Dysfunction
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Culture, power, and American political policy with respect to Native Americans and African Americans are the focus of the two books under analysis herein: Robin D. G. Kelley’s Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! and Anastasia M. Shkilnyk’s A Poison Stronger Than Love. In Kelley’s book, he makes the case that any culture or race will appear dysfunctional if only its most damaged or criminal members are studied. Most social science analyses only focus on the underclass deviance or culture of poverty in examining African American culture, while the normal black men and women who work and lead middle-class lives rarely find their way into ethnographic texts. As Kelley (1997) writes, “Most social scientists believed they knew what ‘authentic Negro culture’ was before they entered the field. The ‘real Negroes’ were the young jobless men hanging out on the corner passing the bottle, the brothers with the nastiest verbal repertoire, the pimps and hustlers, and the single mothers who raised streetwise kids who began cursing before they could walk” (20). Kelley’s book represents a critique of how the maintenance of stereotypes often meshes with reactionary social policies. Anastasia M. Shkilnyk’s A Poison Stronger Than Love is actually about two kinds of poison. One is the mercury poisoning of the water and fish that killed members of the Ojibwa village, a disaster that resulted in the forced relocation of the scattered bush communities into one town.
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lass. As Kelley (1997, 105) notes, “Much of the blame falls on the shoulders of women, gays and lesbians, and colored people for the fracturing of the American Left, abandoning honest class struggle, and alienating white men who could be allies but will not because of the terrible treatment meted out to them by the loud minority.” The position of the multicultural Left, according to Kelley, fails to take into consideration how free-market capitalism and the working class are constructions built around racial exclusion.
Life on the new reserve was quite different than the traditional existence led by the Grassy Narrows people. Assimilation, missionaries, and government policies helped transform a culture from one rich and beautiful in ceremony and spiritual teaching to one that had given up on guidance and leadership for its youth. From marriage ceremonies and practices to the coming of age ceremonies for young women and men, the older members of the Grassy Narrows people eventually quit fighting the missionaries and indifferent youth and gave up teaching and guiding the young. As Shkilnyk (1985) writes about the loss of the vision quest ceremony for young males, “The puberty vision quest, once considered fundamental to a per
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Approximate Word count = 1708
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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