Underlying Message...Maybe?

Winnemucca wrote us an autobiography. She wanted us to see into her life, to see how she saw when in her youth. Right? Sure maybe, but maybe not. What was the most striking thing that she talked about in her writing? The suffering that her sister had gone through. So what was she trying to tell us? A story? Or that her sister was raped? I'd like to take the time to argue neither.

If you read carefully, Winnemucca's writing deals a lot with women. She puts a lot of the emphasis on her mother's emotions and her sister's emotions. Even when discussing her grandfather's trusting nature, she always related it back to how it put her mother and sister in hard situations. Winnemucca is highlighting the struggles of the female Native American. While it makes sense that Winnemucca is talking specifically about women since she is a woman writer, I think that we overlooked the true survivance message of her writing. No one tells the story of women, it is all told from the aspect of the man. Having Winnemucca write about her struggles and women's struggles is survivance because it is getting the message out about what happened to women during hard times. She is allowing women to find their own survivance within her story, to remember how they fought hard for what was right.

Very First Blog Post...Ever!!!!

I can easily say that I have never written a blog in my entire lifetime...which isn't that long if you consider how young I am but that's besides the point. So now that I have my own blog about NAS 5, I decided to title it "But Why...?". This is because the point of this blog is to discuss the readings and what they mean. A common question asked during interpretation is "why" so why not include that in my title? I am constantly asking questions for everything, so this is also one of my most commonly used phrases. I think that asking why is a great way to help dissect readings that are most difficult. When you have multiple people asking for explanations on one reading then you end up with a better understood meaning.

I missed the discussion on the second part of the Popol Vuh. What I would really like answered about the Popol Vuh is whether or not the two brothers were magical? Also, what were they? If these characters were not man, then what are they? The way I read it, the brothers were definitely some type of magical spirit. There is no way that they could have escaped multiple times from challenges that were meant to kill them. Also, they came back from death multiple times. One of the brothers had his own head chopped off and yet he somehow reattached it! I don't understand how that could be possible without some type of voodoo assistance. That in turn means that these brothers were not man, as we picture man today. Man would not be able to do that. But are the brothers made of wood or dirt? What is the material they are made out of since we are in between this whole man made of wood before man is made of corn time frame? Other than that, I found the reading highly entertaining because it was just an extremely interesting creation story.