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Thomas C. Gannon
Native Literatures: Yet Another Introduction
Any contemporary discussion of “Native American literature” might begin with the question whether there is any such thing. For – like the term “Indian” itself – it has certainly been an act of Euro‐American colonialist essentialism to assume such a transcontinental category of Indigenous discourse. Critical assumptions of its characteristics – for example, spiritualism, naturism, communalism – in the initial decades of interest in literary Native America (the late 1960s through the 1980s) have often been little more than the recycling of old whitestream clichés about the “Indian.” These long‐standing stereotypes continue to occlude what is an incredible cultural diversity. Any anthology of “Native American literature” is actually quite as problematic as an anthology of, say, “European literature”: the Lakota and Diné authors therein, for instance, issue from very different worldviews, making their verbal arts at least as disparate as the various special geniuses of French, German, Spanish, and Italian literatures that make up those venerable “World Literature” texts. Tentative summary statement #1: Works of the various American Indigenous literatures are best discussed as examples of their specific tribal cultures – as Ojibwe literature, as Mohawk literature, and so on.
And yet, statement #1 is most true regarding pre‐contact oral discourses; it still holds to a large extent in nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century writings; and of course, it is least true from the mid‐twentieth century on, after the US federal relocation program, which had as its most positive unexpected consequence a new pan‐Indian consciousness. By the late 1960s, this new pan‐Indian identity led to a budding Native American Renaissance in literature. Suddenly, writing as an Indian became a viable, often powerful poetic or political persona; suddenly, Lakota polemicist Vine Deloria, Jr. could declare in 1969, “Custer Died for Your Sins.” A less laudable result of pan‐Indianism is that specific tribal identities became increasingly blurred. By the end of the century, in “To Save a Great Vision” (1997), Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday can presumably understand completely the poetics of the neo‐Lakota text Black Elk Speaks (1932); a generation later, Sherman Alexie’s various fictional characters from the Pacific Northwest can endlessly obsess about the Great Plains warrior Crazy Horse. The positive side of this coin is that the “other” in the “self/other” colonialist binary could finally write back against US mistreatment of various American tribal peoples in a somewhat unified voice of protest. Tentative summary statement #2: There is a recent coherent body of writing that may be dubbed Native American literature, a literary discourse community stemming from a post‐relocation, pan‐Indian national imaginary, which found its initial climax in the Native American Renaissance and is best described as a newfound political “Indian” consciousness writing back against the historical trauma of US settler colonialism.
However, statements #1 and #2 both must be qualified by another undeniable fact: almost all “Native American literature” has been written in English. From day one of contact with the Euro‐cultures of greater technological might, Native peoples have been forced to negotiate with that power through the language of the colonizer. (As the narrator of Sherman Alexie’s “Imagining the Reservation” earnestly asks, “How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt?” [1993a: 152].) If language is culture, as anthropologists have long said, then the de rigueur adoption of English was an ipso facto acculturation and deculturization, demonstrated by the ironic fact that the early text often dubbed as the opening salvo of Native American literature, Samson Occom’s A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772), is a sermon by a Christian Indian minister. While one might point to this genre’s origins in the spoken word as a sign of that fine Indigenous tradition of oratory, it is just as true that this first instance of Native literature – written and published in English (leaving the oral traditions aside) – is in fact a piece aimed at the unwashed Native heathens in need of Christian salvation, written decidedly from the imperialist point of view of the colonizer. If we jump forward a century or so, the flowering glory of late nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐century Native texts is the autobiography genre, epitomized by Paiute “princess” Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1883). Here, too, the stresses of a cross‐cultural negotiation are evident, as Winnemucca finds herself torn between the authorial “I” of Western self‐inscription and a concomitant communal drive to tell the story of and for her people. And so, as will become evident in the following treatments of genres – and this is tentative statement #3 – “Native American literature” has always been a product of cultural hybridity, of literary hybridity, as the colonized have continually found themselves in the discomfiting yet potentially exhilaratingly liberating position of having to reinscribe the “master’s forms.” As we now examine a few major genres of Native literatures, then, these caveats should be kept in mind.
