Brain Drain

Archive for January, 2008

Matthew Fry Jacobson Traces Racial Constructs in Whiteness of a Different Color

As the white race is somewhat new to scholarly examination, it provides a useful tool in determining how race is assigned and used to regulate the body politic throughout history. Rather than studying oppressed minorities and the effects they have suffered, the white majority holds far more control having dictated who deserves white privilege and why. In Matthew Fry Jacobson’s historical survey, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, he effectively argues that race is a social construct rather than biological fact, particularly as he traces the shifting white privilege assigned or denied to the Irish as well as the interpretive operation of race upon Jews, and although he does little to address gender bias within racial categories or include immigrant source material and their own views of where they fit in, these shortcomings offer little dissuasion from his matter of point.

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I still see things that are not here. I just choose not to acknowledge them.
- John Nash, A Beautiful Mind

I’m your average Jane when it comes to movies. As a member of Netflix, I’ve opted for the one-movie-at-a-time-for-$6.99 package. The only technical film operation I am familiar with is filling my online movie queue, checking snail mail, and pressing “play.” Thank goodness for Richard Barsam’s guide, Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film. Without it, the lexicon used both in the production/direction and analysis of film would be lost on me. The closest I have come to analyzing film technique, aside from story, is when I found porn in my genealogical research. Essentially, until now, I’ve prefered to see without really looking.

That said, and since class didn’t officially have to write for today, I’m just going to wrap up Chapter 1, “What Is a Movie” for myself. You’re welcome to read along.

To summarize ultra-simplistically, a film is both form and content inextricably intertwined on celluloid (unless it’s digital). That’s the easy part. It’s the myriad ways in which form and content can be manipulated that blows my mind:

• Through the camera lens (as both perspective and frame)
• Coexpressibility of time and space (parallel edits and montages)
• Lighting (chiaroscuro: a term that describes contrasts of light and dark which I’m thrilled to recognize from an oil painting class)
• Via the constructed illusion of realism and the opposite, or antirealism (fantasy, sci-fi, thrillers)
• Striving for verisimilitude: a convincing appearance of truth based on “realistic” expectations as well as a filmmaker’s and audience’s mediation of conventional and innovative cinematic language (scenes, sequences, dissolves, etc.)
• Through a flexible dependence upon the conventions and overlap of genres and subgenres
  • Narrative or fiction (action, biopics, comedy, fantasy, film noir, etc.)
  • Non-fiction (factual, instructional, documentary, propaganda)
  • The conflation of both via historiographic metafiction (This note is my own written especially for Michael)
  • Animation (drawing, puppet or clay animation, pixilation, computer animation)
  • Experimental film (Un Chien Andalou – An Andalousian Dog, as the book translates – is on UbuWeb if you want to see it. The eyeball scene is a trip.)

In the end, it is all simply an illusion of movement – but a complicated one at that. And so here we end where we’ll begin another day…

—-

FoYoInfo: English Department Visiting Scholar
Jim Collins Lectures on Film and New Media
April 8th, 7-9 p.m. in Saint Joseph Hall

Does anybody wanna go?
(The old Postmodernism gang perhaps?)

—-

PS: How odd to be reading references to the filming of Brokeback Mountain on the day that Heath Ledger was found dead.

THE ASSIGNMENT: Consider the play’s script.

Samuel Beckett
B R E A T H

CURTAIN

Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold about
five seconds.
Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light
together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and
hold for about five seconds.
Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum
together (light as in 1) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as
before. Silence and hold about five seconds.

CURTAIN

RUBBISH
No verticals, all scattered and lying.

CRY
Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical,
switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.

BREATH
Amplified recording.

MAXIMUM LIGHT
Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about
3 to 6 and back.

Compare it with the film adaptation by Damien Hirst.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=vw6HWwPEQm8]

Damien Hirst’s interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s script “Breath,” inserts his own additional meaning within Beckett’s vague framework. While he remains true to Beckett’s visual direction, Hirst departs from the original sound direction in order to support the visual choices he has made. In the end, the themes of life and death are explored in both, yet Hirst has chosen to use smoking and imagery of medical equipment to suggest a specific story.

