Poem Analysis: Journey By Tiara Anderson

After reading “Journey,” by Tiara Anderson in the first issue of Red Rising Education magazine, I understood that there is an array of various conflicts Indigenous men and women have to tolerate on a daily basis. Anderson discusses many topics in her poem including stereotypes, self-hatred and the missing and murdered Indigenous women. She is now in her senior year of high school and a mentor in a girls program called “Nodoka girls.” Anderson initially wrote this poem when she was twelve years old though, but this poem 's revised over the years. Five years later, at the age of seventeen (Anderson, 2017, pg. 13), she finally mustered up the courage to share it with the world. This piece takes you along the journey of a young girl’s path to self-acceptance and delivers an insight of her culture.

Anderson writes “Take away

This implication is an excellent example of the racial hierarchy, and the fact that Europeans are at the very peak and minorities such as indigenous people have been forced to the bottom. For the most part, I believe that European civilizations have crowned themselves to be at the majority by colonizing other countries but, society should be put to blame for promoting European-like countenance to be more appealing. In the very first paragraph, she writes “I locked myself away for many summers to come” symbolizing that she tried to escape from her native features and imitate European looks. Anderson felt isolated from her culture, no one taught her to love her brown skin and religion and if it wasn 't so, she could have expelled some hurting years in her life. We, as a community need to start acknowledging the customs and beliefs of our diverse population. In this day and era, cities are becoming more diverse by the minute, and if we don 't begin to accept each other, it could very well result in a series of tragic