Native Autobiography: “The Story of a Life … and of a People’s Dream”
John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks characteristically begins with a disclaimer, that this is not only “the story of my life,” of an old Lakota who had grown up in the time of Custer and Crazy Horse, but the story of the Lakota themselves, of a “people’s dream that died in bloody snow” (2014: 1). Early Native life writing is highlighted by this pull between the one and the many, between the individual who is writing and the cultural whole that the writer often feels to be the true and greater subject of her or his story. But a problem immediately arises in the various autobiographies – like Black Elk Speaks – that are ultimately collaborations with a Western white auteur. Unsurprisingly, the latter, inevitably empowered with the final editorial say, has been prone to emphasize the individual, a tendency evident in much of Black Elk Speaks. But then, Neihardt also choreographed the entire arrangement of this book, and even “ghost‐wrote” the opening paragraphs, well aware that such a collectivist “it’s about me and my people” opening had already become a stock Euro‐American expectation about such an exotic, “primitive” culture. This also allowed Neihardt to portray the history of the Lakota – and Black Elk’s own feelings about that history – as much more tragic and doomed than the original transcripts suggest. Indeed, the cross‐cultural hybridization that resulted in Black Elk Speaks goes far in explaining Arnold Krupat’s oft‐quoted dictum that “Indian autobiography is a contradiction in terms” (1985: 30).
But Native life writers needed no actual white collaborator to feel and express this tension, to make Native autobiography a literary disjunction or “contradiction.” Sara Winnemucca’s dilemma, in her Life Among the Piutes, has already been mentioned. Two decades later, another talented Native woman, Zitkala‐Ša, would publish the three‐part story of her early years as “Impressions of an Early Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” (1900). Later collected in her American Indian Stories (1921), these narratives highlight the stark contrast between her rural Dakota childhood and the mechanized, regimented boarding school system. Early in the book, she “plays the primitive,” painting herself as a “wee,” wild, “whooping” Indian in awe of “palefaces” and “iron horses.” But by the time she is a teacher at the infamous Carlisle Indian School, after years as a boarding school student back East, her disillusionment and alienation – from both cultures, it appears – are complete:
For the white man’s papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit […] On account of my mother’s simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also. I made no friends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God […] Now a cold bare pole I seemed to be, planted in a strange earth. (2003: 97)
Here, the tension between the “two worlds” results in despair and near ego dissolution, as least as portrayed by the persona of American Indian Stories.
For the first few decades of the twentieth century, Great Plains authors dominated Native literature, exemplified by Dakota author Charles Eastman’s memoir From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), yet another text whose very title bears the burden of assimilation, although Eastman does question the benefits of the dominant “civilization” at several points, especially regarding the traumatic events of Wounded Knee. As with the later Black Elk Speaks, the nature of Eastman’s text as a collaboration is problematic: his white assimilationist wife’s editorial hand in his publications is now nearly as notorious as it was once obfuscated. Even these authors’ use of the term “wigwam” – Zitkala‐Ša also uses it frequently as a synonym for the quite different Plains Indian tipi – indicates how much their Great Plains‐centered auto‐inscriptions were still very much influenced by an eastern audience more familiar, at the time, with the abodes of the “Eastern Woodlands” tribes.
Another Great Plains writer, Luther Standing Bear, reveals his Lakota culture in a series of three books, My People the Sioux (1928), My Indian Boyhood (1931), and Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933). The first chronicles his presence at one of the last Lakota sun dance ceremonies before their ban in 1883, and his attendance as one of the first students at Carlisle Indian School. Unlike Zitkala‐Ša’s descriptions of the Indian boarding school system as routinized cruelty, Standing Bear’s enthusiastic readiness to assimilate is now painful to read in its naivety, as he expresses pride in being “one of the ‘bright fellows’” who learns his “name quickly”: “I soon learned to write it very well […] I took a piece of chalk downstairs and wrote ‘Luther’ all over everything I could copy it on.” Having had his very identity reinscribed as “Luther,” Standing Bear reproduces the cultural imposition with his own compulsively copious literal inscriptions (1975: 137–138).
Standing Bear’s evocations of his South Dakota youth, in contrast, often read as nostalgic requiems, as self‐farewells to the Lakota boy Ota K’te. The last sentence of My Indian Boyhood is (sadly) indicative; having just told the fast‐paced story of his first buffalo kill, he laconically concludes that such hunts are now gone forever. The Lakota close connection with other species is reinforced in an oft‐anthologized essay from Land of the Spotted Eagle: in “Indian Wisdom,” he asserts that the “Lakota was a true naturist – a lover of Nature.” His contrasts of this attitude with the Western worldview are well done, even moving; and yet the reader feels that such a pantheistic/“animal‐rights” philosophy has been expressed in similar language before. And it has: in Euro‐Romanticism. Standing Bear continues: “Everything was possessed of personality, only differing with us in form. […] The world was a library and its books were the stones […] and the birds and animals” (1978: 192, 194). While the extent of the machinations of Standing Bear’s white editors and “assistants” is unclear, one might read “Indian Wisdom” as one of the first well‐known contributions to the mythos of the “Eco‐Indian”: at last, it may signify as much what his whitestream audience expected from its “close‐to‐nature Indians” as it does an authentic presentation of a pre‐contact Lakota worldview.
