I am proud of my essay because it shows how much I improved from the beginning of quarter 2. The difference between the start of the quarter and the end of the quarter is a lot different as I later learned to stay on topic instead of before where I used to always be off-topic making the essay not sound great. My final essay was about how place impacted three characters from some of the books I read that quarter.

Arnold is impacted by community, his family as well as his location he lives in. Arnold’s family has never moved out of the reservation and has stayed in the same one for over 100 years. This is showing how loyal they are to native brotherhood because their “spirits stay in one place. We [Arnold’s family] are absolutely tribal” (89). Arnold does break this rule as when he moves to Reardan, he thinks that he “cursed my [Arnold] family. I had left the tribe and had broken something inside all of us and I was now being punished” (173). This impacts Arnold because as soon as he moves to Reardan, people in his family start to die and as Arnold always thinks about himself negatively, he thinks this is because of him. Even though Arnold’s parents have stayed in the same reservation their entire life, they gave up and became alcoholics and this impacts Arnold because now they do not care about Arnold as much as a normal parent should. This is why “they don’t want their kids to be drunks” because they do not want Arnolds kids to be treated the same way (46).

This is one of the paragraphs I did for the essay.