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Comparing Short Story 'Hearts And Flowers'

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Malala Yousafzai, youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate, once said, “ I speak not for myself but for those without voice… those who have fought for their rights… their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated”. Natives are continuously being treated with inequality and are constantly being discriminated against; Malala Yousafzai is one of the many people who stood up for people like the Natives, people who cannot speak up for themselves. The short story “Hearts and Flowers” by Tomson Highway speaks of an eight-year-old boy who fights to prove that Native people are just as human as white people. Throughout the story, one is able to uncover how people who …show more content…

“If a man, or a woman, aged twenty-one or older cannot vote… then how on earth can he be human”(Highway, 187). To be able to vote, one had to be aged twenty-one or older, however, in the case that they were Cree, they could not vote. Under the circumstances that they could not vote, Native citizens were considered not human. The act of voting has tremendous symbolic meaning in “Hearts and Flowers”; voting gives people an opportunity to convey displeasure and eagerness, happiness and unhappiness; it allows them to feel involved. Tomson Highway uses the literary technique, symbolism, as an illustration, which distinguishes humans from nonhumans. Native citizens were stripped from their rights and were considered below humans. Without knowing what their values were, let alone who the Natives were, the white people in the community forbid the Indians from voting. American poet, Maya Angelou, once said, “Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible”. People have become so prejudice to the point where they make judgments without proper knowledge, and as a result, this leads to harmful outcomes. In addition, if people have the proper knowledge, discrimination wouldn’t be as present as it is

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