This collaborative confusion comes to the fore in the 1930s, with Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. Raymond J. DeMallie’s edition of the original interview transcripts, The Sixth Grandfather (1986), was a bombshell in Neihardt/Black Elk studies in highlighting Neihardt’s various editorial interventions, including the entire chapter on Crazy Horse. Today’s Black Elk scholar is now well aware that nowhere in the book is it revealed that Black Elk had converted to Catholicism decades before Neihardt sought him out to impart to him the wisdom of traditional Lakota ceremonialism. Thus the Lakota religious tradition is presented as much more akin to Western monotheism than it actually is, an obfuscation that may be attributed as much to Black Elk as to Neihardt. Another problem is shown by returning to the transcripts: a good majority of the most famous (and flowerily “Indian”‐sounding) passages in the book were never spoken by Black Elk, and indeed are Neihardt’s often out‐of‐the‐blue editorializing additions, inserted for literary effect or pathos. Neihardt’s main intent in Black Elk Speaks, to eulogize the “end of a dream” and a people – and unconsciously erase them and co‐opt what he perceived to be their cultural values? – is sadly manifest; the degree to which he took great poetic license in recasting the specifics of an old Lakota’s true “life story” is less obvious but just as lamentable.
Both Lakota and white collaborator threads are continued in another book popular with whitestream readers, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions (1972). The Native voice of Lame Deer is strong here, even charmingly idiosyncratic. As with Zitkala‐Ša before him and Mary Crow Dog afterwards, his description of his Indian boarding school experience is damning; the chapter on his hanblecia (vision quest), “Alone on a Hilltop,” is one the best twentieth‐century portrayals of this traditional coming‐of‐age ceremony in literature. And yet the reader alert to the politics of the 1960s and early 1970s hears another voice here, presumably that of Richard Erdoes: one strongly suspects that the neo‐Romantic attitudes of a certain Indian‐loving Euro‐hippy made Lame Deer sound much more like a cross between an angry AIMster (AIM refers to the American Indian Movement) and a New Age‐naturist wise old guru than was completely warranted. Erdoes’s job was made easier when he “co‐wrote” Lakota Woman (1990) and Ohitika Woman (1993) with Mary Crow Dog (aka Mary Brave Bird) because she was an angry AIMster. And yet, besides revealing the early moments of AIM’s founding and the details of the Trail of Broken Treaties march (1971), Lakota Woman is notable as further, more recent testimony about the scandalous abuse in Indian boarding schools.
Native autobiography achieves a greater degree of irony and sophistication in an amazing text by Ojibwe master‐of‐all‐genres Gerald Vizenor. His Interior Landscapes (1990) is a tour de force of playful/sardonic self‐revelation. (If there is any evidence of a “collaborator” here, it is the Euro‐poststructuralist theory in which his prose – fiction and non‐fiction – is inevitably imbued.) Interior Landscapes may be one of the most stylistically unusual autobiographies ever written, “Indian” or otherwise. Vizenor’s troubled childhood and adolescence as a “crossblood” are presented in a deadpan, almost detached fashion, inflected by both his reading of French theory and his experience as a newspaper reporter. Even quoted sentences in isolation serve as emblems of his style: “I was invisible when we entered the department store late that afternoon, a mixedblood on the margins with wild hair, dental caries, and the unrestrained manners of a child who lived in a basement” (1990: 50). Maybe the central event of the book concerns Vizenor’s antagonistic relationship with AIM – and their attempt at cultural revival via Lakota ceremonialism. When the (mostly Ojibwe) AIM leaders attend a Pine Ridge ceremony, Vizenor finds himself seduced by the drums, but characteristically, he refuses their charms: “I had been close to […] the absolute truth of spiritual conversion that night; a few more minutes […] and my name might have been lost to the tribe behind a bunker at Wounded Knee. […] instead, my pen was raised to terminal creeds” (235). Against such an essentialist nostalgia for inauthentic origins, Vizenor draws a circle around an admittedly, even proudly, racially hybrid self, as a “crossblood” person beyond the pale (and power) of white and “red” identity power structures. Indeed, what’s most notable about Vizenor’s self‐inscriptions is that his “Native identity” is constantly problematized, in his emphasis on his “crossblood” status and his constant refrain of an assertion that the “Indian” per se is a Euro‐American construct imposed upon the American Indigenous as an act of discursive power.
Finally, any discussion of Native life writing is complicated by the fact that, since the late 1960s Native Renaissance onward, much of the most interesting Native autobiographical forays have appeared within mixed‐genre texts. For the “autobiographies” of N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, and so on, one is best directed to those works that are a rich mélange of autobiography and poetry and creative non‐fiction. What characterizes the best of such recent texts in general is an earnest assertion of individuality, even idiosyncrasy, combined with an ongoing negotiation with one’s Native “roots.” We may have wandered far from Black Elk’s (or – ahem – Neihardt’s) wish to express his “people’s dream,” but in even the most contemporary examples of Native autobiography, this double‐voiced dilemma – and strength – remains central.
