Short Takes

Part Six

(I guess I lost track of how many I had done - kind of the way I lost track of which week this is in semesters. But really this is part 6!)

Essays I read this week:
1. From "Mexico's Children" by Richard Rodriquez
2. "What Sacagawea Means To Me" by Sherman Alexie

Analysis of "What Sacagawea Means To Me" 

In this essay, Alexie uses an extended metaphor of Sacagawea to reveal how the United States is a contradiction. He begins with a mocking story or experience about how one can visit Sacagawea’s “brain” and experience the way she lived life. For example, she dies of a mysterious disease which could have been brought on by Lewis and Clarke, which reflects the hypocrisy of “civilizing” America. Also in her relationship with the two explorers, she still defends them against her long-lost brother after the fact that they enslaved her. This in itself shows her as a contradiction. He then extends this contradiction to the United States as he represents her as “our mother.” Here he places “clashing evidence” by mentioning that she is the “first gene pair of the American DNA” and alluding to the fact that “in the beginning, she was the word.” This scientific and religious connotations in neighboring sentences continues this contradictory theme. It all goes in to expose how he, like most Americans is “a contradiction.”