Black Elk Speaks Essay Example for Free

Black Elk Speaks Essay In the article, Black Elk Speaks with Forked Tongue, Couser is giving his opinion on how he thinks that Neihardt was in actuality suppressing the Lakota way of life and Black Elk’s story. His opinion is backed by some good points from the text and as well as other scholars who have the same opinion as himself. Couser does believe that Black Elk Speaks is a well written book and he even respects and commends Neihardt in his attempt to honor Black Elk, â€Å"before detailing the short comings of Black Elk Speaks I would like to acknowledge the considerable efforts Neihardt made to honor Black Elk’s narrative† (Couser). Couser then dives into the idea that this book as an autobiography should be a thing of the past. I think Couser then gets carried away with an opinion about how Black Elk was being censored and the truths were kept secret. Couser’s argument is good but his tactic and tangent near the end could have been left out; it does not hurt the argument but it also is too absurd to help the argument as well. Couser states that one of the problems with Neihardt is just the sheer fact of the language barrier; he uses DeMallie as an example of a person who thought the same thing. While there is good translation at times there are horrific and even completely made up parts in the book; this goes back to Couser’s argument that the book is not qualified to be called a Native American Biography. Neihardt had Black Elk’s son translate while Neighardt’s daughter would take notes; this action alone makes it inevitable that there will be some miscommunication and misinterpretation. It was then Neihardt who, in order to fill in the loss in translation, put in his own creativity and somehow turn a story into a piece of literary work. Due to the language barrier it was inevitable from the very beginning that Neihardt would have to change things around for literary purposes. Couser seems to only point out the bad parts of the book and never goes into depth about any of the good things, for instance: had Neihardt gone verbatim what Black Elk said he would have gotten factual information wrong, â€Å"After we had danced, she spoke to us. She said something like this: ‘I am sixty-seven years old. (Neihardt 177); this is just one example where Neihardt saw a mistake and corrected it just as any good editor would do. A literal translation of every word Black Elk spoke is not plausible due to a difference in culture as well as language. As a writer it was Neihardt’s job to put it in a form that is readable. It was his job to try to convey the emotions Black Elk was portraying in the telling of the story. Seeing what Neihardt put in and left out did not make much of a difference and it seemed to be well done for as big of a barrier he faced. Couser also argues that Neihardt’s free translation, not just language barrier but also that Neihardt could fill in things with his own creativeness, debunks the argument that Black Elk Speaks is a true Native American Autobiography. He believes that Neihardt’s attempts to change and convey emotion are merely Neihardt using his own opinion and creativeness. The text in the book is not verbatim and therefore Neihardt did his own thing. Couser later argues that Neihardt creating much of the story is still a kind of suppression and is conveying a dominant power. Neihardt used creativity just as any other writer would have done. â€Å"There were many lies, but we could not eat them. The forked tongue made promises† (Neihardt 172); that sentence is Neihardt’s and it may not be what Black Elk said but it could have been something that Neihardt could see Black Elk saying. Just because something is creative does not mean that it is an absurd thought. He used creativity to convey what he was seeing from Black Elk himself. Had Neihardt only gone by words I think more would have been lost in translation; not only is there language that has to be translated but also an emotional language. Neihardt took it upon himself to convey the emotion and had someone else transcribe the notes. Even though the translation was not word for word I think he portrayed the emotion quite well in the text. Couser then starts his tangent about how in this â€Å"autobiography† the white man is still suppressing the Native American Indian. He discusses little things like how Neihardt should not have addressed Black Elk as Black Elk. He also accuses Neihardt of trying to make the book too Indian like. He criticizes Neihardt’s writing of Black Elk. Couser then argues that the reason that Neihardt did not mention as many rituals or customs in the text is due to a dominant culture trying to eradicate and hide another culture, the Native American Indian culture. All in the same argument Couser suggest that the book is a sign of cultural imperialism; he says that the books was meant to escape cultural imperialism but in the end the book seems to be all about cultural imperialism I believe that Neihardt wrote the book and went off, as closely as possible, Black Elk. Neihardt approached Black Elk, not vice versa; had Black Elk approached Neihardt the book would probably be totally different then what it is today. Neihardt had every right to do what he did in the book due to his poetic license. It should be a given that Neihardt was going to do some of his own things; however, that does not mean that the book is a cultural imperialist book or a historical fiction. For some reason Neihardt changed his intentions for the interview; they were going to go towards his poetry but for some purpose he turned to a novel. I believe Neihardt was doing the story telling in a way that had never been done before, in a literary way. Black Elk told the story in an oral and story form and Neihardt then transformed the story into a literary work. Couser did have a strong argument and I do agree with what he said about how the book should not be taken as a Lakota bible or a Native American Biography; I do not agree with his argument that the book is a form of suppression upon the Native Americans. The flaws in the book are minute enough that it can still give a considerable amount of history and background on the Lakota people. However, it should not be taken as a bible for the Lakota people, after all not everything of what was said about the tribe and rituals is in the book and one must do more research than just read and study Black Elk Speaks. All Neihardt was expected to do was his best and I think he did accomplish his goal of creating a fairly accurate portrayal of the Lakota people and the Indian life of Black Elk.

