. I had never thought of this before. Basically, the Native American story shows the importance of cooperation and that there is not a power struggle in creation, where the Christian story displays a power hierarchy of one God creating everything. In the Christian story, God makes everything good and then humans come and spoil everything, where in the Native American story, animals and her children help Charm in creation and the world starts off chaotic and then goes into good. These two frames of thought definitely show the differences in Western thought compared to American Indians.

This blew my mind when King then goes on to discuss that our whole culture has been formulated around the Christian origin story and that this influences our views and beliefs about everything else that we think or do. This shows that a story influences others and the stories that they also live and have.

I cannot even explain how much I was amazed by this first chapter. Not even about the differences between American Indians and Western thought or the importance of the stories in our lives. I think that I was just amazed by the grand scale of stories and human life. It is hard for me to even wrap my head around the thought about how society as we know it, could have been extremely different with a different story to start it off with.

Oh, how I love this book!!!!!!

In my prior blog, I posted about reading Code Talkers by Joesph Bruchac for my children’s literature class. We had a discussion today in class about racial literature for children and if it is a good thing for children to read or not and the argument within children’s literature academics about the importance of realism within children’s literature texts. Everyone in my class, besides me, is an education major, and it was very interesting to hear their responses to this book.

Everyone agreed that this is an important book to be taught to children in school. The importance of realistic literature for children is because even though not all children may be living like the characters from the text, some children might and might feel better knowing that they are not the only ones.

The interesting thing about the discussion to me was when my teacher asked what are some common stereotypes that people have about American Indians, to start discussing how stereotypes are wrong, bad for children, blah, blah, blah… But the responses by my classmates was all stereotypes that we have about Indians in the past, like they lived in teepees, wore headdresses, were good as farmers, etc.

Why did they only thing about Indians in the past and not in the present? Do most people think of Indians as a dying or dead group? This was definitely upsetting to me.

I am in a children’s literature course right now, also. For this last week, we had to read the book Code Talkers by Joseph Bruchac. This was an amazing story that explains how the Navajo Indians were very important within WWII. The marines used the Navajos to deliver urgent and confidential messages by using the Navajo language. This way the Japanese would not be able to uncode the messages and learn the information that was being sent. Navajo is a very hard language to learn and basically only children that are brought up speaking Navajo can master the language.

I enjoyed that I knew information about American Indians because of this American Indian class before I started reading this book. I also did my presentation and text review on Joseph Bruchac so I had a lot of prior knowledge about the author before reading this book.

The book starts off with the protagonist leaving his home on the Navajo reservation to go to a missionary boarding school. Bruchac shows how confusing and frustrating it must have been to lose your own language and the horrible punishments that they went through if they were caught speaking Navajo instead of English. I also had never thought about how they were given a set uniform, a haircut, and a name on their first day at these schools. All three of these went against many beliefs and ideals within the Navajo culture. This book definitely captures the insensitivity that the white people had for American Indian views, beliefs, and cultures.

The main points of this book are about how the protagonist joined the marines during WWII to become a codetalker and to fight for this country. The reader realizes that even though these Navajo soldiers were taught from a very young age that their language and culture was bad and wrong, that they in the end utilized their native language to help this country win WWII.

Andrea wrote a blog about the new PBS documentaries about American Indians entitled “We Shall Remain”.  I really wanted to watch these, but was unable to.  So, the next best thing was to read about them on a classmates blog!

Dan wrote a blog about Thomas King’s text “The Truth About Stories”.  I loved this book and was very interested in what my classmates thought about his writing.  Dan wrote about how King utilizes different writing stylings to show the importance of oral storytelling.  King is so amazing!

And Heather wrote a blog about Driskill’s poetry.  I definitely agreed with her in thinking that this poetry is amazing.  It is very passionate, powerful, emotional, and sensual.

Although there are some poems in this collection that I really like, I am not as excited about this poetry as I was about Qwo-Li’s.  Harjo’s poetry is still very good, but just not as much the style that I enjoy reading.

My favorite poems by her were “The Creation Story”, “If All Events Are Related”, “The Woman Hanging From the Thirteenth Floor Window”, “Fire”, “3 A.M.”, and “The Dawn Appears with Butterflys”.

It took me a few poems to get into this collection, but once I hit the poem “Map of the Americas”, I was in love with his writing style and beliefs.  He seems to be very honest and true to his beliefs.  His writing is very descriptive and allows me to visualize certain objects that relate to his poetry.

My favorite poems in this collection were: “Map of the Americas”, “High Yella Sonnet”, “Eulogy for the 40th”, “Grandmother Spider’s Lesson for an Urban Indian Queer”, “Evening with Andrew Jackson”, “Mutiny”, “I want to Bite Words”, and “A Long Story Made Short”.

The most upsetting part to me was the discussion about overpopulation, which some environmental groups feel is the cause for the destruction of the Earth.  This leads to taking away reproductive rights of women and to oppression of people of minorities, lower economic class status, and immigrants.

