Paula Allen's 'Where I Come From Is Like This'

“Where I Come From Is Like This” is an essay that primarily is addressing the people who have misinterpreted the significant roles that Modern American Indian women played in traditional American Indian culture. Paula Allen sets up her argument in the first paragraph and states that American Indian Women are “deeply engaged in the struggle to redefine themselves.” (1.) They struggle with the fact that they have to incorporate both the traditional tribal and modern definitions of Indian women in their lives. The first claim that Allen makes in order to validate her argument is that she has “known a wide range of personal style and demeanor” in Indian women. Sometimes people see “women as fearful, sometimes peaceful… but they never portray women as mindless, helpless, simple, or oppressed.” (2.) She is trying to say that all women are complex and different in their own individual way. Her primary support for this claim is ethos, which she builds by sharing the many memories she has growing up as a half breed American Indian

By stating that from her “daily experience of Indian life” and mentioning her mother and other Indians that raised her, she gets the audience to trust that what she’s saying is accurate, since she has experience. She states that Indians are truthful human beings and “care for their children and their old people… and that you will never see an Indian orphan and you always know that when you’re old, someone will take care of you.” (7.) Allen is suggesting that if Indians do all these things, there is no reason for other non-Indians to call them savages, and she uses the ethos to help convince readers otherwise as