A song by Johnny Cash : correction of the homework.

Hello there! 

Voici le corrigé de votre travail sur la chanson écrite par l'indien Peter Lafarge, et offerte avec d'autres textes à Johnny Cash en vue de la publication d'un album. Johnny Cash le dit lui-même en introduction,dans la vidéo que vous aviez à étudier. Ecoutez-le à nouveau .
Lisez ce que je vous propose, et prenez ce qui peut vous aider à faire une explication de tetxe orale de cette chanson.
Je n'ai pas tout corrigé, uniquement ce qui me semblait vous avoir posé de réels problèmes.
Pour ce qui est de l'histoire des Sénécas,tout était dans la chanson, il était donc inutile et peu intelligent d'aller copier-coller des lignes entières de Wikipedia!.......
Apprenez le vocabulaire inconnu.


Johnny Cash : a song written by Peter Lafarge

“As long As The grass Shall Grow”

The document : This is a text written by Peter Lafarge, a Seneca Indian, who apparently, according to what Johnny Cash says as an introduction to his performance, gave him a few songs for one of his albums.

It is a text made of four stanzas, and a chorus. Each stanza is composed of eight lines and four rhyming couplets. (aa bb cc dd )

It relates the story of Dam Kinuza, a dam that flooded Seneca land and sacred funeral sites. It also goes back in time, and reminds us of the treaty once signed with Washington and soon disregarded and broken, like most treaties signed to secure Indians their territories “forever”.

The chorus is there to hammer home the hypocrisy of American promises, to emphasize the contrast between what had been said – empty words, useless promises – and Indians reality.

C. It refers to the very words of many treaties that concluded on promising land “forever”, using metaphors Indian chiefs could fully understand and respond to, because of their great attachment to and respect of Mother Earth.( stanza 2 line 7)

E. 1. “George” refers to George Washington. On lines 5 to 8 , we are told about the treaty that secured peace with the US and Indian rights as well –line 8 – signed by the president himself. The land was to belong to the Senecas “now and forever more”.

2. On line 35, we are told that the government itself has corrected “the father of our country”(line 36 )’s promise. If the government has done so, we can conclude that George Washington must have made a mistake at the time. But then, every single American admires, respects and sets that founder of the nation on a pedestal. Therefore Washington cannot be wrong! Those who are guilty are the politicians who have bereft the Indians of their rights. The whole line therefore is an antiphrasis. What is really meant here is the very contrary of what is said:  “ The father of our country cannot have been wrong an Indian is worth as much as any American.”

3. The tone here is falsely naive. Peter Lafarge pretends to be drawing logical conclusions from the politicians’ decisions to annul Washington’s treaty and build a dam on Seneca land.

G. The best examples of the bitterness and disillusion of the Senecas are :

Stanza 2 line4: ” It will flood the Indian country a proud day for Uncle Sam” (bitterness )

Stanza2 line 6: “ It will drown the Indian graveyards, Cornplanter can you swim?”(bitterness, scorn, self-derision)

Stanza 3 line 2 : “ the liar’s mouth” (disillusion)

Stanza 3 line6 “they laughed in his face” ( bitterness and disillusion)

Plus various lines where sadness can be felt like in:

Stanza 2 lines 1 and 2; stanza 3 line 8.