Self-representation in Photography

After browsing through all the photos, I found the photo of Terri-Lynn Swain most striking. This photo seems to portray a native individual living in big city. The first thing you see is her native clothing and the big buildings behind her representing an urbanized city. This seems to symbolize that she values her culture and it is important to her indicating that although she lives in a different society, her roots still are shape her identity. Living in an urban area has not weakened her native culture, she strongly shows that by the way she looks.

Another aspect of this photo is her body language. The woman stands with great confidence like a leader based on the look on her face and her hands to her hips. She seems to be standing proud to be a Native individual wearing her traditional clothing and being in a civilized society. By standing with courage and confidence, she is not facing the city but is looking away from it. Her eyes are looking up towards something perhaps the woman is looking into the direction of a rural area by imagining her roots.

An interesting feature about this photo is that the image of the woman is clearly shown whereas the background of the city is a little blurry. This can represent the importance of the woman and her clothing. The city is probably seen as not important to look at. By taking the photograph this way, the woman stands out and is shown being proud of who she is.

Week 4, "Birth of A Colt"

Paraphrasing a poem...
(Prompt 1)

Birth of A Colt
By Linda Hogan

When we reach the field
She is still eating
The heads of yellow flowers
And pollen has turned her whiskers
Gold. Lady,
Her stomach bulges out,
The ribs have grown wide.
We wait, our bare feet dangling
In the horse trough,
Warm water
Where goldfish brush
Our smooth ankles.
We wait
While the liquid breaks
Down Lady’s dark legs
And that slick wet colt
Like a black tadpole
Darts out
Beginning at once
To sprout legs.
She licks it to its feet,
The membrane still there,
Red,
Transparent
The sun coming up shines through,
The sky turns bright with morning
And the land
With pollen blowing off the corn,
Land that will always own us,
Everywhere it is red.

REWRITE:
We go to the field
Lady is still eating, her nose is yellow from the plants
Her stomach is large
We wait with our feet in the water trough
Goldfish are in the trough
Parturition begins, we see legs first
The mare cleans her colt
It is now morning
Pollen is blowing off the corn
Everything looks red (because its dawn)

This poem was not particularly difficult to figure out what was really going on… it was fairly straight forward. A mare gives birth to a foal. However, towards the end of the poem there is something symbolic going on. Something that seems significant to me is the repetition of pollen; why does it appear at the beginning and the close of the poem? There is also the repetition of the color red. Initially red makes me imagine bold, passionate emotions, or something sinful even. But in this poem, where the color red is placed, I get the sense of “rebirth”. Red is associated with the birth of the colt and the beginning of a new day. Yellow is another color that comes to my mind as I read through this poem. I don’t have a particular emotion that I associate with yellow, other than happiness or cheerfulness maybe. In this sense, I would say that yellow images help bring the poem to life, or help the reader get a good image of what’s going on in the poem. I don’t see a deep hidden meaning to the use of yellow images in this particular poem.

As it Was In the Beginning Response

I found this reading very interesting. First, because the father allowed his native daughter to go to the missionary school, even though her mother disagreed with it. Second, because of the hypocritical events that occurred in the story as well. Ester's identity was completely stolen when she entered into a world and culture that was not her own. Her beliefs, faith and comfort was placed in St. Paul, who ended up betraying her and killing her spirit. I found it very hypocritical of St. Paul to try to convert Esther to his religion and his ways, however, when it came down to his nephew wanting to marry Esther, his attitude towards her changed. St. Paul was who she looked up to, and who she placed all her trust in when she had to leave and go to the mission school, and he betrayed her with his attitude towards the native people.

He even referred to Esther as a serpent, which is kinda symbolic because when I think of a serpent it takes me back to Adam and Eve in the bible. The Serpent was satan and he got Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and she gave some to Adam, which lead to their downfall. Within this story, I see St. Paul as the serpent and also Esther in some was as well. However, mainly St. Paul because he talked his nephew out of marrying Esther, the woman for who he loved dearly, and he wanted him to marry someone who was of his kind and not a girl who had native blood.

The ending of this story shocked me, because I didn't think that Esther will kill Laurence because he listen to his uncle. However, I understood where Esther was coming from emotionally and this lead to her killing Laurence. She didn't want him to marry the other girl because she was in love with him and if she couldn't have him, then no one else could.

At the end of the story, I also found it very interesting that when they discovered Laurence's death they referred to her as a native who killed him and not as a women who was emotionally hurt my the things St. Paul's words and Laurence's decision to forget about her.

Cracking The Maya Code, Week 3 Post 1

"At the beginning of the film “Cracking the Maya Code,” the narrator poses a question: "Imagine explorers arriving to find our cities deserted. All of our books have perished in some unknown catastrophe. All that is left to speak for us are the written words we have carved in stone. The travelers could not make sense of our script. But if they could would they comprehend who we were?"


Consider this scenario with respect to the carved stones that appear in our society today—the Vietnam Memorial, Mt. Rushmore, the Lincoln memorial, artwork on campus, etc. Imagine that only a small handful of important books had survived, hidden away alongside these carved stones. How would our monuments and books speak for us? If they could understand our writing system, would future explorers be able to understand who we were?"

With only our written language and no one to speak it, it would be very difficult and near impossible to make any sense of our alphabet. Letters and numbers appear everywhere and are applied to every aspect of our lives. We do not use pictographic symbols or characters, which like the Mayan culture, in some instances assisted in the deciphering of their written language.

If these hypothetical explorers had been able to figure out our language, the question is then about our culture "would they comprehend who we were?". What were our values? Were we religious? Were we diverse or all the same? What did we eat?

With only the strongest of monuments left standing, would they be sufficient in detailing our society? I say no. A significant part of our society is our language and communication. Though everything is now written down, or typed, I still believe that oral history is a very important part of American society. We are also a very visual nation with the new age of booming technological advances. Our society in general is extremely fast paced with even the most basic elements: food, travel, education, etc.

However, I also think that our monuments would paint a fairly decent picture of some of what we value. For example, the war memorials clearly depict scenes of battle and carry a sense of respect and brotherhood. Presidential monuments are clearly respectful of the men that are carved inside of them (although I wonder if something such as the Lincoln memorial wouldn't give the wrong impression that we worshipped him as a god or something, architecturally the building does looks similar to temples in Greece).