Sherman Alexie Response Paragraph

Response Paragraph I really enjoyed reading Alexie’s essay. What he writes about is very expressive, and you get the full point of what he is trying to express. The main part that touched me is when he is explaining how he was treated, and what he had to go through just because he was smart, and wasn’t afraid to express himself. The other children would beat him up; he was looked down on, and also treated as an outsider because of this.

Alexie didn’t care though because he knew that there was something other than the reservation in his future, and that the world was much bigger than the reservation that he lived on, and there was more to be gotten on the outside. He wasn’t going to let the other Indians keep him down, and stop him from learning. It’s awesome that when Alexie is an adult he goes back to reservations to help the children, because when he was a child there was no one that was there to support him, or to look up to other than his father of course.

So he wants to be there to support them and express to them that they can have a future, and open their eyes to the possibilities they have in their future. He even wants to help the same type of children that had beat him up. Those children are his main target. Alexie could have forgotten about where he had come from, but he didn’t he goes back, and he’s helping these children that otherwise wouldn’t get any help, or ever have been shown that just because they are Indian, and they are from a reservation that they are smart. He won’t give up on them.

Alexie is a very good role model for these children that don’t have very many role models in their lives at least any good ones. It’s a very special thing he does; not very many people would do what he is doing. Even in today’s society people still think like when Alexie was a child. They think that Indians are dumb drunks, but people don’t realize what all they have been through in their history. How would you feel if you were forced from you home and made to live in some new strange place, and live by some other foreign people’s rules, and even to be made into servants?

If you think about it there really isn’t all that much information about what happened to the Indians it’s still kind of shrouded in mystery, or I’m just not looking in the right places, but like with slaves, you’re taught about it in school, and there is a whole month dedicated to Black History. Where is the month for Indian History, and all you get taught in school is minor information that’s more about the Civil War, or the Pilgrims than anything. Any way’s there should be more ready information about Indian history available to Americans living on reservations and off.