Exploring Borderlands

Trevor Olson
English III
Ms. Fordahl
2/18/2014

Exploring Borderlands

            This past week we talked about and learned about exploring borderlands. We read a story and watched a PBS video again. The story was written by Gloria Anzaldua. The name of the story was How to Tame a Wild Tongue. In the next paragraphs I am going to talk about the story and how borderlands have to do with the story and video.

            The theme I am going to talk about throughout the story and video is culture. Culture is what helps make borderlands. Borderlands are formed by a strong dividing line of cultures. Each culture has different languages usually, but some have very little to no change in their language.

            In the story How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Gloria Anzaldua describes how the culture is different in the Americas from where she lived before. In the story the girl was treated unequally because of her language. She could speak English, but not much at all, it was very broken. Her parents would always tell her to just keep quiet because they didn’t want to be embarrassed of her broken language. So that’s why there is a culture borderland around the Americas.

            In the video from PBS there were women and men from Spanish speaking countries and they are called Chicanas and Chicanos. The video talked how there were conquistadors, people that were the first too settle in Mexico, and how they were very important to the culture and the language. The men and women talked about how it was nice to come to a land that they weren’t criticized about their language. They also say it wasn’t the easiest to move away from their homeland and to America.

            So in conclusion, in the story How to Tame a Wild Tongue it talks about cultural borderlands because of her native speaking in America and how tough it was growing up. In the video they talk about borderlands and culture change between Mexico and America. So both the story and video have to deal with exploring borderlands.

Native Voices

Trevor Olson
English III
Ms. Fordahl
2/04/14

          In the past couple of weeks we have been talking and learning about native voices and creation stories. We read a couple of stories and watched a PBS video. The stories were written by Scott Momaday and Louise Erdrich. The story names were Way to Rainy Mountain and Saint Marie. In the next paragraphs I’m going to talk about how the native people have relationships with their land they live on or were born and raised on.

            In the story Way to Rainy Mountain, author Momaday describes the land where his grandmother lived and where he grew up as a child. He describes the oral tradition in his tribe and how his elders lived a long time ago. Here is an example of Momaday describing the land, “A single Knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range.” He says in the story that his people are a landmark and gave the land the name Rainy Mountain. This relationship with the land in this story resembles the relationship in the next story Saint Marie.

            In the story Saint Marie, Louise Erdrich describes the land of where she grew up as a child. In my opinion this story was like a yellow woman story. In the story there is a nun that is a trickster in the story that tricks the little girl into believing she is possessed. An example about the land out of the story is “Recently a windbreak was planted before the bar for the purposes of tornado insurance.” In the next paragraph I’m going to talk about how I have a relationship with the land.

            I have a relationship with the land because of my job. My job is to be a beekeeper. I work on a bee farm and you need pollen from the land for the bees to make honey. The honey is extracted from the bees onto hives and then is extracted from the hives into a condenser which cleans and thins the honey, to make it able to sell. So that is why I have a relationship with the land.

            So in the story, Way to Rainy Mountain it talks about the land that Momaday lives on and where he grew up.  In Saint Marie she talks about where she lives and what the people and conditions were like there. In conclusion the stories and I both have relationships with the land.