Indian Boarding School The Runaways Analysis

“Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Eldrich bears overwhelming notes of running away from what could be what one assumes to be the Indian boarding school and returning to home. The beginning few lines provide the idea of wishing to return home on boxcars and an escape in their dreams. The next line, “the rails, old lacerations that we love/ shoot parallel across the face and break,” indicate a guiding force in memories and pain, but also a longing for what the lacerations represent in the phrase ‘old lacerations that we love.’ The lacerations refer to emotions and memories of home, and using the imagery of train tracks cutting through the ground like lacerations, show how home might not be a particularly perfect idea. This contradicts the often false nostalgia of home and how home, while often thought to be a perfect concept, is overrepresented and can be painful. This idea of home and memories is again referred to in the further line, “riding scars you can’t get lost.” Scars also implies a further development of lacerations into the scars and how they’re still following them and reflecting on the memories of home, reinforcing those ideas. As the lacerations have progressed into scars, the poem shows a further progression in time in the next stanza. The second stanza begins with the runaways on the train mentioned in the first stanza. The line, “lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark less tolerant,” is showing how runaways would want to stay in