the witch child. entry 2

I am a little more than half way through the book. There are a lot of difficult things going on in the text. I mentioned the main conflict in my last blog post. Mary thought that in America she would be safe from the witch hunters and she could begin a new life, different than her old one. But even as people travel overseas and oceans, no matter where they go, they carry their superstitions and beliefs with them. Really, if anything, it might become worse in America. Several people are beginning to suspect that Mary is different. And several people have been informed about her past.

To get away from this, Mary spends a lot of her time in the woods. She has befriended some Native Americans and she enjoys being in the woods. But she cannot be seen with the Native Americans because the settlers fear them and hate them. I think that this is another conflict in the novel. Nearly none of the settlers know anything about the Native American people. Mary’s Native American friend, Jaybird, helped cure one of the settlers from a disease. The Native Americans know a lot about the land and the plants, including which ones heal and which ones are poisonous. This knowledge could help the settlers, especially since they only have one doctor. But they do not trust this; they believe that use of herbs is associated with witchcraft. Which leads back to the main conflict of this story.

The conflict with the Native Americans in this book reminds me of a movie that I watched in social studies this year. It was called Bury my heart at wounded knee. Although the two stories take place in different time periods they both have parts about the oppression of Native Americans. the movie, Bury my heart at wounded knee, is about the assimilation of Native Americans. The witch child takes place far before the battle at wounded knee and the assimilation of native Americans. i really felt strongly about what we saw in the movie. i thought that forcing people to change their ways of  living and their culture is a very cruel thing to do. america was originally the land of opportunity and religious tolerance, but it did not start out that way. It took hundreds of years for it to become that. and even to this day, many social issues involving rights still exist.