Junior Theme--Dah Dah Dah!!

This. Is. It. The moment every New Trier student has always dreaded--the start of Junior Theme. Okay, maybe I am being a bit melodramatic, but based off of what some people say about the Junior Theme, I have a good reason to be. Honestly, I have been hearing rumors about the Junior Theme since I was in middle school. People say it is horrible.  People say they stay up all night, every night working on it. People say the essay is 20 pages long! The list goes on…

For those of you who do not go to New Trier, the Junior Theme is really just a big research paper that every junior at our high school does. The good news is that most of the above rumors are far from true (at least in my American Studies class). For our class, we are allowed a great deal of freedom in choosing our own topic on something that we are truly interested in. As long as the topic relates to a current American issue and we can state our inquiry in the form of a "why question," the choice is all ours (as opposed to some classes where students are assigned a Junior Theme topic). Also, I never really have to worry about pulling any all-nighters (unless I procrastinate a TON) because we are given class time to research and other resources such as the librarians to aid us. 

To be honest, I am really enjoying the project so far. I have only begun some preliminary topic searching and researching, but I have narrowed down my ideas somewhat. Some topics I have considered are same-sex marriage laws, Native Americans today, incarceration rates among different demographics, smoking, and lack of religion. To be honest, I still have no clue which topic I think is the one that I really want to do my project on.

However, I have always been very interested in Native American life and I think that I might like to pursue that topic further with the guiding question, "Why are many Native Americans in such a terrible current situation?" Though I have heard many stories in school and in textbooks about how Native Americans were forced out of their homes to make way for white settlers, I am not sure why modern-day Native Americans have never really "recovered" from what happened to their ancestors hundreds of years ago. Early on in my research, I discovered some shocking statistics: "American Indians have an infant death rate that is 40 percent higher than the rate for whites. They are twice as likely to die from diabetes, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease...3.5 times more likely to suffer kidney damage and 3 times more likely to die as a result of diabetes" (Opposing Viewpoints). Could all these horrifying facts be a result of what the government did to Native Americans hundreds of years ago? Or might this be a result of what is still being done to them today? I still have no clue...