Alice Walkers

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Alice Walkers essay “Everything Is a Human Being” summarizes her understanding of human existence on earth and how the earth itself is intertwined. Throughout this essay she portrays her passionate relationship with the earth and its inhabitants by personalizing things like trees and snakes, giving us a better illustration of how our earth is treated. She was able to give a new and more relatable understanding of how humans have been selfish to our earth and how our non-human inhabitants are the ones suffering. While laying in a grove of trees she states, “As I was laying there, really across their feet, I felt or “heard” with my feelings the distinct request from them that I remove myself. But these are not feet, I thought, peering at them…show more content…
She states that the “Wasichus starved the Indians into submission, and forced them to live on impoverished “reservations” in their own land. Like the little snake in my garden, many of the Indians returned again and again to their ancient homes and hunting grounds, only to be driven off with greater and greater brutality until they were broken or killed.” Walker relates how the drive for power has resulted in the destruction of the surrounding environment claiming that humanity has come to the point where it treats the earth like dirt. The Wasichus did not kill for food, the killed because they wanted to kill therefore fighting against the earth and “although the native Americans fought as much as any other people among themselves, never did they fight against the earth.” Walker makes a great point of relating the Wasichus to the Native Americans when she explains how the native people “made love” to the land where as the Wasichus “raped it”. This really pulls it together showing how the natives worked together to preserve our earth, to protect it and only take what they needed for survival, while the Wasichus basically did not care about the earth and took whatever they
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