Friday, February 26, 2010
The Warrior's Ways
In The Warriors by Anna Lee Walters, the existense of survivance overpowering. The sisters' Uncle, Uncle Ralph, is the personification of survivance in a character. His constant lessons promoting their traditional Indian ways amongst his nieces is his way of fighting for his culture to carry on in the world that he sees overtaking his traditional lifestyle. Similarly Uncle Ralph's bizarre behavior could be a result of the troubles he has had to encounter. For example his consistancy of always being on the run and always bringing a meal to those that he visits upholds the Indian traditions. Potentiallly the constant traveling could be the Uncle attempting to carry on his tribes tradition of migrating and being on the move and maybe his alcoholism isa result of the suppression and struggles he went through watching his traditional Indian ways disappear into the modern "white mans" culture. What this reading made me wonder is what time era was this story written, are we talking modern times or still back in the beginning of much of the Indian assimilation
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I kind of think it's the other way around. The fact that he continues to talk to his nieces about living a better life and pretty much imparting wisdom on them seems to be his way of resistance. He is trying to resist the conformity that is eventually happening by telling a future generation. I see survival in him being alive. But it seems like he is barely hanging on. I feel like he has a struggle for survival as he becomes a desolate man towards the end.
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ReplyDeleteI believe Uncle Ralph was an example of survival, because he did teach his nieces very important life lessons, as well as trying to keep his Indian traditions of a warrior which was bringing food to the table every times he visited his family. His ability to hide all his problems when visiting his family were a symbol of survival, even thought the alcohol was killing him inside he manage to conceal it from them. However after a while he lost his strength of keeping his bad habits from his family.
ReplyDeleteTo me, this story's time era is modern. That's just how I imagined it to be when I was reading the story. And he does display survivance really well since he tried to keep traditions passed on to generations.
ReplyDeleteI think that Uncle Ralph was in some ways an example of survivance. He passed on his culture to future generations as one of the few people that still held on to older traditions. His story was tragic though, as we saw him slipping into alcoholism and then turns into a vagrant himself. Though he didn't resist the loss of himself, he taught his younger nieces that they had the power to resist cultural assimilation.
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