Phase 1 Prompt 1

Cultures change. Sometimes they change slowly in response to warming temperatures, differences in food sources, or new migration patterns. Sometimes they change swiftly in response to colonialism, famine, migration, or war. But at some point a culture ceases to be a culture and becomes an ethnicity. Many people are familiar with the stories of the white man colonizing American, striping the Native Americans of their land, and forcing them onto infertile reservations in the hopes of turning them into a typical “white man” rural farmer (and remember that many Native American cultures involved hunting a gathering for food). Therefore it is not difficult to deduce that this change in culture didn’t make life on the reservations easy.  The median income on some reservations today is as low as $10,000 a year, and reservations are also being described as “violent, drug-infested, and criminal” (Treuer) as a result of this poverty.  But there are roughly 310 Indian Reservations in the United States, and 564 federally recognized tribes in the United States; so where are all the Indians? There is no hiding the fact that the Native American culture is “dying out”. Although there is said to be over 2 million Native Americans alive today (verses the only 200,000 in 2000), not every Indian lives on a reservation.  Before the Europeans came to American, there was said to be over 300 Native American Languages. Today there is only about 150, and of those only 20 are thought to their children. The rest are left to the elders to preserve and the average life expectancy of Indian men on Indian reservations is about 64 (Treuer). At 65 many “white people” just start to retire. In the short story “the approximate size of my favorite humor, the main character’s wife Norma states that “’Every one of our elders who dies takes a piece of our past away,’ she said. ‘And that hurts more because I don’t know how much of a future we have.’” (Alexie, 167). Throughout this short story there is a constant theme of using a sarcastic tone and humor to hide pain. The main character James Many horses is dying from cancer, however the only way he can deal with his pain is through jokes and sarcasm, eventually causing Norma to leave.“Still, you have to realize that laughter saved Norma and me from pain. Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.” (164). In reading this story I feel like the dying of James Many Horses is somewhat symbolic of the “dying out” of the Native American culture. Norma was known as a preserver of the Native American culture. She was known to make the best fry bread around and whenever an elder would die she would “weep violently” (Alexie, 167).  She was known as a warrior. So when James Many Horse jokes about dying I think it’s signifies how Native Americans today are hiding their pain with alcohol and “loving to hate their fathers”. Norma’s leaving represented the departure of Native American Culture, and when Norma returns she claims it is “’…because making fry bread and helping people die are the last two things Indians are good at.’”(170). Nonetheless, with this final gesture from Norma who finally gives in with the jokes of death and the children that would never be, I feel as though not only is she accepting the death of her husband but also the death of her culture.

-Aryn Banovic

Reference:

Treuer, David. Rez Life: An Indian's Journey through Reservation Life. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2012. Print.