Paulos's World Lit Blog

Settler colonialism has dramatically changed the lives of Native Americans in different ways as can be seen by the characters in There There . One way settler colonialism affected the people in the story is that it caused massive mixing between Native Americans like how Edwin’s mom is white and his father is Native American. This mix of cultures which we see is affecting Edwin, as he recently started going to the Native American center near his house to work, this happened due to settler colonialism. Also, the forced removal of Native Americans from areas such as the Indian Removal Act or Dawes Act is probably one of the primary reasons why most of the notable characters in the stories are near the poverty line as they were unable to form generational wealth. For example, Opal had to move when she was a child. The acts were made to remove ‘Indianess” which can be seen plenty by some of the protagonists like Tony not really being connected to their Indian culture until the Oakland powwo...

How did generational trauma, directly or indirectly, affect the main characters in the story? For example, Jaquie’s use of alcohol and the higher rates of alcohol usage within the Native American community can be attributed to anxiety or mental health problems that were rooted in generational trauma.

  The first micro lecture gave a lot of good context of the Native American past such as the Prologue in the novel. I learned more about the Pocahontas story and the biases that we have because the main narrative of the story was only told from the British perspective and not the Native American perspective. From the British perspective, we hear that the tribe leader wanted to kill him, but Pocahontas saved him because she was attracted to him. However, from the Native American Perspective, we learned that it was an adoption ceremony into the tribe. I learned about the different cities in the civilization of America before Columbus. The city I was most interested in was Cahokia. It was double the size of London but only housed 10-20 thousand people. There were pathways, sites of worship, buildings, courtyards, houses, and more. Based on the reconstructed image I saw, I was reminded of just how advanced Native American civilization was.  I also learned about how they used anima...

  So far I have yet to do much for my final project. I researched for a couple of hours for primary texts that follow the theme, of lovers ending in tragedy, as Antigone did. I mainly found middle eastern and European texts such as Pyramus and Thisbe or Tristan and Isolde for older texts. Now, I plan to look for adaptations of these stories in Asian or African contexts because I have not seen any older-age African or Asian literature that has a story about lovers ending in tragedy. Sometimes the research can be frustrating and I want to switch the topic, but then I just switch the keywords on a search and I get better results. The topic that I originally chose I have stuck for now because of the European and middle eastern texts I have seen, however, if I can not find any adaptations in other contexts, I will have to think more about potentially switching my topic to another topic. If I would have to say something is enjoyable, it would have to be succeeding in finding a source aft...