My Reservation

My Reservation

In the short book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, the reader follows a young teen named Junior as he goes through his freshman year full of racists, hormones, and basketball. Arnold was born with water on the brain, and has mismatched eyes, brain damage, seizures, a stutter, and a lisp because of it. He wasn't supposed to survive a surgery given to him shortly after his birth, but he overcomes all odds and makes it through. On the Spokane Indian Reservation, he grows up bullied and called retarded, with only one human friend. His friend's name is Rowdy, and Rowdy has an abusive drunk of a father. Some of these tendencies seem to have been passed on to Rowdy as well, as Rowdy is one of the angriest people that Junior knows. On his first day of high school, Arnold throws a textbook a his math teacher and gets a suspension. However, a few days later his teacher comes by and tells Arnold that he needs to get out of the reservation. There is no hope on the rez, only disappointment and people who have given up.

One of the similarities that I draw between Junior's world and ours is the fact that there are little reservations everywhere. Sure, I personally may not be eating meals 18 and a half hours apart, but there are similarities I can draw to explain the hopelessness of certain situations. For example, the majority of jobs available today aren't what some people want. Arts, like singing, performing, or painting, are fields that have precious few jobs, and seem to be discouraged in schools today. Arts funding is now prominent among a school's fundraising goals, and multitudes of clinical studies say that arts are a fundamental part of education, but most school boards don't fund the arts as much as say, science or math. While I don't want to come across as saying science or math aren't important (especially not now, as the STEM fields are having an explosive growth), but turning the arts into an "add-on" or "option" in terms of funding isn't the correct way to go through things.

Native Son

Native Son

               Bigger Thomas seems like a normal black boy in the 1930s. He lives on the South Side in a one-room apartment with his mother and two siblings, and spends his time loafing around with a gang. He and his gang rob fruit stands or newspaper stalls and he does bad things in the back of theaters. However, he concealed within him a deep rage and hatred for white people, because they took away his opportunities and barred him from leaving the South Side. He was offered a job from the relief service, which he grudgingly accepted, and he went to report to Mr. Dalton. He chauffeured Dalton’s daughter, Mary, to a building in the loop. There they met Jan, her boyfriend. The three went out that night, and upon returning home Mary was so drunk Bigger carried her to her bed. He then saw her mother, Mrs. Dalton, in the room. To stop Mary from speaking, Bigger put a pillow over her. She died of suffocation, and he then decapitated her and threw her into the furnace in the basement. Then he acted like nothing was different. He quickly ran out once the reporters discovered that there were bones in the furnace, assuming them to be Mary’s. They then trapped him on a South Side rooftop, and quickly brought him to trial. Max, Bigger’s lawyer, argued that he had done this crime by instinct and he didn’t mean it. I don’t believe him. To kill someone is something that takes real willpower and effort to do – something that can’t be brought about by instinct alone. Bigger killed Mary by accident. He may not have deserved the death penalty at that time, but his mindset afterwards was that he was free, he was not guilty. Because his mindset changed from accident to intent, Bigger no longer deserved the right to call his killings an accident. He deserved at the very least life in prison.