Perspective

Reading The Round House has really helped to put a lot of things in perspective for me. It is so often that we get so caught up in our own lives, our own struggles, and our own problems. Now, I am considering a faction of life that I never paid any mind to previously, life on native american reservations. It's rarely talked about in main-stream media, besides your occasional protest or oil spill. Even the history books neglect to cover it. American history is taught with a surprising lack of native american content, even though they were the ones who helped the colonizers settle and survive in the first place. After the Trail of Tears and the forced movement to reservations, Native Americans are barely ever covered again. The fact that this story is set in the 1980s also helps to draw a comparison between the time period that so-called white america deemed so fun and prosperous, the native american community was being attacked and ignored. Moving on from just the racial issues presented in this novel, this is also incredibly well narrated, and I often forget that this is not a memoir written by a native american man looking back on the summer when he was thirteen, but rather a middle aged native american woman. This has really set a standard of good story telling for me, and a precedent that all other books will have to meet. All in all, this book has been incredibly eye-opening to me, and I will definitely be more conscious of researching and looking into what is going on in the native american community.