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What Sacagawea Means To Me

722 Words3 Pages

This Sherman Alexie's influential essay, "What Sacagawea Means to Me" is all about our country and its contradictions. When you first start reading this essay, you get the feeling that his tone is sarcasm. At the beginning of his essay Alexie states this, "In the future, every U.S. citizen will get to be Sacagawea for 15 minutes". My thought is that he is saying everyone in the U.S. will get to experience hardships like the ones that Sacagawea had to suffer throughout her difficult life. Sacagawea was the Indian woman who led Louis and Clark on their expedition across the U.S. However, she had a very brutal life that most people do not know about; that is Alexie's main idea in this essay.He talks about how Sacagawea and America are both contradictions. …show more content…

In the beginning, Alexie mentions “In the future, every U.S. citizen will get to be Sacagawea for 15 minutes” now at first I had no idea what he meant by that, but once I got to the conclusion, it clicked. You can tell that in this passage, Alexie is being sarcastic. But I think that he was doing that on purpose to get his point across. The more that I read this repeatedly, the more sense it made and how Alexie felt that he, himself is a contradiction as well. Although, he mentions Sacagawea quite often, he does bring up other people as well. What got me from the first passage is “IF THE U.S. IS EDEN, THEN SACAGAWEA IS EVE. It came to my mind that Alexie was obviously referring to the bible. Eve was the first woman on earth, first wife, and the first mother. In comparison, Sacagawea was the only woman to lead the Louis and Clark expedition. Eve’s weaknesses was she was tempted by Satan when he encouraged her into doubting the word of God. Sacagawea’s weakness was that she got taken by the Hidatsa tribe, she had an arranged marriage and she did not fight for it. By talking about the strengths and weaknesses about Sacagawea and Eve came to my attention that we just must accept personal responsibility for our actions and choices we make in our lives. Along the passage, Alexie also mentions “As a Native American, I want to hate this country and its contradictions”.

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