While Beckett’s script calls for a stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish, Hirst chooses to use detritus from the medical profession. An overturned gurney draped in sheets to soften the vertical lines, scattered keyboards, a monitor, syringes, medication bottles, wrinkled sheets and bed pans cover the stage. The stage itself is not stationary. It’s motion is as disorienting as the scattered remains of items. Amid the chaos are bags of medical waste neatly tied up in bright yellow plastic bags. No bodily waste contaminates the otherwise sterile scene. The only evidence of human contact are the knots at the top of the bag, a small semblance of order within this chaos, the only and limited sense of control. Hirst plays on this idea through the use of carefully placed and repeated patterns. Pale blue bedpans are clustered together, three triangulated keyboards point to a central monitor. Colors of bright yellow, pale blue and orange dot an otherwise fluorescent white background lit in the fashion of hospitals. While none of these elements are described in the original script, Hirst has not strayed from the call for rubbish nor from the instruction for timing and the shift in lighting (with the exception of brightness).

Where Hirst does stray from Beckett’s direction is with his use of sound. Beckett calls for a “faint brief cry and immediately inspiration.” Instead, Hirst foregoes the cry and uses the specific sound of someone inhaling with great difficulty. The sound is organic, human, painful and strained but ends on an up note like at the end of a question, perhaps demonstrating hope as oxygen enters the lungs. The second sound is again devoid of the cry. The expiration is not normal  but the sound of one’s last breath as the muscles of a torso relinquish their ability to expand once more. This sound is of air trailing out to the still silence of finality. By eliminating the vagitus, or newborn cry, this film becomes a strict dealing with with the end of life and eventual death, ignoring the beginning altogether.

Hirst’s insertion of the ashtray and cigarette butts add significance separate from the script. Like the yellow bags of waste, the butts have been manipulated by human hand and positioned in the shape of a swastika .This contrasts with those randomly scattered outside the ashtray to the left. The swastika is, since World War II, symbolic of mass murder and gas chambers. Carcinogens have polluted the otherwise sterile environment and, coupled with the sound of what could be interpreted as a last human breath, the sterile environment of the human body as well.

In this adaptation of Beckett’s “Breath,” Hirst makes visible the evils of smoking and the inevitable death resulting from it. This exploration of the cultural phenomenon and flaws of humanity is not unlike the majority of Hirst’s work. According to Tate Britain:

The impulses driving Damien Hirst’s work stem from dilemmas inherent in human life: ‘I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live for ever. I can’t escape the fact and I can’t let go of the desire’. The materials he uses often shock, but he says he ‘uses shock almost as a formal element not so much to thrust his work in the public eye but rather to make aspects of life and death visible’.

In this film, Hirst focuses on what could be called cigarette companies’ organized mass murder, the addictive properties that control that level of that complicity in aiding death for thsoe who choose to smoke, and the medical profession’s limited power to overcome the ill effects. By doing so, he effectively forces the viewer to question all aspects of smoking and the role they play in snuffing out a life. As with Beckett’s play, there are no answers here. The film simply provides the vehicle for complex thought and the resulting meaning resides with the individual viewer.

From the ACLU:

This Friday, you can join thousands of people across the country in marking a sad anniversary with an act of hope.

The first prisoners arrived at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay on January 11, 2002. Guantánamo quickly became an international embarrassment. It has made a mockery of our laws and values for six long years. We won’t allow seven; this is the year we are going to end the national disgrace.

Nationwide, the ACLU has set January 11th as a day of protest, declaring that it’s long past time that we put an end to illegality and close down Guantánamo. The ACLU and organizations across the country are asking people of conscience to wear orange to protest Guantánamo. I hope you will consider standing in solidarity by wearing orange on Friday as well.

Guantánamo is a reminder that fundamental values of justice and fairness can sometimes be violated by the very government entrusted with upholding them. That’s why we hope you will get involved in one of the following ways:

Pledge to stand up for American ideals and values. Sign the Pledge. And ask your friends to get involved.

Throughout this week, there will be events across the country- protests, prayer vigils, marches, and more – to bring focus to the injustices being perpetrated at Guantánamo.

Check out the materials available online: you can print out a poster and fact sheet, download a blog badge and get a toolkit with tools and tips on how to get further involved on January 11th.We’re running online ads on over 100 blogs to raise awareness and ignite further activism in new audiences. If you have a blog, please consider downloading and posting a badge, and blog about closing Guantánamo this week. Let us know about your blog and we’ll keep you on the inside track with updates, interviews and additional resources.

