The Role Of Birds In Native American Literature - 1425 Words

Everyday birds fly in the sky. They leave the ground of reality and escape to the portal of the spirit world- the sky. Birds are prominent figures in Native American cultures. The significance and spirituality of birds in Native American culture is translated into Native American literature. In Monkey Beach, The Lesser Blessed, and Flight the main characters experience traumatizing events. As indigenous characters, the spirit world and spirituality are mechanisms that they use to cope with their trauma. Whether these characters have the birds’ spirituality thrusted upon them through birds or seek spirituality in the birds, the main characters of all three pieces of literature all share birds as devices of spirituality. In these books birds†¦show more content†¦This is a reference to where Jimmy is located. Yet Lisa does not completely understand these messages that the crows give her, as a few pages later she says, â€Å"God knows what the crows are trying to say. L a’es- go down to the bottom, like a halibut hook stuck on the ocean floor; a boat sinking, coming to rest on the bottom† (Robinson 17). In this excerpt, Lisa foretells that Jimmy’s boat sank, yet she either ignores the message or does not understand it fully. The crows are mediating from the spirit world that Jimmy and his boat are on the ocean floor. For most of the book Lisa relentlessly questions whether Jimmy is alive, but in the very first sentence of the book the crows tell her the answer. In fact, the spirits and crows tell Lisa about Jimmy’s death when she is a young girl. She says, â€Å"I heard crows cawing and screeching. I went to the window and saw they were gathered in a circle. They lifted off the lawn, and I could see a dead crow with a missing wing. It lay at an odd angle. It was small and young, in the process of molting into its adult feathers when something had caught it and chewed it almost raw†¦ Jimmy ran onto the back lawn and carefully cradled it against his arm. He stood in the predawn greyness and flung it upward. I watched the transformed baby crow soar upward, shrink to a tiny dot, then disappear behind the clouds. WhenShow MoreRelatedThe New World974 Words   |  4 Pagesevaluative concepts about status and roles and as such are central to interpreting and evaluating social groups including one’s own.†Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ (xvi) Kilpatrick explores â€Å"the social, ideological and political construction†(xvi) of stereotypes in literature, film and politics. Literature has been around for centuries but film making are an adequately new invention, however stereotypes within them have their origins centuries before. 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