Ryan Mullins
University of North Florida
Crooked Arrows is a 21st century film which embodies cultural resilience throughout the film. The team utilizes culture, heritage, and longstanding traditional values to help overcome adversity and defeat poor self-esteem, in order to turn their lacrosse season around by going back to their cultural roots.
Within the film Crooked Arrows, it depicts a Native American prep school lacrosse team in New York, which struggle not only on the field but also off the field. The on the field struggle quite simply pertains to the fact that the players are simply undersized unlike the much larger prep school competition who always annihilate them each game of the regular season. Despite …show more content…
Having self-esteem makes a phenomenal difference in all aspects of your life, whether it be on an individual basis or when working together as a team. Although, Coach Logan’s fire pit speech and allowing for posts on social media outlets may seem unconventional, his “antics” in turn created what is referred to as a “legacy of survival” in regards to the team’s overall self-esteem and acceptance of their culture. The article Native American Resilience further accentuates, “Learning of their history through oral narratives—the passing down of stories from one generation to the next—may strengthen or shatter a sense of self. Native American families differ in how they retell stories of the past. One family may tell stories that linger on tragedies of the past, who is responsible for the way things currently are, and who can or cannot be trusted” (Skousen, n.d., 3). The team began to partake in this role, especially when they called themselves the Crooked Arrows, in order to realize that even though they may be losing a ton of games at first it quite simply wasn’t all about scoring a goal to pulverize your opponent, but rather to please the Creators. A book titled American Indian Ethnic Renewal proudly proclaims, “Through common identification, group formation and reformation, and cultural production and reproduction, ethnicity is revitalized and constantly renewed. These ethnic construction processes occur in a larger social context where ethnogenesis is influenced by political policies that designate, legitimate, and reward particular ethnic boundaries” (Nagel, 1997, 10). This pertains to the ethical and ethnicity dilemma of Coach Logan wanting to expand on his reservations casino, while in the process of decimating the would be former lacrosse field to make room for the expansion. However, as Coach Logan grows to know each member of the team individually them being all