The narratives explicate helplessness experienced by Snead’s mother and grandmother during their years in public schools. Snead’s mother is violently and forcibly pulled into English system of beliefs and education in spite of her resistance causing her to develop a sense of disrespect towards her own language, identity, colour, and cultural practices. The commonalities like imposition of settler’s life-style, food habits, and education on grandmother and mother hint at the overpowering influence of missionaries in Native American childhood, the only difference being that the Boarding schools which worked independently in the former case are aided by Federal Government in the latter. Here, the European influence is an enforced intervention …show more content…
Important to note here is also how the family and community to which the child belongs are denied participation and influence in children’s upbringing. Divested of one’s language now Cherokee children now see themselves drifting away from means to understand the spiritual symbols embedded in their oral narratives which would be rendered incomprehensible to them denying them access to the healing principles embodied in the same. A continuum with the Trail of Tears is established here for the Cherokee children. After severing off physical ties one’s own land that holds spiritual values in Cherokee conscious the children now driven out of their own houses on reservations and alienated from one’s heritage and cultural