No Parole Today

This last section of No Parole Today chronicles Linda Tohe’s life after the Indian boarding schools, and her moving into going to college. This section is called No Parole Today. Based on the free verse poems and the short stories, it seems like although she and her classmates had “made parole” and were free from the lives at the boarding schools, they were still systematically, internally, and emotionally in jail but not physically jailed. They still remained effected individuals and lots of trouble followed them in a world not prepared for them and a world that did not want them. Tohe speaks about “Sarah T’s husband shot her at the Tohatchi Laundomat” or of hearing of the death of a friend in a small obscure section of a newspaper. It seems that the life that she speaks of after the boarding schools was very sad, dark, and not the least bit uplifting. I wonder why she decided to do that? Did she want to show the reader of her work true reality rather than “feel-good stories”?