Compare and Contrast

Compare and Contrast

Compare and Contrast

Chrystos's "Today Was a Bad Day Like TB" is the story of a single irrepressibly wretched day in the life of a Menominee Native American. The author's work is less a poem than an outcry, a barely contained outpouring of anguish and seething rage at the belittlement and humiliations faced daily by Native Americans. It could not have a stronger foundation. Throughout the history of the United States, the story of the Native American has been one of massacre, repression, and genocide justified by the rhetoric of a nation's so called "manifest destiny." But while the poem is specific to the viewpoint of a single person, it is also a potent paean to the tragedy of countless Native American peoples faced with horrific treatment not only in the past but in the present.

The conduct wrought upon Native Americans in the past is well documented as one of the worst and most far reaching atrocities of history, and that fact burns resentfully in the subtext of Chrystos's poem. Its greatest manifestation is in its opening line, which opens with a simple observation: "saw whites clap during a sacred dance". In that simple expression, Chrystos opens her story bluntly with a display of the saccharine, belittling displays belying the bloody history of the Americas, one of massacres and endless slaughter, of Wounded Knee and the Pequot War. Charles D. Bernholz states in an online article that the Americans considered the Native Americans to be something less than human, with their tribes and conglomerations "[having] no legal title to [their] land" and, presumably, to their lives. It is unsurprising then that the native peoples would endure centuries of aggression at the hands of the self-proclaimed benevolent Europeans, eventually culminating in the "removal" of remaining tribes to barren "reservations" to serve out the rest of their lives in wretched camps where many would die from starvation or disease. Chrystos notes this also in her work, choosing the blunt title "Today Was a Bad Day Like TB," alluding to the horrors that tuberculosis once wrought upon the native peoples to illustrate the extent of her disgust and rage.

Chrystos's words are a thunderous reflection of the horrific treatment suffered by Native Americans throughout the history and contemporary times of the United States. Like the Aborigines of Australia, the Arawaks of the Atlantic Islands, or the daughters and sons of ...