Four Souls

For this week's blog I want to focus on the parts of Four Souls that I thought were funny. The thought of a old man wearing a nice dress around town is funny enough, let alone picturing him wasted and past out in the basement of a church. Another funny and yet very disturbing part was when Nanapush mooned the kid and his parents and then turned around and did some sort of "dance". I can only imagine what this "dance" entailed, and as sick as it might have been it made me laugh because I never expected to read something like that in a Native American Studies' class. I also think its funny and absurd how Nanapush will go to great lengths to cover something up, when it would be ten times easier to simply tell Margaret the truth. I guess this is true of everyone though, they might know lying is wrong, but are too afraid to tell the truth for fear of the consequnces. Part of the reason Nanapush never feels like he can tell Margaret is that whenever she discoveres hes done wrong she scolds him and gives him the silent treatment. It think she realized that she was part of the problem, and thats why when she found out his "star" cover up, she simply looked at him and laughed. This was great on so many levels for their relationship: for one it showed Nanapush that he can tell her the truth in the future and not be afraid of her reaction. It also showed him that Margaret loves him unconditionally, because he had done some pretty horrible things to her (even though they were unintentional) and not only did she forgive him, but she laughed it off, showing that no matter what happens she will always love him and stand by him.
I also wanted to talk about Sherman Alexie's interview with Steven Colbert from the Colbert Report. I realized that I had a pretty narrowminded opinion of the Native American writers we studied in this class after seeing how witty and outgoing Alexie was. From my perspective a Native American poet was someone who takes life too seriously and only focuses on tragedies and other sad events, but after seeing Alexie on the show I realized that there was more to him than that. He was sarcastic and a really quick thinker and in my opinion he was running the interview and saying some of the more comical jokes, not Colbert.