Native Fiction: “You Can Go Home Again”?
One of the critical truisms regarding the Native novel involves what William Bevis has famously called the “homing” plot motif (Roemer 2005: 17). This gesture has usually been read (and often literally embodied in many of the major novels of the Native “canon”) as a return to one’s Native place, and thereby one’s cultural roots, as if adamantly rebutting Thomas Wolfe’s famous dictum with a forthright “You CAN go home again; and in fact, you must do so, to retain any sense of tribal identity and any hope for cultural survival.” This certainly characterizes the two most famous novels of the Native literary renaissance, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) – in which Abel, an alienated World War II veteran, returns to Jemez Pueblo and ends up running and singing to the rhythms of the Diné Night Chant – and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), about another estranged World War II vet, Tayo, whose cultural return to Laguna Pueblo is propelled by the traditional Pueblo stories that serve as the parallel mythic narrative thread of the novel.
But this “going home” motif allows for many permutations, as Silko’s own subsequent novels demonstrate. Gardens in the Dunes (1999) is panoramic in its main characters’ peregrinations (from California to Boston, to England, to Italy and Sicily) before arriving back home: but the Native protagonist, Indigo, finally does return to her Sand Lizard tribe’s home ground, and the main white character, Hattie, finds her own spiritual “home” in a pre‐Christian European worldview. Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) expands the “going home” motif to the geopolitical: in accord with Mayan and Laguna Pueblo prophecies, this apocalyptic novel’s plethora of multi‐plots merge in a final movement of Indigenous peoples from the Third World South to “el norte,” despite the efforts of a crumbling US capitalist‐military‐industrial complex.
But something happened during the Native literary renaissance that complicated this seemingly eternal Indian trip back home; that happening is encapsulated in the figure of Blackfeet author James Welch. Certainly, the main character of his first novel Winter in the Blood (1974) has a going home of sorts in his final discovery of his grandfather’s identity and of some particulars of his Blackfeet history. But the novel’s ending, like much of its action, remains as bleak as its cold Montana setting. Bleaker yet is his second novel, The Death of Jim Loney (1979): here the protagonist’s final suicide by cop, after a drunken flight on foot to the reservation that he’s always felt alienated from, has been read as a positive return to his Native ancestry; but this reading ignores the mixed‐blood Loney’s lack of knowledge about his tribal heritage to the very end – and what can only be seen as a tragic ending. If the prototypical Native “going home” is ultimately a comedy or romance of cultural reintegration, Welch’s dark plots offer an alternative mode of tragedy and satire, in which any “homing” gesture or event must be viewed as ironic – versus the “running on the edge of the rainbow” neo‐Romanticism that characterizes much of the first generation of the Native literary renaissance. Welch’s unremitting realism serves as an antidote to both eco‐spiritual nostalgia and maudlin victimhood. Arguably, this opposing strain in Native literature continues on in the recent fiction of Sherman Alexie and the like, in which an often stark realism is tempered by sardonic humor.
One can and should read this “homing” motif as a positive, no doubt, in its very hope for and literary enactment of cultural recuperation; but one should always be aware that it also plays into comfortable mainstream audience expectations of a peculiarly (supposedly) “Indian” nostalgia for origins. It also allows the whitestream reader to keep Native America safely in the past tense. As Craig Womack has written, “Native‐written fictional stories about reconnection to Native culture enjoy a much wider popular appeal than non‐fiction written by Indians concerning their tribe’s land claims or politics.” Regarding Native fiction per se, there is “the glaring difference between the attention given to Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, a novel about a warrior’s reintegration into Laguna society, and the author’s Almanac of the Dead, a novel that posits that indigenous peoples throughout the Americas will take back their land. America loves Indian culture; America is much less enthusiastic about Indian land title” (Womack 1999: 11). Alexie is more succinct in his generalization: “A book about Indian life in the past […] will sell more copies than a book about Indian life in the twentieth century” (2000: 21).
Native American fiction before the Native literary renaissance was largely a series of isolated island gems often widely separated by good expanses of geography and time. Highlights of early twentieth‐century Native fiction include such novels as Cogawea: The Half‐Blood (1927) by Mourning Dove (Okanagan/Colville), Sundown (1934) by John Joseph Matthews (Osage), and Waterlily (1944, pub. 1988) by Ella Cara Deloria (Dakota). As with later Native fiction, and in accord with the “hybridity” theme of the introduction, the protagonist of a good number of these texts is a mixed‐blood or “half‐breed,” as the subtitle of Cogawea baldly indicates. The plots and characters thus often revolve around this central tension created (as we’ve already seen inscribed in Zitkala‐Ša’s memoir) by occupying a liminal identity “between two worlds.”