“The impact of an immigrant family living in a one-bedroom apartment and taking mass transit pales in comparison to that of a wealthy family living in a single family home with a swimming-pool and two cars. ” (75, Smith)

The chapter of the book by Winona LaDuke that we read was called “Akwesasne: Mohawk Mothers’ Milk and PCBs”.  This article tells the story of the Mohawk reservation in the St. Lawrence River area.  This is the most polluted and toxic area on this continent.  GM and other industry plants have been polluting the land, air, and water for decades.  This chapter shows how indigenous feminism is put to use with this issue.  Katsi Cook, a reservation midwife, has started an organization called the Akwesasne Mothers’ Milk Project in an effort to “understand and characterize how toxic contaminants have moved through the local food chain, including mothers’ milk”.  (19)  Toxins and pollutants, such as PCBs, DDT, Mirex, and HCBs have been found in high percentages within the water and land that this reservation is located on.  Unfortunately, this affects the fish and other wildlife in the area.  Cook is trying to inform expectant mothers about these pollutants and to tell them not to eat fish from the river.

We also read the third chapter of the book Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.  The chapter was entitled “Rape of the Land”.   This was such a moving text because it discussed the idea of environmental racism.  Environmental racism is “by forcing those people who have already been rendered dirty, impure, and hence expendable to face the most immediate consequences of environmental destruction” (57).  This form of racism affects all different types of peoples, usually minorities or people of lower economic class status.  For example, “3 out of every 5 African Americans and Latino North Americans live in communities with toxic waste sites.  Half of all Asians, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites.  People of color are also disproportionately affected by workplace hazards.  For instance, pesticide exposure among primarily Latino farmworkers causes more than 300,000 pesticide-related illnesses each year.” (57-58)  This is especially hurtful to many American Indian reservations, as described in the earlier discussed LaDuke article, since their land is often used by the government for nuclear waste dumps.  The most disturbing section of this text is the information about the Marshall Islands and the nuclear bomb tests that were done there after WWII.  The indigenous people of these islands live with the after effects of nuclear contamination on a daily basis.  1 in 3 babies born there have some form of birth defect, ranging from having only 1 eye, to having 2 heads, or “jellyfish” babies, which are born with no bones and have see-through skin, and die within a day of birth.

It is ridiculous that we test nuclear bombs or dump off nuclear or other poisonous waste around people whose lives are not seen as valuable to the citizens/government of this country.  These people are beginning to voice their anger and concern and hopefully more voices will add to theirs to show that this is important, not only to their lives, but to all human beings on this planet.

I am in a children’s literature class, also. In this class, we were recently required to read the science fiction novel Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Engdahl. I really enjoyed this book for many reasons. But while I was reading this novel, I found many instances where I was thinking about American Indian studies. The author states that this novel was not written to discuss current relations between races and peoples on our planet, but about how our future might be. BUT, there were way too many discussions and quotes that dealt with colonization and savages for me not to think otherwise.

A simple summary of this novel is there is a federation of planets that is extremely evolved. Some of their people obtain jobs as a kind of ethnographers or anthropologists. They watch and visit lower evolved planets and peoples, but are not allowed to interfere with these people or to let themselves be known in any way. A team lands on a planet that has a lower societal evolution and lives within a feudal system. They try to help these people from another planet that is trying to colonize this planet for themselves and put these people into reservations. The people that want to colonize the planet see the natives as not even real people who don’t deserve true freedom or rights since they think that these people are not at the same intellectual and technological level as themselves.

The text is written using perspectives from each of the three different groups of people and essentially shows that even though humans are different and may live in different forms of societies and believe in different values, the differing groups all consist of humans that have thought, emotions, beliefs, ideals, and rationality. I think that this text would be an interesting text to be studied in regards to culture clashes, but especially in regards to American Indian studies, since there has been a history of looking down on natives and the set up of reservations to aid Western settlers with colonization. Since this book takes place in the future and with different groups of cultures and peoples, readers can sympathize with thoughts and beliefs with each group, without originally having a stereotype in the their head with a correlating culture.

Here are some quotes from this text that made me think of it relating to American Indian studies:

“We’ve got to make an example sometimes, put these devils in their place — or else sooner or later somebody’s going to get hurt.”  “Hurt?  Wasn’t she hurt?  Or don’t you put murder in that class?”  “Look, blasting a savage isn’t murder, and you know it.  Murder’s a word that applies to human beings.” (44)

“We’re not killing them off, are we?  They’ll get a whole tract of free land.”  “Yes, free — on their own planet.  Maybe two or three percent of the surface.  Of course, it won’t be the most attractive two or three percent.”(90)

“We ourselves are no better than savages.  We are on no higher a level than the natives, and we never will be; progress is a myth!”(148)

“How could they ever imagine the way that ‘civilized’ men were likely to behave toward anybody who happened to be both different and weak?”(195)