Native American Literature
Dr. Newmark
Essay Two

Four to Five Pages
Due: Wednesday, April 18

In this essay, you will need to include commentary drawn from your primary texts plus information from three additional scholarly sources. Your Works Cited page, then, will have at least five items on it. Please be sure that the majority of your paper is your own insight into the texts and that your supplemental sources are brought in to supplement your insights. Be sure to follow correct MLA paper format, for both layout and citation.

Please answer one of the following questions, developing an arguable claim (a thesis) in your first paragraph:

1. Using two texts of your choice from this semester (one must be from after the midterm), please describe the various challenges and triumphs of young Native boarding school students. Drawing from your reading of two sources, do you believe that the boarding school experience was unilaterally traumatic, difficult, scarring? What did students think of the experience, as adults writing about it? Did it benefit them in any way? What perceptible imprints did boarding school leave on the writers’ texts?

2. Please consider gender identity as related to mixed-blood identity. You will build your argument based on your examinations of two texts from this term (one must be from after the midterm). Several authors pay attention to “gendered” roles within Native communities, roles that don’t always correspond to the gender roles of “white” America. For example, Mathews indicates that certain difficulties faced by Challenge perhaps result from the problems he has understanding/accepting his own mixed-blood identity. Does this have something to do with the expected roles of men in these two different cultures? Please do not use Mathews in this essay unless you plan to read the whole novel (I use an example from Mathews here only to get you thinking in the right direction). Same goes for McNickle’s The Surrounded. Using two of the other shorter pieces (which are also excerpts, mind you) from our course, please discuss the sometimes fraught relationship between gender identity and race-affiliation (mixed-blood/full-blood status) among Native textual subjects.