Tensions In Martin Luther King's Life

Luther does talk a lot of the tensions he had combining each life. Changing his physical appearance seemed hard on him. He talked a lot about the clothes. He talked about how it make him feel awkward and uncomfortable. He said the leather boots he had to wear where most of the suffering, and how the white people told them if they walk in the dew with bare feet they would catch a cold. This was very strange to him because the natives when bare foot all the time and were never told of any type of sickness they could pick up. He also did not like the red flannel garments which made him feel like he was being tortured. He said he would get undressed and hide them away until he had to put them on again. What also challenged him about combining the white man life was having to
cut his hair. He said it made him feel strange and he never did understand how long hair “stood in the path of our development.” Changing his name was a serious tension too. Obviously your name is very important because that's what people call you, it is part of your identity.
He had to go up to a blackboard with names on it and pick one he liked and slowly learned to respond to his new name. Out of all the changes he was forced to make he said changing his diet was the most injurious. He went from eating meat, fruit, and vegetables, to white bread, coffee, and sugar. Although all this change occurred after five years contact with the white people he resumed life on the reservation and kept in direct contact with the tribal life. Zitkala-Sa’s experience with the tensions she had between combining her two ways of life were different then Luthers. For example, she shared a time early in her writing of a time a white women was playing with her and threw her up and down for fun. This was frightening for her because that wasn't something her mother would have ever done. Another time was when she got older she said her pride kept her from going back to her mom. This was because if her mother had known she would have said, “the white man’s papers were not worth the freedom and health I had lost by them.” She believed if her mother had said this it would have been to
unbearable. That was a tension between two ways of her life because she had experienced the “white man’s” way of living and her mother had not so her mother would not have understood why she would continue college. Something so little was such a big difference for her that she remember it many years later. Luther found issues with the educational system and the assimilationist policies. He believed that all this changing the native children had to do was not just robbing the native, but American of a rich heritage. He said “Today we should be perpetuating history instead of destroying it, and this can only be done by allowing and encouraging the young to keep it alive.” He also believed that even though the whites had a lot to teach them, the whites could have learned a lot from the natives too. They could have exchanged ideas and languages. Zitkala-Sa found many issues with the educational system and the assimilationist policies. One, she found it stupid that it was acceptable for an unexperienced white man to be in power just as long as he was Christian. His need to feed his family was seen as more important than any Indians. Another issue she found was more in herself. She said while she was pursuing her education she had lost touch of all the nature around her. When she was taken to the “small white-walled prison,” also known as her room, she lost her connection to her salvation. In the end of her writing what she found most bothering of all the educational system did was when the white visitors would come into the schoolhouse and see the native child were “civilized” and that they could boast about their charity to the natives.
4. I believe Luther's American school would have obviously looked like a more diverse place. Not just whites but also natives too. I think it would have been a place where kids could learn about not only white American history but native history too. Maybe they could have been taught why certain tribes have different languages and what earlier white settlers did wrong to the natives, so the children could learn from their mistakes. Today, I think Luther’s American school would look very similar to how school looks today. America is a very diverse place. But I also think if Luther’s school had existed our schools today would have more of a native American influence, like the students would know more about native tribes and cultures. It would have been nice to not have lost all of the Native Americans’ culture.