Who Runs The Show Analysis

AMST 105: Who Runs the Show? For my class I chose the title, “Who Runs the Show?” I decided to name it this because it is one that would cause me to wonder what it means and I would like to think that it would be one that other people would also be interested in. My plan is that the students who take my course would be drawn in just from the title. I would never actually tell the students what I mean by the title, because I am hoping that as the class went on that they would come to figure out what I mean by the question, and by the end of the semester they would understand what I am meaning for the title. From my title the ‘who’ can be either the state government, federal government, or tribes, or a combination of them. The ‘show’ is …show more content…
While they are exploring this topic, their assignment will be to read an article called “Non-Indians and Tribal Criminal Jurisdictions” by Duane Champagne, found in Indian Country Today. This article will help explain why the United States will not allow tribal governments to persecute non-Indians and how that may affect the trial. A key statement found in this articles is “Non-Indians perpetrate violent acts against Indian Country’s most vulnerable citizens, acts which the federal government frequently neglects to correct and tribal courts are often rendered powerless to address.” This goes along with what happens in The Round House. The criminal in the book gets away with what he did to Geraldine and it is mostly because of what is described in that sentence. From these readings I want my students to understand that there is a gap between the tribal governments and the United States government and because of this gap many criminals are getting away. I also want them to realize that something needs to be done in order to fix this gap. Either the state needs to allow the tribal governments to persecute the criminals no matter if they are Native or non-Native, or there needs to be some sort of joint court that uses people from both the tribes and outside of the tribes. This leads to my final theme for the …show more content…
There is always the sense of gap between tribes in the United States with the government and the non-Natives. For this portion of the class they will be trying to determine what needs to be done in order to fix that gap so that the world is at peace with one another. In The Round House there is always this sense of superiority with all of the non-Natives over those who are Native no matter what relationship they may have with the Natives. For example, it says “Then I told him about Sonja’s diamond stud earrings and the lizard-skin boots and about the night Whitey beat on her and how it looked like she was planning to get away from him and I told him how much money I had found.” “She could get real far on that..” (238) Sonja is a non-Native who is involved with a Native and whom Joe loves. In this section it seems as though Sonja outsmarted Joe and made him keep quiet about the money so that she could run away with it all. There was no mutual understanding between the two. Sonja also acted like she was better than the others because of her new clothing and jewelry. There are many other characters that the students will be able to examine and see that there is a distance between Natives and