Essay | 1320 | University of North Texas at Dallas

Answer each of the questions below in several sentences. Collect your responses together and submit them to this assignment.

Refer to this passage from Terese Marie Mailhot’s essay, “A Woman, Tree or Not” (Longreads.com) (Links to an external site.) in order to answer the questions below:

“I know that the rhetoric of lost culture is a white imposition. Governments have implemented policy to categorically destroy us — how we owned land, or received an education, or were treated with health care. The Indian Act is still the only policy in place put upon a race of people in the entire world. And we aren’t a race — we’re categorized as one, but we’re sovereign people who are self-identified and thousands of years old. We were here before borders and it’s why I work and live in the United States, under the Jay Treaty, which states any Native born in Canada can travel freely between the US and Canada.”

Questions

1. How would you categorize the following attempt to integrate Mailhot’s passage into this writer’s work? Is it a paraphrase, summary, or quotation? Why?
   • “Some scholars and writers have noted the demand on Native peoples to provide accurate information about themselves for the purposes of categorizing and cataloging their differences from other groups. These scholars defy what Terese Marie Mailhot describes as a policy of making Native peoples feel lost and disconnected.”  
2. Is the passage above accurate in its characterization of Mailhot’s ideas? Why or why not? 
3. What makes the coherence of the following attempt to integrate Mailhot’s passage difficult to understand? How would you revise this passage to make it more coherent? (see CEL Ch. 16 p. 474-476 for more information)
   • “The writer of the essay ‘Tree or Not’ discusses race. ‘We’re sovereign people who are self-identified and thousands of years old.’ This is why she does not feel lost.”