Finding Yourself in Virtual Reality
By Marina Corinne Smeltzer
I honestly really enjoyed reading Rebecca Roanhorse’s Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience and was left with a lot of thoughts and questions. I enjoyed the story and it also opened my eyes to some literary tricks through the purposeful use of perspective and capitalization. I personally really enjoyed how she wrote it in the perspective where you get to play the part of Jesse Turnblatt, or Trueblood as he prefers. I think that Roanhorse’s use of second person point of view is very appropriate because it places the reader in Jesse’s position, experiencing everything he goes through as if it is their own “experience.” Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience is cleverly an “authentic Indian experience” in itself while it also talks about Jesse’s job of providing VisionQuests to Tourists. It was interesting to me when I realized this because I originally thought the title of the short story was referring to Jesse’s job, but as I prepared to write this journal I realized it might refer to the story as a whole, as it offers you, the reader, an immersive experience in Jesse Trueblood’s life.
Throughout the short fiction, I also found Rebecca Roanhorse’s use of capitalization to be quite interesting. Some of the words that seem unusually capitalized are Experiences, Boss, Management, New Agers, and most interestingly, Tourists. I think Experiences is capitalized to show that it is their product that they sell and to slightly satirize and show how people come to get a fake experience of what they want to think of as authentic. As I read, I felt that Roanhorse used capitalization on the words like Boss, New Agers, and Tourists, to emphasize their use as labels. I felt that the capitalization of Tourists was a slight jab to reverse the roles, since normally it is the tourists stereotyping the natives as Indians, calling the visitors Tourists puts a twist on who does the labeling.
Aside from the literary hacks used to create this immersive story, the overall plot is very captivating and thought provoking. I thought this story was somewhat satirical to show how people can be insensitive about people’s backgrounds and make a joke of their life stories. Jesse’s job of creating virtual reality experiences for people to “find themselves” and have an “Authentic Indian Experience” is pretty sad because he basically has to advertise his culture as being what Tourists expect it to be based on movies and media. Making the “authentic experiences” virtual reality and totally based on the expectations falsely portrayed in movies shows how people want to believe what they want and suppress reality. Jesse’s work shows how it is all about getting good ratings even if it means going against your beliefs. Another thing that stood out to me was how easily Jesse was replaced by White Wolf. I was so disappointed by how fake and back-stabbing White Wolf turned out. Jesse’s story exemplifies how easily the truly authentic can be replaced, which reminded me of how technology, specifically artificial intelligence, can replace human jobs. The way Jesse innocently told White Wolf his whole life story and then an opportunity for advancement became available and White Wolf seamlessly replaced him reminds me of how we train machines to do things and be smart and they will be replacing us just as easily as White Wolf. White Wolf’s goal of completely taking over Jesse Trueblood’s life, including job, home, and wife, and then pretending not to know him at the bar, also kind of reminded me of how people could be easily vanished and erased from history in George Orwell’s 1984.