The Tribes Project Description/Summary
The Tribes Project was to look into the life of Spokane Indian and immigrants, read a book called The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, and figure out what type of person we are by reflecting on our selves. We were focusing on self-reflection, racism, and where we belong or who we belong to. We read bits and pieces of The House on Mango Street, we made poems about a classmate,we made a self portrait, read The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, and made our own sketch or spoken word or reading about or from The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian. Down below will be the process/work we've done over the past month.
The House On Mango Street Performance
The House on Mango Street is about a girl who is growing up in poverty with her family and tells little stories about the people and experiences she's had growing up there, she was trying to figure put who she was gonna be. . They are short stories, so a group of people were given a chapter and we're asked to read the chapter in some way of performance. My group decided for each person to read 1 sentence and another person would read the next and so on. While reading the chapter, there would be little sounds we would make with our mouths to add some sense/imagery to the story. This is how it was performed.
"I Sing To You" Poem/Interviews/Self Critique
For the "I Sing To You" poem, we had to interview a classmate so we know what to write about them, I interviewed Litzye Guel. We talked about one of most favorite or most impacted person in our life, a place that we love, and an event/memory. She talked about her family on how much she loves them, she talked about her grandmas house and how they always played games there on Sundays, she also talked about traveling and going on trips in her dad's truck when he comes back from work. It was nice talking to her, it didn't feel like an interview, it felt normal, which was good, it was nice getting to know her. After the interview we started writing drafts of our poems, we made 2 drafts, and 1 final draft. The first draft was to check grammar and punctuation, she also checked it see what she can connect with and what she couldn't, the second was to analyze and break down the lines to see if it was to her, after that we had a critique session with some 8th graders and see what we should change and fix.
Before we made our final we had our critique session with an 8th grader, what we did was he read my poem and I read his essay about biking. He had a good story about his passion of bicycling but he needed to work on his wording and punctuation/placement. He told me to add little things that people would be interested in and that she would only know and can connect to which was good advice. The thing that struck was he was mature/professional about the writing, he didn't just say "It's good", he told what sounded good and what I could fix a bit, which was very helpful.
Human Sculpture for The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian
As an activity, Dr.P (our teacher) would read a paragraph from The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, once he finished reading, he would want us to strike in a pose that acts out what he said. It was fun and at the same time very complicated because he would read what Junior felt like which made it hard, but also made it fun.
Self Portrait for "I Sing To You" Poem
Our job was to interview our classmate, write multiple drafts in a poem about them, critique, and have a self portrait. What we did was to take a portrait of ourselves for the poem that our partner made us. The photo on the bottom is my self portrait. I chose this spot because I liked the lighting the sun gave, the background was nice the tree, school and clouds stood out to me a lot so that was also nice. Plus I wasn't posing for it, my friend took it randomly while I was going to pose for a photo intentionally, also the fish-eye lens gave it a nice effect.
What is to "Belong"
In The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, the main character Junior, struggles with fitting in, not with fitting but mostly figuring out who is. Is he Spokane Indian, a teenage boy, a basketball player, well he is all because that is what s belongs to. We all had a choice to read an article about people belonging to something that they what they believe they belong to. My article that I read was about a Muslim feeling he belongs to ISIS and a Swedish person belonging as a Neo-Nazi. Here is the article as the link. Same Anger Different Ideologies: a radical Muslim and a neo-Nazi
Performance/Exhibition
In the book The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, Junior talk about "Unspoken Rules" about fighting kids in the reservation he lives in. So we decided to an Unspoken Rule skit, but we didn't really know what, so we decided girls will do the females unspoken rules and boy will do the males. So I was in a group of 3, it was Aj, Angelo and I. We decided we wanted a humorous skit so we decided to make the Unspoken Rules of the Boys Bathroom. It's about what you should and shouldn't do while using the boys bathroom, and we decided to act it out as if it was an 1960's instructional video which gave it it's humor. Here are some photos from the rehearsal and performance.
Reflection
After doing this whole project about belonging, I belong to the tribe of soccer players, video gamers, movie watchers and so one, and they haven't changed during this project. When trying to write about a sensitive subject you could say for some people don't make an interview, try to make it like normal conversation, have fun with it, get to actually know and not just do it for the grade. In the descriptive writing, the analyzing method was really helpful. It got me to think what specifically i need to change and what I would could work on personally. In collaboration for this project, have efficient work, but at the same time have fun with it, make sure everyone knows what they're doing and are doing and if they are, just talk and have fun with each other. A moment in this project I want to remember is the skit and going up to perform it, before we got up and started acting, the crowd was cheering super loud and wanted to see our skit really badly so it felt really good, that's what I want to remember.