Week 14

Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven appeared to be immensely different than any other novel presented in this class. I understand that I am not entirely familiar with the content or style of the other novels because I was not assigned to read them, but at least from what I've observed, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is very unique. For one, it's written in a series of short stories, giving a very sporadic, discontinuous feel to it. However, the biggest difference between this novel and others from this class is that it has nothing to do with agriculture or food production, and my group, when reading it, found difficulty in relating it to a class dedicated solely to studying various issues in agriculture and food production. Of course, there were themes, such as community, family, and resilience, that overlapped with a lot of what we've been discussing in class, but overall, this novel was a bit of a non-sequitur, if considered meticulously.

Really, though, this novel points to something broader that encompasses most of what this class has been iterating: a place to call home. The novel follows the lives of several Indians living on a reservation, and Alexie does not paint a pretty picture of their lives through the many stories of the trials and difficulties of reservation life. What makes this life most unbearable is that it is not the life that they chose; it is the life that was chosen for them. The Indians, throughout their history, were forced off of their native land and into the reservation, and they have experienced various forms of oppression and discrimination from the white community since. Hence, the reservation is not a place that the Indians call home, and the novel shows them often wanting to leave the reservation and coping with the problems they experience while on the reservation through alcoholism, reminiscence, and a lot of complaining.

Thus, a place to call home, according to the novel, is as much a physical place as it is a state of mind. Yes, the Indians in the novel dream of reclaiming their ancestors' actual land because it was taken from them, but in actuality, any place, even the reservation, would suffice for them if it is free of hardship and oppression. They don't focus particularly on abandoning their physical location as much as they do escaping the difficulties of their lives, and this strongly echoes what this class has been emphasizing. By studying these imminent crises in agriculture and food production, we've established that our home, the earth, in its current condition, is not what it should be, but that does not imply that we give up on it as our home and succumb to the inevitability of the brokenness of the earth. We don't strive for a life apart from what we've unfortunately destroyed; we strive for a life apart from destruction. Like I mentioned earlier, a place to call home is as much a physical place as it is a state of mind, so we cannot rely on the earth to be a sufficient home itself; we must work ourselves to consider it as such and to thus treat it as such.

Hopefully this serves as an adequate conclusion to the semester as a whole. The earth is our home, and we ought to strive to feel at home in it. Of course, this takes on several different applications and manifestations, so it is a fairly broad statement. Thus, hopefully it encompasses most of what this course has communicated, and hopefully it carries enough weight to actually have some sort of meaning to our lives.