LITR 4332 American Minority Literature Model Assignments Final Exam Submissions 2013 question 2

 Patricia Stacey

Minority Cultures, Their Symbols, and Their Identities 

Since the term ‘minority’ is used so frequently and to refer to so many different things, it feels important that the term be explained in relation to what it means in the class, especially in order to show how the American Indian and Mexican American races embody the idea of a minority culture. The first point to make is that while the United States was created and continued to grow through a huge amount of people traveling to live here, normally called immigrants, that a minority culture is different from an immigrant culture because immigrants chose to come to the United States and to become a part of its culture. A minority culture is not only a race that didn’t have a choice in coming to America, like the African American race, but is also a race that had no choice but to join and assimilate into the dominant culture. These minority races are races that had no voice in which to protest and no choice but to submit to the will of the dominant culture. So, according to this definition the American Indian race and the Mexican American race are cultures that do represent what it means to be a minority culture.

First, let’s discuss these races forced participation with the dominant culture as a quality of a minority culture. Building on the idea that the Native American race and the Mexican American race shared similar experiences in relation to their culture and finding their identity despite the conflict between the new and old cultures, there are several texts that can be used to support this idea. In Bless Me, Ultima this culture conflict is seen in the fact that Antonio is made to adjust to two different cultures, his culture at home where he knows what expectations he is supposed to follow there where he speaks Spanish which is quite different from his school culture where it’s all about learning English and trying to conform to the dominate culture of the United States.

In a similar yet much more forced way, Love Medicine shows the same kind of cultural identity loss as a result of being made to learn the dominant culture, however in Love Medicine it refers to the generations of children being removed from their homes and taken to boarding schools where their only cultural experience is that of the dominant culture. William Owen’s second research post from April 22, 2013 titled “From Teepee to Dormitory” was an amazing example of the dominant culture forcing the Native American youth to disregard their own culture in favor of the dominant ‘civilized’ culture. His post talked about the suffering that whole families went through at having their children ripped from them to learn some strange new culture over their own traditional culture.

The American Indian culture and Mexican American culture differ from each other in that the symbols they use in the two novels are quite different. Consider that a symbol is something like a person, a place, or a thing in a story that seems to have an importance or significance beyond what the actual thing is. A narrative is basically a story that tells a sequence of events, and this story and plotline can be anything from fictional to nonfiction, a personal account, or historical. So, with those ideas of a symbol and a narrative in mind I noticed that the symbols in Love Medicine were more natural, down to earth, normal things while the symbols in Bless Me, Ultima were more mythical, magical, or religious. In Love Medicine, the symbol of home is a pretty ordinary thing, as is food or water which were two of the other symbols. The idea of a homecoming, of seeking home, is a theme seen quite often in Native American literature, which since the Native American people were actually forced from their homes the idea of seeking home being seen in their literature makes sense to me. The idea of trying to return home is seen in the poem “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” where the students at a boarding school are attempting to get home only to be taken back to school. Another home reference is in the poem “The Margins Where We Live” where it mentions that because they live on the margins, which could potentially symbolize the fine line between the traditional Native American culture and the culture of the United States, that they will be able to safely navigate their way down that fine line. And, as Native American tribes have a religion that is much more closely connected to the land and the earth than Mexican Americans do, the difference in the Native American earthy symbolism compared to the more traditionally religious or mythical Mexican American symbols also seems quite understandable to see in their literature. The Native Americans religion and it’s closeness to the earth can clearly be seen in the Origin Stories & Creation Myths of the American Indians. In the origin stories, both the two common patterns that are seen relate to animals and the earth, where in the ‘earth-diver’ pattern the land is created by the animals bringing the soil up from the bottom of the ocean while in the ‘emergence’ people and animals have just risen up from their previous forms to be able to live on land. Even more examples of the earth and animal based religion can be heard in their cultural stories, stories I heard on a cassette tape called “How Rabbit Tricked Otter” which is what sparked my interest in Native American folklore and culture when I was growing up.

In Bless Me, Ultima one of the symbols we see is The Virgin of Guadalupe, who is seen as a symbol of not only seeking understanding and forgiveness, but also the resolution of cultural disagreements. With how conflicted Antonio is in the story, it is only natural that we would see him turn again and again to the Virgin as he seeks to find a way to balance not only the different cultures in his family but between his home and school. However, with all the experiences Antonio goes through, seeing good people killed and bad people not punished for their actions , he also turns to the Virgin to try and make sense of why he does not see a forgiving and understanding God.

In Love Medicine, one clear theme through the novel is the problem of the Land Allotments the Native American were receiving, or not receiving, from the government. The novel talks about how hard life is on the reservations, using the scenery with its cairn gravesites to show how the government is responsible for these Indian deaths. The book also talks about how the Native American people after only receiving a small allotment of land were being pressured to sell off their land. This brings into focus the fact that through legal maneuvering the reservations were becoming smaller and smaller as the Native Americans lost their land again to the ‘white man’.