Analysis Of The Movie ' Old News ' By Deborah Miranda Essay

In Deborah Miranda’s memoir “Bad Indians”, she uses documents, images, and drawings to expose colonial violence and provides evidence of a history of conquest. There are different types of colonial violence that are depicted throughout her memoir, such as: physical, emotional, sexual, and cultural violence. Additionally, Miranda exposes the nature of colonial violence by providing evidence by implementing particular sources to contribute in confirming the history of conquest throughout the lives of California Mission Indians.

Lives for Native Americans on reservations have never quite been easy. There are many struggles that most outsiders are completely oblivious about. In her book The Roundhouse, Louise Erdrich brings those problems to light. She gives her readers a feel of what it is like to be Native American by illustrating the struggles through the life of Joe, a 13-year-old Native American boy living on a North Dakota reservation. This book explores an avenue of advocacy against social injustices. The most observable plight Joe suffers is figuring out how to deal with the injustice acted against his mother, which has caused strife within his entire family and within

Even though the U.S. got more land from the Indian Removal Act and gave the Indians a new home with covered expenses it was a downcast for many Native tribes and a miserable event throughout history. In the writing of John G. Burnett’s Story of the Cherokees, he discusses how terrible and sad the removal of the Indians were and how it negatively affected the Indians. Specifically, “Woman were dragged from their homes”(2),”Children were often separated from parents, with the sky for a blanket and the earth as a pillow.”(2) In general, all of the Indians and even the women and kids were treated horrible as if they were seen as savages, and as if they were animals. Although, when being treated like savages, were the Indians the true savages or

From its birth, America was a place of inequality and privilege. Since Columbus 's arrival and up until present day, Native American tribes have been victim of white men 's persecution and tyranny. This was first expressed in the 1800’s, when Native Americans were driven off their land and forced to embark on the Trail of Tears, and again during the Western American- Indian War where white Americans massacred millions of Native Americans in hatred. Today, much of the Indian Territory that was once a refuge for Native Americans has since been taken over by white men, and the major tribes that once called these reservations home are all but gone. These events show the discrimination and oppression the Native Americans faced. They were, and continue to be, pushed onto reservations,

In her novel, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Deborah A. Miranda theorizes that the underlying patronage of her father’s violent behavior arises from the original acts of violence carried out by the Spanish Catholic Church during the era of missionization in California. The structure of her novel plays an essential role in the development of her theory, and allows her to further generalize it to encompass the entire human population. “In this beautiful and devastating book, part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir, Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems.” Patching together every individual source to create the story of a culture as a whole, Miranda facilitates the task of conceptualizing how Societal Process Theory could play into the domestic violence she experiences growing up as the daughter of a California Indian.

The book “Lakota Woman,” is an autobiography that depicts Mary Crow Dog and Indians’ Lives. Because I only had a limited knowledge on Indians, the book was full of surprising incidents. Moreover, she starts out her story by describing how her Indian friends died in miserable and unjustifiable ways. After reading first few pages, I was able to tell that Indians were mistreated in the same manners as African-Americans by whites. The only facts that make it look worse are, Indians got their land stolen and prejudice and inequality for them still exists.

As a young adult living in Oklahoma, I had never given a lot of thought as to the portrayal of the Native American. Although, it never occurred to me that my perception of life might be different from those growing up and living with the everyday realities reservation life offered. Simply put, I was overjoyed to be amongst those who lived on the reservation and in hindsight, I realize that I was naïve as to the treatment of those I call my people. Growing up, I was always aware of my Native heritage, but truthfully that is where it ended. My grandmother a full blood Cherokee woman was content to live the life to which she had become accustom to in the white man’s world. Therefore, as children, stories of my grandmother’s childhood were never bestowed upon my brothers, sister, and I. Ultimately, leaving us to our own imaginations and with that I created the image I had readily embraced, the image of the beautiful Indian maiden.

Colonialism has a historical context that has long obscured and distorted the experiences of indigenous people, particularly those who endured the brutalities of the California Missions. Although indigenous people are portrayed in history as docile people, who openly embraced invasion, Deborah Miranda dismantles this depiction in her memoir, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, through two stories called “Dear Vicenta” and “Novena to Bad Indians”. Throughout the stories run various narratives of survival and resistance, which form new understandings of colonization and missionization. Miranda practices decolonization through oral history in order to form new and ongoing indigenous identities. Evidently, through decolonial practice and deconstructing dominant narratives about “colonized” peoples and replacing them with stories that use traditional memory and practice, Miranda disrupts the commonly accepted narrative of indigenous peoples by reconstructing the dichotomy between good and bad Indians through acts of resistance and survival.

