I did this exercise to show what a misnomer the term 'boarding school' was in relation to what native children across the continent had to go through. It makes one think that it was a privileged thing to be at the school, just because of the name. This is an example of how we should take words with a grain of salt when it comes to the Native communities, as it is often untrue. The process of "unlearning" what we "know" about Native Americans is tricky, and it means looking behind words into reality so as not to be deceived by the falsities of the colonizing viewpoints.
Monday, December 15, 2008
No Parole Today
I presented on the book "No Parole Today" by Laura Tohe in class, with class discussion and a little workshop. I wrote the term "boarding school" up on the board and had the class tell me what words they associated with that, which I wrote on the whiteboard. The words were things like "uniforms, rules, religion, scary old men/women, away from family, privilege," etc. Then I wrote "prison" up on the board, and we did the same thing. One thing that we noticed was that there were quite a few similarities between the two, not the least of which were things like forced separation from family and friends, and no choice about whether they were there or not.
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2 comments:
Comparing "prison" and "boarding school" is something people do not connect together. Children who are forced to go to boarding school may feel imprisoned and I think you did a very effective exercise!
I really enjoyed your presentation because you presented the ideas of the text while stimulating a discussion in an abstract and interesting manner.
It could have been simple to dictate what we all had already read. Yet, you instead challenged us to really examine what the content meant to us and to the author.
Someone once said that the first step toward releasing oppression of another is to recognize the cultural biases within yourself. And the best way to do that is to see the others' way from their own perspective.
No Parole Today begins to show subtle insight into the multi-faceted dynamics of the oppressed person within the boarding school experience. It also cleverly shows the human picture of what it was like to walk in the shoes of this Native woman during her youth.
By showing the every day experiences that she had intertwined with the not-so normal setting of being in a 'prison', she creates an identity that non-Native women can feel. We all have had issues with authority, friends, boys, etc, on varying levels. By identifying with her larger audience, she thrusts them into a position where it would be very difficult not to see her as possessing the same level of humanness and therefore deserving the same freedoms and rights of any other woman in our society. It is then easier to agree that the intitutors were guilty of ethnocentrism and the cultural genocide that embodied it.
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