Cree/Kootenai author Darcy McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936) can be read as a touchstone of early twentieth‐century Native fiction – and as a precursor to what would follow with Momaday, Silko, Erdrich, and the like. At the novel’s outset, the mixed‐blood protagonist Archilde Leon literally has just returned home to his reservation in Montana, and he eventually follows his mother’s rejection of Catholicism – an explicit return to “paganism” (1998: 285) – in re‐embracing his Native heritage. As with many such novels, his resistance against the white powers‐that‐be is but a muted, pyrrhic victory, as he is finally led away in handcuffs for his accidental complicity in the killing of a white game warden. In brief, the actual results of the mixed‐blood’s acts of rebellion and Native reassertion in Native novels are often quite – mixed. Archilde’s most successful insurrection is a theological one, in a crucial flashback scene in which a meteorological anomaly creates a “vision” of a “flaming cross.” The boarding‐school priest immediately shouts “‘The Sign! Kneel and pray!’” But young Archilde’s attention is soon drawn to a bird that crosses the purported “Sign”; this bird “flew past and returned several times […] what seized Archilde’s imagination was the bird’s unconcernedness. It recognized no ‘Sign.’ His spirit lightened. He felt himself fly with the bird. When he looked at the priest again he saw in him only darkness and heaviness of spirit” (1998: 102–103).
Working our way forward to the Native Renaissance and the groundbreaking novels of Momaday, Silko, and Welch already mentioned, there is this bivalent thread, of a neo‐Romantic reprivileging of the Native and “Nature” – thus Archilde’s “free bird” becomes Momaday’s Abel running at the end of House Made of Dawn – counterbalanced by later versions of Archilde being led away in handcuffs, as Welch’s Jim Loney – who has throughout his novel been haunted by a contrasting “dark bird” – surrenders his very life, unable to cope with being a very mixed‐up mixed‐blood in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Momaday’s status as “founding father” of the Native American Renaissance figures a concurrent geographical shift from an early twentieth century made up of a preponderance of Great Plains Indian – especially Dakota and Lakota – authors (e.g. Zitkala‐Ša, Eastman, Standing Bear, and Ella Deloria) to – by the 1970s – authors of the desert Southwest, highlighted by such luminaries as Momaday, Silko, and Simon Ortiz. Interestingly, Momaday’s own writing life embodies this shift, as one whose Kiowa tribe’s historical roots run from Montana to Oklahoma (a route traced in his The Way to Rainy Mountain [1969]), but whose formative biography and main fictional texts reside firmly among the Diné and Pueblo people and settings of Arizona and New Mexico (e.g. House Made of Dawn). Such a literary‐geographical heuristic is an entertaining game, but such generalizations fall before the increasing proliferation of Native literature throughout the United States occasioned by the Native literary renaissance itself.
Indeed (as if the Great Plains hegemony had immediately reasserted itself), let us move to the fiction of two northern Plains Ojibwe authors, Gerald Vizenor and Louise Erdrich. As with his non‐fiction memoir discussed above, Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1978) signals a radical new direction for Native fiction. This postmodern dystopian satire not only slams all logocentric centers of meaning, including the grand narratives of Western rationalism and capitalism and anthropocentrism, but also lampoons Natives’ own need or propensity to “go home,” to cling to some authentic Native identity and myth of origins. And yet, in this Rabelaisian narrative of ostensibly gratuitous violence, slapstick hilarity, and endless Joycean trickster wordplay, the protagonist Proude Cedarfair, shamanic leader of his woodland reservation, still partakes in a prototypical journey and return. After he and his troupe have wandered far into the shards of a dying US mainstream civilization, he ultimately dies and returns to his Ojibwe homeland – as a non‐human spirit, as a “vision bear.” Vizenor’s eternal deconstructions of his own narrative episodes via a Dostoevskian polyphony severely complicate such a blithe Campbellian reading; but the framework, the “going home” motif, remains.
While Vizenor’s long subsequent series of novels continues in a similarly pomo‐philosophical vein that is perhaps more successful as cultural criticism than as aesthetic fiction, Louise Erdrich’s first four novels entail a skillful continuity of plot and character that qualifies as a veritable tetralogy: Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994). The first novel, Love Medicine, might serve as a microcosm of Erdrich’s style and world – a tightly crafted mélange of love and violence, of Ojibwe traditionalism, even mysticism, working hand in hand with realistic portrayals of twentieth‐century Native life. Erdrich’s fiction might be considered a stylistic/thematic middle confluence of the Momaday–Silko and Welch–Alexie streams of Native literature in this regard. One is both awed by the “Native,” and totally entertained by the “Indian.” The many scenes of stark realism point to the influence of Welch; but there remains a strong wisp of “Indian Romanticism” here. The last word of the novel is, after all, “home.”
