A Tasty Slice of Buffalo

          I was lying on a table pretty relaxed when suddenly I heard the chief stumble in. Uh-oh. I knew it was about time for me to be cut up and eaten by all the members of the tribe. I was a tasty slice of buffalo and I was on the menu.

                 

          First, as always, the tribe leaders began playing one of their gambling games which meant they all needed their large amounts of alcohol. I decided to tune out their broken and slurred English because how could they possibly have anything important to say. After I became bored, I decided to start paying attention to their conversation. They were mentioning something about a pipeline and how the government was trying to build it across their lands and ruin the water supply. I thought about my poor buffalo brothers and sisters who would be displaced by this atrocity and I was so mad at the American government for doing this to us. How could I be proud of the country that I’ve been roaming since I was a baby bison, how could I be a patriot when the rights of my own people were being trampled upon. How could this country, the “land of the free, home of the brave” (Vowell) take away my most precious right? Wait. Imagine how the Native Americans feel about this. I’ve been brainwashed by this country into thinking that all Native Americans are drinkers, gamblers, and uneducated. These stereotypes have been so ingrained in my head that I didn’t stop to question whether or not they are true.  I didn’t even stop to consider their feelings about the pipeline and instead I only jumped to my own. The white man who oppresses the Indians is in a way exactly like me. He would never think about them and instead only think about himself. And if what they say is true,

            Are we all equal?

Just a Piece of Cheese

There I was, just a piece of cheese, sitting in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s pantry hoping that I could stay alive for a few more days. 

Then I heard her talking about something that she needed to write. She was drafting a document that she called the Declaration of Sentiments, which I as a lonely piece of cheese, had no idea about. As I heard her discussing this document, I started to realize why she was writing it and what she was hoping to accomplish.

She wanted to write this document in order to gain equality for men and women, and specifically earn women the right to vote in elections. However, most men did not agree with this idea and the people who had the power to change this societal injustice were all men. Still, Stanton wanted to spark a revolution that she hoped would one day bring about legislative change.

One part of the document is a list of grievances suffered by women at the hands of men. This part states things such as “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable rights to the elective franchise.” This is an interesting decision because she does not list the grievances generally, but rather in a very specific manner. The purpose of this was to make women seem like objects that were suffering at the tyranny of men just like the white male colonists were suffering at the tyranny of King George.

Also, one of the things she wanted to include in her document was a specific list of things that women wanted in order to be equal. However, eventually she reached the same conclusion I did which was that this list of specific wants was not necessary and in fact might hurt their cause in the future. I realized that if she only said that women want the right to vote and nothing else, then they might not get anything else in the future. This decision shows that language does not only have the power to influence and change society but it also has the power to limit in a profound way. Thus, no matter how inclusive an author intends to be, some group is always excluded because the language itself that the author uses is limiting.