George Orwell :: essays research papers

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Motihari in India, which was at that time part of the British Empire. His family was not very wealthy and like most middle-class English families of that time, their livelihood depended on the Empire. In 1907, his family returned to England. His parents managed to send him to a private school in Sussex and when he was thirteen, he won a scholarship to Wellington. Soon after that, he won another scholarship to the well-known public school, Eaton. After being forced to work very hard at preparatory school, Blair lost interest in any further intellectual exertion that was not related to his personal ambition. In his book Why I Write he says that from a very young age he had known that he must be a writer. But, he also realized that in order to become a writer, he had to read literature. However, in Eaton, English literature was not a major subject and he spent his five years reading works by the masters of English prose includ ing Jonathon Swift, Laurence Sterne and Jack London on his own. He failed to win a university scholarship after the final examinations at Eaton and, in 1922, he joined the Indian Imperial Police. This decision was not the usual path that most Eaton students would have taken. Blair preferred a life of travel and action and he served in the force in Burma (now known as Myanmar) for five years. He resigned from the police force for two main reasons: firstly, being a police officer was a diversion from his real ambition of being a writer; and secondly, he felt that as a policeman in Burma, he was supporting a political system in which he could no longer believe. Even at this time, his political ideas and his ideas about writing were closely related. In his book The Road To Wigan Pier he wrote that he wished to "escape from†¦ every form of man's dominion over man", and he felt that the social structure of British Imperialism was that "dominion" over the English working class. After he returned to London at the age of twenty-four, he began to teach himself how to write. He spent most of his time writing in very poor living conditions because he felt that the poor in London and Paris represented the people of Burma under British rule.

