Paper #3 Topic Idea Workthrough

While in class on Monday, many of the conversational pieces piqued my interest reasonably. I want to rant on a few of them to get my thoughts straight for this paper. After each main idea that I can come up with, I'll elaborate a bit. By expanding on these thoughts a bit, I'll be able to look and see where I have the most room for growth or where I hit a dead end.

1. The idea presented at the end of Smoke Signals of forgiving your fathers and your ancestors for the things that they may have done wrong that messed up your life is very close to me personally. I really want to write about this topic so that I can relate it to my own personal experiences with my father's alcoholism, but I shouldn't write about this topic for that very reason. The paper would be too personal and I wouldn't be able to separate good factual quotes from my own personal feelings. If I did this paper, I would have to be very careful to make sure that I relate the things that I may choose to say to the movie and to Victor's Father's problems with alcohol. If I can change the wording in a way that prevents me from coming back to alcohol without changing the idea, I might be able to come up with a stronger thesis, and ultimately, a stronger paper...

2. I would love to focus on the ancestry involved in Native American Culture and then use the history that we have learned about Native Americans with writers like Zitkala Sa and compare that to the image of the ancestors that Hollywood creates with the stereotypical, "stoic" Indians. I want to really centralize around how the concept of ancestry is important, but that the real ancestors are faded and clouded by the idealized ancestors that Native American kids like Victor from Smoke Signals imagines. I would use Sherman Alexie as an example of modern day Native Americans and their problems. I would try to reference back to Zitkala Sa for direct references of what real Native American culture was like off the reservations. I would try to say that many kids, Native American or not, believe that the stereotypical Native American man that hunted buffalo with spears and wore animal skins while dancing around a fire is really what Native American culture used to be like. I don't foresee many problems with this paper, actually. It seems solid.

By the end of writing this blog, I've decided what I want to write about, examples from texts that I could use, and what my main argument would be. I'm not going to delete the first part, though because I want my original thought process to show in my final decision. I made stronger connections with something that I already thought of and created a thesis around it that would support the stronger ideas. With this kind of pre-planning, I feel confident in advance about the quality of this assignment.