Native Americans have been oppressed, discriminated against, and mistreated since the Europeans first came to America. Countless Native Americans have died at the hands of white settlers. One of the worst accounts of their mistreatment, however, was the Trail of Tears. The “Nunna dual Tsuny,” as the Cherokee call it, refers to the forced mass movement of Cherokee people to Indian Territory in Arkansas and Oklahoma. (Hook, 6-8) It was a tragic event in the history of the United States.

The American Indian occupies a unique place in the White American imaginary. Indians, one is told, are cordial, wise, poor in the “humble poverty” sort of way, brown, there assist whites with either mystic knowledge or humorous ignorance. Figures such as Squanto, Tonto and Disney’s Pocahontas along with a large smattering of Westerns and cartoonish depictions have created this image of the Native American – an image which rarely translates into the present day. In contrast to this, Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a Native American coming-of-age story centered around the first-person point of view of the Native protagonist Arnold “Junior” Spirit, Jr. and his dual life on the Spokane Indian Reservation and his time off the reservation at an all-white public school in the town of Reardan, Washington. The novel revolves around themes like race, identity formation and mortality and details life on Indian reservations as it attempts to give a realistic account of contemporary Native American life, each which shape the novel in unique ways.

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race” (King 119). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., mentions the injustice received by Native Americans from their cultural antithesis in his novel, Why We Can’t Wait. Accordingly King alludes that the faux Americans will never culturally understand the Native Americans as they see them as the inferior. Naturally this misunderstanding between cultures has presented immense disadvantage to the Native Americans, especially in the justice system. In the United States, Native American’s receive disproportionately harsher sentences from predominately White courts that lack the cultural empathy to understand these cases. This lack of justice is examined in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, where the protagonist, Abel, a Pueblo

America’s blindness to the past and the “whitewashing” of history, sanctions for many tales of exploitation and cruelty to go unnoticed. We hear about slavery and of the displacement of the original inhabitants of America, Native Americans, but the extent to which we hear about their plight only goes so far. Those elements of different cultures which are not useful to the story of success and triumph for the colonizers is ignored, minimized, transformed or just destroyed. (Arnold, 1999: 1) This cherry picking of history is what allows for the exploitation of the marginalized people to continue on today. If America was to trace the brutal and racist timeline of American history and genuinely examine it, then they would have to face the colossal

During the latter half of the 19th Century, lives of the Native Indians who lived on the plains was affected from technological developments and government actions. Some of these developments and actions involved cutting off the Indians from their herds, innocent lives being taken away from Indian men, women, and children who had nothing to do with the whites, and the movement of Natives into reservations. The way government treated the Natives played a large role in the Indians lives, and it’s clear that it affected them in an unjust way.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “the ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people”. This quote resonates with me because it explains how normal it has become in our society to dismiss history or the various forms of oppression and dominations. Prior to reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, I had very limited knowledge of the massacres, enslavement and tragedies that the Native Americans tribes endured because of colonization. As an immigrant to the United States, I did not know a lot about Native Americans nor were they part of the larger academic conversation. In school the most we were taught about Native Americans were that Columbus sailed the oceans in 1492, looking for India but instead he discovered

Enticingly, the Spanish colonists came to this land with a passionate goal to develop the land and extract its natural resources for their profit. To this day, the Spanish’s action on this land has brought prosperity and has propagated California to be the leading roles in the innovation of new technologies and the production of movies. Despite of having this reputation, people seldom discuss on the origin of the land. When the Spanish came, the Indian are the inhabitants of the land; ruling the land and surviving with all the natural resource. As history is depicted by the victor, the fate of the right owner of the land has always been untold. Their once peaceful time had ceased to continue as the Spanish colonized and stole the land from the Indian. Trickeries and militaries were used by the colonists to exploit the land for their benefits. The Indian population begin to decline as the newcomers were “[gobbling] up native foods and undermined the free or “gentile” tribes efforts to remain economically independent” and the outbreak epidemic of “European diseases” had declined “60% of the population of mission Indians (Castillo). To not disremember the suffering of their people, poems like Indian Cartography by Deborah Miranda and Itch Like Crazy: Resistance by Wendy Rose are composed to capture their heart-breaking moments and to disclose their suffering to the world, but both poems have a different goals: Indian Cartography emphasizes on sympathy; while Itch Like Crazy