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Georgena Felicia's avatar

The hatred of the mother hurts her daughter as well as the young man. But the daughter will have to figure that out. It is the burden of successive generations to see through the prejudices of their own families, and move on the better for it.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Yup

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Blake Nelson's avatar

In AA they say: Anger is sadness in a leather jacket.

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Marcos's avatar

Wondering if the adjective you added was “completely” (first guess). Or was it “angry”? You had me thinking about your editing process.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

It was "angry"

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Marcos's avatar

Love that change! Thanks for sharing.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Thanks

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James Don BlueWolf's avatar

Oh Yeah!

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Notes from the periphery's avatar

I’m half Cree. This breaks my heart. ❤️

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Terry Freedman's avatar

Very poignant and powerful, and with a little wry humour too. One of the benefits of aging is becoming a but wiser and more understanding. Like Oscar Wilde said, youth is wasted on the young. Doesn't exonerate the mother though.

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M Virginia Hill's avatar

True, and for good reason

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

I'm married to a Native American woman but from a different tribe. I've taken to referring to our marriage as being Native Orthodoxy.

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J.'s avatar

Classic!

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J.'s avatar

Poignant poem. All kinds of echoes.

Anger being totally justified, but the question of where it is appropriate to direct it...

Maybe your girlfriend's mother imagined her whiteness being a focus for anger on the rez rather than her getting to know your family and friends and origins? Breaking down some walls by talking and laughing.rather than othering.

In my country we have Māori people who also have Pakeha (white) ancestry. Also: Chinese/Spanish/Indian/Jewish etc etc.

We don't have blood quantum rules.

Historically, marriages between tribes strengthened alliances. Some of our people won't look outside our culture for a partner. That's understandable.

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Carol Leibiger's avatar

But her racism isn't just an acknowledgement, it's also a cause.

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IG: @blamethebarber's avatar

Hmmm

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

Very powerful. Anger is a very complicated emotion. These decades later, you understand that the mother was not completely wrong... and is this understanding also helped by some amount of anger that has accumulated in you, aimed at the mother who would not allow her daughter to visit the reservation? Maybe, like an echo that reverberates back and forth, the mother's act of forbidding stoked the anger even more, an anger which the mother had recognized, and had anticipated, and had made her want to protect her daughter from an anger that she herself, the mother, had helped stoke.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

You have me looking in the mirror!

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

you might notice me in that same mirror too.

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

Many years ago, while in Santa Fe, I played hooky from a conference I was attending, and spent a few hours at the Native American Art Museum. I saw a sculpture there that I will never forget. It was screaming with rage. I couldn't tear myself away from it. I kept going around to look at beautiful rugs and paintings and other wonderful things, all of which I have by now completely forgotten, and then returning again and again to the room with the sculpture. I think the artist was a student. I never wrote down his name. I have only a vague recollection of anything else in the museum (or at the conference), but this powerful sculpture that had burst out of an art student is etched in my memory.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Yeah, I often have th same reaction with art in general.

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

This is a quote from James Baldwin, it's exactly this:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

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RonMcF's avatar

True enough, I'd say. But at your angriest, early in your writing career (I think), you had a great capacity for humor. In "Imagining the Reservation" (in LR&T) you offered the formula Survival = Anger x Imagination, proposing that imagination was the only weapon, but I countered (somewhere in print) that your formula should've been divided by Humor. You never have lost that capacity (genius?) for humor.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

This has thinking a parallel thought. Standup comedy is so scrutinized these days. It seems that only a certain kind of angry humor is tolerated by my comrade leftists.

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Cecilia Camardo's avatar

That’s always bothered me about stand-up comedy. Particularly when historically it has been such a guy’s club where women were not allowed to be funny. Frat house hazing.

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Kate Bradley's avatar

I don't feel any anger from your poetry, ever. Maybe your anger is fuel for your creativity? If that's the case, the metamorphosis is astonishing.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Anger can be fuel, I think.

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TScot's avatar

Your replies are poetry

Melancholy is a form of rage

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Thank you.

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