...“Evolution” by Sherman Alexie displayed three central images in the poem that proved vital to the explanation of the meaning. The three central images that are vital to the poem are; Buffalo Bill, the pawn shop, and The Museum of Native American Cultures. The author depicts a methodical degradation of Native American people and their culture. For instance, Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation directly across the border from the liquor store, which is open 24 hours a day / 7 days a week (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). The site for the pawn shop was established to suggest that the Native American people were drunkards. Buffalo Bill refers to the image that signifies the American government and the white people. Alexie utilizes an elongated metaphor throughout the poem that emphasizes the deception that the American government engaged against the Native American society. This may have resulted from the Plains Indians retaliation against the white settlement and the subsequent defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn (Buffalo Bill Center of the West, 2018)....
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...In Alexie’s “Evolution”, I have chosen the pawn shop as my first selected central image (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). I believe that Alexie selected to use the pawn shop for his poem as an ironic view of a trading post. The pawn shop mentioned in Alexie’s poem is a place where the Indians go to sell all of their possessions for less than its true value. A pawn shop typically purchase items for less than their value, so they can sell it for a profit. A trading post was a place where the Indians and settlers were supposed to trade items to each other of equal value, even though this was not always true. The Indians were treated the same at the pawn shop as they were at the old trading posts. I have chosen to use the items that the Indians sold in the pawn shop as my second selected central image (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). Each of these items were an ironic part of their livelihood. They gave up their warmth, protection, tools, homes, past, willpower, and eventually their freedom. It did not happen all at once, since it took a process of time for them to lose everything. The availability to lose everything was “24 hours a day, 7 days a week”, which is every...
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...Native American Culture: Disappearing or Evolving? It has been made clear through our studies and the understanding of cultures through various pieces of work, that culture is something that defines most of us as humans, while allowing us to keep close to our traditions and values and in a society that is constantly progressing and evolving. In addition, Native Americans are one group of individuals throughout history, who have always had a strong set of traditions and values, and these traditions have even evolved and progressed. On the other hand, one could argue that these set of traditions and historical roots of has begun to disappear. Through comparing Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, and Edward Curtis’s photography sets documenting Indian Culture and identity, we are shown how these works represent Native American Culture as it is changing and evolving over time, and how it is disappearing. In Reservation Blues, we are introduced to modern day Indians, and how they are influenced by music, and a less traditional lifestyle, while Edward Curtis used his photography as a visual platform to paint a historical and attempted to recreate history through his photographs. The evolving culture of Native Americans is something that is represented throughout Reservation Blues. We are introduced to characters that defy, what some would consider, traditional values and norms. We are presented a literary picture of modern day Native Americans who challenge this through music,...
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...Using Facebook to Teach Rhetorical Analysis Jane Mathison Fife The attraction of Facebook is a puzzle to many people over the age of thirtyfive, and that includes most college faculty. Yet students confess to spending significant amounts of time on Facebook, sometimes hours a day. If you teach in a computer classroom, you have probably observed students using Facebook when you walk in the room. Literacy practices that fall outside the realm of traditional academic writing, like Facebook, can easily be seen as a threat to print literacy by teachers, especially when they sneak into the classroom uninvited as students check their Facebook profiles instead of participating in class discussions and activities. This common reaction reflects James King and David O’Brien’s (2002: 42) characterization of the dichotomy teachers often perceive between school and nonschool literacy activities (although they are not referring to Facebook specifically): “From teachers’ perspectives, all of these presumably pleasurable experiences with multimedia detract from students’ engagement with their real work. Within the classroom economy technology work is time off task; it is classified as a sort of leisure recreational activity.” This dichotomy can be broken down, though; students’ enthusiasm for and immersion in these nonacademic literacies can be used to complement their learning of critical inquiry and traditional academic concepts like rhetorical analysis. Although they read these texts daily...
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...Resources for Teaching Prepared by Lynette Ledoux Copyright © 2007 by Bedford/St. Martin’s All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. 2 1 f e 0 9 d c 8 7 b a For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000) ISBN-10: 0–312–44705–1 ISBN-13: 978–0–312–44705–2 Instructors who have adopted Rereading America, Seventh Edition, as a textbook for a course are authorized to duplicate portions of this manual for their students. Preface This isn’t really a teacher’s manual, not, at least, in the sense of a catechism of questions and correct answers and interpretations. Because the questions provided after each selection in Rereading America are meant to stimulate dialogue and debate — to generate rather than terminate discourse — they rarely lend themselves to a single appropriate response. So, while we’ll try to clarify what we had in mind when framing a few of the knottier questions, we won’t be offering you a list of “right” answers. Instead, regard this manual as your personal support group. Since the publication of the first edition, we’ve had the chance to learn from the experiences of hundreds of instructors nationwide, and we’d like to use this manual as a forum where we can share some of their concerns, suggestions, experiments, and hints. We’ll begin with a roundtable on issues you’ll probably want to address before you meet your class. In the first section of this manual, we’ll discuss approaches to...
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