Book Review: Leading Change by John P. Kotter Essay

Leading Change by John P. Kotter. Harvard Business School Press, 1996. In light of the increasing rate of change in the business environment due to factors such as technological advances and globalization, the need to be able to make successful transformations within an organization becomes more imperative than ever before. In Leading Change, Kotter identifies an eight-step guide for making successful organization changes. These eight steps stem from avoiding common mistakes made during organizational change efforts seen in the past , such as: too much complacency; failing to create a powerful guiding coalition; underestimating the power of vision; under-communicating the vision; permitting obstacles to block a new vision; failing to create short term wins; declaring a victory too soon; and neglecting to anchor changes firmly into the organizational culture. To avoid these mistakes, leaders of an organization requiring changes should consider the following steps: 1. Establishing a sense of urgency 2. Creating a guiding coalition 3. Developing a vision and strategy 4. Communicating the change vision 5. Empowering broad-based action 6. Generating short-term wins 7. Consolidating gains and producing more change 8. Anchoring new approaches into the culture In establishing a sense of urgency , it is hoped that a leader of change will be able to direct stakeholders’ drive towards a common purpose and reduce  complacency. Common causes of complacency include : the absence of a crisis, low overall performance standards, wrong performance measurement indexes, too much happy talk from management, and lack of sufficient performance feedback from external sources. It is suggested that a leader creates a sense of purpose allowing weaknesses to be exposed, setting performance targets that are too high, analyze current opportunities and highlight the organizations inability to pursue them, and cut-down on the â€Å"happy talk† and listen to disgruntled customers. Very often, committees of employees devoted to making organizational change are ineffectual because they do not have the any influential, senior managers who can make changes happen and reinforce the urgency of the committee’s purpose to all levels. Kotter suggests careful selection of committee members to include senior management and influential people, with care taken to avoid those employees he labels â€Å"egos† and â€Å"snakes† (i.e. those employees whose egos may take precedence over the committees agenda and those people who may undermine the trust necessary to build strong committee relationships) By developing a vision, a leader creates â€Å"a picture of the future with some implicit or explicit commentary on why people should strive to create that future.† (p. 68) It not only clarifies direction but helps in motivating those people who will be affected and/or implementing change. Kotter gives examples of good and bad visions and suggests that a perfect vision should be clear and simple enough to explain within five minutes. A vision should also inspire people to force people out of their comfort zones, it should be challenging but attainable, and usually takes advantage of fundamental trends such as globalization or technological changes. In communicating the change vision, Kotter argues that in this day of information overload, talk of vision and strategy takes up only a small fraction of employee time and the ideas are often lost. Using analogies, repetition and the use of multiple forums for conveying change vision will help employees to understand and remember the ideas. Clear concise language is a must. To empower employees for broad-based action enables much more flexibility within an organization to adapt to a changing environment. Barrier to empowerment however exist in i) the organizational structure where resources are so fragmented that timely delivery of objectives is nearly impossible , ii) the skills of employees, iii) systems of the organization such as HR systems which advocate antiquated measures of performance which contradict new changes, iv) supervisors who are reluctant to change from the traditional command-and-control style of management. Despite the long-term nature of many organizational changes, Kotter suggests that the generation of short-term wins is of utmost importance and not necessarily at the expense of long-term benefits. He cites examples of CEOs who have implemented long term change initiatives but the failure to create short-term wins and tangible benefits made stakeholders impatient resulting in disenchantment. He reinforces the clear difference between management and leadership and their importance in the pursuit of short-term and long term goals (leadership being more long-term vision and strategy-oriented, management being more concerned with the pursuit goals in the immediate future). The achievement of short-term goals not only reinforces that scarifies made for long-term goal achievement are paying off. They also help to reward change agents and undermine cynics/anchors to change, they build momentum and can help fine-tune vision and strategies. After a short-term win, Kotter warns that it is all too tempting to relax and even regress in some cases back to old ways. All momentum of change is lost. To be able to consolidate gains and keep producing more change, he suggests that management increase urgency levels, and learn to understand and appreciate that interdependencies with in the organization dictate that when changes are made in one area, they often require further changes to be made in other areas or departments. Once changes have been made, it is then important to anchor them into the corporate culture. It is observed that culture is not easily manipulated so this should be done when all changes have been made. Changing â€Å"the way we do  things around here† is imperative so that regression to old practices is not experienced. To summarize, Kotter reinforces that an increasingly changing business environment is forcing decisions to be made quicker and organizations to become more flexible to external changes than ever before. Only with increased flexibility, teamwork and leaner organizations can a leader ever hope to make changes in response to these pressure. The leadership qualities of the change agents very important because they set the vision for others to follow. The importance of continual learning is also emphasized because leaders who are constantly changing themselves and going out of their comfort zones arguably are more able to leave those comfort zones in order to adapt to a changing environment.

How does fire frequency influence tree species diversity in the boreal forest Free Essay Example, 1500 words

The continuous interaction that takes place between fire weather and vegetation greatly contributes to the community of species that thrives in the systems. Shifts in the communities of vegetation are expected to occur as a result of the successful migration of propagules that are reacting to the changing bioclimatic envelopes but at a slow pace (Krawchuk, Cumming & Flannigan, 2009). This also research wishes to identify the species that are able to survive after the forest has been affected by the fires and how long the ones that regenerate themselves take before they can go back to their original states. Research question How does fire frequency influence tree species diversity in the boreal forest? Hypothesis and predictions The frequency of the occurrence of the fire in the forest shows a relationship with the diversity of the species that exist in the forest. When the fires post an increased rate of occurrence making them take place more frequently mainly as a result of climate change, then there is a significant decrease in the diversity of the trees that will thrive in the forest. This is because the fire acts as a natural disturbance which goes a long way in harming or consequently killing the trees that exist in the forest. It can predicted that if the frequency of the fires is higher as a result of the climate getting warmer, then the fires will generally be of a high intensity which will burn and ultimately destroy the species of trees that are in the forest. We will write a custom essay sample on How does fire frequency influence tree species diversity in the boreal forest or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now The effect of this will be a reduction in the number of species that are in the forest since after being burnt, there are some that will not be able to regenerate. On the other hand, if the frequency of the fires that are occurring in the forest is low, then the characteristics of the fires will significantly change. This will mean that the fires will be less intense compared to the contrasting scenario and therefore there will be more likelihood of more species surviving leading to a more diverse forest in terms of the species of trees that thrive there. Methodology and Experimental design To understand the effects that result from frequent fires that are experienced in the Boreal forest on the diversity of the tree species that exists there, a factorial experiment will be designed with three variables: climate, which will feature the current one and the one that is expected in the future, the occurrence of fire which will feature the frequency now and the frequency that will be experienced in the future and the diversity of the species which will also feature the species that exist now and those that are expected.