Dan - Week 10 PAP 4 - "On The Amtrak From Boston To New York City" by Sherman Alexie

 In his poem “On The Amtrak From Boston To New York City” Sherman Alexie describes his interactions with an older white lady sitting across from him while on the Amtrak from Boston to New York, and how the comments that the lady was making about the local landscape were extremely emotionally and internally conflicting for Alexie, who is a Native American.

Shortly into their trip, the lady points out to Alexie a “house on the hill [that] is over two hundred years old,” but all Alexie can think about is how his culture and ancestors were inhabiting those lands “15,000 years… before” anyone else was there. This introduces the main theme of the rest of the poem, which is the obliviousness to the very racism and misrepresentation of Native Americans by white people in America. When the lady then asks if Alexie visited Walden Pond, he refrains from sarcastically responding about the “five Walden Ponds on [his] reservation out west,” and the other “hundreds surrounding Spokane,” because he understands that it’s not the lady’s fault that she is uneducated on the Native’s history in America; she truly does not know that Alexie’s ancestors were on these lands tens of thousands of years before the Walden Ponds and the 200-year old houses. 

Alexie also expresses his discontent for the fake heroic acts of white colonizers in the past couple hundred years, correctly arguing that “if [the colonizer’s] brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers hadn’t [gone] there in the first place, then nothing would need to be saved.” Once again, Sherman is showing how the Native Americans had a successful and profitable civilization, but the colonizer’s actions ruined that, and then the colonizers are seen as heroes. Alexie concludes the poem with one line, different from all the other 4-line stanzas, that truly emphasizes the Native American struggle: “Somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.” By wrapping up the poem with this line, Alexie paints the picture of the sad reality in this country, that people are taught the wrong history and end up invalidating many centuries of tradition and culture that were built up by Native Americans on the very land that we claim to be “ours”.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-the-amtrak-from-boston-to-new-york-city/