What I have learned so far this semester is that there is still a vast amount of knowledge about the Native Americans that we haven't discovered yet. I feel that we have only just reached into the prize box and pulled out a few items that might help us understand the beginning of what we need to grasp, but that we've only scratched the surface.



As a nation are still very judgmental. Not only to the Indians, but to other races and each other. When I look at where we have been and where we need to be in order to be an honorable nation, there is a vast meadow that stretches across the horizon to the unseen mountain that we still have to climb in order to reach our goal of being better human beings. Our government is greedy, but men and women whom we call our leaders going to the extent of using eugenics and genocide to abolish what they feel are lesser people or lesser races is disgusting.

The American Indians have such patience and acceptance of other people, and the rest of us need to listen to what they have to say. They could teach us so much about how to love and how to live in harmony with each other. but unfortunately, others have to willing to listen in order to learn. as a nation we are just not ready to do without some sort of intervention. Someone with some gumption and some clout, an activist like George Clooney, needs to stand up and say, "This is what I've learned, and you could benefit from it too."

Maybe one day, when I write the great American novel and be come a famous author, I can do that.

I think that we are a young country, but we are a country of one people. We are all Americans. We may have different cultures and different backgrounds, but we are all Americans. My daughter once told me that she was Irish, German, Cherokee, Black, and British. Now it's true that our ancestors come from all over the world, but I needed some clarification as to why she thought she belonged to all those nationalities. So I asked her to explain to me her reasoning.

"That's where we're from," she said.

"No, that's where our ancestors are from," I told her. "We are from America. We don't belong to those other countries, but our heritage does. What our grandparents taught us about that heritage is what we practice in traditions and values. It's why your grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all come together on major holidays because the role of family is an important value."

We also have invented our own traditions and values over time. Change is a natural part of our culture, and adapting to new things is the basis of our world. So, why can't we make a change for the better? Acceptance is the first step. We cannot learn to love one another without accepting others for their differences, and differences is what make us all unique. And uniqueness allows so many perspectives and solutions to problems.

We are all Americans. Can we not make a change for the better and love each other like the brothers and sisters we are? This is a great nation with so many differences, but why do we let those differences divide us. They should bring us together. Look at all the things we could learn from each other. Look at how together we could change the world for the better if we would just take the time to listen to one another.

Yellow Woman

Leslie Marmon Silko

It was hard for me to chose which essays in this week's book to talk about. There is so much information and insight within them all. I didn't read them in order, I skipped around from the back to the front to the middle. There's just something about reading a collection of stories or essays from front to back that makes me want to put them in some sort of chronological order. Reading them in a chaotic fashion allowed me to be able to read each story separately and keep each piece's meaning separate in my mind. Crazy I know, but it worked for me.

The first essay that I turned to was "The People and the Land ARE Inseparable." It was this piece in which I first caught a glimpse of something, but I wasn't sure what it was. There was conflict between the words and the lines, but I was attributing that conflict to the years of fighting over land and boundaries, the Europeans taking over and defining what was right and what was wrong, what was theirs and what belonged to the Indians. Because that was how they had always done it and the white culture was more powerful, that was how it was going to be done, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. On the surface, there was nothing there that we hadn't already learned. But it wasn't until later, when I read "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit," I realized that the conflict wasn't only about whites and Indians. It was about culture, and it lies within each human being.

In this book, Leslie Silko is a odds with herself. She is torn between what was and what is, and her mixed heritage seems to complicate the war. But the thing is, Silko knows that is who she is, and she accepts it and draws from it. And I think that the book is not only about learning Laguna heritage, but her learning to live as an Indian in a white country without loosing her heritage. It's also about what we can all learn from each other. In the video, she continues teaching the difference of then and now, how we as a people need to remember that the earth is a living being too, and our greed is killing our relationship with the earth.

"In the old days," is Silko's favorite phase throughout this book. In the old days, there was acceptance for who a person was. No one judged another based on appearance or sexual orientation. The "live and let live" philosophy made life simplistic, and everybody was happy.

Today, people seem hell bent on telling you what's right and what's wrong. (Sound familiar?) We are constantly plummeted by others telling us how to think, telling us how we should act. Judgments are passed on others in magazines, newspapers, and television. With the advent of Facebook, all of us can join in telling others how to live their lives. With the constant flood of media coming our way, it's amazing to me that each human brain can differentiate one's own individualism from a mass conglomeration of nonsense. But then again sometimes it can't.