Ford 1
Raeya Ford
Miss. Fleming
NBE 3U1
21, November, 2017
Unhealthy Medicine Wheels In Motorcycles & Sweetgrass Medicine Wheels are a very important idea to Indigenous people throughout Canada, they can represent many things such as east, south, west, and north, or infant, youth, adult, and elder. The Indigenous people tried very hard to keep each section in balance because they believed that if they were to become unbalanced than that person was no longer healthy. In the novel Motorcycles & Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor, it's clear that not all the characters have a healthy Medicine Wheel, due to events that had happened in their past. As NOW (Toronto) had put it, it’s a “playful yet soulful” novel. Sam and John are two characters …show more content…
With everything that John has lived through he seemed to never leave the his youthful part of his wheel. He continues to play childish games such as when he was trying to help Maggie and buried “two big sandbags full”(313) of bones throughout the forest. Him playing the childish games can have a serious effect on the rest of his Medicine wheel because it appears that he prefers to stay there. John, like the majority of living things, has the ability to feel the emotion of jealousy. “Everybody used to talk about me. Now they talk about him … What’s he got that I don’t”(6). For so long the indigenous people had believed in the spiritual world and the creatures that live there, but when the europeans arrived, the europeans taught them the ways of the church erasing their beliefs and in doing so people stopped talking about John and made him angry and jealous of their religion injuring his mental development. After reading the novel it …show more content…
“I’ve carved a lot of petroglyphs in my life, and painted pictographs too … when I get bored I petroglyph”(328-330). John has written things and drawn pictures in rocks and on cave walls, but in his explanation as to why, his answer was that he was bored and had no meaning to it and didn’t mean to pass down any knowledge to whoever was to read them. In the novel John changes his appearance slowly, but he never seems to change his opinions. John has a conversation with Jesus at one point about how things have gone and about his past love Lillian who had died. “Well, good for you. Lillian seemed happy with all your forgiveness”(267). John is angry at Jesus because of what the church had done to ‘his people’ and how Lillian had gone to a school, and even after this conversation he still seems to hold a hatred for the church and all they had done, stopping him from having a new beginning and harming his Medicine Wheel. Throughout the book it is brought up that John has lived a long time, but with all that time he has never truly grown up and has experienced to many things harming his
Raeya Ford
Miss. Fleming
NBE 3U1
21, November, 2017
Unhealthy Medicine Wheels In Motorcycles & Sweetgrass Medicine Wheels are a very important idea to Indigenous people throughout Canada, they can represent many things such as east, south, west, and north, or infant, youth, adult, and elder. The Indigenous people tried very hard to keep each section in balance because they believed that if they were to become unbalanced than that person was no longer healthy. In the novel Motorcycles & Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor, it's clear that not all the characters have a healthy Medicine Wheel, due to events that had happened in their past. As NOW (Toronto) had put it, it’s a “playful yet soulful” novel. Sam and John are two characters …show more content…
With everything that John has lived through he seemed to never leave the his youthful part of his wheel. He continues to play childish games such as when he was trying to help Maggie and buried “two big sandbags full”(313) of bones throughout the forest. Him playing the childish games can have a serious effect on the rest of his Medicine wheel because it appears that he prefers to stay there. John, like the majority of living things, has the ability to feel the emotion of jealousy. “Everybody used to talk about me. Now they talk about him … What’s he got that I don’t”(6). For so long the indigenous people had believed in the spiritual world and the creatures that live there, but when the europeans arrived, the europeans taught them the ways of the church erasing their beliefs and in doing so people stopped talking about John and made him angry and jealous of their religion injuring his mental development. After reading the novel it …show more content…
“I’ve carved a lot of petroglyphs in my life, and painted pictographs too … when I get bored I petroglyph”(328-330). John has written things and drawn pictures in rocks and on cave walls, but in his explanation as to why, his answer was that he was bored and had no meaning to it and didn’t mean to pass down any knowledge to whoever was to read them. In the novel John changes his appearance slowly, but he never seems to change his opinions. John has a conversation with Jesus at one point about how things have gone and about his past love Lillian who had died. “Well, good for you. Lillian seemed happy with all your forgiveness”(267). John is angry at Jesus because of what the church had done to ‘his people’ and how Lillian had gone to a school, and even after this conversation he still seems to hold a hatred for the church and all they had done, stopping him from having a new beginning and harming his Medicine Wheel. Throughout the book it is brought up that John has lived a long time, but with all that time he has never truly grown up and has experienced to many things harming his