Friday, February 5, 2010
Mary Brave Bird
In We Aim NOT to Please by Mary Brave Bird her survivance writing takes a rather disconnected tone. While reading her piece there were actually points where I was taken aback and thinking that it was actually written by the white man. By using language such as "the people," it sort of portrays the illusion that Brave Bird doesn't associate herself as one of the Native Americans, or at one point I began to question if she was a whiteman living in the Indian community to study them or something. I thought it was kind of ironic for her to write from such a distance from her culture; she was in a sort dissociating herself from a culture that she was emphasizing in such a positive light. By taking this approach to her story I think Brave Bird was not trying to dissociate from her heritage, but rather she was trying to give them better recognization. By writing in a disassociated tone, it could bring her story better recognition because rather than and Indian writing positively about her own culture, it would grab readers as a outsider and "more accredible" white man writing about the Indians with a positive connotation. In the end by saying that she is proud and Native American, could be intended to throw a twist at the reader, maybe proving to them that Native American's are more similar to whites than they are credited to be and that the are capable of all the same intelligence and skills. Did anyone notice the same trend?
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The reason her tone may sound like that of a white man is her background. She went to missionary school and if I remember correctly her family was not to keen to have her identify as a Native American, they believed in assimilation. Although parents have plans there are some things that are out of their control, Mary Brave Bird's connection to her heritage was one of those things. Maybe her tone reflects an understanding or a perspective that we have not yet heard in Native American society, I think whatever she is doing with word choice is working- I love her.
ReplyDeleteI don't think she is disconnecting herself to Native Americans. She still identify herself as Indians and part of the AIM. I think she talk like this is because her background and the event is already past and she is looking forward to future dreams.
ReplyDeleteI'd have to agree with you that she is disassociating herself from the Indians. Yes, sometimes she does seem to be a bit distant from the Native Americans when she's writing, but I feel like she was just trying to be real with her readers. Her tone seems to be the kind of tone where she is telling all truth and she does not want to dance around it or falsify anything. At one point she admits that they were not angels.
ReplyDeleteMaybe she disassociated herself from AIM when they got violent, or when they did something that she didn't believe in, but she definitely seemed to identify herself as part of AIM.
I have to disagree with you I don’t think she is disassociating herself form the Indians, I think the opposite I think she shows how proud she is of the AIM movement and how they took matters in to their own hands. I also don’t think that her tone sounds like that of a white man, maybe I interpreted her writing in a different way they you did, I guess it all depends on the read. I think her tone is of a woman who is proud to be part of the American Indian movement.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your comment on the disassociation between Brave Bird and her people. I believe the term the people is of respect, because she is only referring them as THE people, and other people she calls whites and such. She is also proud of AIM, I felt as though she had glorified it.
ReplyDeleteI did not interpret Mary Brave Bird's tone in the same way. I did not think that she was associating herself with the white man. However, I do agree with your statement on how she seems to have taken a step back in writing this, like she is viewing AIM from an outside perspective. For example, she refers to her first encounters with AIM, which allows the readers to see into her past and experience the same feelings she was feeling at the time. She views the movement with awe and wonder, and throughout the piece, the reader gains a sense of how much Mary Brave Bird has grown through her experiences with AIM. She has grown to be very proud of her Native American heritage.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if one thing y'all are picking up on is that Brave Bird had a co-author with her in her book -- kind of like a "ghost writer." A lot of people who aren't writers employ someone to help them with the grammar and mechanics and formal structure. Does this make a difference in the way we read Brave Bird?
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