Compare And Contrast Three Generations Of Native American Women's Birth Experience

Compare and Contrast Essay

Melanie Zwitter

Rasmussen College

Compare and Contrast Essay The two short stories that will be compared and contrasted in this essay are “Black Mountain, 1977” by Donald Antrim and “Three Generations of Native American Women’s Birth Experience” by Joy Harjo. In “Black Mountain, 1977”, the story is about a grandson and grandfather that keep a relationship even when the grandfather’s daughter doesn’t want them to have a relationship. The grandson would stay with his grandparents and found a way to keep their relationship even with problems that happened. In “Three Generations of Native American Women’s Birth Experience”, the story starts out with a girl as a pregnant teenager about to give birth

The grandson in “Black Mountain, 1977”, mother was an alcoholic and his parents fought all the time, his grandfather had retired the year his grandson graduated from high school. His grandfather asked him if he wanted to help his fix up a house and with everything going on with his family, he went there with his grandparents. During that summer he grew and knew with everything happening with his family he would be ok. The young girl in the beginning of “Three Generations of Native American Women’s Birth Experience” had a different experience in growing up. She had a bad experience with the hospital that she birthed her son and did not want that to happen again and she says, “I wanted something different for my life, for my son, and for my daughter, who later was born in a university hospital in Albuquerque (Harjo, 1991).” She got a good job that offered her insurance and when her daughter became pregnant she was going to give her what she never had but then her daughter had went into labor a month early having problems. Leading to a difficult labor but was different because she was surrounded by family unlike her mother who was alone. The young girl now a grandmother has grown into a better life for her and her

The difference between the two short stories is that in “Black Mountain, 1977”, there is a dysfunctional family dynamic where the narrator wants to have a relationship with his grandfather and his mother is trying to stop that from happening. In “Three Generations of Native American Women’s Birth Experience”, the narrator wants to have a better life for her family and be treated better as a Native American compared to how she was treated when she was younger. This are very powerful literary works because unfortunately dysfunction and being treated unfairly is a way of the world right now. Not that everyone is this way but as a nurse this will be seen more often than we would like. With these stories, the characters have found a way to make it through the bad