Guantánamo has become a stain on our nation’s honor. That is why it is so important you join the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are demanding the closure of the prison at Guantánamo on January 11th.

Thank you for standing with people of conscience to demand the US government close Guantánamo once and for all.

Thank you,

Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director ACLU

P.S. There is so much more we can do to spread the word and encourage others to join in this protest. Check here for more ways to get involved.

© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004

Charles Baxter’s Defamiliarization: A Summary

In Burning Down the House, Baxter addresses the issues of stale character and meaning in fiction. Avoidance of overdetermined characters and events is achieved through what he calls defamiliarization. Only when this idea is employed does a piece of fiction become interesting.

To create fictitious people in the same way an elegy is written about the deceased is to create something flat. “Such a recital is all overdetermined. All the arrows point in one direction” (31). A limited scope of the whole of the person is neatly packaged and presented as deemed fit by societal expectations. The result is a staging of what Baxter calls “the show business of every day life” (29). This predictable approach, where characters are created according to form, is what detaches them from memory. They are “overparented” by the author. Characters must be comprised of more than one side. A reader identifies most with interesting details of struggle and failure; otherwise a character has nothing to distinguish him or herself from the norm. As Baxter says, “the difference between fictional art and public rhetoric is that in fiction, the arrows point in all sorts of directions” (32). In essence, the character becomes an identity with which the reader is too familiar.

The way in which an author creates meaning in a story can fall into the same trap. To focus on one “truth” and fit the narrative neatly within the boundaries of that truth is to deny the reader dramatic tension. There is no learning involved. Modernists felt that “truth had gotten stale” (36) and cliché so they broke the rules and shook their audience. After they ran out of rules to break, time passed and what they had produced had also become familiar. As Baxter says, familiarity means security and the “power to predict” (38). In this attempt at newness, what becomes new also becomes old. Additionally, the avant-garde approach of innovation and marginality offers no real solution. To throw out the old for mere novelty simply creates and adds to the confusion avant-garde artists construct. Baxter believes we need an alternative approach and offers the solution of defamiliarization.

Defamiliarization is “a technique for finding a certain kind of detail that resists the fitting of the object into a silhouette, that is, into a ready made symbolization” (42). Viktor Shklovsky calls the silhouette concept algebrization, “the process of turning an event or familiar object into an automatic symbol” (41). This factor which can be plugged in to mean something familiar fails to add interest. Baxter combats this boredom with an idea of Gerard Baxter Hopkins, that “images [become] memorable when some crucial part of their meaning [has] been stripped from them” (41). Mundane, predetermined meaning must be removed from objects and images to add unpredictability. Another form of defamiliarization is misalignment or diversion from a single truth via juxtaposed contradictions of emotion. People often feel many opposing emotional reactions when impacted by a single change in their lives. These combinations represent simultaneous forms of existence within one individual and create an unpredictable outcome. It becomes uncertain which emotion will rise to the surface and influence the next action. Another tool in the arsenal of defamiliarization is point of view. This provides the framework of observation and works best when the narrator doesn’t know what their own journey means. Their position offers a picture that is moderately strange. This speaks to the idea of renormalization, where “moderately strange in the middle of ordinary is the lens for focusing the ordinary. Without it, the ordinary has nothing against which to define itself” (49). Ultimately, defamiliarization is about “not finding ourselves where we expected to be but where we did not expect to be found, and at a moment when our defenses are down” (49).

Works Cited
Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1997.

Reposted from my Kenya blog, Alfajiri:

For days I have been able to do nothing more than hold my breath and watch the atrocities unfolding in Kenya as violent objections continue in response to the disputed election of President Mwai Kibaki. When it comes to news coverage, I want less of the dramatic “still smoking” violence and descriptions of how this looks at an international level and more about non-rioting families and what it means for them to be “displaced.” The truth is, I have no clue as to what it entails, not on a level of daily survival. Where is the human interest? Why is it always the last detail to get covered? I despise the media’s limitations and, at the same time, am drawn to the stories like a moth to flame.

Yesterday I read “Kenya’s crisis spreads gloom over Africa,” a Reuters article in which journalist Barry Moody opened with:

Kenya’s sudden spiral into chaos after years as a regional anchor has badly set back Africa’s democratic progress and will strike a heavy blow against the economies of a wide swathe of neighbouring nations.

