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Pretty Like A White Boy And Sara's Gift By Barbara Smith

514 Words3 Pages

In the short essay Pretty Like a White Boy by Drew Hayden Taylor and the short story Sara’s Gift by Barbara Smith, both protagonists come into conflict with forming their identity. The two characters illustrate Indigenous peoples' struggle with questioning their identity and searching for a belonging. The protagonists in both stories struggle with not fitting in because of their appearance. Drew Hayden Taylor never knew his white father, he grew up with his Ojibway mother and lived in the indigenous community, but was always looked at differently. “It’s Not Easy Having Blue Eyes in a Brown Eyed Village”(Taylor 504). Since Taylor did not look Ojibway, he felt insecure about his appearance and had a hard time fitting in, and had a difficulty connecting with his identity and whether he really was Ojibway. …show more content…

She had trouble fitting in with the white culture because everyone viewed her as Indigenous.“Lots of the white people look down on me because I’m Indian. I’m so confused, I don't know where I belong” (Smith 45). This caused Sara to question her identity because of how she looked. Next, the experiences of not being able to fit in make the two protagonists feel isolated. Taylor did not look like the other kids in the Ojibway community. “Whenever we played cowboys and Indians, guess who had to be the bad guy, the cowboy” (Taylor 504). This made him notice the difference between him and the other children, he felt isolated in his own community because of his appearance. Causing him to question his identity, when he felt ojibway but everyone saw him as white. Since Sara grew up away from her culture and has not spent a lot of time in the bush, when she went back she was not able to fully understand her native language. When she tried to speak, her family could not help but laugh

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