Answer:
The Runaways focuses on the identity of the Native American children who were sent to boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries, as part of a state sponsored attempt to gradually eradicate the culture of the native people.
Over the years, many children were abused in these institutions. Many children ran away. Most came out with a confused idea of who they were and where they should be living. Virtually everyone had no clue as to what home meant because the land they were born on had been taken by the government.
Louise Erdrich's poem highlights this problematic issue of home and identity by giving a voice to a child in one of these schools, a speaker for the collective soul of wronged natives.
The poet herself is part Native American (Ojibway or Chippewa tribe) and part German. She says of the poem:
'Runaways is one of the first poems that came out of letting go and just letting my own background or dreams surface on the page.'
The poem was written in 1981 and published in her first poetry book Jacklight in 1984. It received critical acclaim. Louise Erdrich is also a novelist and in both disciplines writes about the Native American world, basing much of her narrative in the Turtle Mountain region of Minnesota.
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways takes the reader into the dream-like world of young runaways about to fall asleep perhaps after being recaptured and returned to the dreaded boarding school.
The poem is a part virtual journey, part wishful thinking, part ancestral hurt, and pain.
What makes the poem so powerful is the contrast between hope and despair within the collective hearts, and the inevitable clash of language. There is in reality nowhere for the runaways to go. Their escape to freedom is a delusion, yet their instinct is to try and make it home nevertheless.
Explanation:
