imperfect effort

it has been necessary for me to work diligently for my own support, and the education of my children

but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course.

Seriously, Madison, cut your losses and stay in Canada where there’s poutine and Tim Hortons.

Although, I can’t say I’d do the same if I freed someone and they made the brash decision to walk right on back into the claws of danger. Seriously, Madison, cut your losses and stay in Canada where there’s poutine and Tim Hortons.  

When he sees that Madison has been taken into slavery again after his (brave?) decision to try and free his wife,

Later the story performs its inevitable acrobatics and turns really into a slave narrative where we see the enemies as the revolting slaves.

but that’s a story for another time)

I can easily see how Melville uses a sense of dramatic irony to keep the reader in tow with the story while also trying to sell a slave narrative.

a ride down confusion lane, shall we?

Yeah, you heard me.

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

belch’d words

My respiration and inspiration,

me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

Nature without check with original energy.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,

Creeds and school

abeyance,

Hoping to cease not till death.

All the story does is reiterate the societal bounds that women and minority groups have been trying to break.

clearly

. We’ll get our fairytale ending.

Neither Unca nor Alluca are examples of feminist characters for one simple reason: every action they both take is motivated by the pursuit of a man.

an entertaining read

It doesn’t even pass the bechdel test!

prove his love for Unca and she miraculously revives him

I know we all love Pocahontas,

Students in the district would no longer go to the school nearest home but to the one dedicated to his or her grade.

The schools were too good, and as integration increased, they just kept getting better.

He was wrong about that. Many have failed where he succeeded, then and since.

hog or a dog

derided the slowness, and dullness of the English army,

I told them, they had as good knock me in head as starve me to death.

Then I took it of the child, and eat it myself, and savory it was to my taste.

boiling horses feet;

By which I certainly understood (though I suspected it before) that whatsoever the Indians told me respecting him was vanity and lies

found no comfort here neither,

restoration would come to nothing.

a mess of broth, which was thickened with meal made of the bark of a tree, and to make it the better, she had put into it about a handful of peas, and a few roasted ground nuts

fortnight

I told them the skin was off my back

his squaw gave me some ground nuts; she gave me also something to lay under my head, and a good fire we had;

Boston

I fain to stoop to this rude fellow,

sticks for my own comfort, that I might not lie a-cold;

my master being gone, who seemed to me the best friend that I had of an Indian,

and never let her see it afterward.

This is not to say that Rowlandson’s depiction of the colonial encounter isn’t valid or worth the empathy it so easily conjures up for readers. The problem is not that Mary Rowlandson wrote about her captivity.

This imbalance allows for the subjectivity of innocence to continue polarizing until it becomes nearly impossible for some to see the truth.

and that there was seemingly no viable reason for it other than inherent brutality.

she—and society as a whole—deemed the context of her captivity unimportant

but put five Indian corns in the room of it; which corns were the greatest provisions I had in my travel for one day

pagans

she gave me a piece of bear. Another asked me to knit a pair of stockings, for which she gave me a quart of peas.

sannup

and fried in bear’s grease

I must go four or five miles up the river farther northward.

Saturday they boiled an old horse’s leg which they had got, and so we drank of the broth,

and yet this river put a stop to them

only my knitting work and two quarts of parched meal.

his dame

home

I went to see my daughter Mary

without any refreshing of one nature or other

Captain Beers’s

I had been of God’s holy time; how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent

Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures,

and I fell down with it

Native American cultures and their respective literatures are not ornamental and historical artifacts of America's past, but are both ancient and on-going-and as complicated as those of any other of the world's peoples.

"the Indian world" and how to understand it.

losing their culture

lack a fluent literacy in English.

sexual allusions-maintaining that censorship had never been exercised towards children in the past.

He should have said something to the effect that "I'll take you across one time, two at most," or "I'm at your disposal for the next fifteen minutes, no more." But he gave a basically open-ended agreement-made a contract-and hence the porcupine woman was per- fectly within her rights in both demanding that he return three times and in quilling him to death when he reneged.

It remained only to convince the members of the several hundred cultures in North America that there was no difference between them and that henceforth they should be prepared to be regularly mistaken for one another

is no such thing as "Native American litera- ture," though it may yet, someday, come into being.

cult

Black Water-spirit at about that time was having a hemorrhage and I wanted him to eat the peyote. “Well, I am not going to live anyhow,” he said. “Well, eat this medicine soon then and you will get cured.” Consumptives never were cured before this and now for the first time one was cured. Black Water-spirit is living to-day and is very well.

From that day on to the present time she has been well. Now she is very happy.

It had legs and arms and a long tail.

Suddenly I saw a big snake.

So there we

Before that I had been unable to laugh.

It seems to be alive and moving around in my stomach.

Peyote,

Yesterday the stranger said to me, “You may easily perceive, Captain Walton, that I have suffered great and unparalleled misfortunes. I had determined, once, that the memory of these evils should die with me; but you have won me to alter my determination.

Will you laugh at the enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer? If you do, you must have certainly lost that simplicity which was once your characteristic charm. Yet, if you will, smile at the warmth of my expressions, while I find every day new causes for repeating them.

Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth.