Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

Introduction

Louse Erdrich’s poem “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” basically is about survival and experience on how Native American children were taken from their homelands and able to have the idea of returning despite the attempts for the system crushing their culture. In “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” Louise Erdrich utilizes the use of metaphor and imagery to explain the pain of forced cultural assimilation and experience of native American children through the paradox of home, which is a central theme in the poem.

“Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” relates to the experience of Indian children who struggle to maintain their cultural identities and to preserve their cherished memories about home regardless of a series of efforts in purging them of their Indian heritage. However, the use of haunting language explains that, for the children, the word they had first known had changed to the extent that it existed only based on their imaginations. Therefore, the children would escape to their homes only when they went to sleep and dream as well.

In stanza one, Erdrich conveys the longing when he said, “Home is the place we head for in our sleep. / Boxcars stumbling north in dreams / do not wait for us. We catch them on the run” (lines 1-3). Fighting assimilation that was being forced upon them, the children had only their memories. In fantasy, in sleep, from their only escape in life, they return home. Additionally, even from their fantasies, they are trapped; even in their dreams, the trains: do not wait for us” line 3.

Through relating the experiences of the “runaways” as well as their dreams of home, Louise Erdrich recreates the experience of the emotion of Native American Children sent boarding schools. Probably, the history of the Indian schools more explains the experience that is explained in the poem as well as shedding light on the repercussions of America’s policy based on forced assimilation. There is also punishment in the last stanza of the poem on how the children endured through runaways that are envisioned as being shameful.

The girl’s punishment to have scrubbing clean on a flat concrete sidewalk might be viewed as precisely insulting. Moreover, half of the poem gives a stirring dream that is an inflected narrative of escape. Even from the title, it is unusual enough to conjure an impression or image based on an oppressive boarding school from the reader’s mind, although the first few lines do not mention any school. The first stanza has explained the path towards freedom that the children were to undertake. Next, the second stanza describes how the children we caught as well as their return journey towards the boarding school.

By using metaphor, Louise Erdrich, in his poem, grants an articulation capable of applying non-literal meaning onto phrases and words, which turns out to be applied to actions and objects across the poem. For example, inline (4) “Rails, Old lacerations that we love,” there is a clear metaphoric insight from the minds of the young natives, many of whom might never meet any other escapee and yet all would presumably hold the very similar observations.

Additionally, “Rails” specifically meant what was fixed deeply into the ground were tracks, they are memory, everyone with these memories as markers and allowing all the natives to see. Finding strength and tenderness is something that that is ugly is highly interesting. Therefore, the children seemed to embrace the ugliness, since from the same distortion and pain which had been caused by the white oppressors, earning their freedom.

There are desires and fears from the victimized children from institutional re-education time from the Native youth. Although their bones were totally broken similar to their community of past and present as their drives were equal, they shared their goals. There tireless efforts to flee their captors at all cost had rung true. Metaphors creatively set the scene and put the audience based on a headspace where all could feel their wants and pains as well as need, and also prosopopeia assists them with their identity.

In other words, the children were lost, and the audience’s hearts probably followed nearly behind, though it would be noted that through self-education as these great catastrophes might be evaded. It is ethnocentric thinking and fear that leads to heinous choices sone by the ruling power. With the help of a willingness and an openness to communicate, a repetition of inhumane crimes like those are considerably unthinkable

In the poem “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” Erdrich personifies human invention and nature with images of frustration and struggles to match similar feelings, which are for the underlying poem’s narrative voice. In the quote, “You cannot get lost. Home is the play they cross, (7)” it shows that the children had paradoxically selecting to lose themselves. They were genuinely lost from the surety, which was in the white men’s institutions. That is where they had lost their identities. They left for the elements they were free and made them reclaim themselves as well as finding “home,” even if they ended up being as well as on their own terms.

Also, “if any place they cross” is probably home, then precisely the children were reclaiming home, which is the freedom in the lengthy elimination from the indoctrinating institutions. The literary device oddly enough that the children were not necessarily represented by passengers but mostly the boxcars themselves. Thus, they were personified, provided their own feelings; “it was their legs,” having the same goals, traveling the routes for which they would have followed anyway, though offering with haste, less likely defied instantaneous gratification.

Louise Erdrich, therefore, closes the poem when he explains how the children tried to remember their cultural heritage despite being forced in order to adopt the white American customs. The history of the Indian boarding schools, as well as how they had worked in ridding the children of their Native American identities, evidently informs the poem. Even though the runaways had wished to have their trip returning home, they knew the coldness that they were feeling would come to an end soon. There is a pain as well as memories of pain, although there is strength from the memory of the story and image where the names and nature stay side by side.

In that sense, Erdrich’s work is not only literary but also political. Through invoking an emotional response in her audience, he is capable of exposing the dark side of the history of the united states and the treatment of Native Americans. The poem by Erdrich has profoundly utilized the use of imagery and metaphor in describing the pain on forced cultural assimilation and the experience of the native American children through the central theme of the paradox of home in the poem.

Work cited

Erdrich, Louise. “Indian boarding school: The runaways.” Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century Native American Poetry (1998).