What troubles me most is that this statement pertains to Africa as a whole, as if an entire continent can ever be affected in one particular way by a single event. Skimming through Google or surfing a feed aggregate will reveal only a seriously flawed and over generalized assumption while missing the nuances involved. Sadly, these are the impressions that stick with people.

Interestingly, Moody ’s argument lies in direct opposition to what his content suggests. Perhaps this is to create a sense of tension in his piece. Instead, it creates a great deal of tension toward the article for me. Although one quote backs his opening statement, the two most poignant quotes refute it by saying:

“The politics of every country in Africa are very, very separate. African politics are all local and all personal … I don’t think it has any wider implications at all,” said Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society.

Control Risks senior Africa analyst Chris Melville agreed: “While Kenya is at the heart of an unstable region, we do not consider that the current situation will significantly contribute to regional instability in the short-term.”

What I question is how a region so troubled could have been influenced by Kenya’s democratic process to begin with, particularly since this is not the first time that tribal issues have arisen over an election. Does Moody truly believe this? While I understand that Kenya’s economy is taking a serious tumble and that supplies and tourism are at a standstill at the moment, I tend to agree with Dowden and Melville. Politics and tribal relations have borders and, short term, economic factors will not likely create regional unrest. I suspect that the effects will have a broader reach only if the violence and turmoil continue for any great length of time. Obviously, the possibility exists – but we’re not there yet.

Aside from my concern, the current political situation has my family and friends understandably taking notice. Something happening half a world away seems surreal until you know someone with a connection, no matter how remote that connection is. All I can say is that I’m glad people are paying attention, regardless of the reason. Sadly, my greatest fear is that accounts of “uncivilized” people will tarnish some already suspect perceptions of those people worried for my safety. Must we always fall back on these words? These are a people in turmoil due to serious complications within their government. To call them uncivilized is too easy and has too many dire implications.

This is not to say that I’m not wondering what the violence means for both the country and for my trip. My first thought was that, although I’m standing by on purchasing airfare to Nairobi, ideally things will settle down before I travel and I can be of some help in restoring the daily functions within the already impoverished Kenyan villages of Kiminini and Kitaleto. Surely help will be needed there now more than ever. I have just learned that the NGOs affiliated with Village Volunteers have not gone unscathed by the violence and the effects of displacement. I hope against all hope that this isn’t so for the sake of Kenya and Village Volunteers, but if significant danger continues to exist over the next few months, my focus will have to shift to Ghana. Either way, I plan to go to Africa.

The Disintegration and Reclamation of Indigenous Identity in America (from the archives: 12.13.2006)

European settlers, civilized folk with a strong avarice for economic and territorial affluence in the New World, fought a dark and dangerous indigenous people for nearly three centuries after the arrival of renowned explorer Christopher Columbus. Offerings of Indian Territory were extended in an attempt to peacefully divide the land among both races, but the Indians resisted and violent battles ensued. Great American heroes were born out of such battles and yet benevolence prevailed as Americans generously offered gifts of English language and Christian religion to civilize the remaining savages. Unable to achieve the desired effect, the Indians have remained an unresolved problem for America, a country fondly referred to by its thriving citizens as “land of the free and home of the brave.”

Indigenous history reveals a very different story, one of the invasion and occupation of the Great Turtle Island, genocide of the original island people, and for those few remaining, ethnic cleansing through assimilation. Forced to abandon their native identities and adopt European-American culture, indigenous people have been coerced to submit to an occupying force and are further marginalized by the power of the English language. In both its euphemistic and discriminatory capacity, English has bound Native Americans to a history and identity which is not their own, and in a way their own language could never have betrayed them.

To say these stories possess the dramatic elements of a theatrical production is a valid argument as it has already been demonstrated. The Euro-American version of history, much like Prospero’s narrative in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, offers a triumphant telling of European colonization. As Paul Brown remarks in “’This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Prospero calls to his various listeners “and invites them to recognize themselves as subjects of his discourse, as beneficiaries of his civil largess” (P. Brown 218). Shakespeare, understanding the usurping power of Europe in America, calls attention to Prospero’s mastery of language as power of “civility” over “savagery.” Interestingly, the English language, as used to strip indigenous people of their culture, eventually empowered them to address their oppressors and reclaim what is left of their Native American identity. By recording the struggles they have faced, Indians have elevated themselves far beyond mere “linguistic subjects of the master language” (P. Brown 220).