The Native American short story has also been a vibrant genre since Silko published her seminal set of stories toward the beginning of the Native literary renaissance: “The Man to Send Rainclouds” (1969), “Yellow Woman” (1974), and “Lullaby” (1974). “The Man to Send Rainclouds” is a powerfully understated portrayal of a mission priest’s inability to understand his Pueblo constituency, to cross the divide of religious worldviews. “Yellow Woman” is a prime example of a Native text that marries the sacred and the secular, the miraculous and the mundane, in being both another incarnation of the traditional Pueblo “Yellow Woman” tale concerning her mythic flirtation with the deity of Summer – and the “real,” contemporary story of a human woman abducted by a Navajo. “Lullaby” is the most successful of the three in sheer pathos, ending with an old Native woman simultaneously singing a “lullaby” to her husband as he lies dying – and mourning her children lost either to war or assimilation – and reinforcing the tribal, generational circle of life that provides comfort to all of this trauma:
The earth is your mother,
she holds you.
The sky is your father,
he protects you.
Sleep,
sleep.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..
We are together always
There never was a time
when this
was not so.
(1981: 51)
Powerful in their invocation of tradition, Silko’s early stories, remain, of course, as centerpieces of the “rainbow” school, of the earnest “going home” neo‐Romanticism discussed above. Contemporary Native short stories, as with the novel, either follow this tradition, or reject it, or serve up some successful (or not) confluence of the two streams I have identified. For instance, Alexie’s own short stories are much more in line with the Welch‐sardonic vein of Native fiction. Yes, there are plenty of drums and dancing and “en’it”s and appeals to cultural survival in his collections of short fiction – most notably, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), and Blasphemy (2012) – but the “going home” gesture is more often than not an ineffectual, black‐humor “looking back,” as in the coda of one of the longer, more ambitious stories from The Lone Ranger, “Indian Education.” The protagonist here is one of the few “good” Indians who may make it out of the reservation “culture of failure” by going to a white school, but even he realizes that he is stuck in a Western ideology of Indian stereotypes: “I try to remain stoic for the photographers as I look toward the future” (1993a: 179). Just as tellingly, his reservation contemporaries instead can only smile “for the photographer as they look back toward tradition” (1993a: 180). This is not your Silko’s “going home.”
The black humor of the stories in The Lone Ranger are reflected in their very titles – for example, “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore” – while some are postmodern, surreal effusions more in the tradition of Kafka and Barthelme than Momaday and Silko (e.g. “Imagining the Reservation”). But the earnest reader of Native literature may ultimately conclude that Alexie’s fiction embodies an apparent essentialism of the “Indian,” of relying too much upon a pan‐tribal stereotypical young Indian male who laughs too much, cries too much, drinks too much (and even climbs back on the wagon too much) – and also has a man‐crush on Crazy Horse.
Alexie’s literary evolution continues in his inevitable turn to longer fiction, in such novels as Reservation Blues (1995), Indian Killer (1998), and Flight (2007). One might perceive a veritable growth, as if in response to the critique above, in such a short story as “Breaking and Entering” (2009), in which the narrator kills a young black intruder; the narrator’s part‐Indian status only comes to the fore when his act is condemned by the media as a “white‐on‐black” killing. His ultimate turn to a Native identity remains, by story’s end, excruciatingly problematic. But one is still left with the impression, in Alexie’s fiction in toto, of the end of his novel Reservation Blues, where the band members have decided to leave the reservation and head out to Spokane. The future looks bright, and new – and urban. And yet it is still one more “homecoming,” at least metaphorically: their final gesture of leaving remains a holding tight to tribal tradition in the form of imaginary horses running alongside their city‐bound van. Big city here we come, but one still gets the strong sense that these characters are still going home.
Native Poetry: Of Dream Wheels, Eagles, and Iowa City Bars
Native American poetry is even more difficult to cover in a limited space than Native fiction: there is a lot of it. That first generation of Native Renaissance poets happened upon a strange and difficult set of expectations, however. Besides a few turn‐of‐the‐twentieth‐century poets who published their own work – notably, Pauline Johnson (Mohawk) and Alexander Posey (Muskoke) – the “nature” of “Indian poetry” was largely a Euro‐American literary construct. Versions of some of anthropologist Frances Densmore’s transcriptions of the “lyrics” to Ojibwe (1913) and Lakota (1918) songs soon appeared as “poems” in literary magazines as illustrious as Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, and these apparently imagistic, haiku‐esque, oh‐so‐suggestive “free verse” snippets were taken as proof that “America” had a poetic soul from the very beginning. This initial literary appropriation was followed by a half century of anthologies of “Indian poetry” by white editors, framed by George W. Cronyn’s The Path on the Rainbow (1918) and A. Grove Day’s The Sky Clears (1951). And so, by the time of the first two important collections by Native Renaissance poets themselves in 1974 – N. Scott Momaday’s Angle of Geese and Leslie Silko’s Laguna Woman – there was already a lot of culturally appropriative baggage to deal with.
