ACCULTURATION
AND ASSIMILATION
‘Shereman Alexie’s Integration’
Dr. P. Ramendra
Karmakar
Shennan Alexie’s short story INTEGRATION portrays the silhouttee of the baleful situation of the Native Americans who subsist and bear the brunt as if their primogenitors committed a tragic Haw against God and His people. They live in reservations which appear as bad as the dalit colonies constructed by the state governments in India. Alexie sees the veiled apartheid existing in a country like America that preens itself as the most advanced and civilized nation. Being sensitive to the suffering of the hapless, he identifies himself with the people who are subjected to segregation and victimization by the dominant American white community. Alexie is celebrated for his detailed descriptions of the psychology and environment of the reservation. He presents ‘humour and wit in thc face of intense poverty and ravages of alcohol abuse that are part of reservation life’.
The story of Integration presents the grim reality of the American Indian life stamped out beneath the vista of beautiful panorama of picturesque and voluptuous harmonies. The American Indians having a sense of loss of their homeland, grapple with rootlessness, harbouring age old grudge an inherent antagonism explosively persisting in their hearts. Their actions are an expression of annoyance and anguish about their fate. American history narrates that Native Americans or Red Indians were the first inhabitants of the Northern America. They were believed to have settled in Alaska after they crossed the land bridge located on Bering Sea from Siberian region. They lived uninterruptedly in the Northern part of America until the arrival of Europeans especially of British descent.
The White race in their advance took North America into its fold, driving away the Native Indians, the less civilized race, to the Westward. They snatched their large tracts of lands and several years later created for them reservations signifying permanent imprisonment of letter de cachet. In the course of time, no white government tried seriously to safeguard the Indians’ rights, culture and traditions. The treaties signed between the two were often dishonoured by the successive (White) governments. However, in the fight for supremacy of the Great Plains, ‘the dynamic, more advanced, industrialized society was bound to conquer’. The statement made by the President Hayes in 1877 is a testimony to this: “The Indians were the original occupants of the lands we now possess. They have been driven from place to place. The purchase money paid to them in some cases for what they called their own has still left them poor. In many instances, when they had settled down lands assigned to them by compact and begun to support themselves by their own labour, they were rudely jostled off and thrust into the wilderness again. Many, if not most, of our Indian wars have had their origin in broken promises and acts of injustice on our part “(The United States Since 1865 Foster Rhea Dulies: p.41).
In the aftermath, Native Americans were fated to be involved in an unequal struggle which is in fact, a clash between two types of civilizations. During the last three centuries, their population seemed to be on the decrease by millions of deaths owing to their contact with the Europeans who were initially responsible for spreading among the Indians diseases like smallpox, measles, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, yellow fever etc., against which they had no remedy. In the twentieth century, as a result of the declining rate of infant mortality, the number of Native Americans began to increase not only in North America but in American continent on the whole.
Integration deals with the disposition of a Native American Indian boy named John who was sky-jacked in his infancy from an Indian reservation hospital. He was taken to Seatle where a childless White family adopted him. For many years John suffered from self-inflicted psychological maladies ensued from the consciousness of his brown complexion, and his identity, which he could finally beat back and began to lead normal life.
The narrative of Integration begins in a hospital located in the Indian reservation in the 1960s. Alexic depicts the environment of the hospital marked by unhygienic conditions and squalid milieu. The predicament of the locale matches the palling plight persisting in the minds of the people. The scene is described as murky and dismal.
In the examination room, an Indian family of four are collectively coughing blood suggesting the dearth of medical facilities and the gravity of the situation as well as the callous attitude of the government. “Tap, tap. The doctor cuts the umbilical cord quickly. A nurse cleans John, washes away the blood, the remains of the placenta, the evidence. His mother is crying” (Ibid: 1718). The abduction of the child and strafing of the reservation area by the gunman from the helicoptor testifies to the brutal force used against the Indians who resent it and attempt to resist. “The jumpsuit man holds John close to his chest as the helicopter rises. Suddenly, as John imagines it, this is a war. The gunman locks and loads, strafes the reservation with explosive shells. Indians hit the ground, drive their cars off the roads, dive under flimsy kitchen tables”.
The new house of John is a beautiful place surrounded by greenish meadows and gardens bill he does not show the signs of insignia of diadem. In lieu, his personality is torn by anomie and alienation and carries in it his ancestral cry for justice and protests against the suffering and suffocating life led by his people. Being conscious of his identity through brown complexion, he transforms himself into an inhibitive and introspective individual causing embarrassment to his fellow students. Sometimes, John attempts hard to overcome his difficulties. He is the only Native Indian in the school. He has friends, handsome white boys who headed off to college. John would never speak to any of them after graduation with the exception of one or two whom he comes across in the supermarket, movie theatre, restaurant, etc., “At first he listened to himself say the right things, respond in the right way. I’m good. Working hard? Nah, Hardly working”. The more surprising trait in his personality is that he does not honour the greetings of his classmates and behaves as if he were not known to them. When the girl friends conduct themselves in the most natural way and converse over various things in general. John feels insignificant and does not want to be in their company: He promises them that he will control his feelings and emotions that are near neurotic and ‘ll behave well in front of their fathers who feel that the boy is suffering from infra dig syndrome.
John, like any other underdog, is rebellions within himself and does not seek divine intervention and does not believe in prayer. He revolts against his condition and against the creation as a whole. He rather wages a metaphysical war against the conditions in which he is embroiled. He rises in revolt demanding not life but unity and lucid awareness. His metaphysical revolt is aimed at realizing inner happiness in the face of an incomprehensible or malignant universe. John works out well and creates a design for applying it psychologically to strike an equilibrium. He obtains a regular bathroom pass. In the bathroom, he fights against his anger, gnashing and biting his teeth and lips only to seek freedom from the surges of emotions and anger. After coming out, he does not manifest any of these psychomatic symptoms or “any strange behaviour.” He forges this method into a regular process and baptizes himself as “an integrated one”, a “trailblazer”.
Alexie suggests that many of the Native American Indians turn out increasingly desperate and fall into dissipation and atheism owing to the loss of their homeland, and infringement of their values and customs and evanescence of their traditional pageantry by the intrusion of white man’s modernity.
Paradoxically, Native American Indians are abrasively insensate to the advancing enemy who has blended within himself the culture and civilization of Europe and is largely generous, healthy minded and pragmatic refusing to accept the philosophy of despair and assuming the spirit of Prometheus, restless for the new, and waging an indefatigable warfare against the frustrating forces. Like an Untouchable, Veluta in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things who emits ‘a particular smell’, Native American Indian maintains ‘silence’. The protagonist, Albel, in native American Indian novelist, Momaday’s House of Made of Dawn, accuses his fellow Native Indians of ignoring the advancement and of their aversion to modernity. And they are lying low and revel in the cult of animism. “The people of the town have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old duties of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example.”
Under the given circumstances, what does Native American do except joining the mainstream? Many an Indian has met this contingency by settling in urban areas imbibing white man’s education and culture simultaneously keeping Native American Indian’s distinctiveness. It’s significant what Momaday says: “Its a matter of identity. It’s thinking about who I am. I grew upon Indian reservations and then I went away from the Indian world and entered a different context. But I continue to think of myself as Indian. I write out of that conviction. I think this is what most Indian people are doing today.” (Native American Testimony Peter Nabokov: 438). But many other Native American Indians show reluctance to merge with the Europeanized living style as they feel their ethnicity rather than modernity, matters.