Historically, the most powerful linguistic tool employed by expansionists was the euphemistic term “Manifest Destiny.” This concept legitimized American advances into territory already inhabited by Mexicans and American Indians. As Dee Brown describes in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, “To justify … breaches of the ‘permanent Indian frontier,’ the policy makers in Washington invented Manifest Destiny …The Europeans and all their descendants were ordained by destiny to rule all of America. They were the dominant race” (8). While Americans were purportedly fated by God to expand in the name of their great experiment of liberty, ironically, this liberty was not meant for all people. Indians were rounded up while soldiers “concentrated them into camps” (D. Brown 7), allowing for American retrieval of Appalachian gold. Brown’s naming of a recognized dominant race indicates the point at which Indians became aware of two choices. They could either fight to retain the freedom of their land or submit to relocation, making way for the American harvest of natural resources with the promise of provisions in return. When Little Crow, chief of the Mdewkanton Santee, toured the rapid developing eastern cities, he “was convinced that the power of the United States could not be resisted” (D. Brown 9), and yet he was “determined to oppose any further surrender of their lands” (D. Brown 9). Black Kettle, leader of the Cheyenne, trusted the American offer of provisions as payment for his lands and relocated to ensure tribal survival. Black Kettle was killed on a reservation along side 103 fellow Indians in an attack of betrayal by American soldiers. Manifest Destiny was clearing the way and “like the antelope and the buffalo, the ranks of the proud Cheyenne were thinning to extinction” (D. Brown 174). By the late 1950’s only the terms had changed. Leonard Peltier, in Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance, describes “the most feared words in our vocabulary: ‘termination’ and ‘relocation.’ … To us, those words were an assault on our very existence” (Peltier 80), as was the FBI term ‘neutralization.’

Another effective tactic employed by American colonists was dysphemism, linguistically painting a damaging picture of indigenous culture. “Savage” and “heathen” were common terms associated with Indian people regardless of the observation Christopher Columbus had made, “So tractable, so peaceable, are these people” (D. Brown 1). During the winter of 1868, “In his official report of victory over the ‘savage butchers’ and ‘savage bands of cruel marauders,’ General Sheridan rejoiced” (D. Brown 169) in what could be considered his own savage slaughter, although he didn’t label himself as such. Placing the words into written military record simply reinforced a long standing stereotype already in place. Still, the lasting effects of his influence are evident in Sheridan’s most famous spoken words, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” (D. Brown 171) which was “honed into the American aphorism The only good Indian is a dead Indian” (D. Brown 172). Opposition to this type of attack on the Indians proved futile as only victory mattered to the government. When “white men who had known and liked Black Kettle … attacked Sheridan’s war policy, … Sheridan brushed them aside as … ‘aiders and abettors’ of savages who murdered without mercy” (D. Brown 170).

Sheridan proved quite influential in popular American belief. This same accusation of “aiding and abetting” savages was bestowed upon Leonard Peltier more than one hundred years later. He has resided in prison since 1976 with no substantial evidence supporting murder charges for the deaths of two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation. Considered a political prisoner by many, he is suspected to be the scapegoat for a failed attempt by the FBI to exterminate more Indians, clearing the way to the reservation’s Uranium enriched soil. Former Attorney General and Peltier’s defense attorney, Ramsey Clark, in his preface to Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance says, “There’s no question but that our own government was generating violence against traditional Indians at Pine Ridge at that time as a means of control and domination, some believe on behalf of energy interests” (Peltier xvii). Peltier himself says, “I shot only in self defense … I wasn’t trying to take lives but to save lives … of a defenseless group of Indian people. That’s the only ‘aiding and abetting’ I did that day” (Peltier 170). Peltier has become the symbol of “an Indian who dared to stand up to defend his people” (Peltier 14), his story bearing strong resemblance to early Indian warriors who rallied against oppression for the health and well being of their tribes. For this reason, he and they share the charge of aiding and abetting, although this phrase is no longer as damaging to Peltier as is a new legal term. “So simple an act by the courts as changing my ‘consecutive’ sentences to ‘concurrent’ sentences would give me my freedom” (Peltier 171), a poignant example of bondage through language. Prison guards who attempted to cage Peltier’s spirit as well as his body often used degradation for provocation, talking about “how stupid and filthy Indian people were, about how ugly our women were and how they had such loose morals, about how our children were ‘defectives’ and should be rounded up and shot like stray dogs” (Peltier 146). Peltier returned only his strength of silence.