Momaday’s oft‐anthologized “Carriers of the Dream Wheel” (1975) may be the most famous poetic salvo of the Native literary renaissance. It is a prototypical celebration of the oral tradition as culture bearer, via the controlling metaphor of a “Wheel of Dreams” that is “carried on their [Native] voices,” and it has its origins in the “First World,” in tribal time immemorial. It bears the memory of ancestors, of the “aboriginal names,” and it is borne largely by the elders – by “old men, or men / Who are old in their voices.” The powerful ending reveals not only Momaday’s love for long‐vowel assonance, but also his fine ear for poetry read aloud – that “oral tradition” that the poem is ultimately about:
And they carry the wheel among the camps,
Saying: Come, come,
Let us tell the old stories,
Let us sing the sacred songs.
(1976: 42)
The last two lines are especially powerful in their rhythm, the latter entailing a trochaic “drumbeat”: “LET us TELL the OLD STOries, / LET us SING the SACred SONGS.”
This is a great poem because N. Scott Momaday wrote it. It is also a very “Indian”‐sounding poem, in both its invocation of Indigenous tradition and its chant‐like repetitive style. Unfortunately, in less skillful hands than Momaday’s, bad imitations of this style became fairly common in Native poetry of the 1970s and into the 1980s, leading to Alexie’s denigration of the “corn‐pollen, four directions, eagle‐feathers school of Native literature” (quoted in Chapel [2000]). This general “eco‐spiritual” neo‐Romanticism is reflected in the very titles of the Native poetry anthologies of the era, such as Kenneth Rosen’s Voices of the Rainbow (1975), Geary Hobson’s The Remembered Earth (1979), and – of course – Duane Niatum’s Carriers of the Dream Wheel (1975).
The best Native poets in the wake of Momaday and Silko – for example, Simon Ortiz, Linda Hogan, Maurice Kenny, Carter Revard, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie – have often been a hybrid of good ol’ “corn‐pollen Indian” and a more sardonic realism. By the time of the 1990s poetry of Adrian C. Louis and Sherman Alexie, in fact, a darker realism comes to the fore to such an extent that a critical backlash occurred among more traditional Native Americanists, such as Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook‐Lynn. Referring to Louis’s irreverent confessional verse, Cook‐Lynn accuses him of “[m]aking poetry out of […] only self‐loathing and Anti‐Indianisms” (2001: 15, 16); in sum, such urban black‐humor satirists as Louis and Alexie have been proclaimed guilty of telling tales out of school, as it were. And so in poetry, too, a tension is evident between a neo‐Romantic traditionalism and a more Welchian realism and sardonicism.
Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) can be considered the third in an initial triumvirate of Native poets that includes Momaday and Silko. From Going for the Rain (1976) through From Sand Creek (2000), Ortiz’s poetry has been lauded as the voice of the “eco‐Indian” and environmental justice, already evidenced in an early poem from Going for the Rain, “Four Poems for a Child Son”:
You see, son, the eagle is a whole person
the way it lives; it means it has to do
with paying attention to where it is,
not the center of the earth especially
but part of it, one part among all parts,
and that’s only the beginning.
(1992: 45–46)
Such a reprivileging of other species, with the reminder that “we are all related,” is characteristic Ortiz – as is the belief that such lessons should be imparted to the next generation, which many of his poems enact.
Muskoke/Cherokee poet Joy Harjo’s notable collections include She Had Some Horses (1983), In Mad Love and War (1990), A Map to the Next World (2000), and a selected‐poems collection, How We Became Human (2002). The phrase “mad love and war” may be said to aptly embody her poetic corpus: her poems combine a crow‐trickster’s craziness (the “madness”) with a righteous anger at social injustice (the “war”), which is inevitably tempered in her mature work by an optimistic gesture of hope and forgiveness (the “love”). Perhaps the two most famous poems from She Had Some Horses – and from her entire corpus – are the title poem – a tour de force of incremental repetition – and the last poem in the book, “I Give You Back,” two poems naturally paired in their self‐ and racial reconciliation. The latter poem personifies and then exorcises “fear” via ceremonial repetition (both “I release you” and “my heart” are repeated four times, as if invoking the four directions). Divested of such fear, which issues all the way back to the crimes of colonialism, the narrator can now embrace her own internal conflicts and contradictions: “I am not afraid to be black / I am not afraid to be white”; and most importantly, now “I am not afraid to be hated. / I am not afraid to be loved” (1983: 73–74).
