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The Purpose Of Unit V: American Indians

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Unit V: American Indians

The movie Smoke Signals was very humorous, although it was very entertaining it was also an insight on the oppression and the resentment that the culture obtains.The movie explained the therapeutic and uneasy choices made to cope with past trauma. I learned that alcohol, violence and abandonment play a big role when trying to figure out your cultural identity; especially when you have been assimilated and abused into thinking that your culture is not important. I learned from the speakers that despite the past and the false accusations of an American Indians personality, Natives are really down to earth people and so forgiving. I’ve learned that even today the American Indians are divided into groups by the Blood …show more content…

The purpose of the boarding schools were to strip the Indians of their culture, to punish them until they believed and practiced English ways. Boarding schools were made to isolate the children and break the patterns of their backgrounds. The adolescents at were treated horribly at the school, their hair had been cut, they had been abused for speaking the only language they knew and they were locked in closets for crying. The children of the boarding schools were neglected, they returned with the language of the English and some knowledge of christianity but they did not return with the basic skills to work in the white society. The children could no longer relate to their families and the impact was huge negativity. Returning home children were neglected because they could not decipher the language used at home, parents were depressed and started using alcohol which caused them to be so sloppy that they abandoned children, suicide rates had risen with the rates of crimes, gangs, and violence. Because of the anger and oppression the American Indian community fell apart, with nothing to really unite them because of the absence of culture and

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Smoke Signals is one of the most touching films of the 1990’s, based on Sherman Alexie’s short story, This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona. Although it is not a standard Western film, but one can learn much about American Indians’ life as it is a film created and acted by them. The indigenous characters of the film are not represented as the typical Western film’s American Indians, but the story represents indigenous life in a natural way, and gives a contemporary image to the viewer of them as the new generation American Indians, who grew up in Native American boarding schools, speak the English language well, and white people started to convert them into the Christian religion. The well-known stereotypes about their roots and lifestyle appear in a hidden, humorous way with the help of symbols that usually refers to their past; and do not appear in an easy, clear way, as it is hard to understand without any background information about Native Americans. In this paper I would like to search for the symbols of the film, analyse them, and try to understand the historical or even political background of these motifs, which pervades American Indian’s life, and can help us understand their spirituality that is deeply rooted in their culture.

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