This constant labeling was a large part of the language that Americans insisted was superior as they stripped Indian children of their native tongue. In 1884, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin “attended White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana where she experienced humiliation and insensitive treatment” (Fetterley 532). She would “actively test the chains which tightly bound [her] individuality like a mummy for burial” (Fetterley 555). Bonnin’s mention of burial is telling as Americans attempted to assimilate the Indian children, a process in which much of their culture became dead to them. In 1953, Peltier attended the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota. He, like Bonnin, was forbidden to speak anything but English without the consequence of a beating. “Still, we did. We’d sneak behind the building the way kids today sneak out to smoke behind the school, and we’d talk Indian to each other” (Peltier 78). Indian language, the connection it embodied to the Earth and to others, became contraband, criminalized for decades.

During their Americanization, Bonnin and Peltier found themselves “drawn to both cultures … spread eagle between them… nearly torn apart by the conflicts and contradictions between the two” (Peltier 79). Claiming his individual identity, Leonard embraced each name he was given. He is prideful of his connection with French fur hunters through Peltier and recognizes Leonard for its meaning of lion-hearted. His Indian names include Wind Chases the Sun, symbolic of freedom, and He Leads the People, a call to action. The Christian and American labels, which can be interpreted as an act of assimilation, are respectfully declined as Peltier says of his indigenous identity, “I am a native of Great Turtle Island … Our sacred land is under occupation and we are now all prisoners” (63). Bonnin, in discarding her white American names, gave “herself her own tribal name, Zitkala-sä, which means Red Bird” (Fetterley 532). This identification provided a solid base from which all other thought flowed for each author.

A focus on connection between Indian people is what inspired the English writings of Dee Brown, Leonard Peltier and Zitkala-sä. Dee Brown reached back through the past collecting sources of forgotten oral history to “fashion a narrative of the conquest of the American West as the victims experienced it, using their own words when possible” (D. Brown xviii). Hoping that these words have not been dulled, Brown explains that “we rarely know the full power of words, in print or spoken” (D. Brown xvi). The number of books sold is testament to the clarity of the words’ sharp truth. Peltier is compelled to join his story with Brown’s history because “speaking out is my first duty, my first obligation to myself and to my people” (Peltier 9) and “Only when I identify with my people do I cease being a mere statistic, a meaningless number, and become a human being” (Peltier 43). Peltier, in particular, is most separated from his people behind prison walls. In writing, he is able to break free like Wind Chases the Sun. Combining her award winning mastery of oratory skills stemming from Indian tradition, along with her American English writing skills, Zitkala-sä publishes accounts of her childhood for “Atlantic Monthly”, providing a realistic and softer presentation of Indian family life and criticism of assimilation practices. Her regionalist “desire to tell Indian legends and stories in an Indian voice … in written English … may have created an intolerable opposition to the oral story telling tradition she hoped to ‘transplant’” (Fetterley 534). Caught somewhere between Indian and white society, her return to advocacy, or “life as a reformer may indicate that the price she paid for attaining the language… was the loss of place” (Fetterley 534). Still, her struggle is documented and what culture could be preserved is.

People of indigenous descent have joined in a great discourse with traditional white American history. Their tale, after centuries of struggle, has just recently reached a greater audience with a fairly new possession of writing skills within a much longer history of oral culture. The English language, which originally attempts to bind them, is used to set them free because people, not the language itself, defines cultures as inclusive or other. Through their history, novels and poems, each author extends an invitation to a middle ground with no retaliation for the crimes committed against their people. As Shakespeare’s Prospero eventually learns, “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” (Shakespeare 75, 28)

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William, et al. The Tempest Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. William Shakespeare, The Tempest; A Case Study in Critical Controversy, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, 10-87

Brown, Paul. “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”; The Tempest as the Discourse of Colonialism” William Shakespeare, The Tempest; A Case Study in Critical Controversy, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, 205-229

Peltier, Leonard. Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 1999.

Fetterly, Judith and Marjorie Pryse, eds. American Women Regionalists 1850-1910. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995.

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001.