In some ways, Harjo’s poetry belongs to the “corn pollen” school, in its often ceremonial style and regard for Native traditions; but she’s also very much a product of a second generation of Native poets more urban and realistic in imagery and outlook, and her mythic deer are more likely to show up in downtown Denver, her mythic women dancers in a smoke‐filled barroom. In a way, in fact, she is a happy hybrid between the poles of Momaday and Alexie. Her poem “Remember” (1983) is a great exemplum of this – at least in its original version. Frequently anthologized as a very “Indian” poem, it hits all the “corn pollen” clichés, if you will: each incremental repetition beginning “Remember” is ultimately a reminder that we are all related, both human and not human, and that we all partake in language and dance. In accord with my “happy hybrid” argument is the line “Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her / in a bar once in Iowa City.” The first sentence is very first‐generation; the second sentence gives it a very interesting second‐generational spin. (To put it in another way, the first sentence might have been written by Momaday; the second, by Alexie.) Later in the poem: “Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the / origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war / dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once” (1983: 40). Once again, the “corn‐pollen‐mythic” beginning is rendered more “real” by the second half of the line. Another fascinating thing about this poem is its editorial history. The sentences about the Iowa City bar and the “corner of Fourth and Central” – these are the only urban references in the poem – are excised from the version of “Remember” in Harjo’s collected‐poems version (2002), as if she now found in them too great an incongruity in tone, as if they ruined this “Perfect Native American Poem.” And, of course, it’s no surprise that this fundamental polar tension continues to oscillate within the psyches and texts of contemporary Native poets.
With such collections as Old Shirts & New Skins (1993), The Summer of Black Widows (1996), and One Stick Song (2000), Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) quickly established himself as one of the most talented Native poets. In this genre, his notorious black humor includes a quick, sharp creative and irreverent wit in little evidence among the first generation of Native Renaissance poets. The Summer of Black Widows includes the marvelous punning and clever basketball homoerotopoetics of “Defending Walt Whitman” and the well‐known satire – in part, slamming the “corn pollen” school yet again – “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.” One Stick Song offers such hilarious gems as “Crow Testament,” in which “Crow” is part Old Testament evil accomplice and part Native trickster victimized by Euro‐colonialism; in section six of the poem, the mythic bird is irreverently collecting “empty beer bottles” on the reservation, “but they are so heavy / he can carry only one at time” to get the “five cents” deposit; the punch line, after five sections of heavy religious imagery: “Damn, says Crow, redemption / is not easy” (2000: 27).
Obviously, much of the power of Alexie’s satire is its against‐the‐grain response to the previous generation of Native poets. This is nowhere more evident than in his “Nature Poem,” which even begins with the epitaph, “If you’re an Indian, why don’t you write nature poetry?” Okay, the poet agrees – sort of, by writing a poem in which “nature” – including an obligatory “(eagle)” in parentheses! – is presented as an inimical force that simply and ruthlessly kills off a group of “Indian fire fighters” (1993b: 24). Such satires on the eco‐Indian are a large component of Alexie’s general reaction against the “corn pollen” school. Native poetry has come a long way from inflections of eagles and metrical drumbeats. This is a good thing.
A Coda of Sorts
All academic summaries of “Literature X” are necessarily ideological misrepresentations of “X” – this one perhaps more so than most, given the overtly political contestations about what “Native American literature” even is. But for better or worse, it exists as a conceptual reality, a subject of power that is continually subject to contestation. As for what “Native American literature” is, we have Harjo and Bird’s definition: “a native literature produced in English that is written for an English‐speaking audience and that incorporates a native perception of the world in limited ways” (1997: 25). Upon examination, this is a pretty disturbing, even deflating, definition. Both language and audience are ultimately Euro‐American, in a fundamental sense; the best a Native (and necessarily culturally hybrid) author can do is to express a “limited” glimpse of a “native perception,” and this statement (by itself) glosses over the fact that they are/were hundreds of “native perceptions,” the many native worldviews of various tribes, augmenting the limitation a hundredfold. Native texts, then, can be said to be mere shadows in Plato’s cave, or Nietzsche’s metaphor‐of‐a‐metaphor.
Another of Harjo and Bird’s statements seems much more positive and uplifting, echoing as it does Momaday’s call for a recognition of Native literatures within the wider US literary corpus: “The literature of the aboriginal people of North America defines America. It is not exotic” (1997: 31). But – and indeed – it is even less exotic than many readers (and even Native Americanists) could have hoped or imagined.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 2 (REGIONAL LITERARY EXPRESSIONS); CHAPTER 28 (CREATIVE NONFICTIONS).