User:Pooel/Theme of preservation of tradition in a.m.klein's indian reservation

Theme of preservation of Tradition in                 A.M.Klien's 'Indian Reservation:Caughnawaga' Abraham Moses Klien was a Canadian poet, journalist, short story writer and a lawyer. He is renowned for his poems.'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga' is one of his famous poems, where Klien advocates preservation of traditions. Those who alienate themselves from the traditions are dismissed by him as mere ghosts. In this poem Klien depicts the corrosive impact that the western culture has effected on the Red-Indian's traditional life style. Klien laments the extinction of the ancient Red Indian Race in the first stanza of the poem as follows: Where are the braves, the faces like autumn fruit, Who stared at the child from the coloured frontispiece? And the monosyllabic chief who spoke with his throat? Klien records his ache to meet the brave Red Indians whose faces were like the autumn fruit.The autumn fruit stands for the possession of ripe wisdom by Red Indians.The poet longs to see the Red Indians standing at their 'frontispiece'[the door step] gazing at their children walking out. He is very eager to meet the 'monosyllabic' chief who spoke briefly in a gruff and guttural voice. He calls the Red Indians affectionately as 'feathered bestiaries', because they with their fur and feathers resemble mythic animals such as Chief Running Deer, Black Bear, and Old Buffalo Head featured in the fables of Aesop, a Persian story-teller.He says: Where are the tribes, the feathered bestiaries?- Rank Aesop's animals erect and red, with fur on their names to make all live things kin- Chief Running Deer, Black Bear, Old Buffalo Head? In the second stanza of the poem,Klien records the strong feeling he had nourished for the Red Indians, when he was a child. He wished to escape from the class room chalk, the varnish smell,and the watered dust of the street and paddle to the shore where the chief lived with his followers so that he would enjoy the clean out doors and the Iroquois track of the Red Indians. He was very eager to meet the chief, 'with arms akimbo'[ with his hands on the hip] whom he had seen only in a calender. In the picture, the chief was looking like a mascot or a person bringing good luck. The child did not know that the Red Indians are non existent and are to be seen only in pictures. Klien then proceeds to describe the degradation of the Red Indian Civilization.The Red Indians have given up their traditional life style being lurred by the commercial western culture.They adopt modern French names. They neither daub themselves with paints nor wear bronze jewels. The Red Indian 'Squaws'[wives] no longer cover themselves with vegetables outfit which puffed like a tent. The Red Indians now a days wear overalls. They grow very commercial and degrade themselves by adorning themselves with bedraggled feathers and dancing their traditional dance to please a white Mayor  after receiving a bribe.Their children 'bite'the dust to pick up the brown pennies thrown by the tourists at church doors. Klien laments in the last stanza that the relics of Red Indian Civilization have become saleable commodities.He mourns that 'their past is sold in the shop'.The things once used by them such as the beaded shoes, the sweet grass baskets, the burnt wood by which they drew designs on their bodies, gaudy clothes, and inch-canoes are affordable for sales now.The 'grassy ghetto' is no more their home and are preserved as relics in the museum. Hunting occupies no place in their life. The fauna or animals hunted by them at the risk of their life, are also kept in the museum with their pale and bleached bodies. They have abandoned their native religion and converted to christianity. They become pious and prosperous,but Klien rejects them as ghosts of their vital original selves as there is nothing original in them.He says : About them watch as through a mist, the pious properous ghosts. The poem'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga'[Caughnawaga- name of the colony inhabited by Red Indians ] epitomizes Klien's feelings that the civilization of the Red Indians has disappeared and can never be revived or revitalized.