All Our Relations Literary Elements

Non-fiction book

The action described takes place in present time in various locations all over USA.

The action is told from the perspective of a third-person objective point of view.

The tone and mood is a neutral one.

The protagonists are presented as being the indigenous communities while the antagonists are represented by the colonizers.

The major conflict is between modernity and tradition.

The book reaches its climax when the narrator reaches the conclusion that nothing can be done to repair the damage which has been done to the native communities.

The book begins with a depressing description of a group of naive young men, drunk by the side of the road. This description is used here to foreshadow the fact that the narrator will focus on analyzing the way in which drug abuse and alcoholism affected native communities.

When the narrator claims that the native communities would be better off without any help from the outside is an understatement because later in the same chapter the narrator describes how the native communities became completely dependent on the help they received from the outside.

The main allusions found here is the idea that the efforts various governments made to help the indigenous people only pushed them deeper into depression and made them think that suicide is the only option for them.

The most important image described in the book is that of the dead native teenager. This image is important because it shows just how much mental health issues affect the communities and how many people feel as if they have no other choice but to take their own lives.

One of the most paradoxical ideas presented in the book is the idea that indigenous people became strangers on their own lands.

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The land is used here as a general term to make reference to the idea of legacy.

We have a personification in the sentence "the sun embraced everyone as a mother".