Essay Blog Post

In Sherman Alexie's What Sacagawea Means to Me, he begins writing using a sarcastic tone about the nature of life and how everyone, "regardless of race, religion, gender, and age", at some point in their life will get to be like Sacagawea in some way. What he means by the examples he gives in his first paragraph - being kidnapped as a child, sold and forced to marry, march alongside two strange men and lead them on their expedition, and all you get is a stinking shirt for your trouble - is that life is a journey that is sometimes unexpected and certainly unpredictable. You are raised by your parents standards, you go to school as expected, get a job as you are typically forced to do in order to pay bills and support yourself, marry and have children, complete this long journey that is life, and then you die. The dying part is the t-shirt you get for your troubles. So, no matter who you are, where you come from, this is life's journey for you. Noone is exempt.
Alexie discusses, with a sense of irony, that Sacagawea is a contradiction, like so many other Americans - Miles Davis, a famous musician and descendent of slaves, Emily Dickinson writing poetry while Crazy Horse was attacking Custer, Ted Bundy, a respectable, handsome serial killer. She should have hated and rebelled against these white men. In fact, she died from a mysterious illness obtained by the very people who had basically enslaved her and whom she helped. Just as Sacagawea was destroyed by this illness, so were so many other lives by the colonization and settling of America that she had a small hand in. She is a contradiction. He mentions that she is no hero, and the reason is that, forced or not, she did participate in forever changing Native American lives - but, she is not the only one. Many individuals, black, white, Native American, and even canine, participated in this journey that forever changed America. Life is full of contradictions just like Sacagawea's.
Alexie's tone shifts throughout the essay, and he ends in a somewhat bitter tone. He says, "I want to hate this country and its contradictions", but he cannot because, simply put, he exists because of them. Perhaps we all do.